Annette Copeland says she graduated from the school of hard knocks because she couldn’t learn any of life’s lessons the easy way but that was because her mental/emotional toolbox had broken tools in it. After a challenging childhood, Annette got pregnant at 16 - on purpose - and married her boyfriend as a way of exerting some control over her life. She left the abusive marriage at 18 and spent the next 20 years trying to prove that she wasn’t a teen-pregnancy statistic. She worked hard to make it look like she had it all together, while judging anyone around her for things she thought indicated they didn’t have their lives together. Finding the right tools and learning how to use them changed everything about how she shows up in the world.
Guest Bio
Annette Copeland, ND is the author of "Dragonfly Into The Light." After her own journey of recovery from self-neglect and toxic patterns, Annette felt compelled to raise awareness about trauma and emotional abuse. She combines awareness and solutions while encouraging individuals to break repetitive cycles and generational patterns. She believes it’s essential to recognize behaviors that cause repetitive patterns in order to practice emotional self-regulation. Annette encourages everyone to look into their own experience in a way that will allow them to recognize and release behaviors that evolved from past experiences to create a life of peace and fulfillment.
Turning 40 and Breaking Generational CursesAnnette Copeland’s childhood was bumpy. Though her parents divorced when she was young, her dad was around off and on because her mom would allow him back when her one-person income wouldn’t support the family. As a child, her father had been diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease and told he wouldn’t live past 18 so he lived his life like he was on fire and without regard for consequences. That didn’t leave much room for emotional intelligence or care for how his lifestyle and behavior affected the other people in his life. Her mother didn’t have the emotional skills to communicate her needs, either, which resulted in a home environment that was emotionally unstable and communicationally fraught.
As a teenager, Annette didn’t know how to manage her own emotions or communicate effectively which left her feeling like she had to compensate. That resulted in her becoming an overachiever and an overpleaser. She didn’t understand what love felt like.
To assert some control over her life, Annette got pregnant at 16 - on purpose - and married her 20-year-old boyfriend. It turns out she jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. The abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband was not what made her leave. It was when he started turning that abuse on their two-year-old that she found the courage to leave at 18.
She lived the next 20 years of her life trying to prove that she wasn’t a teen-pregnancy statistic and that she was the straight A student who deserved all the things she never made it to because she chose to get pregnant. She worked hard to make it look like she had it all together, while at the same time judging anyone around her for things she saw or thought indicated they didn’t have their lives together. She found herself in a vicious cycle without the tools to break herself out of the cycle.
By the time she was 30, her health had declined. She went to the doctor and told him she thought she had rheumatoid arthritis because she Googled it and he said, “ok. Here are some pills.” She took those for five years, but they didn’t seem to help. She finally decided she didn’t want to do that anymore and her doctor said, “well I never thought you had rheumatoid arthritis anyway; I just didn’t know what else to do with you.”
From there, she pursued knowledge on natural remedies and how to eat healthier. And she ended up with a job in marketing for a chiropractic office, which furthered...