We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Helen Brenner. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Helen below.
Alright, Helen thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
I have been on an inner healing mission for decades after having experienced rape, sexual abuse, and bullying by peers and teachers during my childhood. I found my Holy Grail and now my mission has turned outward in helping others find their own healing!
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My brand is Helen Brenner Coaching as well as Getting Past Survivor.
I’m a trauma healing coach and I have a special interest in working with women who experienced sexual, physical, and psychological abuse in their childhood. I love helping people heal, especially people who have experienced great loss in their lives or feel abandoned in some way.
Through my work, regardless of childhood trauma, I find that all of my clients share so much of the same challenges. We are human and humans are flawed. Those flaws affect and mold who we become and much of it remains until someone like me helps them to understand their brains and resolve those challenging emotions.
I do my change work through the conscious hypnosis area of the mind because 90-95% of our brain’s activity is out of our conscious awareness. All of that behind-the-scenes activity greatly determines how we respond and show up in our lives. “Fix” that and life is completely different.
I spent decades as a therapy client trying to resolve my own childhood sexual abuse and bullying traumas. I never seemed to find the way through. So I decided to earn a BS in Psychology and a MS in Mental Health Counseling to find out why it wasn’t working for me and the many childhood trauma survivors I knew.
I kept feeling there was something deep going on, I could feel it in my core.
There was always a feeling of seeking answers, wanting to know more, a drive find release from the hard emotions and behaviors I was experiencing like desperately needing someone in my life, feeling lonely and unloved, feeling very unwanted by people who were good for me and attracting people who weren’t, oversleeping and being late or missing work, holding myself back in my work, not standing up for myself, and so on.
I had experienced hypnosis 20 years ago, which helped alleviate a few symptoms, but the deep uneasiness remained, which led me to searching for training in it and subsequently discovering NLP in Hypnosis™ and Eye Movement Emergence™ and experienced the deep changes I knew I wanted.
The transformation in me that came from my unyielding curiosity to find answers for myself was mind-blowing. Not only did it explain why therapy didn’t work for me but also introduced me to a whole new level of understanding about the human brain and how it works. I threw myself into 4 years of training and gaining experience perfecting my skills and bringing it to clients across the US and in Europe, Australia, and Japan.
My biggest accomplishments happen every week when I show people a better way, a way that brings the changes they want with minimal discomfort and without reexperiencing what burdens them.
People think that you need to talk about your problems in order to resolve them, but we know from brain science that this isn’t true.
My clients are so incredibly relieved to not have to rehash everything they experienced in order to get better. From a personal perspective, I’m most proud of my efforts to find a better way! I found it, I experienced it, and I bring it to others.
The other thing I’m very proud of is my website and creating what I hope is a place where people feel understood, safe, and comfortable. Putting the words and images on my website was a huge vulnerability trigger, something that many of my clients also experience. Add to that the struggle to describe what I do because our brain is just so complex and there’s not a single word to explain how our mind keeps repeating certain behaviors in an effort to learn.
The effort that goes into an entrepreneurial website requires personal understanding of who you are and how you want to show up in your world. This leads many entrepreneurs stalling in their actions to put themselves out there because of confusion and fear. My understanding of the effort behind creating a website helps me know what to uncover in my clients so they can move forward with confidence.
The hardest thing is describing what I do, just like it is hard to explain how our brain works. Scientifically there’s so many neurons and chemicals that are involved within our brain and all these neurons are firing at different moments at different times that result in emotional and behavioral responses. The goal is to eliminate or greatly minimize the responses people don’t want and create new, chosen responses they do want!
What I do is very unique, cutting edge work based on decades of brain science and already proven ways of creating behavioral change.
The theory of conscious and unconscious mind has been around for a while and has been taught by many experts before me. But no one can truly explain in a tangible way what is consciouness and what is unconconsiousness. It’s not something you can check out at a shop and measure it to the precise measurement.
My message is simple – I will help you clear out what you don’t want and replace it with what you do want! It’s the how that makes me unique, makes this work unique, and that’s what I want people to know.
How I do it is by taking you through a state of light, meditative trance and uncover the ways you unconsciously see, hear, feel, think, say, and do things. Explaining an experience that can only be experienced had been the hardest for me.
I have first person experience of trauma and all the aftermath (fear, shame, guilt, etc.) that brings us so much pain, and I have first person experience and confirmation that the tools that I have learned and bring to clients truly work and work fast!
I have a great deal of education and experience in mental health that gives me a deeper understanding of why things are they way they are in human behavior.
I’m different from most NLP, coaching, and mental health practitioners because my techniques are more advanced, more specific to specific change people want.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
I was raped at 7 when my family was living in Belgium as American expatriates. Soon after that incident occurred, my dad was transferred back to the US where I was faced with hostile kids and teachers and frequent sexual abuse continued for another 7+ years.
It was a threatening, chaotic, lonely, alienating, isolating life full of self-perceived and self-imposed failures.
From that moment at 7, I was broken. But it was also the beginning of a resilience to find answers that has never wavered. That unwavering quest created in me a person who searches for answers, finds them, and shares them with others either as information in writing or in my coaching/healing work with clients.
It’s been 50+ years since that first incident so specifics around what I knew at the time about right/wrong are foggy, but I always remembered feeling unsettled. I struggled with flashbacks. I started wetting the bed and sucking my thumb (better known as regression).
I was the youngest of six kids and when things went awry there quite often was a threatening “don’t tell mom!” uttered by someone. Telling me to keep things to myself was ingrained simply from the normalcy of life. But, when it came to something as emotionally isolating like rape, that “don’t tell anyone” threat really kicked in. Fear of repercussions from the rapist, shame over actually being the victim – “it must have been my fault,” and the simple fact of not even knowing how to describe or articulate what happened all preclude victims (young and old) from telling anyone.
In my preverbal innocent core, I truly believe I knew that things were wrong then, but when you’re raped/molested from a young age, it becomes who you are. The focus turns inward and focuses on too often on “what’s wrong with me.” I don’t remember that feeling of what’s wrong with me as related to the rape and sexual abuse, but I do know that the after effects greatly impacted my behaviors, socializing abilities, and learning… causing teachers and classmates to tell me something was wrong with me. I was full of shame. I was embarrassed. I was confused. I never told anyone, probably never thought to tell anyone – “Oh hey, by the way, I’m being molested all the time…and that’s why I’m struggling!”
But I never gave up on my quest for understanding. I couldn’t stop myself from searching. I talked with therapists for years, $15,000 worth of therapy after my copays. But I wasn’t finding relief. I wasn’t finding solutions. The same issues that I had experienced were happening again and again, like over sleeping and being late for school or work. Not getting my homework done and cutting school so I wouldn’t get in trouble (I stayed home, by the way, no exciting galivanting to report. Overspending, overeating…
All of those issues just kept following me. I couldn’t shake them. But I really tried. And so I continued on my quest, and in my mid-40s to age 51 I earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology and a Master’s Degree in Mental Health Counseling. I was going to figure it out for myself.
And so this resilient journey of finding the answers and finding the solutions finally paid off when I found the techniques that I bring to clients, the techniques and modalities that truly made the difference in my life.
It was through that education and healing through NLP in Hypnosis™ and Eye Movement Emergence™ that I began to find that I what I had been searching for. That healing took away my pain and replaced it with my realization that throughout my life, in relationships, I was always searching for someone to save me. Someone to swoop in and rescue me. Heal me, and chastise those who hurt me.
For decades I thought I was looking for peace, but really, it was a hero. A hero that didn’t exist outside myself. It took years to finally accept that nobody was going to save me, except me. And that was a new kind of pain. Even if they could do something for me, they weren’t willing. And if they were willing, they weren’t able to do anything. What I was looking for didn’t exist. It either wasn’t possible or it just didn’t exist.
My resilience continues as I nurture and grow my own inner hero. Taking the power of me into my own hands and making my own differences in my own life. And helping others along the way.
I have so much “never give up, never surrender” energy overflowing because I truly believe that when you sense something in your core, you’ll never qI come into contact with. Be resilient, don’t stop searching. The ultimate goal is finding our true selves and living lives the way we want to …
What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?
All of my clients have all come to me through referral by someone who worked with me or by people read my story through my writing and my website and told others what they’ve found.
I do such unique change work that it really needs to be experienced to understand what it is I do and so traditional advertising and social media posting can’t truly convey it. It’s very hard to explain that I’ll do hypnotic, out-of-conscious awareness work while you’re talking to me. People think you’re either conscious or in a hypnotic trance, but I find the middle path through. When clients refer others to me, they say – “just call her, don’t try to understand it, just trust me it’ll work!”
My message is simple – we’ll clear out what you don’t want and replace it with what you do want.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://helenbrennercoaching.com/
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/helenbrennercoaching/
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/HelenBrennerCoaching
- Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/helenbrenner/