As Amáte Growth Work began to evolve, the most significant resource at my disposal was dependence on my own inner guidance system. However, the method certainly did not spring out of thin air. In hindsight, my personal experiences, education, and professional preparation were perhaps uniquely suited to the task of creating this particular healing method.

By the time in 1983, when I was 41 years old, I discovered I was living life as an emotional 8-year-old, I had survived over 100 moves, the chronic alcoholism of my parents, the suicide of my father and the sudden death of my step-father, two marriages and divorces to immature adults, the birth of two children, the overwhelming challenge of raising five children for 8 years, and ongoing crises caused by my immaturity.

Despite chronic problems in my emotional life, I became a successful mental health program grant writer and program planner in Maine in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1970s I created, taught, and ran a model alternative high school for drop-outs, designed and implemented a system-wide program of peer counseling activities, and was an adolescent case worker for a Department of Social Services, all in the mountains of Colorado. The experiences of teaching and counseling underachievers with emotional problems, and writing and developing successful programs promoting emotional growth and mental health, contributed heavily to the skills and confidence necessary to create an emotional healing method and a center to present the method to the public.

In the early 1980s, while earning my M.S. in Psychology through the University of Wisconsin, I worked as an Aftercare Specialist at the Hazelden Foundation for Addictions in Minnesota. I was responsible for intensive short-term interventions with sober and straight former patients who returned to Hazelden in living situation crises. I become known for my short-term approaches for resolving difficult emotional and spiritual issues.

At Hazelden I was afforded the unusual privilege of working with psychologists and psychiatrists as they administered, read, and used the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) test with patients. I was allowed to compare my readings and evaluations with the experts. My mother, Dr. Samantha Ross, finally achieved sobriety and was manager of all patient care at Hazelden while I was there. She was an expert in detecting often subtle mental disorders in patients. I worked closely with her in evaluating Aftercare Visitors and group participants for possible mental problems. I was permitted to observe her conducting evaluations on questionable mental status primary patients and discussing her conclusions with the patients following the interviews. As a result of these extraordinary experiences I became practiced in determining those inappropriate for traditional interventions, a skill of vital importance when working in private practice with a client population limited to those within normal psychological ranges.

In 1982 I became Aftercare Director of a private alcoholism treatment center in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, and in 1983 started an Aftercare Center in Manhattan with Leonard Holzer. Clients included the super rich and famous. Working with this clientele forced me to become comfortable with “star” individuals and helped me appreciate the universal needs, specific challenges, and unique possibilities of this client population. It also provided invaluable insights into becoming a public person, something vital as this healing method becomes widely available. In late 1987 I was asked to write the book published in 1990, The Seashell People: Growing Up in Adulthood, New York: M. Evans & Co., Inc. that became the first concrete step in the creation of Amáte Growth Work.

From 1991-1994 in Manhattan, the method developed through work with over two hundred clients from diverse social, educational, and professional backgrounds. In 1994 I moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where I worked with several new groups of clients including senior citizens, gay and lesbian clients, adults whose children or grandchildren had died, and nine psychiatrists. I began to be able to work with Spanish speaking clients.

In 1997 I returned to Manhattan with the intention of publishing a description of the healing method. It quickly became apparent that I needed greater professional credibility and the appropriate educational background to responsibly explain and defend the method. In 1998 I entered Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center in San Francisco, an accredited distance learning institution, and accepted an invitation to live and work in the Dominican Republic. Within weeks I appeared on national television programs that produced an extensive following. That experience confirmed even very diverse cultural, educational, social, and ethnic groups were able to benefit from the method.

In 1999 I moved to Costa Rica to work and continue my studies. I began to understand the historical philosophical underpinnings of the method and relate the method to the thoughts and work of others. I helped a number of clients from the gay community in very homophobic Costa Rica, expanded my experience in working with parents, and assisted couples after they had used the method individually. I also worked with a group of late adolescents from dysfunctional homes and discovered it was possible to help them develop tools to achieve emotional maturity and find their life paths even when their parents remained emotionally stuck and dysfunctional. Experiences with the variations of extended family groups and cultural patterns in Costa Rica further confirmed the broad potential of the method.

In 2003 I returned to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico to become the companion of an old friend who died of cancer seven months later. The experience was invaluable in gaining insights and understanding of the final stages of the emotional risking process of life, and completing the doctoral degree in 2004.

Now, in the summer of 2006, at 64, the degree has been completed, The Amáte Institute is a reality, I am living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, the place on earth I love best, doing the work I believe is my destiny, helping others like I was heal their fearful pasts…and learn to live at peace in the present.

Life is still a challenge…still provides opportunities for confronting fears and taking emotional growth risks, but today I have the tools to identify the emotional risks that are right to take, take the risks courageously, and love myself through whatever consequences result from the risking….all skills I began to develop when I began doing the Inner Work to heal my past….and all skills that are basic to the Amáte Growth Work healing process.

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