About Me

I've spent much of my life learning how deeply what we believe about ourselves shapes the way we live.

For more than twenty years, my work has also placed me in the lives of people whose circumstances, experiences, and choices had shaped the way they saw themselves. Today, I bring what those years have taught me into Twelve Two.

My career has taken me through corrections, addictions, youth services, healing environments and shelters, from frontline work and case management into leadership. The circumstances have varied enormously, but underneath them I've seen something remarkably consistent: how easily what we've experienced, what we've done, how we've learned to respond, or what others have told us can become what we believe about who we are.

I've also watched what happens when that perception begins to change. Someone consumed by shame begins to understand that something they've done doesn't have to become their identity. Someone who has always seen themselves as angry becomes curious about what's underneath it. Someone who couldn't imagine a different future begins to recognize strengths and possibilities they couldn't see before.

And I've learned that this isn't unique to people whose lives have reached an obvious breaking point.

People are people.

It doesn't matter whether you're sitting behind bars or sitting behind a desk. You can have a successful career, a family and a life that looks perfectly fine from the outside and still struggle to belong, repeat patterns you don't understand, or quietly wonder whether there's more to your life than what you can currently see.

I know that not only because of my career. I know it because I've lived it too.

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

— Romans 12:2

As a child, “do not conform to the pattern of this world” didn't feel like freedom. All I wanted was to fit in, to belong and to be accepted. In many ways, the verse felt more like a prison than a promise.

At the same time, I always had this sense that there was a light within me that I needed to protect. I couldn't have explained it then; I just knew it was there. So I built walls around it, and even as a child I somehow knew those same walls would eventually have to come down if I ever wanted to be free.

For years, I carried self-hatred, a lack of confidence, pain I didn't know what to do with, and a deep need to belong. I was exhausted from trying to prove that I deserved to be loved, yet holding the pain often felt easier than facing the belief underneath it: that I didn't deserve to be loved.

I had believed it for so long that I no longer recognized it as a belief. It was simply the lens through which I saw myself.

As an adult, the part of Romans 12:2 I hadn't understood as a child became the part I needed most: “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Renewal wasn't about thinking more positively or becoming a better version of myself. It was about becoming willing to question what I had believed was true.

“What if the way I had learned to see myself wasn't the truth?”

My relationship with God had never been simple. I believed in Him, but I was also angry with Him for much of my life. I was angry about the verse He had given me, angry that I couldn't simply fit in, and at times angry that the same God I wanted to let me die was also the reason I couldn't bring myself to end my life.

And yet, I could never quite walk away from Him. As a child, I had a vision of God telling me everything was going to be okay, and somehow I carried that with me even when very little felt okay. At my lowest, I believed God had created me to be evil, and I couldn't understand how He could possibly love me. Over time, He became the God I came to know as loving me through all of it — the anger, the questions, the pushing back, and all the years I couldn't see anything in myself worth loving.

In 2018, I fell to my knees and asked, God, I surrender. Show me who I am. I was terrified of the answer. What followed wasn't an instant transformation, but a slow unraveling of things I had believed were true for most of my life. I began separating what had happened to me, the ways I'd learned to survive, and the things I'd done from the truth of who I was.

The verse I'd carried since childhood began to mean something different. Words became life. Renewal wasn't about becoming someone new; it was about letting go of what had kept me from seeing what had been there all along. The light I'd spent so many years protecting hadn't disappeared. I was finally learning how to live from it.

Looking back, I can see how closely my personal life and my professional life were connected. My titles changed over the years, but the heart of what mattered to me did not. I kept finding myself in places where people were being understood by what was most visible, while knowing there was always more to them than that.

Much of my career was spent creating places where people could feel safe, seen, and as though they belonged. It took me years to understand how personal that was. In many ways, I had spent much of my adult life trying to create for others some of what I had longed for myself.

That work has taken me across Manitoba, British Columbia and Alberta, where I've helped create an Indigenous Healing Centre for federally incarcerated women, led work focused on keeping youth connected to their families, helped open and restructure a women and families treatment centre, and led the opening and restructuring of shelters.

I'm proud of those accomplishments, but what has stayed with me most is the people — clients, staff, peers and teams — and what I've witnessed when someone begins to see beyond what they had come to believe about themselves.

Different stories. Different circumstances. But underneath them is a question I've come to know well: Is what I've come to believe about myself the whole truth of who I am?

Why Twelve Two

Romans 12:2 taught me something very different about renewal. It was not about changing who I was. It was about no longer allowing what had happened to me, what others believed about me, or what the world said was true to have the final word.

That understanding transformed me. It brought freedom, peace, and a different way of living. Twelve Two came from wanting to create a place where that kind of renewal could be explored with someone else too.

Twelve Two grew out of all of it — my faith, my own life, and more than twenty years of seeing how much can change when a person is no longer defined only by what has happened, what they have done, or what they have learned to believe.

That is still the way I see people today. And it is the reason I do this work.

See more clearly. Live more freely.