We were lucky to catch up with Vivian Meraki recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Vivian thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. If you had a defining moment that you feel really changed the trajectory of your career, we’d love to hear the story and details.

I grew up as an immigrant in the 1980s, in what I often call the Texas of Canada. I grew up hearing stories from family friends about their experiences, and that as recently as the 1970s, there were still some places that had signs up saying “No Chinese or dogs allowed”. That was the context I grew up in.

So I learned early how to survive. You don’t show your emotions. You don’t focus on what you want. You work hard. You achieve and perform and do well, but not so well that you stand out too much. You blend in. That’s how I learned to stay safe.

That way of living carried into everything: my schooling, career, and personal life. And it worked on the surface. I built a successful 20+ year career in marketing and communications. I led high-performing teams working with Fortune 500 brands, agencies, consultancies, and social impact startups. I had the six-figure salary, respect, and stability… And I also had the life I was supposed to want: marriage, two kids, our forever dream home. All the boxes were checked.

At the same time, I was becoming increasingly empty on the inside. I felt like I was disappearing under the weight of burnout and all the responsibility.

I wondered about the dreams I’d once had and remember thinking, maybe this is just how life is. Maybe not everyone gets to be the main character of their life. Maybe I’m just a side character.

The moment that changed everything was like any other day at home. Only this time, as I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, I asked myself a simple question… yet probably the hardest question I had ever asked myself. If this is my life for the next 10, 20, 30 years, am I okay with that? And the answer was a very soft, heart-breaking no.

Painful, yes.
Questionable, no.

That moment forced me to face what was actually going on. I had built a life that looked right, but didn’t feel right. I grappled with it a long time, but in the end, I knew something had to change, That led to some of the hardest decisions and conversations of my life.

My marriage ended and I left my marketing career and stepped into coaching. And now, I work with people who want to feel like themselves again and stop being afraid of the stress patterns that they may be passing on.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m a family relationship expert, somatic trauma-informed coach, and the author of Parenting Through Divorce. I support parents, especially mothers, who want to feel like themselves again and stop worrying about what they’re passing down to their children.

My work comes from my own life.

Soon after I moved out of the matrimonial home as our family was navigating our divorce, my kids started experiencing crippling anxiety. They couldn’t let me out of their line of sight. School drop-offs and transitions between homes became incredibly hard. Our once brave, resilient children were suddenly scared, insecure, and feeling fragile.

As a parent, that’s one of the hardest things. That feeling of helplessness and hopelessness where you don’t know how to support them. You’re just watching them struggle.

I went all in trying to find answers.

I scoured books, articles, podcasts, and research. My co-parent and I signed the kids up for child therapy. It was supportive, but I couldn’t shake the thought that it was only 50 minutes each week. What about the rest of the time? Surely there was more I could be doing to support them.

In the end, the biggest shift didn’t come from something outside of me. It came from what I had already been doing within my own work. My training and work in somatics. I took what I was doing with my clients and translated it into an age-appropriate approach for my kids. Those turned into conversations, exercises, and small practices we could do together. I worked with them gently, in real time, through the moments that were really hard for them.

That’s what changed everything for my family.

I ended up writing the book I had needed at the time but never found, in the hopes that it would support other families going through something similar. Since then, readers have told me that it was a lifeline and a warm hug during one of the hardest seasons of their lives.

It also shaped my practice.

Today, I work with parents navigating life transitions like divorce, grief, family estrangement, and loss of identity. Most of my clients are thoughtful and self-aware. They’ve read the books, done the therapy, and understand their triggers. They know what they “should” be doing. And yet, they still find themselves reacting, snapping, shutting down, or feeling overwhelmed. Because you can only mindset your way through so much.

You can tell yourself things like “I’m worthy, strong, and capable”, and part of you will work hard to believe it. But there’s another part that is still holding you back. That’s not a willpower or mindset problem. That’s a conditioned pattern that’s stuck and held in the body.

That’s the work I do.

I work with my clients to reconnect with their body and nervous system, and to decondition the stress patterns that are held there so they can actually be released and replaced with new ones that serve them. And this creates real, tangible change.

Clients come back saying they feel a level of peace they haven’t felt in over a decade. They describe feeling alive again. Lit up, clear-headed, lighter in their day-to-day. The cognitive load lifts. Decisions get easier. And the changes aren’t just internal, they show up everywhere.

The relationships in their lives shift. There’s less conflict, more ease, more genuine connection. Parents who used to feel constantly reactive find themselves responding with a steadiness that surprises even them. Things that used to set them off don’t even phase them anymore.

One of the things I hear most often is that people were able to go deeper in a single session than they had in many years of therapy across different modalities. In one case, we got to the core of something in one session that had been blocking them from going for something that they’d wanted in their life for years. Once that was addressed, everything else started to shift.

I work with a small number of clients at any given time so that I can go deep with each client, and I offer asynchronous support outside of my sessions, because I deeply believe that’s where the real integration happens. Not in a one-hour conversation, but in the actual moments when an old pattern wants to take over. That’s where I want to be.

People come to me asking things like: Why do I keep reacting this way with my kids? Why can’t I feel like myself? I just know something’s off. By the time they leave, they’re not asking those questions anymore. It’s not just because they found an answer, which they have, but because they felt the shift at the body level and how they move through their life.

I spent over 20 years in high-performance environments leading teams and delivering results. That didn’t go away. It’s baked into how I work. I designed my programs for real results people feel and see in their lives. This isn’t abstract or theoretical. The results are real, and they show up in real life.

What I’m most proud of is the impact I see in people’s lives. My system is simple, but it goes deep and it works because it’s designed around the way your body actually functions.

What makes that possible is the level of emotional safety people feel from the very beginning. That’s not something they have to work up to. They feel it right away. And I know that’s rare. It’s hard to put into words—it’s one of those things that has to be experienced—but people tell me they’ve spent years, sometimes over a decade, searching for someone they could feel that with. And when they find it, something in them relaxes that maybe hasn’t relaxed in a long time. From that place, we can go to the places that have previously felt too difficult or too tender to access before. People are often surprised by how quickly they get there and how much shifts when they do. That it doesn’t feel forced, but rather like something finally clicks. And that becomes their new baseline.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

The biggest lesson I had to unlearn was that my value came from how well I performed, how much I could hold together, and how little I needed.

I took pride in how little I needed and how independent I was. I now know, that was all a survival strategy. You figure out early what keeps you safe, what makes you acceptable, what helps you feel like maybe you belong. And for me, that meant working hard, reading the room, not asking for too much, and never making things harder for anyone else.

I got really good it. And it worked. It built a very successful multi-decade career operating like that. It got me through hard things. But it also meant I drifted further and further from what I actually wanted, what I felt, and what mattered to me.

So even when I had the career, the family, the home… all the things I was supposed to want, I still felt like something was off. But I didn’t know how to resolve that. I hadn’t been taught to listen to myself. I’d been taught to perform and push through.

The unlearning ended up being something I couldn’t will my way through. I needed to address it at the body level, gradually, layer by layer. And what who I am now as a result isn’t a different version of me. It is more like… the original one. The one that I have always been before all the conditioning happened and I learned to shrink to belong.

That’s what sits at the heart of my work now. I’m not just helping people change who they are, but I’m helping them undo the ways they learned to survive so they can finally live the life they want to design for themselves.

If you could go back in time, do you think you would have chosen a different profession or specialty?

Without hesitation, I would choose it over and over again and I wouldn’t change a thing.

Looking back, every step I’ve taken has culminated in the work I am doing now and every step I take now will continue to culminate into the future I’m stepping into. I don’t regret anything.

Doing the work I’m doing now, what I now know is that I was always meant to be doing this work. I was made for this. But I also know that I couldn’t be doing this work without having gone through everything that I experienced and what I’ve lost (and gained) along the way. The pain I went through has given me the depth I have now.

So many principles that lie at the core of who I am and my practice are ones that I have now because of the insights of what I lived. For example, I wouldn’t know how to create and access emotional safety if I hadn’t lived so long without it. It’s because I never had it that I know so intimately what robs someone of it, even when it’s unintentional, and also how to repair and create it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.vivianmeraki.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vivianmeraki
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vivianmeraki
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@vivianmeraki
• Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@vivianmeraki