We were lucky to catch up with Amber Tolbert recently and have shared our conversation below.

Amber, appreciate you joining us today. Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?

My parents did the best they could and gave me all they could. I grew up on a farm in a tiny town in South Carolina. Many would of described my childhood as “sheltered”. I didn’t know as a child that nature would be how I found home, and maybe my parents didn’t either but they gave me the world!

As a little girl, my mom would be calling for me throughout the house trying to find me. She’d ask my 3 older sisters, “where’s your baby sister?” Without fail, they would find me holding the baby chicks as they hatched from their shells rocking them to sleep, or, laying down in the hay in the barn with the new baby cafe. I don’t know how as a little girl I bonded so well with animals, but they were my friends. They saw me, heard me, and loved me.

Growing up on the farm I could drive a tractor before I was able to drive a car. I felt so much freedom in being able to drive on the farm, bailing hay, moving cows, or mending fences. The skills my parents gave me in maintaining a farm, growing and harvesting a garden, and caring for animals is far more valuable than any of the degrees I earned. Why? Because, it gave me purpose, confidence, and belief in myself.

The work ethic I adopted has given me the ability to know how to provide for myself and my family. History has shown me, I’m built and trained to win, achieve, prosper. The road has been long, bumpy, painful, and scary but the outcome is amazing!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I was raised on a farm in a tiny town with very little dreams because my world wasn’t very big. It wasn’t that I didn’t want more, it was that it wasn’t even in my perception. My family suffered from numbing and medicating with substances in order to survive the pain and trauma. Both my parents came from scarcity of some type that left them with a lot of baggage to carry the rest of their lives. My Dad ended his own pain when I was 24 years old, before he witnessed my graduation from college, my wedding day to my best friend, and the birth of my two boys.

I endured a lot of abuse, neglect, scarcity, and pain in my childhood and it led me to become a social worker. It was not in my vision, I just followed the “bread crumbs”. I’ve been in recovery for 17 years as an Adult Child of Alcoholic and Dysfunctional Families. That led me to owning a multistate group practice leading a team of 10 women in recovery supporting individuals, couples, and families surviving childhood trauma.

What makes my practice different from others is our desire as a team to live in recovery and work in integrity. We don’t ask a client to do anything we haven’t done ourselves as a client in our own journey. Our approach is mind, body, and spirit because trauma doesn’t just live in our memories. It takes up permanent residence in our body attaching to tendons, ligaments, and joints. We heal the whole person by Reparenting the Inner Child to heal the Soul. Trauma in childhood impacts our essence, our being, our spirit. Therefore, recognizing our worth and working to heal all the layers Reparents our inner child and gives back many of the things our parents didn’t have to give us. We don’t have to live the rest of our life in deficit.

I spent most of my childhood trying to save my parents, or trying to keep my Dad alive. What I’ve realized in my journey is my purpose is helping others find their home. If we have a home, we have no reason to leave. My home is in nature, back to my roots.

My team and I support fellow travelers in learning how to be beings not doings. We teach, lead, and guide others through the journey of recovery so they too can find their way home.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Part of my backstory was surviving abuse where I had to learn how to abandon my body so the only pain was to my body and not to my soul. In my industry this is called dissociation. It’s a necessary survival skill for children of childhood sexual abuse because the brain can’t comprehend the heinous acts happening to the body.

As a survivor, research shows that once a victim, there’s higher risk of becoming a victim again. Unfortunately, that is my inner child’s story. Somehow she was so brave and knew how to protect the most precious part of us, our soul. I do believe my soul was wounded by the repeated abuse, however, the journey of recovery created a space that allowed me to understand self abandonment is not the way out.

Today I can look at those that were supposed to love and protect me (but actually hurt me) with grace and forgiveness. That has not always been my perspective. Sharing my story created unintentional chaos because it created a division in those that I thought mattered most. But my resilience and courage to speak my truth set me free of carrying that baggage and allowed me to heal and become whole.

Any advice for managing a team?

The best advice I have for supporting a team is to Lead them. I choose not to be a boss. I walk out my recovery to the best of my ability daily, and I hold space for them to do the same. Our “job” is not priority in our life. It is A priority, but it is not THE priority. We are in roles where we are also expected to model that alignment to our clients and create an environment that allows for that level of congruence. The biggest advice I can offer is integrity and accountability. I can’t just hold it for others, I also have to be able to be held accountable as well. My team does that for me, not from a punitive place, but from a relational loving place. We create connection with people because we are allowed to be human. Mistakes are permitted, so is repair.

Contact Info:

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