About Jessica
For much of my life, growth was entirely focused on healing.
Childhood trauma and loss left me with complex PTSD, intense anxiety, and anger, and my own healing began when I first entered therapy at 22.
That journey eventually led me into the profession itself.
I have now spent more than two decades as a psychotherapist, much of that time as a trauma specialist, and both the work and the people I have had the privilege of sitting with have changed me profoundly.
Over time, something shifted.
As fear became less central and my nervous system became quieter, I became increasingly interested in a different question:
What becomes possible when healing is no longer the destination?
What do we do with the freedom that comes when we are less governed by old fear, conditioning, and automatic reactions?
For me, the answer has involved repeatedly finding myself at an edge.
Sometimes that edge has been deeply internal: learning to stay present with experiences I once would have tried to control, explain, avoid, or brace against.
Sometimes it has required changing the shape of my life.
Some Life Changing Edges
Leaving a belief system that once held me
One major edge came through my relationship with Christianity.
For a long time, faith gave me something I deeply needed: structure, community, a sense of safety, and a way of connecting with God in the midst of a life that had often felt overwhelming.
Eventually, though, the structure that had once expanded my world began to feel too small for the questions I was asking and the person I was becoming.
Deconstructing those beliefs meant risking certainty, belonging, and relationships, but when it was time, I knew.
Leaving a marriage I still valued
Perhaps the largest edge I have crossed was leaving a 25-year marriage to someone I still loved.
There was no villain in that story. But I had reached a point where I knew I could no longer keep shrinking myself to fit into the life we built together. He was not interested in healing, growth, expansion, or adventure and these things are life to me.
I had to let him make his own choices and I had to make mine.
Loving someone and knowing you can no longer grow in the same direction can both be true. Leaving was painful, but it was also one of the clearest acts of trusting what was asking to come alive in me.
An Ever Widening Worldview
Beginning around 2018, I started playing more with questions I had once completely dismissed: consciousness, intuition, energy, astrology, the nature of awareness, and the possibility that reality may be larger and stranger than what we can easily explain.
Through a series of synchronicities, I found myself living in a place that felt perfectly designed for what came next.
I now think of it as my chrysalis.
I had the solitude and space to go deeply into meditation, breathwork, energy work, and innumerable metaphysical rabbit holes, and to undergo perhaps my most expansive transformation yet.
What began as exploration gradually became a profound reorientation in how I understood myself, healing, consciousness, and the life I wanted to create.
During that time, psychological astrology became one of the unexpected tools that helped me understand myself more deeply.
It gave language and symbolic structure to patterns, tensions, and developmental themes I had lived my whole life but had never quite been able to see in the same way through psychology alone. I literally found myself dancing in my living room with the joy of the validation I felt as I learned to explore my birth chart in depth.
Astrology has become a way of listening more closely to the patterns and energies moving through my life, and of recognizing when something in me is being asked to grow, release, risk, or become more fully itself.
That widening of perspective didn’t stay theoretical. It gradually changed what I was willing to imagine and do with my actual life.
Living the Edge
Travel
International travel has also played a significant role in helping me become more comfortable with the edge.
I didn’t have the privilege of visiting another country until my early 40s.
I had always dreamed of seeing the world but fear and a scarcity mindset kept me local.
World travel has changed me in indescribable ways, but more recently I have begun experimenting with a life with longer stays, deeper immersion, and perhaps eventually a more nomadic rhythm.
Speaking & Teaching
Moving into speaking and teaching is another current edge.
I have had an underlying sense for a long time that my work would eventually move beyond the one-to-one room. At the same time, I was very comfortable inside the privacy, predictability, and intimacy of individual work.
I am a naturally private person, and visibility carries its own charge for me. Standing in front of a room, entering a wider social field, and allowing more people to see me at once asks something very different of my nervous system than sitting across from one person.
When I began more seriously imagining this next chapter of teaching and speaking, something had changed.
I could feel the yes in my body. There was an energy, gratitude, and excitement that simply hadn’t been there when it wasn’t yet time.
So this next chapter of my work again requires practicing what I teach: allowing myself to experience my edge, staying present with it, and continuing to move toward what feels alive.
Purpose doesn’t generally arrive as one grand calling
Sometimes purpose reveals itself as:
A pull.
A curiosity.
A recurring image.
A desire we finally allow ourselves to take seriously.
A place we cannot stop thinking about.
A possibility that begins to feel alive in the body before we know what to do with it.
The point is not to know with certainty before we move. The point is to enjoy the experiment.
Space to Expand grew out of all of this.
My work now brings together decades of psychological and clinical experience with embodiment, nervous-system regulation, presence, consciousness, intuition, energy awareness, conscious creation, and deep psychological astrology.
I am interested in the practical, the science, and the mystery.
I care about helping people understand the patterns that have shaped them, but I am equally interested in what becomes possible when those patterns no longer get the final say.
I care about nervous-system regulation, but not only so that we can feel less anxious. I care about it because a more regulated system gives us more capacity for joy, desire, intimacy, visibility, uncertainty, imagination, change, and connection to that mysterious something beyond ourselves for which humans have many names.
I care about presence because it allows us to meet life more directly, without immediately judging, narrating, resisting, or trying to make the moment into something else.
And I care about conscious creation because surrender and agency do not have to be opposites.
We can loosen our grip on how life must unfold while still dreaming, imagining, experimenting, and consciously participating in what comes next.
A Little More Personally
I love my people, simplicity and comfortable minimalism, wide-open spaces and busy cities, wildlife, and being immersed in places and cultures different from my own.
I travel light. I would happily spend much of my life seeing more of the world, learning as I go, and finding out what each place has to teach me.
Yoga, meditation, breathwork, nature, and stillness have become important parts of how I return to myself.
And relaxing, for me, often still looks suspiciously like work because I love learning new things.
These days that might mean psychology, consciousness, intuition, energy, astrology, or whatever question has captured my attention next.
I am always learning.
Always experimenting.
Always finding edges.
And that is the spirit I bring to this work.
Important Note:
Engaging with me through Space to Expand LLC is not entering a professional counseling relationship with me. Here, I do not diagnose or treat mental disorders and this work should not be used as a substitute for medical or mental health care.