How to Strengthen Trauma Resilience in Real Time with Emma Churchman

 “You have to, at some point, make a decision about how you're going to show up in the world. I had to make that decision that I am going to be the person that moves towards more life, that moves towards more possibility.” —Emma Churchman

Disaster does not arrive politely, and grief does not wait for permission. We are living in a season where trauma is stacking faster than we can process it, & most of us are still expected to keep functioning. This conversation meets that tension head-on, without fixing or softening it.

We sit with Emma Churchman, a trauma chaplain and resilience consultant whose life and work were reshaped by Hurricane Helene, compounded loss, and decades of personal trauma. Her lived experience informs how she helps communities, leaders, and organizations navigate crises in real time.

Listen with us, then stay with the work.

• Trauma resilience in the age of constant crisis
• What actually helps in the first days after a disaster
• Compound grief and how it impacts the nervous system
• Why recovery takes longer than anyone expects
• Leadership during natural disasters and uncertainty
• Supporting others without trying to fix them
• Real-time trauma tools for everyday life

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Episode Highlights:
02:27 The Impact of Hurricane Helene and Personal Loss
05:22 Trauma Chaplaincy and Leadership Consulting
10:02 Trauma Recovery Techniques and Business Support
15:30 “Unshattered” 
21:27 Advice for Trauma Survivors and Support for Friends and Family
26:47 Normalizing the Experience

Resources:

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📖Books by Emma

**The Deep End of Hope in the Wake of Hurricane Helene: 40 Days and Nights of Survival and Transformation
**Unshattered: Surviving My Mother’s 123 Personalities and Transforming a Legacy of Abuse

✍🏻Sign Up for Free: 

Trauma Recovery Program

Connect with Emma: 

Emma is a speaker, bestselling author, mentor, and spiritual advisor with over 25 years of experience guiding individuals through trauma toward resilience & hope. Drawing from her own experience of childhood adversity, her work spans roles as a Quaker minister, nationally certified trauma chaplain, and creator of a Trauma Recovery Certification Program.

Her book, The Deep End of Hope in the Wake of Hurricane Helene, explores spiritual resilience amid disaster. As a PhD candidate in Conscious Business Ethics, Emma integrates soulful leadership with practical trauma-recovery strategies, inspiring individuals and organizations to navigate life’s challenges with strength and purpose.

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Transcript

Hey ladies, it's your host, Heather Nelson, welcoming you to another season of Life Conversations With A Twist. This is a space where we dive into stories of remarkable women who've conquered challenges and emerged stronger. Join me each week as we unravel tales of resilience, triumph and empowerment. These narratives aren't just stories. These are stories of inspiration, and I'm so honored to have the space to share them with you. Plus, I will be sharing my own personal stories of inspiration as I navigate starting my own business and achieving my own goals. So whether you're driving in the car or out moving your body, get ready for heartwarming stories and empowering conversations together. Let's raise a virtual toast to empowerment, because here at Life Conversations With A Twist, every story has the power to inspire. Cheers, ladies. 

Heather Nelson: Hello, everyone. Welcome to this week's Life Conversations With A Twist. I have the honor of having Emma Churchman on. Her and I just met, but we've been in conversations about coming on this podcast. I'm really intrigued by the work that she's doing, so I can't wait to dive into this conversation. Welcome to the podcast.

Emma Churchman: Thank you so much for having me, Heather. I'm delighted to be here with you today. 

Heather Nelson: I love it. So tell our listeners a little bit about who you are, where you live, and a little bit of background about your everyday life, and where you sit. 

Emma Churchman: Yeah, absolutely. I live on top of a mountain outside of Asheville, North Carolina. And we were just hit really hard by Hurricane Helene in September of 2024, and a lot of our community was devastated. I ended up hiking down on day 4, three miles down our mountain to get to the fire station, and no one from the outside world had shown up. I was just going to see who's alive, what's happening, because all of our roads were destroyed. We didn't have power, internet, water, or anything. And so I go down and say to the fire chief, I'm a trauma chaplain, how can I help? And he said, thank God you're here. Here's your first case. And so I jumped into volunteering as a trauma chaplain. That's my background to help our community process this extreme devastation, which led to me writing my first book, The Deep End of Hope in the Wake of Hurricane Helene, that came out at the beginning of 2025 talking about the first 40 days following the hurricane, and how we navigated that trauma as a community, and how I navigated it individually. Because I also had a brother die by suicide six weeks before the hurricane. I had another brother die by suicide two weeks after the hurricane, so it was compound grief that I was dealing with. So my work has pivoted as a result of this natural disaster. I'm now focused on pioneering this field of trauma resilience, both to work on my own stuff and to help other people navigate unexpected events, because natural disasters have increased by 300% in the past decade alone. And you know this, Heather. Living in California, y'all had crazy wildfires at the beginning of this year.

Heather Nelson: This year, since 2017, I think, was our first fire. And yeah, for a couple years it was just back to back, and just devastating like old towns. And my dad was actually a survivor of the 2018 Dixie Fire, which is kind of like Central California, and he lost his whole house. The whole town is gone, and he still lives there because he's rebuilding. But even just being in that situation and seeing it, it brings tears to my eyes because that's happening all over the world. Especially California, we get hit with the wildfires, and then we sit there and watch the news and see you guys on the East Coast dealing with floods, hurricanes and awful things. Yes, I know this is the work you do, which we'll dive into. But I'm curious about your take on, why do you think that there are so many extreme disasters happening right now?

Emma Churchman: I think environmentally, this is the impact of our world figuring out how to reshape itself as we've been destroying it systematically. So that's one level. I think emotionally and spiritually, we're in the middle of a really profound change on our planet where we've got to figure out how to become resilient in a whole new way. We've run out of time, for example, to hang out for a decade, hang out on a therapist couch for a decade feeling our feelings. We have to figure out how to process trauma in real time, because our world is speeding up. It's with natural disasters, but it's also with things like artificial intelligence. We are going so quickly right now that we're literally having to rewire our nervous systems and figure out how to find function in a different way. Does that make sense?

Heather Nelson: Absolutely. I was just curious about what your take was on why it's happening so much. But I do agree. I'm 43, so I'm not saying that I'm old, but I definitely have been through different generations. I just feel like currently where we sit, there's just so much trauma happening between the natural disasters, covid, all the things that our world has had to deal with lately, possible wars and things like that, it's scary. It's requiring us to really fortify ourselves in new ways. What is a trauma chaplain? And how did you get into this work?

Emma Churchman: So part of the requirement for going to seminary, I'm a Quaker minister, is you have to do hands-on practical experience. So becoming a minister is really similar in some ways to becoming a doctor because you go through residency. You've got to practice being a minister. And my residency was in different trauma centers in different hospitals working with people who had gone through some traumatic experience. And I noticed as soon as I walked into the first hospital that I was really drawn to that emergency and that ICU work. So that's how I became specialized as a trauma chaplain, and then I'm a leadership consultant now. So I work mainly with business owners and with companies who are navigating unexpected events or having to pivot that kind of thing. So I bring my trauma chaplaincy into that work.

Heather Nelson: Wow. I applaud you, because it's definitely work that I could not do. I always think of people in the medical world and I could not imagine seeing the things that come through. So I just want my hats off to you for being the person that shows up to help people in these times of need. What was it like going through Hurricane Helene? You obviously went into emergency disaster mode like, how am I going to help people? What was that like?

Emma Churchman: It was horrifying to just in a matter of minutes and hours to lose everything. To look outside and be like, hey, we literally cannot get off this mountain because of the mudslides and the trees down, and we don't know when, and if we're ever going to have power again. We don't know how to get food. We can't drive our cars anywhere. It was terrifying. And my husband, Jeff, grew up in New Orleans and lived through Hurricane Katrina. I remember on day three or four when I was panicking and saying, I don't know how I'm going to do this. He looked me in the eye. He's like, you need to figure it out, because we are in this for the long haul. This is not something that's going to go away tomorrow. This could be months. And in fact, it's going to be a decade or longer. We're still doing active recovery in our area. We just got our road reopened a month and a half ago. We just got trash service a month and a half ago, and we're getting mail service next month, we think. And we're over a year out from the hurricane. 

Heather Nelson: I was gonna ask you what the state of the area is now. And where have you guys come from that? Has everybody rebuilt? 

Emma Churchman: No, we're still rebuilding. We've got a neighbor who just got trusses up on the house that she's rebuilding. We have private bridges that still haven't been rebuilt. Recovery is slow and long, because you've got to get involved with the appropriate disaster recovery organization. FEMA takes forever to decide whether or not you qualify for funding. Even those of us who were insured did not get coverage because flooding isn't covered when you live in the mountains because it happens here normally. We're very much still in the middle of it.

Heather Nelson: After the hurricane had hit and you were like, okay. You come down the mountain to figure this all out, what were some of the steps that you had to take? I'm only asking this because we are all going through trauma across the United States in different ways. So if someone's listening and they're in this space of, okay, this major disaster just happened. Where do you start?

Emma Churchman: Well, the first is what I see is the rescue phase, that's really basic stability. Do you have food? Do you have water? Do you have shelter? Getting your basic needs met because without those basic needs, it's really hard to think about anything else because your brain is in a traumatized state. So for example, after Helene, I remember that I would have to write myself, post-it notes of things to do, feed the dogs, turn on the generator, make breakfast because my brain wasn't computing. So really having grace and compassion with yourself, and remembering to breathe. A lot of us when we're in a traumatized state, we stop breathing, and that disconnects us from our body. It makes it harder for our brains to work. So a lot of times, what I'm doing with people when they are in that initial traumatized state, that rescue phase, is helping them get their basic needs met, and then also reminding them to breathe.

Heather Nelson: And that goes for not just a natural disaster. That goes through a horrible car accident or a death. There's so many things that happen, so this really could be great advice for any of those types of traumas. And the work you're doing now, you had mentioned that you're doing a lot with businesses and trauma. Can you talk about some of the stories and clients that you've had that you've had to work through some of their trauma? 

Emma Churchman: Let's talk about insurance companies, for example. So that's a field that I'm naturally connected to, because I had a horrible experience talking to my insurance company where they explained that there was nothing they could do. But then I started thinking about it from the perspective of the insurance handlers and all of the conversations they have to have day in and day out about what they can't provide to people who are in need, and the trauma that they're going through. So that's when we think about trauma, there are so many different aspects to how people can be impacted by it. So with the hurricane, it's the disaster survivors. It's the people who live in the floodplain or live where the hurricane hit. But then it's also the disaster aid workers who come to support, see the devastation, and get overwhelmed. And it's the emergency management folks. It's the firefighters, the police, the sheriff and all those folks who are trying to attend to people who are traumatized, who are getting traumatized themselves and then going out larger it's insurance companies, it's loved ones who live on the other side of the country who don't know what's happening. All of us can be traumatized by an event that happened nowhere near us.

Heather Nelson: So true. I didn't even think of that when the fires happened here. We're all in this crazy headspace. But then you have your firefighters who are out there fighting fires, and then you have the people who are trying to feed people. And there's so many different factors. I never even thought that that was something to even consider. 

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Heather Nelson: Do you help these companies when they're already in trauma? Or do you help them set the stage for when there could be possible trauma? 

Emma Churchman: I don't help set the stage because they're not interested, because that's never gonna happen to us. It's only after the shit has hit the fan that I get involved.

Heather Nelson: So when you go and work with them, is it like a project based? Do you go there for a few months? Or is it a session? What does that work look like? 

Emma Churchman: It's often like a wellness session, like going in for a couple of hours to give them some trauma recovery tools. So I have a trauma recovery certification program that teaches 10 trauma recovery tools that you can use in the field at the moment. You don't need to be in front of a computer or anywhere special. So they teach, they allow you to recover in real time with what you're going through.

Heather Nelson: Okay, that's so cool. I'm assuming that you help people all over the world. That's what we're up against because you see so much trauma. How do you stay grounded and level? I'm sure it's got to be hard to see that work, to see these things, to see people going through trauma, how do you stay grounded?

Emma Churchman: I write out a lot of what I go through. So my second book, which came out a month and a half ago, UNSHATTERED: Surviving My Mother's 123 Personalities and Transforming a Legacy of Abuse, is my memoir. I had to write out what happened to me as a way of processing it. That's how I do this healing for myself. That's just been the way it always has been for me. When I put it on paper, it's no longer in my body, it's somewhere else, and I can work with it, work through it. Does that make sense?

Heather Nelson: Yeah. Everyone always talks about journaling and gets all that out. When you have all these to do things in your head and you're like, just write it out. So it's like you're out of your body. So talk about your first book. And so this one's all about the hurricane. 

Emma Churchman: The deep end of hope in the wake of Hurricane Helene. So it was one of the first books on the market about Helene, and it's the first 40 days and how WE as a community, and how I individually navigated one of the worst natural disasters in our country. And it gives trauma recovery techniques and tools. 

Heather Nelson: Did you have a team of people? Or were you the one leading the charge? Or was there like a group of people who do the work that you do that are like, okay, come together and let's figure out how we rebuild, and how we help and support each other.

Emma Churchman: There were two other people in my community who had some background in trauma or therapy who stepped in to assist, but the main light was me doing the work. 

Heather Nelson: Wow, that's amazing. And then your second book, which you said just came out last year. 

Emma Churchman: It came out about a month and a half ago. It was interesting because I was doing these daily posts on Facebook, on social media, about what was happening after the hurricane, and I was getting thousands of people responding and commenting saying, this is not at all what we are being told by the media that is happening. And Emma, you should write a book. And I thought, I don't have power. How am I gonna write a book? But I got an article in The Guardian where they actually started following my story about what was happening, and then I had a publisher reach out and said that we would acquire this book. And so I had a very brief conversation with them and they said, yes, we want to turn this into a book. We want it to be one of the first books on the market about hurricane Helene. But we also want you to talk about your childhood trauma and what that was like. And I said, oh, I'm already writing a memoir on my childhood trauma. And they said, we want to acquire that too. So when a publisher says that they want to acquire a book, what they are agreeing to is paying for all of the developmental editing, the copy editing, the proofreading, the design, the layout, the cover of the book, the printing, the distribution, the marketing. They are taking on all of that financial burden to get a book out, so they immediately optioned two books from me. And since then, they've optioned a third book that I'm working on right now called Navigating The Deep End: Resilient Leadership in a Volatile World, and that'll come out in 2026.

Heather Nelson: Wow. I want to write a book someday, but everyone's like, it's so much work.

Emma Churchman: It is so much work. I had no idea what I was getting into. It is a redonkulous amount of work.

Heather Nelson: Yeah, that's crazy. I'm now very curious about your childhood and what you grew up in, which is what your second book is about. Do you want to give us a little teasers of some of the things that you've gone through in your childhood?

Emma Churchman: Yeah. My mother has diagnosed 123 personalities. What does that mean? Alternative personalities, like multiple personality disorder. It's now called Dissociative Identity Disorder. She was diagnosed when I was 14 or 15 years old. My father was an abusive alcoholic, so I was raised in a family with not a lot of stability and not a lot of parenting, and then I had three younger brothers. My father and all three brothers died by suicide, so I am the only one who does not have a mental illness and is still alive. So my memoir is about how the heck did I come out still alive.

Heather Nelson: Essentially. I'm very intrigued by this book, that is so much trauma. Even just suicide. I have a friend who lost her husband to suicide, and found him. And it was not a peaceful suicide, it was awful. And I just remember thinking to myself, where do you start? How do you overcome something like that? But you've seen it so many times.

Emma Churchman: Yes. My father died in 1998. And then after that, a decade after, I went to seminary and started training as a trauma javelin. And when you're in the ER/ICU, you see a lot of suicide cases. People who have attempted suicide, successfully or unsuccessfully. So that really gave me an opportunity to start working through my own thoughts and feelings about suicide and what it really means. Because I thought, oh, my God, my father would rather be dead than care for his living children. But I realized now that it's very much a mental illness. I had all of that processing in the hospitals before my three brothers then died by suicide, and I think three of them died by suicide within three years of each other. 

Heather Nelson: Did they have any mental illnesses leading up to that? Or because of the hurricane?

Emma Churchman: Two of them were right before and right after the hurricane. So they were all drug or alcohol addicts, and I think that very much informed their perspective on the world. I don't think any of them really particularly wanted to be alive.

Heather Nelson: Wow. You're so inspiring to have such trauma and such serious things happen in your life to be able to like, I get through that one. I'm sure it hasn't been an easy road for you. But now, this is the work that you are helping others with, and I think that's so inspiring to be able to get through those hard times. Because I know when anybody deals with anything, you feel like you're never gonna get through it. It just feels hard, but you're proof that you can. 

Emma Churchman: You have to, at some point, make a decision about how you're going to show up in the world. And I had to make that decision, that I am going to be the person that moves towards more life, that moves towards more possibility. That doesn't just think life is hard. Let me check it out.

Heather Nelson: Wow. What a story, Emma. I can't wait to, when is your third book coming out?

Emma Churchman: It comes out in June 2026, and that's going to include case studies of different leaders who have gone through very unexpected situations and have figured out how to pivot themselves and their companies to create something amazing.

Heather Nelson: Can you give us a teaser on one of your stories, or one of your most memorable stories, or one of your most impactful stories?

Emma Churchman: Well, two of them are actually people who lived through California wildfires in 2018 and then 2025, and how they navigated them. One of them wasn't prepared at all and had to figure out how to operate her business after she had to evacuate her home. Another one was more prepared. So it was kind of interesting to compare contrast about how they each handled that volatile situation. And certainly in 2025, those fires went on for months, right? It was at least two months, and it's day to day of, can I be in my home? Can my staff be in their homes? How do we run this business? How do we work with our clients when we don't know if we're going to have a physical location anymore?

Heather Nelson: I know I think of some of the business owners in our area when we got hit with the multiple years of fires. But there are some leaders that not only lost their business, but they lost their homes. It's like that double whammy, but then you still need to show up as a leader because you have a team that's relying on you to do the things. It's like a situation where they're going through that, then they can reach out to you and say, help. And then you give them some framework and stuff to really be able to navigate that exactly. Wow, Emma, the work you're doing is fantastic. It's needed. And unfortunately, it's our reality now. I'm sure you probably look at the world and you're like, there's so much work that needs to be done. I'm always like, I want to solve all the problems. You probably want that too, but you can't because it's such a huge thing that needs to be done. And trauma isn't sexy, and it's a little bit stigmatized, so it's not always the most popular topic of conversation. But yeah, it's very much needed. I know I asked you how you process a lot of this, because you are. You take on even just talking to like, I can feel the weight. What brings you joy in life? How do you look at the world in a different lens, find joy in the world, and find happiness?

Emma Churchman: Yeah. I really feel like God has me on a mission, and that helps me not worry so much. I know that God would not have brought me to this place to leave me, and that there is this trajectory that I'm on even if it's hard, even if it doesn't make sense, that I'm on it in full faith, and that lightens my load. 

Heather Nelson: I love that. What advice do you have as a final thought to somebody who is listening to this and is going through something traumatic? What few things could you give them tools to be able to get through this?

Emma Churchman: Yeah, absolutely. Well, practically, in my trauma recovery certification program, it's three levels. The first level is how to heal your own trauma, how to build your own resilience. And it's available for free to your audience. So if you all are interested in that, it's a 28 day online course. You can do it on your own. There's a little bit of teaching and prompts each day, and you do reflective journaling as a way to process what you're going through, and to build your own resilience. So you can go to emmachurchman.com/trauma to sign up for that for free. And if you're going through it to simply acknowledge, oh, my god, I'm going through a traumatic situation, to not try to make it something other than what it is, and to know that it's totally normal to not be okay, that that's a normal human reaction, and if that's how you're reacting, it's because you are a human being who has feelings, needs, desires and fears. So to really normalize the experience, I think, is important. 

Heather Nelson: One more question that alerted me when you just talked about that is, if you are a friend or family member of someone who's going through trauma, what advice do you have for them to help their friend or family member through those hard times? How do you show up? What do they need at that point? Because I know  a lot of times that they don't know what they need. But how do we, as a friend or community member, show up for them?

Emma Churchman: Let them talk or not talk. Don't try to put them into a different stage of healing than where they're at. You're right. Sometimes, our discomfort with someone being upset, or overwhelmed, or not thinking clearly can make us want to kind of push them to a different place in their evolution so that we can be more comfortable. So it's really about setting aside whatever your discomfort is so that you can be present for the other person and just say, I'm here for you. I'm here to listen. I'm here to support you. I'm here if you don't know what you need. I'm just here. And to just reinforce that you are there in presence is really important. That's such a great reminder.

Heather Nelson: Emma, you are truly inspiring. I am in awe of the work that you're doing. And I want to say thank you to everybody who has been a part of your work, and will continue to be. And thank you so much for being here sharing your journey. And sharing something that people probably don't really think is like fun and sexy, but it's our reality. And so I applaud you for the work you're doing, and thank you for being here.

Emma Churchman: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. 

Heather Nelson: I hope today's episode resonated with you. And if it did, don't keep it to yourself. Spread inspiration. Share this episode on your socials, and tag me. And if there's anyone in your life who can use a dose of encouragement, pass it along. Looking forward to continuing this journey of inspiration with you. Until next time, stay empowered and connected.