I’m Sherena, a Certified Life & Relationship Coach, survivor of covert emotional and narcissistic abuse, and founder of Empowered Empath Coaching.

I became a life coach because I wanted to help people just like me.

For much of my life, I didn’t understand how the patterns I learned in childhood were shaping my adult relationships. I learned to read the emotional weather, keep the peace, be helpful, stay strong, and take responsibility for how everyone else felt. I became very good at adapting to other people while slowly losing touch with myself.

When relationships became painful or confusing, my instinct was to try harder. I questioned myself, explained things away, and kept believing that if I could just understand what was happening, I could somehow fix it.

My healing began when I stopped trying to figure him out and started asking myself why his behavior felt so familiar.

That question changed everything.

It led me back to my childhood, the roles I learned to play, the behaviors I learned to normalize, and the ways I had been conditioned to confuse familiarity with love. I began to understand how childhood conditioning, generational trauma, and unhealthy relationship patterns had shaped what I accepted and how difficult it had become to trust my own perception.

As I began connecting those dots, I stopped focusing on changing someone else and started reclaiming myself. I learned to recognize unhealthy patterns, trust what I was seeing and feeling, establish healthy boundaries, and listen to my own voice again.

Somewhere along that healing journey, I knew I wanted to help others do the same. That’s why I became a life coach.

Today, I help people who feel confused, emotionally exhausted, or like they’ve lost themselves in a relationship understand what’s happening, recognize unhealthy patterns, rebuild self-trust, create healthy boundaries, and reconnect with who they are.

I also serve as a leader with HEARD, a Christian support group for women experiencing and recovering from emotional, verbal, and spiritual abuse. For the past several years, I’ve had the privilege of walking alongside women as they begin putting words to experiences that have often left them confused, isolated, and questioning themselves. That work has deepened my belief that hidden abuse thrives in confusion and silence—and that being heard, believed, and supported is an important part of healing.

My faith is at the heart of my life and my work. I believe God can bring beauty from ashes and use even the most painful parts of our stories to bring hope and healing to someone else.

That belief is also at the heart of my forthcoming memoir, A Good Daughter: A Memoir of Choosing Truth Over Distortion and Becoming More Than a Good Daughter. In it, I share my journey through generational trauma, relationships, faith, and healing—and what happened when I stopped trying to be who everyone else needed me to be and began asking a much more important question:

What is true?

I know what it feels like to know something isn’t right but not have the words for it. I also know what can happen when the pieces finally begin to make sense.

That’s why I do this work. You don’t have to figure it out alone.