Turn Your Anxiety Into An Awakening

As a holistic therapist and health coach, I practice an integrative approach with women, addressing the mind, body and spirit.

My Story

My work as a psychotherapist, researcher and teacher has continually invited me to engage in my own self-reflection around who I am and why I do what I do. This reflection inevitably begins by engaging with this quote from Carl Jung: “What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits”. As children we are less influenced by the demands of our society, the cultural prescriptions we engage with in order to fit a particular mold.

Part of becoming who we want to be is unbecoming who others wanted us to be, and in turn, returning towards our original state of wonder with the world.

From a young age, I was always fascinated by the human mind and relationships with self, others and the spiritual world, which I found myself immersed in, attending Catholic school from K-undergrad. I loved to play outside, paint and create games with my friends, hobbies I try to cultivate now as an adult. I had the privilege of attending and leading spiritual retreats as a middle schooler and high schooler where I first began to teach and learn and grow, within the world of personal growth and spirituality. I loved to learn and I also had a strong will – like choosing to play the trombone because a boy told me girls couldn’t! (which, I played for two years – the only girl in the brass band at Marist School in Atlanta).

Mostly, I was the good girl, rule following and high achieving, learning that this was what was expected of me, complying and always working hard. I went on to study Psychology and later earn my Master’s in Professional Counseling, specializing in women’s issue, abuse survivors and mood disorders. I loved my counseling work, and felt that I had found my passion. My husband and I created a holistic wellness business called Merge Health Fitness & Nutrition and I became a mother to the most amazing souls. At major points in my life, I witnessed my own growth that had occurred, which was both wonderful and challenging.

Somewhere during this time, I developed intense anxiety and panic attacks which eventually led to an awakening.

During this healing time is where I learned to heal my anxiety naturally, utilizing ancient healing techniques like meditation, Reiki and acupuncture, as well as heal my microbiome, optimizing the gut-brain axis which is so key for emotional health.

Interested and invigorated by my own journey, I earned a certificate in holistic health coaching soon after and began teaching gut health classes to therapists in the Atlanta area. My counseling practice evolved and deepened as I watched women heal in new and liberating ways.

Several years ago, my intuition was leading me to learn more: I felt I needed to deepen my practice even more, which led me to pursue my PhD in Psychology from the University of West Georgia. With two little kids helping me write papers, I learned about the power of the unconscious and the healing potential in making the unconscious conscious. And I began to explore how our society and culture impacts anxiety in women, particularly mothers.

Inspired by my client work, and my own transition into motherhood, I began to ask questions: why are mothers so anxious, guilty, pressured, selfless? What’s going on here? Why did I also feel these things, even though cognitively I knew better? Four years later, my dissertation work began, exploring how collective values of motherhood affect our mental wellness.

Working with women in this healing field is one of the greatest honors I have in my life.

I deeply value their essence, their courage in wanting to grow and heal, to understand their psychological and spiritual lives. My work is deeply rewarding and both serious and enlivening. I witness miracles of change through evolution and integration of all parts of one’s self. Importantly, I do not see anyone as broken; symptoms are messengers of the body and together we can work to decode them and make sense of them. I believe in the potentiality of each human, to reach towards growth, peace and consciousness. I wholeheartedly believe that one’s commitment to mind-body-spirit-relationship healing is a powerful avenue for facilitating social change and social justice on a large scale.

As we each commit to becoming more conscious, we can live in a more conscious world. My journey has evolved with the support of many teachers, friends, therapists, healers and guides; we do not heal on our own, but cocreate our reality and path through and with others.

Credentials + Affiliations

PhD in Psychology: Consciousness & Society - University of West Georgia
M.S. Professional Counseling - Georgia State University
B.A. Major in Psychology - Loyola University New Orleans
Licensed Professional Counselor in the State of Georgia
Certified Holistic Health Coach
Certified Reiki Master (Level 3)
Affiliations
- American Psychological Association - Member
- Association for Women in Psychology - Member
- Licensed Professional Counselor Association of Georgia - Member

Publications

Bertau, M.-C., Klein Toups, M., Larrain, A., Energici, A. (2021). Time, the Other, and the Collective Voice. Discernments from a Language Psychological Perspective with Three Dialoguing Voices. In Global Pandemics and Epistemic Crises in Psychology. Routledge.
Klein Toups, M. (2022). A sociocultural exploration of maternal anxiety. How dialogism and embodied voice can improve therapeutic outcomes.