A Conversation with Jessica Ella founder of Aaruka Therapy & Certification
Trigger Warning: This episode contains discussion of sexual abuse, physical abuse, family abuse, trauma, and the lasting impact of childhood and relational trauma. Please listen with care and give yourself permission to pause if needed.
Some conversations stay with you long after the microphone is turned off.
My most recent conversation with Jessica Ella was one of those.
Jessica has been my mentor throughout my most recent certification with Aaruka Therapy, where I trained to become a trauma therapist. But our conversation went far beyond the classroom, the certification, or the professional work we are both committed to doing.
We went deep into the places that shaped us.
We spoke openly about our separate experiences of trauma the abuse, the pain, the family dynamics, the things that happened to us and the things we had to learn to carry afterward. We talked about what it means to live through experiences that can change the way you see yourself, other people, safety, love, and the world around you.
And we talked about what happens when you begin to heal.
Not because the past suddenly disappears.
Not because becoming a therapist means you have somehow “figured it all out.”
But because there can come a point where you look back at the road you’ve travelled and realize that the very experiences that once broke parts of you can become part of the reason you are able to sit beside someone else in their darkness.
That is where the idea of turning pain into purpose came into our conversation.
For both of us, doing this work isn’t simply about surviving what happened to us. It’s about asking what we can do with what we’ve learned.
How can we take the parts of our stories that once felt unbearable and use them to help someone else feel less alone?
How can we sit with people in the darkest chapters of their lives without asking them to rush toward the light?
And perhaps most importantly:
How do we show someone what it actually looks like to get out?
Because sometimes we talk about healing as though the goal is simply to walk through the darkness and eventually reach the light.
But what if we turn around?
What if, once we’ve found our way out, we go back to the edge of that darkness not to relive it, and not to rescue anyone but to hold up a light and say:
“I know it feels impossible from where you’re standing. I know you can’t see the way out yet. But there is a path. And I’ll show you what it can look like.”
That is the work.
Not just walking through the dark.
Turning around and showing people the path to get out.
This conversation with Jess is vulnerable, raw, and deeply personal. It is also a conversation about hope the kind of hope that doesn’t deny what happened, minimize the pain, or pretend that healing is linear.
It is about what can become possible when we begin to understand our stories, reclaim our lives, and eventually use what we’ve learned to help illuminate the way for someone else.
I am incredibly grateful to Jess for her mentorship, for the work she does, and for the willingness to have this conversation with me.
And I’m grateful for the reminder that our stories don’t have to end where our suffering began.
Sometimes, the path through our own healing becomes the path we can illuminate for someone else.
This is a conversation about trauma. But ultimately, it is a conversation about what can exist on the other side of it: purpose, connection, healing, and light.
I hope you’ll listen with compassion for Jess, for me, and perhaps most importantly, for whatever parts of your own story you may still be learning how to hold.
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