I’m Suzanne.

I know what it's like to feel disconnected at midlife, even when everything on the outside looks fine.

I grew up a tomboy who spent her days climbing trees and catching water striders in creek beds, assertive and unselfconscious. That changed in fourth grade when my family moved to a more conservative town and I suddenly felt out of place. I learned quickly that my directness was unfeminine, my expressiveness too much. So I began suppressing those parts of myself. Externally I projected confidence, even rebelled. But I was filled with insecurity.

By my early forties I had a full life by every external measure. But something wasn't right. I felt restless and unfulfilled in a job I had outgrown but was afraid to leave. And there was a sense that something in me wasn’t being fully lived.

I had been doing psycho-spiritual work for years, and it helped. But my need to be liked, my drive for control, my reactivity, didn't go away. I remember coming home from retreats feeling blissfully present and clear, only to walk through the door and feel overwhelmed within minutes. I opened a gallery to have a meaningful outlet, but my striving and anxiety came with me. Something was still running underneath that the inner work wasn't reaching.

Then my mother was diagnosed with ALS. Caring for her through her decline and death changed everything. I saw how sacred and fleeting life truly is and I knew I couldn't keep postponing what mattered.

That's when I found Jungian coaching, and shadow work. It was a path toward the more meaningful work I'd been longing for, and a framework that I could immerse myself in — and that could finally reach what years of other inner work hadn't.

When I began putting myself out into the world as a coach, my own patterns showed up immediately. My Inner Judge told me I was too old. My Perfectionist agonized over every detail. My People-Pleaser worried what others would think. My Controller resisted trusting my own intuition as it had so often throughout my life. For months I woke almost every day thinking “I hate myself” — my ego pushing back hard against the new version of myself I was trying to step into.

But now I had tools that could actually meet those patterns with honesty and compassion rather than shame. I learned to find the gifts hidden within them. That shift changed everything. Not just professionally, but in my relationships, my creativity, and my sense of what it means to be fully alive.

This path transformed me. Now it's my honor to walk alongside other women as they step into their own.