About Coach Adriana
Trauma-informed narcissistic abuse recovery coach
Hey there!
My name is Adriana, and I am a certified trauma-informed life coach based in Toronto, Canada. I offer virtual coaching services, both 1:1 and within my community membership. I empower my clients worldwide to heal from narcissistic abuse, emotional and mental abuse, toxic family dynamics, and the emotional, mental and physical pain that comes along with it.
Certifications
I have the following fancy pieces of paper:
Bachelor of Arts degree in Environmental and Health Studies
Mindbody Fitness Coach certificate
Professional Life Coach certificate
Stress Management Coach certificate.
Certified SafeSpace™ Facilitator (Trauma informed certification)
Fancy pieces of paper out of the way, I admit I never thought I would be a narcissistic abuse recovery coach! I did the degree thing and figured I’d be stuck in the corporate world and that’s just how life would be. And then one day, this idea of being a life coach kinda crept up on me and showed itself as my purpose.
How it all started for me
I’ve been coaching since 2019 after a 4-year struggle with chronic physical pain that I had no idea was linked to my tumultuous childhood. I have truly been there in my life, and decided to use my experience to help as many people as possible to recover.
I truly believe that no matter how much emotional abuse you have been through, no matter how much physical chronic pain you are in, no matter how brainwashed you may have been as a child, you have the power to heal and transform from all those wounds.
I don’t even know you (yet), but I already know you have that power. My purpose as your coach is to shine the light through the darkness you are going through because I too, went through that darkness. Most people do not know how to heal from narcissistic abuse, I had no idea myself. I thought I would just be scarred for life after figuring out I was raised by a narcissistic mother. I went through years of what seemed like never-ending therapy, yoga, meditation, and seeking for the next best thing to feel better. After 4 years of chronic physical pain (a manifestation of my repressed emotions from childhood), I learned that healing was possible.
My journey with chronic pain and decades of emotional/mental confusion as a result of narcissistic personalities in my life were what led me to discover my true passion of helping others.
I truly believed, for most of my life, that something was wrong with me. I believed something was wrong with me mentally, emotionally, physically, as a person in general, in my personality, I thought my brain must have been broken. I wasn’t really sure what was wrong with me, but definitely something. I never truly related to most of the people in my life. As a child, I battled feelings of inadequacy from as early on as I can remember.
I had a very unconventional and toxic family dynamic
This dynamic included a very up and down relationship with my late narcissistic mother, and being completely alienated from my father – truly believing he was a complete monster for most of my life (this ended up being a result of early childhood brainwashing). I was also thrust into a caregiver role from age 7 and onward for my elderly grandparents, plus daily schoolyard bullying from ages 7-13. Needless to say, my childhood sucked.
This “life sucks” mentality carried on into my adulthood – until I made a life-changing discovery very early on in 2014, which I had no idea at the time, would completely change the course of my life as I knew it.
In early 2014, I found myself at the end of yet another relationSHIT with someone who told me I was the most amazing person ever only to be nothing just a few months later. It was a very quick relationshit, but a complete mindf*ck. Because this wasn’t the first time something like this happened, I did what most survivors of narcissistic abuse do right before they realize they are, in fact, a survivor of narcissistic abuse:
I went down the Google Rabbit Hole
Chronic pain begins
In 2015 however, I ended up being too distracted to care about any of this healing stuff or figuring out who I was because this was my introduction to the world of severe chronic pain.
In June 2015, after a basic wisdom tooth extraction, I began to experience chronic pain in my jaw and regular migraines. For the next 4 years, things escalated and increasingly got worse. I eventually developed ulcers, carpal tunnel syndrome, neck kyphosis, disc degeneration, tendonitis, arthritis, and, by October 2018 —shingles in my mouth—while getting my jaw realigned with an ALF appliance and braces in an attempt to ward off the migraines. This all by the ripe old age of 30. By this point I truly embodied “WHAT THE ACTUAL F**K IS THIS A JOKE!?” as my slogan.
The shingles would then cause me to have trigeminal neuralgia. This is a severe nerve pain that affects one side of the face/head. It’s also nicknamed the suicide disease because of how painful it is. After four years with all the pain I already experienced, and now TN added to the mix, I had had enough.
Pain-Free at last!
By January 2019, my pain and desperation eventually lead me to the work of Dr. John Sarno and Tension Myositis Syndrome.
In a nutshell, anyone who has chronic pain has had some form of childhood trauma, which results in a lifetime of repressed emotions.
When these emotions get repressed, they go nowhere, they stay in the body and manifest as chronic pain or other chronic illnesses that are not life threatening but have no cure (for example, eczema, IBS, skin or stomach issues, chronic fatigue, and more).
I didn’t believe in this theory at first, however, I was so desperate for pain relief and already tried everything else. I decided I had nothing to lose so I gave doing the inner work a shot even though I was pretty offended by the concept.
This was absolutely the best decision I had ever made in my life. After only 4 months of doing the inner emotional work, by April 2019, I was completely PAIN-FREE!
Saying YES to getting support
The road to my recovery was not easy. I went way too fast, re-traumatized myself, had no one to talk to about it and, I was extremely confused the majority of the time. I went to traditional therapy and even took medication in an attempt to help – but it was evident, I was truly doing this on my own. My therapist didn’t even understand how to process an emotion, and even admitted to me she was relieved I figured something out that helped me because she had no idea what to do with me (literally, after 2 years of seeing her she tells me this!)
What I really wished I had was actually useful Help with a capital H! To me this meant someone who had truly been where I was in life, who came out on the other side of the pain, to tell me I would be okay and hold space for me and shine the light for me to figure it out, instead of what conventional models were offering me as they clearly were not helping at all.
Newsflash: apparently you can’t just 💫PoSiTiVe ViBeZ MiNdSeT💫 your way through life.
Knowing what I know now, I am inspired to help as many people as possible to take their power back, create their own footsteps instead of following in another person’s narrative, and this is why I am a coach. At this time, I will be launching a BRAND NEW group coaching monthly membership. For more information and to get on the waitlist for when this launches in mid to late august, follow the link below. You can also check out my shop right here on my website where you’ll find my ebooks, mini courses, and mini trainings (more to come soon). My own healing journey inspired me to create this page, become a life coach, create a group membership coaching experience for whoever is ready to make big shifts, create my courses and other digital offerings, so that I can help as many people as possible to truly heal from narcissistic abuse, rather than trying one bandaid solution after the other with short-lived or zero progress.
Finally, A Healthy Relationship
With that discovery about where my relationships stemmed from, my life went quite upside-down. I didn’t know who, what I could trust anymore, but I knew this was a good discovery as it would give me the opportunity to change my patterns – as horrifying and scary as it felt at the time.I would eventually reconnect with my estranged father. I was programmed to hate him.
After talking to him and finding actual legal documents, it turned out he wasn’t such a bad guy. I was also overwhelmed with relief that I found this out when I did, and not decades later when it would probably have been too late!The next wonderful thing that came out of my discovery was meeting my amazing husband after taking about a year to focus on myself.
Isn’t it funny how they say when you take a year-ish off to focus on yourself, things really do get better? However – my healing journey was far from over. I couldn’t help but feel like every other aspect of my life—my upbringing, my sense of self—were all lies. Who even was I anymore?
Of course, I was wondering what was wrong with me and why I was never good enough for anyone, how could people be so cruel, would I ever be good enough, and WHY did this keep happening? The behaviour I googled turned out to be narcissism. I always thought narcissism meant someone who just liked to look at themselves in the mirror and was extremely vain. But my google rabbit hole proved there was way more to it, and it’s not just a buzzword to be thrown around when we don’t like how someone is behaving.
At this point, I realized I had been getting into relationships with narcissistic personality types both on a romantic level, friendships – I was even managed by narcs in the workplace. I was absolutely surrounded by narcissists. I began to see the pattens. As I continued diving into the world of narcissistic abuse—the signs, etc.—I made the biggest discovery of my life: HOLY. SHIT. I was raised by a narcissistic mother! This was the reason I kept getting into the same dynamic in all other areas of my life – I knew literally nothing else!