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Speaking and training services from a first-hand, tenaciously resilient experience

 

My name is Rebekah Couch and I am a former teen mother of five children, the youngest child being my only clean & sober pregnancy allowed to remain in my care.  I am a survivor of multiple sexual assaults and was afflicted with untreated mental health issues as an adolescent. My destructive journey began with self-medicating and illegal activities in Jr. High and a daily cocaine addiction by the age of fifteen that eventually advanced to methamphetamine abuse. My addiction and criminal activity persisted for eighteen years, until finally embracing sobriety in December 2007.

My first-hand experience as a dual-diagnosis, uncooperative and contentious client of Sacramento health care systems, CPS Family Court, DHS office and Sacramento County Probation Departments make my perspective especially valuable to providers....

Over the past nine years, I have re-established healthy relationships with my first four children, continuously participated in the rearing of my eight year old, created a solid foundation of recovery, received training and experience working with high-risk mothers.  Currently, I am the current Director of Advancement for Pregnancy Support Group, a contract speaker for Yolo County Foster Kinship Care Education, a volunteer Liaison for Family HUI Mainland, and the most recent appointee of the CA Child Welfare Council; Prevention & Early Intervention Committee. Additionally I have served as a Case Manager of Bishop Gallegos Maternity Home (a homeless shelter for pregnant women) over a four year time period.

It has been my pleasure to serve and effect change in different capacities throughout the community and now at the state level. I have compiled some basic client related barriers to trauma informed care as well as barriers I feel are more systematic related.  Please let me know if your agency would like me to share an accumulated life of experience, knowledge, and methods that serve to illicit change and recovery. I am humbled and honored to provide my perspective to anyone interested.

**References and feedback from previous public speaking events available upon request**

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Hi, Rebekah. What a great service you are providing. It's very hopeful to see people with your lived and professional experience in positions where real change can be made and authentic empathy offered, especially with prenatal support services. I've spent a lot of time talking to parenting survivors of childhood abuse over the past several years and have learned how triggering pregnancy and early attachment to the child can be. I have personal experience with that struggle as well. Knowing that it helps to hear other's stories, I wanted to make you aware of a resource I am currently working. It's an anthology called Parenting with PTSD (revised edition of Trigger Points Anthology released 11/2015). Not trying to push a product here, only extend the writer's stories because many have been positively impacted by them. If interested here is the link: parentingwithptsd.com/   If you sign up for our newsletter you'll receive a link on release day for a free Kindle version. I'd be more than happy to provide you and/or your agency with a hard copy once available as well.

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