Chad Herst, MS, LAC, PCC
I didn’t get into this work because I had it all figured out. I got here because life cracked me open early.
When I was 18, my brother took his life. I grew up in a house where performance mattered more than sensitivity, so I learned to keep going, even when it was empty inside.
Eventually the strategies stopped working. I had to do some real inner work.
Therapy, yoga, and years of exploration showed me that grief and anxiety don’t just live in the head. They’re carried in the body. For a long time I built a career around those tools, and they helped, but only up to a point. The real shift came later, when collapse and injury forced me to stop overriding myself and start listening differently.
That’s when the work I do now was born. I work with high achievers and perfectionists, the ones who look like they have it together while quietly being run by shame, anxiety, or the fear that if they stop, it will all fall apart. I know that cycle because I’ve lived it.
This isn’t about fixing you. That drive to get it handled once and for all is just another performance strategy. I know it well. What I eventually learned is that the ache isn’t a mistake to be erased. It’s a guide. It points to the places we’ve abandoned ourselves and asks us to return.
The tools I offer—somatic awareness, mindfulness, nervous system work, parts work—aren’t about patching you up. They help you stay with what hurts long enough for it to shift. You’ll still spin out sometimes. But you’ll learn how to return, again and again. That’s the slow work of coming home—not by fixing yourself, but by reclaiming the parts of you that never stopped wanting to be seen, felt, and loved.