Clinical and Healing Work
Click here for a detailed timeline of my trauma-informed healing and clinical training and work.
I am a clinician with a deep background in health, wellness, and social service. I was first encouraged to study nursing by Baba Chuck Davis, a remarkable nurse, choreographer, dancer, and impresario for West African dance and culture. He was my teacher at the Capital Health Institute School of Practical Nursing.
I was a formerly licensed Registered Nurse (RN), a Registered Nurse in Psychiatry (RNP), Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN), and a formerly licensed social worker (LSW). I was also a peer/community counselor, a former addiction and recovery counselor, a certified specialist in conflict resolution, and a multifaceted healer with a certificate in trauma-informed care.
As a nurse and/or a health navigator, I worked mostly on night shifts at DC General, Maryland General, Providence Hospital, the Walter P. Carter Center, FutureCare, Hahnemann Hospital, St. Joseph's Hospital, the Ohio Reformatory for Women, and the Ohio Hospital For Psychiatry while working at nonprofits or teaching during the day. I was also a School Nurse at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Baltimore City.
Since 1985 (over 30 years), I have worked with children, youth, adults, and families as a peace educator to prevent violence, advance community health, and elevate wellness. I have also specialized in wellness for people with mental and physical disabilities. As a peacemaker, I apply trauma-sensitive and disability-aware principles and practices of restorative justice, conflict resolution, de-escalation, and Social and Emotional Learning to all of the work that I do.
Mindfulness and mindful movement are also my foremost vehicles for individual and collective healing and in 1990 I created and still regularly use a method for whole-community mindful practice.
A Longtime Disability Rights and Anti-Violence Advocate
I am a lifelong disability rights, anti-violence, and anti-war advocate. These vocations arise from my firsthand experiences.
I share the following information to define myself because others have so often tried to define me.
Diagnosed as on the autistic spectrum and hyperlexic as an infant, I first began reading newspapers, magazines, encyclopedias, and full-length books at the age of 2½ and writing poems and diary entries (which I called "Letters to God") at the age of 3.
At 4, my mother took my writings away from me, fearing that they revealed the considerable violence (burning, beatings, sexual assault, and verbal harassment by multiple family members) to which I was subjected during my infancy and toddler years.
At 5, my mother, effectively, sold me to a known predator, child sex trafficker, actor, director, and theatrical agent named Kenneth Warren Daugherty, a man who was never brought to justice for his many crimes against children.
For two years off and on, from the ages of 5 to 7, Mr. Daugherty drove me to "auditions" in various states on the East coast and in Los Angeles and Las Vegas where I was raped with other children as well as filmed and photographed being harmed by men like Raymond St. Jacques, Matthias Herrmann, and Thomas N. Trager.
To my knowledge, none of these men (and others whose names I still do not know and the fewer women who co-committed and enabled their crimes) has ever been held to account for their crimes against children. Each man whose name I say here spent considerable time and effort trying to silence me (especially in the 1980s and early 1990s) when I spoke out about their crimes.
After entering foster facilities again at around 8 years old, I was twice brutally gang-raped at the final foster facility to which I was interned, sustaining body-altering, lifelong injuries. I was attacked so severely because I refused to shut up about the atrocities committed against me and other children.
Now even into my older years, I refuse to be silent. My voice is the greatest antidote to the poison of their power. Predators and annihilators crave total power. For them there is no greater power than victims' and survivors' complete silence and painful disappearance.
Their next greatest power is their total control over marginalized and vulnerable people. They live and breathe to control because their deepest illness is that they are, in fact, incredibly out-of-control.
Predators' third greatest aim is dehumanization. That is why predators so often do more than physical and verbal harm. They lust for emotional torture: debasement and humiliation. Jokes, insults, bullying, and torture go hand in hand with their other crimes.
My mother was correct: I have been speaking out in multiple platforms against violence since my toddler years--in writing, as a community organizer, and as a public speaker.
I sharpened my anti-war advocacy in my international nonprofit work in West Africa, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and China.
After my diaries were taken away by my mother as a toddler, I received my earliest writing back when I entered foster care for the first time at the age of 7 (I was in foster care 6 times during my childhood at deeply abusive, horrible facilities).
I discovered that a social worker gave my writings to my pediatrician, Dr. Margaret Mary Nicholson, for safekeeping. Dr. Nicholson was the only person I trusted throughout my childhood.
Amazingly, my mother had not destroyed my writings even though they included incriminating evidence of her own and others' crimes written (albeit sometimes with a child's cadence) in the same detailed, direct voice that you, the reader of this website, are reading now.