Aimee Martin
I didn't come to this work from a textbook.
I came to it because I needed it to survive my own life.
And I stayed because it actually works ~ not in theory, but in the middle of school mornings and hard conversations and moments when the old patterns pull and you have to choose, again, to show up differently.
MY HONEST VERSION
Most practitioners studied this.
Whereas I lived it first.
Most practitioners studied this. Whereas I lived it first.
I am a nana raising two of my grandchildren. I love my daughter ferociously and I have watched her battle addiction, relapse, recovery, and a brain tumour diagnosis. I separated from my husband for six years ~ we lived on opposite sides of the country while I raised two small children alone in Alberta ~ and we found our way back to each other after everything. We are 27 years in total now. My mother lives with us. My life is full in the way that does not fit neatly on a website.
I am not telling you this to impress you with how much I have survived. I am telling you because if you are here, it is probably because your life is complicated in ways that most practitioners have not experienced personally.
And I want you to know ~ before you read a single credential ~ that I understand what it feels like from the inside.
"The patterns you carry are not who you are. They are what you learned. And what is learned can change."
That is not something I read. It is something I had to learn inside the hardest years of my life. And it is the foundation of everything I teach.
THE STORY BEHIND THE WORK
Not the highlight reel.
The real version.
The moment that changed everything
I was in a hospital, waiting while my daughter was in the delivery room. A social worker came to find me. She asked me directly ~ are you taking the baby home, or is she going into care? My granddaughter had not even been born yet. I had a matter of minutes to decide. I said yes. Not because I had a plan. Because she was family and that is what I did.
That moment is where my understanding of nervous system shock became personal. I know what it feels like when your whole life reorganises itself in a corridor, without warning, without preparation. A lot of the people I work with know that feeling.
Loving someone through addiction
My daughter's addiction did not happen once. It happened in cycles ~ hope, relapse, recovery, relapse again. I lived the full complexity of what it means to be a family member of someone in active addiction. The high alert that never fully switches off. The way you reorganise your entire nervous system around someone else's instability. The guilt that comes with loving someone fiercely and being furious at them simultaneously.
I sent her to treatment in Costa Rica. She came home into the middle of COVID. We spent six months in Mexico as a family, navigating everything together. And while we were there she kept having episodes ~ falling, telling me she had a brain tumour. I did not believe her. I thought it was symptoms from recovery. I was wrong.
The brain tumour I dismissed
She went to an eye doctor appointment. I waited in the car. When the call came, they were already contacting neurologists. She did have a glioma ~ stable, but with severe intercranial hypertension that had her hospitalised for two weeks. She was given options for her treatment. And then, weeks before she was scheduled for surgery, she relapsed again.
I am sharing this not for sympathy. I am sharing it because the clients I work with are often carrying something like this ~ a family story so complicated that when they try to explain it to someone who has not lived it, they end up managing that person's reaction instead of getting the support they came for. You will not have to manage mine.
The separation ~ and the return
While all of this was happening, my husband and I were separated. For six years. We were living on opposite sides of the country. I had moved to Alberta for extra support during my daughter's pregnancy and ended up staying ~ alone, raising two small children, managing everything by myself, while he was thousands of miles away in our family home.
We have been back together for years now. We are 27 years in total. And I want to be honest: coming back to each other after everything was not simple. You do not just resume where you left off. You bring everything with you ~ the patterns, the hurt, the survival strategies that got you through the years apart. We do this work every single day inside our own relationship. Not because we have it figured out. Because none of us ever fully do.
Where we are now ~ why it matters
My daughter is in recovery. She is back in the lives of her children ~ the two I am raising. We are all navigating this together, under one roof, with all the love and complexity that brings. I have three other grandchildren under the age of three. My mother lives with us. My life has not become tidy. It has become workable ~ because we have the tools now, and because we choose each other even when it is hard.
This is the life I am living while I build this practice. Not before it. Not after it. Right in the middle of it. That is not incidental. It is the reason the work I do is grounded in reality rather than theory.
WHY THIS WORK
I spent years collecting certifications because I kept encountering things in my own family I needed to understand more deeply.
It was not ambition. It was necessity. Every time something happened that I could not make sense of ~ the cycles of addiction and recovery, the attachment wounds underneath the conflict, the way trauma shows up in bodies and relationships and parenting ~ I went and trained in it.
Hypnotherapy because I needed to understand subconscious patterns. RTT because I needed a tool that actually changed things, not just described them. NLP because I needed to understand how language and belief interact. Family recovery coaching because I was living inside family recovery. Grandfamily leadership because I was leading a grandfamily. The physiology of domestic abuse and coercive control because the people I was working with kept arriving with histories that deserved more than I could give without that training.
"The patterns you carry are not who you are. They are what you learned. And what is learned can change."
They do work. Not because everything is perfect now ~ it is not. But because things that were stuck for years have shifted. Because hard conversations go differently. Because the patterns that used to run on autopilot now pause long enough for me to choose. That is what I want for the people I work with.
WHAT I BELIEVE
The things I hold true about this work.
Patterns are not personality
The way you show up in relationships ~ the over-giving, the peacekeeping, the limits that collapse ~ these are not who you are. They are what you learned. And what is learned can change.
Understanding alone is not enough
Knowing your pattern intellectually and actually changing it are completely different things. The pattern lives in the body and the subconscious ~ not just the mind. That is why the work goes to both levels.
Safety before everything
No real change happens in a nervous system that does not feel safe. The first job is always to create a genuine sense of safety ~ not performed, not promised, but felt. Everything else follows from there.
Complexity deserves honesty
The people I work with are navigating situations that do not fit neatly into self-help categories. I will never simplify your story to make it easier to work with. The complexity is part of what we hold together.
You are not the problem
You may have been given that message ~ by people, by dynamics, by years of relationships that required you to make yourself smaller. It was never true. Part of this work is making sure you know it.
You deserve more than just coping
Coping is a starting point, not a destination. The work I do is not about managing symptoms ~ it is about understanding what created them, and building something genuinely different.
TRAINING AND CERTIFICATIONS
The credentials behind the work
I trained in each of these because I needed to ~ because my clients kept arriving with layers that I could not hold well without the right tools. The certifications matter. But they are not the most important thing I bring.
HYPNOTHERAPY
Certified Hypnotherapist
Subconscious rewiring and transformation
RTT
Rapid Transformational Therapy Practitioner
Marisa Peer method ~ root-cause belief work
NLP
NLP Practitioner
Pattern interruption and communication rewiring
COACHING
Certified Life Coach
Trauma-informed coaching and accountability
FAMILY RECOVERY
Certified Family Recovery Coach
Supporting families navigating addiction recovery
KINSHIP
Grandfamily Leadership Certification
Kinship caregiving and grandfamily support
PARENTING
Breakthrough Parenting Certification
Conscious parenting and family dynamics
COERCIVE CONTROL
Physiology of Domestic Abuse and Coercive Control
Certification in progress
A note on scope: I am a coach and hypnotherapist, not a regulated mental health professional. I will always be honest with you about what I offer and what falls outside my scope ~ and I will always support you in accessing clinical care when that is what is needed. The two can run alongside each other beautifully.
WHAT TO EXPECT
What it is actually like
to work with me.
Most practitioners studied this. Whereas I lived it first.
I want to tell you the real version of this ~ not the version that sounds like a sales page.
I will never ask you to have your story organised before you arrive.
You can come in mid-chaos. That is often when this work matters most.Nothing you tell me will make me flinch.
I have heard things that would surprise most people. Your story will not be too much for me.I will be honest with you.
If something you share tells me that you need a different kind of support ~ clinical, medical, crisis ~ I will say so directly and help you find it. I will not keep working with you out of loyalty when something else is what you need.I do not believe in cheerleading.
I believe in genuine witness and real tools. You will leave every session with something specific to do or practise.I work with the whole picture.
Your nervous system, your patterns, your history, your current relationships, your specific life. Not a generic curriculum ~ your actual situation.The between-session support I offer is real ~ not automated.
When I send you a voice message, I recorded it myself, thinking about you specifically.I am still doing this work myself.
Inside my own family, my own marriage, my own life. I am not a practitioner who has arrived somewhere safe. I am a practitioner who is in it with you.
If that is the kind of working relationship you are looking for ~ warm, honest, and grounded in something real ~ I would love to have a conversation.
READY TO BEGIN?