Ed Andrew talks to Amy Lohr on her 36th birthday. Amy is a speaker, integrative psychotherapist and corporate wellness consultant. Amy works with a wide range of professional clients including many lawyers, her speciality is working with high functioning people who have experienced severe trauma, such as addiction, abuse, grief and loss.  Amy's own journey to learning and helping others comes from her own childhood and early adulthood where she was subjected to physical, emotional, religious, spiritual and sexual abuse by multiple members of her own family in remote rural America.  She finally fled at 20 years old and for the past 16 years has been on a quest to heal and repair her own body and mind while learning from traditional Western teachers and eastern practitioners including reiki, Chinese Energy medicine, shamanism and integrating those modalities into a psychotherapy and wellness practice to help others. 

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She sees many professionals who exhibit signs of stress at work but which have far deeper underlying root causes and it these that she works with to overcome and enable people to thrive once again in work and life.  We discuss all aspects of her life, work and study in a frank, profound and insightful interview. 

 

• She suffered all forms of abuse from multiple family members and witnessed domestic violence in a rural area, from childhood to 20 years old. It was not a cult but her father was a senior religious leader. 

 

• She describes what high functioning trauma victim actually means in day to day life.

 

• She talks about how she knew that she wanted to be a healer as a teenager and she wants to give back to the world, bringing holistic healing and spirituality into her own personal and professional work.

 

• She explains why none of the offenders have been arrested - how her life was in danger. How the victim is in survival mode and how even basic emotional needs can still be met by the offenders especially where the victims are children who have never known any other life. 

 

• She describes the further alienation of leaving the family and how a criminal investigation does not protect the interests of the victim emotionally and mentally.

 

• She finally left at 20 and went to the city to study, she has a master in social work, together with a clinical qualification and numerous courses in traditional and alternative therapies.

 

• Detailing how after years of emotional therapy her body started to fail her and how she had to dig even deeper and find alternative remedies, and how traditional psychotherapy differs from holistic methods.

 

• On finding found a naturopathic doctor who understands pharmacology, drugs and herbs, acupuncture, non traditional, neurological emotional testing like a chiropractor, she admits she was 100% sceptical at first but now practices and teaches the same methods. 

 

• Explaining that describing energy modalities is like describing the wind to someone who has never experienced it.

 

• How the body holds al of the energy of incidents memories etc that has ever happened to us,  how it is all programmed in our brain in our neuro chemistry.

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• How we can make up our stories in our mind but our body never lies.  

 

• How both men and women hold trauma in their hips, but men push through it, men are chemically designed to push through their pain, men can be very tolerant of pain and very high functioning regardless of their pain.​

 

• She explains that struggles in adulthood tend to mirror those roles from childhood and we take on them the same roles and dysfunctional themes which don’t serve us as an adult.

 

• How lawyers leave their firms to set out on their own as they can create the support that the firm never had for them, firms are neglecting the human beings that have feelings and families as they are just focusing on productivity.

 

• How wellness, mindfulness and meditation in the workspace can be a fad, or that if the primary reason is to save money is in itself problematic.

 

• We talk about her own corporate consulting, returning companies to integrity and all things pure.

 

• Power V's Force by David Hawkins - how the book has really changed her life. How shame and fear are destructive energies and so if we use that to motivate us we will always get destructive results, as opposed to courage, joy, love compassion get constructive results and consequences.​

 

• She sees herself as a bridge between tradition and non traditional techniques.

 

• On being a reiki master and a reiki teacher, how she hand selects her students, she wants to have a wellness centre in Pittsburgh to bring in multiple types of instructors and a training institute where people can be mentored and trained who are interested in different modalities.

 

• The identity crisis, sometimes perpetual that often comes when you repair and heal deep psychological and physical wounds, opening up to a more spiritual side, and understanding whether you will be accepted by your former circle of friends and colleagues - the grieving process of letting go of the old and welcoming in the new. 

 

• How she is co-hosting a Pittsburgh linkedin local meet up.

 

• How your mind has to catch up with the physical process of healing.