Marissa Boyce

My Story

I think I've been trying to understand people for most of my life. Long before I knew why.

I grew up in an absolute disaster of a family. There was addiction, abuse and neglect, and as the oldest of four kids I took on a lot of responsibility very young. I was heavily parentified and learned to pay close attention to everyone around me. I knew how people were feeling, what they needed and what I needed to do to keep things okay. I became very independent and very capable, but I also spent a lot of my life feeling like I didn't really belong anywhere.

I was also really interested in psychology from a pretty young age. I read psychology books long before I had any idea I would eventually study it or become a therapist. Looking back, that makes a lot of sense to me. I was already trying to figure people out. Understanding people had been important to me for as long as I could remember.

My dad died by suicide when I was 19. I started therapy after he died, so I've actually been on the other side of the therapy room in one form or another for most of my adult life.

My twenties were rough. I struggled with addiction for about 15 years and got sober when I was 30. I did a lot of 12-step work and a lot of therapy. At 32, I became a teacher and started building a completely different life for myself and teaching really suited me. In retrospect, I can see that some of the same parts of me that had learned to pay attention to people and take care of people were probably very comfortable there too. I worked in education for more than ten years.

I got married, went back to school, eventually left an abusive marriage and rebuilt my life again.

By the time I decided to become a therapist, I had already spent years trying to understand my own childhood. I completed a bachelor's degree in psychology and then my master's degree in counselling, and naturally ended up being drawn to childhood trauma.

The funny thing is that by then I could explain myself incredibly well. I knew why I did what I did. I knew where my patterns came from. I knew all the trauma language. I could connect almost anything happening in my adult life back to something that had happened when I was younger.

And I was still doing a lot of the same shit.

How I found RRP

Becoming an RRP Clinician

I originally found Patrick Teahan on YouTube. I became pretty obsessed with his work because he was talking about childhood trauma in a way that felt different from a lot of what I had encountered before. Eventually I started working with Patrick myself and joined an RRP group as a client.

Group work was very different from individual therapy for me.

I couldn't just sit there and explain myself. There were other people in the room, which meant all of the things I had spent years understanding theoretically actually had somewhere to show up. My need to take care of people showed up. My reactions to conflict showed up. Shame showed up. Anger showed up. So did all the ways I protected myself when I felt exposed or misunderstood.

think that's when I really started to understand the limitations of insight.

Insight is important. I love insight. I'm probably always going to want to understand why. But understanding why you do something doesn't necessarily mean you stop doing it when you're scared, hurt, rejected or triggered.

I began to see why relational work mattered so much.

Most of what we call childhood trauma happened with other people. We learned who we were in relationship with our parents, siblings and the other people around us. We learned whether our feelings were welcome, whether our needs mattered, whether it was safe to disagree, whether people stayed, whether we needed to perform or take care of everyone else to maintain connection.

Those things don't always show up when we're sitting alone thinking about our childhood. They show up when we're with people.

That's what fascinated me about RRP.

My experience as a client completely influenced the clinician I became. I began facilitating RRP groups myself, and group work eventually became one of the biggest parts of my practice.

Today I work primarily with childhood and relational trauma. I facilitate long-term RRP groups, lead Inner Child Immersion experiences and train and educate other clinicians in this work.

I'm still pretty obsessed with it.

The longer I do this work, the less interested I am in fixing people. I think I spent enough years trying to fix myself.

For a long time, even a lot of my personal growth was still organized around the idea that eventually I would get somewhere. I would do enough therapy, understand enough, work through enough things, and eventually become this version of myself who wasn't so affected by what happened to me.

I don't think that anymore.

I can't change what happened to the little girl I was. But I can understand her now. I can listen to her. And I can be the adult she needed all along.”

There are things about me that make complete sense when I look at the family I grew up in. Some of them have changed a lot. Some of them haven't. Some of them are actually things I really like about myself now, even though they probably started as ways of surviving my childhood.

That's more how I think about inner child work these days. I'm not trying to go back and rescue some damaged version of myself. I'm interested in knowing her. I'm interested in why she did what she did, what she figured out, what she got completely wrong, what she still gets scared about, and how much of her is still very much here.

And that's how I tend to approach the people I work with too.

Sometimes we're going to want to change something because it's messing up our lives. Sometimes we're going to realize that something we've spent years being ashamed of actually makes a lot of sense. Usually it's a bit of both.

I think that's probably why I'm still so interested in this work after all these years. People make a lot more sense when you know their story.

I know I do.