Welcome to Ask Angela: Relationship Advice for Love After Trauma.

I’m so glad you’re here. As a trauma-informed relationship therapist for individuals and couples, the co-founder of Alchemy of Love and the Institute for Trauma Informed Relationships, my work blends my clinical experience with hundreds of individuals and couples with the wisdom of my depth psychological training. I’ve made it my mission to help those who’ve experienced past trauma to rediscover your innate wholeness and learn how to create deeply meaningful, satisfying relationships

I never set out of start a relationship advice column. But I noticed that I kept getting the same kinds of questions again and again from those in the Alchemy of Love community.

These were questions like:

How do I learn to love myself?

How do I learn how to communicate after growing up without any good models for what that looks like?

How do I stop getting into terrible relationships?

Why can’t I leave this relationship when I know it’s bad for me?

I realized that most of the questions I was receiving in my inbox every week were connected to the ways that trauma or painful experiences from childhood eventually manifest in intimate relationships (and any close relationship in adulthood, really).

My aim with Ask Angela is to provide thoughtful, compassionate, soul-centered guidance on creating a loving relationship with yourself, navigating intimate relationships, and developing the relationship skills that you may have missed out on along the way. As someone with a history of childhood trauma myself, I am passionate about challenging the message that painful childhood experiences leave us broken, damaged, flawed, or doomed to unfulfilling relationships. I believe that, with love, care, and attention, our most difficult experiences can ultimately become the catalyst for personal growth and transformation.

If you are longing for deeper connection—with yourself or with others—I hope you will find something of value here..

About Me

I began my career as a therapist working at one of only a handful of clinics in the United States that specialized in treating adopted children who’d experienced profound attachment trauma. Their past trauma interfered with their ability to form a relationship with their adoptive parents. As a trauma therapist, my role was to help these children learn how to trust again, so they could let down their guard enough to get close to someone else.

When I left this job to become a therapist at a holistic healing center, working with women and men with depression, anxiety, and run-of-the-mill relationship issues, I imagined that my specialized skill set for treating attachment trauma would no longer be needed.

What I actually discovered was the exact opposite.

To my surprise, the struggles my adult clients described in their romantic relationships were remarkably similar to what I’d witnessed at the trauma clinic. Nearly all my adult clients seemed to be carrying the same core wounds from childhood that I’d first seen in severely traumatized children.

Many of my clients reported having unremarkable childhoods, with seemingly-adequate parenting when they were young. And yet, they’d still grown up internalizing messages that created problems in their adult relationships.

This discovery showed me that as humans, we don’t have to experience severe ‘Capital T Traum’a to be wounded by painful childhood experiences. Things like a lack of parental attention, frequent criticism, parental detachment, or rejection of our authentic selves can affect us deeply … in ways we carry with us into adulthood.

This realization—that nearly all of us have core wounds from childhood that interfere with our ability to create healthy, intimate relationships—shook my world and changed the course of my career.

The truth is: I’ve worked with hundreds of individuals and couples and I have yet to encounter anyone whose relationship problems in adulthood don’t have roots in childhood experiences.

I pioneered a new trauma-informed relationship counseling model, Trauma Informed Relationship Counseling for Individuals and Couples, which helps clients understand the connection between their childhood experiences, what they learned about relationships as a result of those experiences, and the issues they’re currently experiencing in their relationships. As the co-founder of the Institute for Trauma Informed Relationships, I provide education and training for therapists wanting to integrate a trauma informed perspective into their work with individuals and couples.

Alongside Daniel Boscaljon, I developed the Five Relationship Archetypes as a model that reflects the different ways that childhood relationship trauma impacts our adult relationships.

This model takes into account our unique and inborn temperaments as well as the kinds of messages we internalize during childhood—about ourselves and how we need to be in order to have relationships with others.

In addition to my specialized training in attachment trauma, I also hold specialized training in therapeutic writing and journaling as tools for trauma recovery, emotional healing, and personal growth.

Our mission at Alchemy of Love is to help people heal their past wounds, reclaim their wholeness, and learn how to transform past pain into the seeds for future possibilities … possibilities that include the kind of loving, intimate relationship with self and others that you deserve to have.

As a relationship expert, I’ve been featured in numerous publications, including Today, Oprah, Cosmopolitan, Well + Good, The Independent, Inc., Salon, Forbes, Refinery29, and many others.

In my spare time, I’m a mixed media artist. My artwork has been exhibited in numerous galleries around the United States and published in several journals and magazines. I’m also the co-creator of the Faces of the Divine Feminine Oracle, published in 2017. You can find my writings and some of my artwork here on Substack in my other publication, Unearthing the Wild Soul.

Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, I now make my happy home in Cheyenne, Wyoming. On sunny days, you can find me cozied up with a book or hiking in the mountains with Daniel.

You can find my art at angelaamias.gallery.