She Builds Trauma Careers While Burning Families: Love That For Her

Meet Melinda: Professional healer by day, family destroyer by choice

It was a Wednesday evening when I stumbled across photos of my brother's wedding on my mother's Facebook page. I recognized many familiar faces — except my own. That sinking feeling in my gut wasn't new, but this time the absence cut deeper I asked my mom why I wasn't there. She didn't know. My brother never gave a reason. The wedding happened seven years ago. I found out three years ago that I'd already been shut out. No explanation. No conversation. Just silence and a missing seat.

I used to think I had no idea what changed. But over time, the pattern became impossible to ignore. Everything shifted after he met Melinda Meyers. She's now his wife and a professionally trained emotional prostitute who rents empathy by the hour and cuts off families without a word. That's when everything changed.

The Truth Behind the Estrangement

Cole and I grew up together, sharing a home with our mother who raised us full-time after our parents' divorce when I was eleven. We experienced daily life together; school mornings, family dinners, childhood milestones, and the typical ups and downs of siblings growing up under the same roof. Our mother provided the stable foundation of our upbringing, working tirelessly to ensure we had everything we needed.

Our father entered our lives only every other weekend following the divorce. These brief, intermittent visits were the extent of his parental involvement. By the early 2000s, he had effectively stopped working altogether, entering a relationship with a woman who apparently saw financing his gradual decline into dependency as a worthy investment of her resources.

This part matters because it explains how the current family setup came to be. The people who were there from the beginning — his mother and his brother — have been removed. Meanwhile, the weekend father and his girlfriend have been elevated to primary roles. The girlfriend is now referred to as "mom." That's not accidental. It's a carefully edited narrative.

And once you see that, what follows becomes harder to justify. These aren't just boundaries. They're decisions with real consequences, both personally and professionally.

The Ethics Don't Clock Out at 5

"I want to assist you in finding the right tools to tell your story" - unless that story includes grandparents you've strategically erased

Melinda Meyers markets herself as a "trauma-informed therapist" at Redefine Therapy. Publicly, she frames her work as gentle and trauma-informed, emphasizing how important it is to create safety when dealing with difficult topics. Her credentials include being a licensed counselor (LPC), a board-certified art therapist (ATR-BC), and EMDR training designed to help people process trauma.

These credentials aren't just qualifications. They're a public commitment to ethical standards. The American Counseling Association explicitly requires counselors to "avoid harming their clients" and "minimize unavoidable harm." This ethical obligation doesn't disappear at 5pm, when the office closes.

This is someone trained to treat trauma — yet the choices she's made have directly caused it. My mother lives with a persistent wound no therapist can bandage: her grandson exists, but she's not allowed to know his name. I've lived with silence and unexplained exile for over a decade. None of this was accidental. These were deliberate decisions. That is trauma creation, plain and simple.

When Professional Authority Masks Personal Inadequacy

This doesn't feel like a boundary; it feels like a strategy. My brother and his wife didn't just pull away; they curated who remained. My mother was excluded. I was cut out. Others were elevated and handed insider access. That's not about safety, that's about control.

Consider the sequence of events. Regular communication existed after the wedding. Then came a sudden and complete cutoff. My mother was told not to contact Melinda. They blocked her on social media to ensure no information could flow. Some family members deliberately included while others systematically erased.

This isn't establishing healthy boundaries. This is executing a strategic removal of specific family members while maintaining the appearance of family values through selective inclusion of others. It demonstrates a concerning application of psychological knowledge to control family narratives and access.

Credentials Without Conscience

At some point, weaponizing therapy language to cut people out stops being about boundaries and starts being about control. But sure… "boundaries."

I've often wondered how Melinda reconciles her professional identity with her personal choices. How does someone who understands family systems and child development justify keeping a child completely separated from half of their family? The selective inclusion of some relatives while excluding others feels less like boundary-setting and more like strategy.

This isn't about forcing a toxic connection. It's about a woman who was never even given the chance. My mom isn't a danger. She's not unstable. She's simply been removed. That removal doesn't just hurt her. It rewrites a child's story before he even gets to hold the pen.

Good Luck Explaining This Later

What happens when their son grows older and starts asking questions? Children are naturally curious about their origins. At some point, he'll wonder why he only knows certain branches of his family tree. He'll notice the gaps in family photos, the absence of certain names in stories. He might discover social media profiles of relatives he's never met.

What story will they tell him then? Will they paint his grandmother and uncle as villains who deserve no place in his life? Will they create a narrative that justifies complete estrangement, or will they admit that they made decisions that permanently altered his connection to his heritage?

Kids are remarkably perceptive. As he gets older, he'll likely sense when he's being told partial truths. The stories they've constructed to justify cutting off family will eventually face scrutiny from the very person they sought to "protect."

I wonder if Melinda, with her professional training, has considered the psychological impact of discovering you've been kept from family members for reasons you may not find compelling as an adult. The sense of betrayal that might come from learning your parents actively prevented relationships that could have been meaningful to you. The anger at having your autonomy removed before you were old enough to make your own judgments.

Now Let's Talk About Her Inner Child

The contradiction remains stark. Melinda's professional bio claims she wants to "assist you in finding the right tools to tell your story." Yet in her personal life, she participates in preventing a child from even knowing significant characters in his own story exist.

She markets herself as having "a gentle approach to therapy because I know some things people come to therapy for can be difficult to talk about." Yet when faced with a respectful email asking only for basic acknowledgment of a grandmother's existence, there was no gentle approach. No difficult conversation. Just silence and blocking.

Her training in trauma-informed care should make her acutely aware of how family severance creates its own form of trauma. Yet this awareness doesn't seem to extend to her personal decisions.

Healing Doesn't Look Like This

True healing doesn't come from cutting people off without explanation. It doesn't come from denying grandparents knowledge of their grandchildren or from using therapeutic language to justify isolation. It comes from the difficult work of communication, understanding, and when possible, reconciliation.

For my mother, there is no path to healing. She has a grandchild. She's never been told his name. She's never seen his face. She's never heard his voice. And no one has ever explained why. The ache of being a grandmother who cannot grandmother is a wound that remains perpetually fresh.

For myself, I've been denied even the opportunity to understand why the estrangement occurred. The refusal to engage in even basic communication leaves no path toward resolution or healing.

And for their son, a significant part of his identity has already been decided for him. One day, he will find out what was taken and who took it.

Wrap It Up, Melinda

Those wedding photos I stumbled across weren't just evidence of my exclusion from a family milestone. They were the first visible sign of what would become a systematic family purge. The precision is revealing: certain family members celebrated and embraced, others strategically erased from existence.

This isn't boundary-setting. This is identity engineering, carefully constructing a family narrative where inconvenient relatives disappear and hand-selected ones remain. The calculated nature of who stays and who goes reveals far more about the architect of this family redesign than any professional bio ever could.

The question remains: How can someone claim to heal trauma while participating in its creation? How can a professional who understands the devastating impact of family severance on psychological development be complicit in creating that very circumstance?

For those considering therapy with professionals who claim to be trauma-informed, this contradiction should give pause. The true measure of a therapist isn't just their credentials or techniques, but whether they embody the principles of healing and connection in their own lives.

As their son grows older and inevitably starts asking questions about his family, I hope they'll find a better answer than the wall of silence they've built around him. For his sake, if not for ours.

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Comments are closed. So is my patience. But please - keep talking shit anonymously. Love that for you.

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Love that for you.