I started noticing.
I began paying attention to my body’s cues instead of judging them. My reactions started making sense.
About Carrie Holladay
I help survivors come home to themselves after betrayal.
I’m a trauma-trained somatic practitioner, betrayal trauma coach, and complex trauma survivor. My work helps women and men understand their protective responses, reconnect with their bodies, rebuild self-trust, and create safety from the inside out.
Before I had the words
I knew something inside me felt shattered.
For years, I did not have the language for betrayal trauma. I only knew that my body was always bracing. Anxiety became my baseline. I felt disconnected from myself, unsure of what was real, and exhausted from trying to hold everything together.
I learned to survive by abandoning myself. I silenced my needs, questioned my instincts, and became very good at becoming whatever version of me felt safest in the moment. From the outside, I could look like I was functioning. Inside, I felt like I was disappearing.
Betrayal did not just affect my thoughts. It affected my body, my sense of reality, my relationships, my faith in myself, and my ability to feel safe in my own skin.
The shift
My healing changed when I stopped trying to think my way out of trauma.
I had spent years trying to understand the pain through logic, analysis, and talk-based processing. Those things helped me name parts of my experience, but something in my body still felt stuck.
Then I found somatic mindfulness and nervous system regulation. For the first time, I began to understand the tightness in my chest, the pit in my stomach, the shutdown, the anxiety, and the hypervigilance as protective responses — not personal failures.
My body had not betrayed me. It had been trying to keep me alive.
What began to change
Safety became something I could feel, not just understand.
I started regulating.
I learned how to support my nervous system instead of forcing myself to push through survival responses.
I started trusting myself again.
My voice, intuition, boundaries, and clarity began to return one small layer at a time.
The story behind the work
This work was born from lived experience.
Survival
I lived for years in anxiety, people-pleasing, over-functioning, self-doubt, and chronic bracing. I did not know my body was living in survival mode.
Rock bottom
Eventually, I reached the point where I knew I could not keep abandoning myself and calling it coping. Something had to change.
Body-centered healing
Somatic work helped me reconnect with the parts of myself that betrayal trauma had buried. I began to feel steady, present, and alive again.
Purpose
My pain became a doorway into the work I now do with women all over the world: helping them understand their bodies, trust themselves again, and heal with compassion.
What I believe
Your reactions make sense.
I believe healing after betrayal is not about rushing forgiveness, forcing trust, bypassing grief, or pretending the pain did not change you. It is about understanding what happened in your body and rebuilding safety at a pace your nervous system can actually hold.
01
Your body is wise, even when its responses feel inconvenient.
02
Self-trust is rebuilt through felt safety, not pressure.
03
Healing does not require abandoning yourself to keep the peace.
04
Repair is only meaningful when safety is practiced, not just promised.
How I help
Support for the body, the story, and the next step.
Somatic Healing
Learn to notice your body’s cues, understand your nervous system states, and build tools for regulation and felt safety.
Betrayal Trauma Support
Understand why betrayal feels so disorienting and how to move through triggers, grief, self-doubt, and protective responses.
Self-Trust + Boundaries
Reconnect with your intuition, rebuild your inner voice, and learn how to create boundaries that support safety and clarity.
Relationship Repair
Explore what repair actually requires: accountability, attunement, nervous-system safety, honesty, and consistent patterns over time.
Training + credentials
Trauma-informed, somatic, and relationship-centered support.
My work brings together somatic healing, betrayal trauma education, mindfulness, attachment, nervous system regulation, parts work, and relationship repair.
View credentials
- Certified Mindfulness and Meditation Teacher
- Certified Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness and Meditation Teacher
- Certified Betrayal Trauma Coach
- Trauma Specialist
- Somatic Attachment Therapy
- Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy
- Foundations of Polyvagal Informed Practice
- Complex Trauma Level I & II
- Gottman Method Couples Therapy
- Treating Affairs and Trauma
- Felt Sense Polyvagal Model for Treating Trauma and Addiction
- Somatic EMDR
- Embodied Intimacy and Relationship Coaching
- Associate Certified Coach, ICF
- Certified Partner Coach Candidate, APSATS
Work with me
Choose the support that fits where you are.
The Circle
Ongoing support, weekly coaching calls, monthly healing themes, somatic practices, and private community.
Explore the CircleCourses
Self-paced support for stabilization, nervous-system healing, self-trust, and relationship repair.
View Courses1:1 Coaching
Personalized somatic coaching for your story, your body, your patterns, and your next step.
Explore CoachingBegin here
You do not have to keep healing alone.
If betrayal has left you questioning yourself, bracing for what comes next, or unsure where to begin, there is a steadier way forward.
