Jan Bergstrom, LMHC has been 24 years in practice as a counselor and trainer in the field of codependency, developmental and relational trauma. She studied extensively with Pia Mellody, a pioneer in treating childhood trauma. Jan also practices Susan Johnson’s Emotionally Focused Therapy, an attachment model for communication as well as Terrence Real’s Relational Life Therapy model for couples. She is a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, a technique that uses a body-oriented approach for healing, a method developed by Peter Levine.
In 2008, Jan created the Healing Trauma Network, a directory of therapists who offer the techniques of Pia Mellody. In 2015, with Dr. Rick Butts, she created the Healing Our Core Issues Institute (HOCII), dedicated to teaching therapists a methodology for healing childhood trauma—training practitioners in a developmental and relational trauma model, an integration of Pia Mellody’s Post Induction Therapy, along with other attachment, mindfulness, and body-based techniques.
Jan currently resides in the Boston area, with her husband of 30 years. She is the mother of two adult sons. As a therapist and guide to others, Jan lives a restorative practice and reaps its many gifts.
When I was four and a half years old, I found my mother passed-out on her bedroom floor. She had overdosed—shortly after giving birth to my baby brother, and she went on to spend six months in a psychiatric hospital. On one of the many days she was away, I remember sitting in the backseat of our car with my older brother as my father drove us to the store, when suddenly our car collided head-on with another vehicle. I was too young to understand everything happening at the time, but, in the months that followed, I became parentless for a span of time that seemed like years. That experience set the stage for a lifelong interest in the impacts of childhood trauma. It also sparked my passion for healing others.
Today, based on the model created by best-selling author and trauma expert Pia Mellody (Facing Co-dependence ©2003), I share with you, Gifts from a Challenging Childhood: Creating a Practice for Becoming Your Healthiest Self. In these pages, you will:
• Learn and adopt 5 Core Practices for healthy living
• Cultivate a framework for your functional adult Self
• Gain clarity about your family-of-origin history
• Reparent your historically hurt places
• Speak your truth, and learn to have your own back
• Gather and use resources to help you heal from childhood trauma
Also for her Book Description OR Author Page if we're able to place some of these:
”In Gifts from a Challenging Childhood, author Jan Bergstrom describes with empathy and clarity the exact emotional, intellectual and neurological ways that children’s brains respond to trauma, and how the impact of that experience endures in the child’s life throughout adulthood. Bergstrom explains how our basic needs as children for love, protection, validation and expression must be met by our parents; and how, when these needs are not met in childhood, we can end up with one-up or one-down self-esteem and over-protective or under-protective boundaries as adults. In-depth descriptions of supportive, therapeutic techniques abound in this book, from mindfulness to grounding to writing a letter to yourself. Whether you experienced traumatic neglect or excessive control and enmeshment at the hands of your parents, this book will not only help you identify what went wrong for you, it will also provide you with validating, supportive and compassionate ways to reparent yourself.”
Jonice Webb, PhD
Bestselling author of Running On Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect and Running On Empty No More: Transform Your Relationships.
“Jan's book is a precious guide to untangling the complications and difficulties many of us have in our adult lives, arising from traumatic childhoods. Read it, underline it, take it with you on your personal journey. This book will bring you home.”
Nick Morgan is President of Public Words, Inc, a communications consulting company, and author of Can You Hear Me? How to Communicate with People in a Virtual World
“The devastating consequences of childhood trauma for the individual, families, and society at large are far-reaching, and cannot be overestimated. Jan Bergstrom’s new work builds beautifully on Pia Mellody's Post Induction Therapy model, offering hope and a detailed path forward for healing childhood wounds and living an authentic and empowered life.”
Vicki Tidwell Palmer
Author of Moving Beyond Betrayal: The 5-Step Boundary Solution for Partners of Sex Addicts
“Jan Bergstrom makes available what most only find from years of therapy; how to live a life of knowing our inherent worth and a practice that returns us to compassion. Her book is a deep yet practical guide to fostering self-awareness and ultimately inherent worth. It is a game-changer for any adult or parent who wishes they had it earlier in their life.”
Susan Brady
Author, Mastering Your Inner Critic & 7 Other High Hurdles to Advancement: How the best women leaders practice self-awareness to change what really matters
“Ms. Bergstrom has made a significant contribution to psychotherapeutic technique in her new book. She has distilled and described in specific concrete, readable, and relatable form the work of master therapist, Pia Mellody. She has added her own creative experiential techniques which translates Melody’s groundbreaking description of the effects of trauma into workable clinical intervention. The content of this book is equally helpful to the practicing psychotherapist who works with trauma as it is to survivors of childhood neglect, abuse, and abandonment. Ms. Bergsten clearly and effectively integrates Melody’s model of trauma with her knowledge of mindfulness/self-compassion and somatic experiencing techniques. The practices and exercises she describes and offers promote awareness, well-being and ultimately intimacy – with Self and others.
Noted Points:
She is clear, concise and very informative in her description of the impact of family dysfunction on the developing sense of Self and identity. She very specifically connects dysfunctional parental dynamics to the negative impact for future adult functioning and intimacy.
Her clinical examples well illustrate Mellody’s theoretical concepts. Her sections of “Reparenting” and “Standing in Your Own Truth” are fully compatible with other experiential trauma therapies such as Internal Family Systems (IFS). The writing is lucid and well described. They offer the client a specific road map to “unburdening” or freeing young and vulnerable inner child parts and processing trauma. Ms. Bergstrom shows the courage to describe her own path which impressed and inspired. She clearly has “walked the walk,” an expert from her own experience I enjoyed and was moved by Ms. Bergstrom’s discussion of the connection between spirituality and the deep work of psychotherapy. This is often a neglected and even feared place to go in the psychotherapy world dominated by behavioral, manualized and pharmacologic treatments. It is so refreshing to hear this relationship made explicit and “outed”.
Dan F. Pollets, Ph. D
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