Healing Without a Rulebook: Kerisma Vere on Healing, Self-Trust, and Creating Lasting Change.

Hello everyone, welcome back to Telling My Story, the podcast where we explore real life stories, personal growth, career journeys, challenges, and the lessons that shape our lives. I'm Henry Chiwetelu, and today we're having a deeply meaningful conversation about healing, recovery, self-trust, nervous system regulation, and what it really takes to create lasting change. My guest is Charisma Aver, a holistic wellness coach and also who helps people move away from all or nothing approaches to self-help and towards healing, self-trust, and a better quality of life. Charisma work is deeply informed by lived experience, professional training, and years of supporting people through change. Her journey has taught her that healing isn't always about pushing harder or following a perfect formula. Sometimes it begins with compassion, understanding, and learning how to reconnect with yourself. She's the author of The Light Switching Myth, Contemporary Approach to Creating Lasting Change, The Companion Journal's Ways I Showed Up for Myself, and the creator of From Pressure to Path, a Compassionate Framework for Change. Today, we'll talk about trauma recovery, addiction, self-worth, nervous system regulation, self-compassion, and how people can begin creating meaningful change without placing unrealistic pressure on themselves. Charisma, welcome to Telling My Story, and it's a pleasure to have you here with us today. Thank

you very much, Henry. I love, quite enjoy having these kinds of conversations.

All right, Charisma, you've experienced significant adversity, trauma, recovery, and personal transformation. Can you take us back to the beginning and share the journey that eventually led you to the work you are doing today?

Um, sure. I don't... I don't ever get into the details of the things that I've been through. It's not necessarily in my best interest or anybody else's. It can be fairly activating to other people. But essentially, the first 20 years of my life, there was some pretty extensive trauma going on, relational and violent and other kinds of things. I don't know, I got through and dissociation was a big survival coping strategy and I hit the world. And I think, yeah, when I was about 17, I tried to kill myself a couple of times because I just, I didn't know how to live with the pain that was on the inside. And when I was unsuccessful with that, I turned to using substances. soft substances, luckily in my favor, but basically numbing myself up for the next 18 years because I just didn't have the capacity to deal with what was on the inside. And I didn't even really fully understand what I had been through and what was on the inside because of the the dissociation and the dissociation sometimes gets a bad rap, but it was, you know, it was really a survival mechanism. It was a, it was a way to survive because it wasn't, uh, it wasn't the time or place. I didn't have what I needed to be able to, to, um, be face to face with all of those things because I had to, I had to pay rent and I had to do stuff. So I went out into the world and I, I got jobs and I had relationships and I tried to build the type of life that, um, that I thought I should have,