Warm Hugs and Welcome!

 

Thank you for stopping by.

 

I am Dr. Nikki LeToya White and I believe that women can thrive despite past traumas. I am a Licensed Ordain Minister serving as an Intuitive Spiritual Counselor, Registered Licensed Board Certified Trauma-Informed Nutritionist, Recovery Coach, Folk Herbalist, Wellness Practitioner, and Leadership Coach. I am also a Licensed Board Certified Public Notary and Loan Signing Agent and a best-selling author of the LonerWife Diaries Series. I am passionate about mental and emotional health wellness for women and women's health. As a patient, therapy helped me to create healthy boundaries, be confident, and prioritize my physical, mental, and emotional wellness. Now, as a counselor, I provide a safe and supportive space for women who struggle with codependency and emotional eating to shift from feeling overwhelmed and stressed to thriving as they explore the wound healing process.

 

Prior to working as a trauma-informed nutritionist and recovery coach. I've worked as a marriage and family counselor and life planning/career coach in private practice. I've held contract work as an individual and family behavioral health therapist, substance abuse counselor, and clinical case manager. I also worked as an operation manager and in-house wellness consultant within the transportation and retail industry. The common work I perform within all of these professional roles involves helping clients who struggle with depression, anxiety, sugar addiction, emotional eating, codependency people pleasing, and responses to childhood trauma "abandonment, and emotional neglect.

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Many people seek support because they feel stuck. I strive to foster insight into this “stuckness” by studying the dynamics within their relationships, especially the relationships with their families of origin. I strive to make sessions feel safe, inviting, and supportive. During our time together I would like to help you end unhealthy cycles and start living the LIFE YOU WERE MEANT TO LIVE AND DESERVE.  Are you ready to start your healing journey to learn treatment for wounds? Whatever your struggles, I am here to support you as you bring your wound closure.

 

I believe that every person is walking their own unique journey and therefore should be met where they are at. We individualize each recovery plan based on where you are at in life. Our tools and resources give women the opportunity to be real with their struggles and to be seen in a whole-hearted way. Courage is not easy to come by and it can be terrifying to open ourselves up to other people. At Spiced Life Conversation we will always open our ears and our hearts to your struggles and find the best possible plan for your life to be healthy and whole in the fashion you need it to be.

 

The actual process of beginning your emotional healing journey for abandonment and childhood emotional neglect trauma that causes codependency people pleasing, sugar addiction, emotional eating, financial stress, and impostor syndrome related to fear of success and being abandoned  typically works in this fashion:

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​1. Information Gathering-exploring where you have been, what you are experiencing now, and where you want to go.

 

2. Treatment Planning: developing a plan, setting goals, looking at growth edges

 

3. Process Work: putting in place tools, resources, and skills to help you build a sustainable life in recovery.

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I use an eclectic mix of therapeutic modalities, including psychodynamic therapy, trauma-informed cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy (DBT)

and acceptance and commitment therapy along with other holistic methods. All the tools I was taught during my training and professional counseling career.

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What is CBT?

Cognitive Behavior Therapy approaches the way people perceive a situation as more closely connected to their reaction than to the situation itself. CBT helps people to change unhelpful thinking, worry thoughts, and their resulting behaviors. It uses a number of tools to bring about these changes. Much of the therapy work is focused on how the person misinterprets their actions and those of others and gives them tools to alter their way of thinking and problem-solve more useful ways of looking at the situation. This often leads to improving their mood and ability to enjoy their lives and being in the world.

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CBT is extremely useful in assisting people with anxiety, various mood disorders, phobias, and obsessive-compulsive disorders.

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What is DBT?

Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) focuses on the psychosocial aspects of people’s behavior. The theory behind the approach is that some people are prone to react in a more intense and out-of-the-ordinary manner toward certain emotional situations, primarily those found in relationships with people whom they are close to. It suggests that some people’s distress in such situations can increase far more quickly than the average person’s, attain a higher level of emotional stimulation, and take much more time to return to a calmer emotional state.

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DBT helps the person identify their strengths and build on them while recognizing thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions that make their life harder. It is a highly collaborative approach with close attention paid to the relationship between the therapist and the client. People in DBT treatment are encouraged to work out problems with their therapist that they have in their relationships

 

DBT includes four sets of behavioral skills.

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· Mindfulness: the practice of being fully aware and present in this one moment.

· Distress Tolerance: how to tolerate pain in difficult situations, not change it.

· Interpersonal Effectiveness: how to ask for what you want and say no while maintaining self-respect and relationships with others.

· Emotion Regulation: how to change emotions that you want to change.

 

The term "dialectical" means to combine opposites. The primary dialectic within DBT is between the seemingly opposite strategies of acceptance and change. For example, DBT therapists accept clients as they are while also acknowledging that they need to change in order to reach their goals. For example, the four skills modules include two sets of acceptance-oriented skills (mindfulness and distress tolerance) and two sets of change-oriented skills (emotion regulation and interpersonal effectiveness).

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What is Brief Solution Focused Therapy?

Brief solution-focused therapy is targeted toward solutions, rather than problems. Even the most chronic problems have periods or times when the difficulties do not occur or are less intense. By identifying the times when problems are less severe or even absent, we can discover many positive activities that individuals are not fully aware of. By, making people aware of these small successes and repeating the successful things they do when the problem is less severe, it helps them improve their lives and become more positive and hopeful. This, in turn, assists individuals to become more interested in creating a better life for themselves.

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Because these solutions appear occasionally and are already within the person, repeating successful behaviors is easier than learning an entirely new set of potential solutions. Since it takes less effort, people may become more eager to repeat the successful behaviors and make further changes.

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What is Exposure Therapy?

Exposure therapy is designed to help people manage problematic fears. Through the use of various techniques, a person is gradually exposed to the situation that causes them distress. The goal of exposure therapy is to create a safe environment in which a person can reduce anxiety, decrease avoidance of dreaded situations, and improve one's quality of life.

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When people experience anxiety due to a traumatic memory, fear, or phobia, they often avoid anything that reminds them of it. This avoidance provides temporary relief but ultimately maintains the fear and pattern of avoidance. In some cases, the avoidance can actually make things worse and give more power to what is feared.  Exposure therapy is designed to reduce the irrational feelings a person has assigned to an object or situation by safely exposing him or her to various aspects of that fear.

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What is Self-Compassion Therapy?

Self-compassion therapy is extending compassion to one's self in instances of perceived inadequacy, failure, or general suffering. Self-compassion requires taking a balanced approach to one's negative emotions so that feelings are neither suppressed nor exaggerated. The three core components of self-compassion are self-kindness, recognition of our common humanity, and mindfulness.

 

These components are all helpful for the emotionally sensitive person and especially those whom suffer from feelings of immense shame.

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Trauma-Informed Approaches to Nutrition Therapy 

Adverse life experiences during developmental periods can have a profound impact on adult physical and mental health. Challenges faced by children that may have once been viewed as “harmless” are increasingly understood as capable of influencing health later in life. The saying “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is certainly not always the case.

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The widely accepted Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) measure asks questions about child maltreatment (emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, physical neglect) and household dysfunction (parental separation or divorce, mother treated violently, household substance abuse, household mental illness, and incarcerated household member). Other forms of adversity that have been added to ACE measures include bullying and violence, discrimination, poverty, and medical trauma, among others.

In North America, one in four people have experienced at least one ACE. Prolonged exposure to ACEs can create a toxic stress response, which can damage the developing brain and body of children and cause long-term health problems. From clinical practice, I have observed that some of the common health problems stem from binge eating and substance use disorders.

While many individuals exposed to ACEs can be resilient (i.e., emerge stronger afterward), for others it has been suggested that “time does not heal all wounds”. Some people develop PTSD after ACEs, while others do not. Many people blur out the memories of these experiences and thereby downplay the impact on their life, and some become entirely amnestic (i.e., don’t recall at certain times). Differences depend on individual factors (i.e., genotype) as well as what type of ACE was experienced.

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Traumatic experiences during adulthood can also be quite damaging to health. For example, trauma and adversity of any kind can lead to an unhealthy relationship with food, compromised nutritional status, and various forms of disordered eating. The relationship between food, individuals, families, and communities must be treated with compassion and a holistic perspective that acknowledges individual, historical (i.e., multigenerational), and systemic (contextual features of environments and institutions) trauma. This perspective has been referred to as the Social Determinants of Health and is the predominant conceptual approach used in Public Health.

Adverse food-related experiences can include unreliable and/or unpredictable meals (i.e., food insecurity), restriction/control over food as well as body shaming (sometimes imposed by parents or family members), loss of food traditions (e.g., migration or family separation), and manipulation, punishment, or rewarding with food (sometimes by well-intentioned caregivers).

Dietary behaviors that can result from adversity include binge-like eating disorders, and reliance on convenience foods high in sugar, salt, and fat, which is often referred to as food addiction. These behaviors can also include hoarding food, impulsive decision-making, and a de-prioritization of planning and budgeting. Understanding this can be the first step in moving toward a healthy relationship with food among people with binge eating.

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During my healing and recovery journey, I've learned that life doesn’t always go in a straight line. Our life choices and everyday decisions can get really messy and tangled, things move fast with an overwhelming sprint and our paths twist and turn in many directions. The right things happen at the wrong time and opportunities get passed by due to lack of knowledge and inexperience. 

 

Some things happen within our life experience that we just cannot understand in the moment no matter how badly we want an answer. And some things that we wish would happen just never do. In order to get through all these difficult emotions and to understand how to remove many of the obstacles, uncertainty, and negativity I learned to do spiritual work for wound care and spiritual energy healing as part of my recovery for healing the abandonment wound. 

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Shadow work, aura cleanse, and balancing my chakra have all been a part of my wound healing recovery to understand how to cope with loss, negative fear-based thinking, toxic relationships with myself and others, and most of all how to practice wound care, self-care, self-love, how to pray for healing and develop my intuition. 

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Trauma-Informed Nutrition Therapy

Trauma-informed nutrition therapy acknowledges the role ACEs and other forms of adversity play in a person’s life. It recognizes symptoms of trauma and promotes resilience by not exacerbating these hidden wounds.

A trauma-informed approach is characterized by an understanding that unhealthy dietary habits, chronic disease, and poor health outcomes may be a result of adverse experiences and not necessarily a result of individual “choices.” Therefore, trauma-informed nutrition therapy aims to avoid shaming, blaming, and stigmatizing. This perspective is critical to reducing weight stigma that is so pervasive in society nowadays.

Trauma-informed approaches focus on holistic well-being rather than weight and/or BMI and recognize that some nutrition interventions can be triggering. They acknowledge the strengths and skills of clients rather than pointing to a lack of willingness, and they inspire healing and a personalized relationship to food. Additionally, trauma-informed nutrition therapy is a practice of cultural humility and aims to address both conscious and unconscious biases.

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Learn more about the Trauma-informed approach here.

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Take the Adverse Childhood Experience Scale (ACES) quiz here.

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Message to Clients

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I have felt the nervousness that comes from sitting across from a therapist for the first time. It can be utterly nerve-wracking to acknowledge that we want to make changes in our lives, and sometimes we can worry that wanting help reflects poorly on us. I want to assure you that I see seeking support as an act of great strength and courage. We only have one life to live, and you are trying to make yours the best possible. I would be honored to meet with you to hear about your struggles.

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As we work together, we will identify your particular gifts as well as the obstacles that you want to overcome. Collaboratively, we will identify how to shift experiences both internally and in your outer world that will allow you to feel more comfortable with yourself and in relationships with others. My hope is that your therapeutic experience will encourage insight, growth, and hope. With that said not all my ways are traditional I also include holistic and spiritual approaches to my work, this type of inner work is not for everyone. 

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About Shadow Work

 

First, I want to say shadow work is not black magick or harmful. There's a misconception about that when someone says shadow work. On my journey to learning more about my ancestors and African spirituality my spiritual teacher explained to me that like winter is to summer, dark is to light, and moon is to sun, we have a shadow self. it's a part of our soul journey here on earth to find our light in the darkness. It's the difficult, painful, our inner demons so to speak feelings in our minds and hearts. It's a spiritual teacher's belief to have a balance of both light and darkness. Keep in mind darkness is not necessarily evil sometimes it's fears and insecurities. 

 

The shadow is a term coined by psychologist Carl Jung, and it refers to our deepest wounds. The wounds that have us believing we're flawed, unlovable, undeserving people. A lot of these wounds occur when you are a child. Like a childhood trauma, being bullied or harassed. or in my case the abandonment wound which is a deep core trauma. It impacts us not only on a human level but also on a soul level. I believe that unhealed trauma, usually rooted in childhood, is the only thing separating us from the love of God, loving ourselves as well as loving others unconditionally without, conditions. This is what allows us to remain trapped in the control of the fear-based worldview. Right now, there is a massive awakening happening to humanity. We are being called to heal our deepest wounds to create space for our soul's purpose and break generational curses of trauma and addiction. We can't let love and light in if these wounds go unsolved. It's about unlocking those darker thoughts and memories and facing them.

 

My teacher said shadow work is about confronting those uncomfortable feelings. Past wounds, childhood trauma, and unresolved pain from relationships.  Anger, guilt, shame, grief, and hatred are some issues that could go unresolved due to triggers caused by people that threaten your shadow self. If these feelings go unresolved they can cause more problems. That's why open wound healing is so important. If not, open wounds can lead to violence, destruction, addictions, and reckless behavior. It can also lead to physical illness. You can wear your body down physically and emotionally. It blocks us from our potential and being positive and happy. This information made so much sense to me. It felt true on a deep soul level therefore, I embraced it and practiced it within my daily inner work of wound healing and charka healing for abandonment wounds and childhood emotional neglect. 

 

Using Shadow Work Journaling As A Tool For Healing Emotional Wounds

 

My shadow work journal helps bring clarity to my life. I'm able to process my deepest pain and release habits that were keeping me from recovering, healing, and being financially stable. It gives me the ability to focus on who I am, what I am good at, what my weakness is, and most importantly what makes me, me. When you struggle with codependency people pleasing you tend to lose yourself. My shadow work journal allows me to stay true to my identity, sense of self, and who I am as an individual that way I no longer feel responsible for my moods, feelings, behavior, opinions, life choices, hardships, finances, and happiness of those around me. 

 

The more I learn about my authentic self the more I have the ability to represent who I am as a person. With this truth, I place that truth on a board as a reminder to honor my own needs, feelings, values, beliefs, and inner voice. This allows me to own who I am, not hide or be ashamed of my uniqueness or flaws. I embrace all of me. The good and bad. 

 

In my discovery, I learned that my greatest strength is I have a caring heart. A caregiver personality. I care way too much about people especially when someone is hurting or needs support I tend to feel their pain and experience hurting too. This triggers me and as a result, I rescue, fix, save, and try my best to please them. Because I care so much it leaves me vulnerable to getting taken advantage of, manipulated, and walked on.

 

I tend to sacrifice my needs to honor others' feelings and needs. When others refuse to show me the same love, respect, and dedication I feel ignored, misunderstood, abandoned, and uncared for. In short, I feel disappointed and disrespected. I wonder why is it okay for me to show love and support but others always seem to be unavailable or self-absorbed with their own needs. It seems as if they are okay with me staying stuck or abandoning my own needs as long as their needs are met or they get what they want. This breaks my heart!

 

Instead of acknowledging how I felt and dealing with the issues at hand, I escaped with food and developed a binge eating disorder. Being rejected, shamed, and excluded I had no idea how to deal with the stress and pressure. With that said, after years of self-discovery, I was able to manage my stress, fears, and emotional scars.

 

Then in 2013, I relapsed. Since then every day I've strived to heal and recover by honoring God and practicing self-care. I've been in full remission for seven years now.

 

Along with my shadow work journal, I follow a simple wellness plan.

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• Shadow Work Journal to process my emotions.

• Sleep schedule

• Water. Whole Food. Workouts

• Mood. Energy and Stress Management.

• Self-Care Routine

• Gratitude Journal

• Tag Sessions: Time Alone With God, and Ancestors, to hear guidance and develop my inner voice in order to take inspired action within my life. 

 

I challenge everyone to take this journey with me to slow down and remember who you are as a person because your feeling matters, your voice matter, your needs matters, and you matter as an individual. I learned that I am more than just a daughter of a police officer, a trucker wife, and a mom of four. I am Nikki. I am Dr. White. I am a child of God. I am a business owner. I am a role model to not only my clients, employees, and children but to all women with addiction and unresolved trauma who are struggling to rebuild their lives just as I have done. Most importantly I have dreams, goals, and needs too, and that's okay. In fact, that is great. I own my needs and desires!

 

I hope you choose to join me on this journey of abandonment wound healing. This challenge will help you figure out your shadow self's emotions, where they came from, and what you need to do to heal them. There are various types of healing exercises. There is journaling, divination, meditation, drawing, and other types of writing. The one we're going to focus on is the shadow journal. In a journal write a negative feeling you are experiencing. Write each emotion at the top of your paper. Take each emotion/paper and ask yourself questions. For example, Anger, what angers me? What can I let go of that angers me? Why am I so angry? How can I be reborn without anger? How would my life be better without anger? Do this with every emotion you write down on each piece of paper. This is a good way to confront your emotions and reflect on what you need to do to make it better. This exercise will help you learn how to process your emotions and deal with stress as opposed to suppressing how you feel. 

 

I would love to hear your story!

 

Email me and let me know how things are going. All you have to do is start the process with your shadow journal. 

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So let's get to it!

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If you need help book a clarity session and I can walk you through the process. 

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