I used to think forensic nursing was where I learned about trauma. It wasn't. It was where I learned to talk about it.

I'm a registered nurse and a former forensic nurse examiner. These days I'd add author, podcast host, and speaker to that list, though nurse is still the word that comes out first when someone asks what I do.

Before any of that, I lived inside the kind of house you don't talk about until you're an adult and someone finally asks the right question. Childhood trauma. Child sexual abuse. Domestic violence. I didn't have language for any of it for a long time. I just had the patterns it left behind.

For years, forensic nursing put me on the other side of that. I sat with people on the worst day of their lives and turned what happened to them into something a courtroom could use: evidence, timelines, documentation, care. I was good at it. For a long time, I believed the work was something I did for other people, separate from anything that had happened to me.

That wasn't true. I didn't understand how untrue it was until I sat through an ACEs training. Not a patient encounter. Not a dramatic moment at a bedside. A training, in a room, with a slide about adverse childhood experiences, where I recognized my own life inside a checklist I hadn't expected to see myself in.

That's where The Fan in the Window started, even though I didn't write it for years afterward. It launched in April 2026. It's a memoir about domestic violence, generational patterns, accountability, and the slow, nonlinear work of interrupting something that started long before I existed.

People who read it kept asking me the same question: okay, but how? Understanding the pattern is the first half of the work. Doing something different with it is the second half. That question is what became You Can Interrupt It: A Practical Guide for the Parent Who Inherited Trauma and Swore They'd Do It Differently, which followed this August. It's built around what I call the Interruption Model™: notice, name, regulate, interrupt, repair, repeat. Both books are available now.

I also host a podcast, The Fan in the Window: Interrupting What We Inherit, where I talk through all of this out loud, every other week, with guests and without them. There's a community that's grown up around it too — Interrupting What We Inherit on Facebook, if you want somewhere to keep the conversation going after an episode ends.

I run all of it through My Sweet Nurse Life, LLC, which is where the MBA finally came in handy. Between the books and the podcast, I also lead workshops for parents, clinicians, and anyone else trying to do this work without a map.

I live in Maryland with my husband, Jimmy. I am a mother to four grown children and a grandmother. All of it still teaches me something about repair.

I'm still doing the work myself, one pattern at a time.

This didn't start with you…but you can interrupt it. 🪟