By: Jennifer “Jaki” Johnson
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
WELLMISS
I never saw myself starting a digital care clinic. I never saw myself working on trauma care for women. None of this was on my radar, yet the unexpected led me on this path.
April 22nd, 2019, was a day I will never forget. It was on that day that my 15-year-old son Christian passed tragically unexpectedly. It was the first time I felt pain, grief, and loss so profoundly. My life would change in so many ways, and because of that, I would later build a startup focused on helping women heal from trauma. The road there is where the journey begins.
It was the beginning of my healing grief journey, where my experience with the mind and body connection happened. Immediately after my son’s passing, people told me to get a therapist, get into a support group and lean into a faith-based community. Those were good recommendations, but they came with their own set of challenges. Finding a therapist to help me with my grief was hard, and not every support group was interested in healing. I initially went to a previous therapist that had helped me when I was experiencing hormonal anxiety while pregnant with my younger son to see if she could help me. But she wanted me to write a goodbye letter to my son on our first visit, and I had yet to process what had just happened. So, that started the journey of me looking for a new therapist. The first therapist I met with shared no emotions as I cried and told her about my last moments with my son, and she did not give me a piece of tissue. The second therapist could not remember if she had ever worked with a parent who had lost a child and had to think about that. The last therapist I met with was an older therapist who showed compassion and leaned in as I told my story and shared a few tears of her own as I shared with her what had happened to me. She told me she was a grandmother and mother and had never lost a child, but she helped women who had lost a child and that we would take this one step at a time. This was a lightbulb moment for me because I finally felt like I had found my person, the perfect therapist, after repeatedly telling my story to different therapists in hopes of finding someone who could help me with what I had been through. That was the beginning of my therapy journey.
The heart knows, and the body speaks. It was six months after my son passed when I noticed I was having alot of heart pain and felt like my heart was hurting. I scheduled an appointment with a cardiologist, and he ran some tests. I shared with him what happened to my son. He later told me that I had Broken Heart Syndrome, that it was an actual diagnosis, and that it was fatal and could be treated with medication. He also told me that my heart was leaking and that I had high blood pressure in my heart. I had already felt like I needed more than just mental health care for my healing grief journey because my heart and body felt like they were also grieving. My cardiologist said that I had to work on my healing and that until I worked on my healing, my body would continue to break itself down. That’s when I searched for care that nurtured me as a whole person, heart, mind, body, and spirit. I went to the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, and spent a week there for a retreat called, Life Rentry After Loss with Christina Rasmussen. It was at that retreat I learned about my silent losses, my thriver self, and the different layers of how grief and loss affect different parts of ourselves that no therapist or clinician had shared with me. I also took yoga, tai-chi, and meditation classes. I grounded in nature, walked nature trails, and ate farm-to-table plant-based meals. It felt truly refreshing and centered me from all the stress I was feeling from my grief. When I arrived back in Atlanta, I was determined to put together a care team that could bring those elements into my healing grief journey. I searched for a trauma-informed yoga therapist. I started seeing a chiropractor who talked about how grief can sit in the body and wrote up a treatment plan that included massage therapy to help with the somatic embodiment of my grief. I took up journaling for a grief course and incorporated breathwork, mindfulness, and meditation into my daily routine. I also consulted with a naturopathic provider who I met when pregnant with my younger son when I had hormonal anxiety on what natural products I could use with my grief since it was causing anxiety and panic attacks. I found alot of these various modalities to be very helpful on my healing journey, but it also came with a price. My health insurance only covered some of the care I was receiving. I also did not see alot of women of color in the spaces I was in, both as a receiver of these care services or a giver of these care services. The words trauma or traumatic experiences was never used by anyone I saw in describing what I was going through and what had happened to me. The unexpected loss of my son was a traumatic experience, and its impact on my heart, mind, body, and spirit were all signs of trauma. I also learned that other women had experienced traumatic experiences and were looking for holistic ways to heal their trauma. The disparities I saw in holistic care were that it was not easily accessible, it was not culturally competent, and it lacked a trauma-informed approach. This ultimately led to me creating WellMiss.
WellMiss was born out of a need for both myself and other women. I knew that bringing the worlds of conventional medicine and holistic and complementary evidence-based care to provide whole-person trauma care was needed. Here I was a year after experiencing such a difficult traumatic experience; I was using my lived experience to create a solution for a gap in our fragmented healthcare system that only saw trauma as a mental issue when data shows that trauma affects both the mind and body. How would I do this? Who am I to build this? How would I get it covered by insurance and make it accessible, culturally component, and trauma-informed? This was the next part of my journey, where I learned about integrative medicine and the Osher Collaborative of Integrative Medicine. Defined by the Cleveland Clinic, I learned integrative medicine uses an evidence-based approach to treat the whole person — mind, body, and soul. Your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs are all involved, so integrative medicine uses a combination of therapies. It “integrates” conventional approaches and complementary therapies to achieve optimal health and healing. I learned about how integrative practices and clinics were billing and getting services covered by insurance. Healing in community was also another element of care and healing that I had sought out but learned many support groups were not focused on healing but rather on staying in a bad place. So, I eventually discovered shared medical group appointments and learned about that.
I think this is the part of my story that can inspire others and that this is where my life took a full circle turn. My past experience working in a group practice and at a hospital in every role, from front desk check-in to claims reimbursement, medical records, patient appointment scheduling, and insurance verification/pre-authorizations, now had a new purpose in my life. I would be able to tap back into these skills that I learned while pregnant and raising my son, who passed was now being used. Here I was on a mission to build the first trauma-informed digital care clinic specializing in providing holistic and integrative trauma care to women. Research shows us that one in two women will experience at least one traumatic experience in their lifetime, affecting their health and well-being. The UCSF Center to Advance Trauma-Informed Health Care research shows us that unaddressed trauma is the hidden cause of most preventable illnesses and is associated with eight of the 10 leading causes of death, including heart, lung, and kidney disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, suicide, and accidental overdose.
When we fail to address the trauma that underlies these diseases, prevention and treatment are far less effective and, in some cases, not effective at all. WellMiss was needed, and I was charged to create the solution.
I never thought I would be focusing on trauma and working on trauma care for women. On average, each of our WellMiss has experienced at least five different traumatic experiences and has been experiencing depression, anxiety, emotional eating, sleep issues, cardiovascular challenges, and traumatic grief. Now, they can come to WellMiss where they receive trauma-informed holistic and integrative whole-person care that is delivered through personalized care teams, shared group medical appointments, and community support.
