Our purpose is to engage leaders and communities to rethink the way trauma is recognized, diagnosed, and treated in children and adults.

The impetus for Shelby’s Walk Foundation was my daughter’s suicide on December 24, 2019. After her death, I reflected on the cause of her death, meaning the unhealed trauma of being raped at age 11. The 14 years between the rape and her death involved well-meaning therapists and psychiatrists. The therapy involved Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) and psychiatrists prescribed everything from trazadone at age 14 to help her sleep, to other “anti-depressants” known as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors.  While these approaches treated the symptoms, they never healed the trauma.

After her death, and as I began to heal from her death, I learned more about trauma and how the two most common treatments (CBT and drugs) failed to account for the whole of Shelby. I remember the words Shelby would often tell me about the counseling and drugs, “They don’t get it; they don’t see me.”

Trauma affects the whole person: the mind, the body, the emotional, the spirit, and the social parts that comprise the whole person. Yet too often the treatment of CBT and drugs do not heal trauma because they focus on the symptoms: manage the “depression,” the “anxiety,” the flashbacks, the nightmares, the triggers. Talking through the trauma with the hope of changing the perception of the trauma.

The more I learned about trauma after my daughter’s death, the more I knew we could do better, we need to do better.

My daughter had a heart for helping where she could. Shelby’s Walk Foundation will continue this by helping others change the ending by providing opportunities for new beginnings.