In this week’s podcast I had the incredible opportunity to sit down with such an inspiring resilient woman, Kelley Gunter: Supervisor for the National Suicide Hotline, a sexual abuse survivor, emotional warrior, public speaker, life coach, and the author of You Have Such a Pretty Face.
Kelley speaks candidly about the numerous addictions she developed as a result of the unhealed trauma she suffered from a childhood riddled with sexual abuse. Kelley’s painful journey to find peace and self-worth began with a 243-pound weight loss, and included many dark moments of despair that eventually brought her to her knees. Those feelings of shame and powerlessness contributed to not only Kelley’s initial weight gain, but the cross addictions she developed following her initial weight loss and the 20-year successful maintenance of that loss. Broken and devastated in the aftermath of her own self-destruction, Kelley’s fractured faith screamed out that somehow, her faint pulse and shattered heart was, in fact, still beating.
Kelley applies her vast therapeutic knowledge to the painful reality that weight loss doesn’t heal the trauma that contributed to the initial weight gain, nor does it systematically prevent the high likelihood that cross addictions can and may develop in people who don’t acknowledge that trauma.
Shame is the core of all addictions and Kelley addressed that shame and the addictions she suffered. Kelley provides not only professional insight into how crucial it is that we begin to address our inner pain, but also provides the compassion that can only be given from one who has walked the path and experienced the darkness herself.
Learn more at https://kelleygunter.com/
Connect on Instagram @gunterkelley
