The Aovia Principle

If you feel stuck, suffer from burnout, or lack a clear purpose for your life, I wrote The AOVIA Principle: A Path of Unlimited Potential for you. This book can serve as a guide to help you bounce back from a crisis. You can use it by itself or as a supplement to traditional therapy. I began writing it during a time when I met all of the above criteria. Despite having a successful career, I felt burned out, stuck at a dead-end, and had a severe case of compassion fatigue.

Being on call 24/7 for ten years had caught up with me. I was exhausted physically, mentally, and emotionally from the disruptions of my circadian rhythm. Then a surgery triggered the re-experience of a repressed traumatic childhood event. I decided to go on a sabbatical and resigned from my position as clinical program director. In my thirties, I had ditched earlier attempts of writing professionally in order to become an expert in another field. During my time off, I realized that I had become just that: a seasoned clinical social worker with a postgraduate degree and a professional license to practice therapy and provide clinical supervision to postgraduates.

Through a series of synchronistic events during my sabbatical, I discovered that the desire to be a therapist and writer had been inside me since I was seven. I had imagined myself in those roles while sitting at an old, black typewriter without paper and missing the A-key. In retrospect I understood that I had been trying to heal from my traumatic experiences as a Verschickungskind (sent-away child) at the age of six while placed in a large group home in Sankt Peter Ording. That place had been marketed as a recovery retreat on the shore of the North Sea in Germany.

Instead of recovery at that facility, I experienced terror and a sense of complete severance from my family and community, accompanied by an unbearable emotional pain that manifested as a painful constriction in my throat. As a six-year-old, I did not know what I have come to understand today: I had been subjected to what psychoanalyst Alice Miller described as poisonous pedagogy, a practice that used authoritarian methods designed to break a child's will. For example, I was placed in a double-bind of having to choose between two forbidden acts-going to the bathroom and wetting my bed. The only possible outcome was punishment for breaking the rules.

Years later, a major part of my healing was discovering the Verschickungskinder Deutschland (Sent-away children Germany) on social media. When I learned that there had been 8-12 million of us between 1945 and 1990, I began to view my early childhood from a brand-new perspective. I connected to others who had been affected, began to support related research, and got involved in activities to prevent such atrocities from ever happening again. Finally, it included writing this book and starting to work ...