I grew up in a small town with both of my parents and two younger sisters. I had what felt like a mostly happy childhood. I was a care-free child, playing outside with friends until dusk, making up games and having adventures in fields and forests.
But even then, I was wired differently than most. I felt everything deeply. I picked up on the emotional undercurrents in a room before I could even name what I was sensing. I didn't have the language for it yet, but I was navigating the world as a highly sensitive, neurodivergent child in a world that wasn't designed for the way my mind and my heart worked.
My dad had experienced childhood trauma, and when he was around, I felt there was no room for joy. Through subtle - and sometimes not so subtle - emotional abuse, he unintentionally projected his low self-worth and feelings of inadequacy onto me. I lived in fear of his reactionary tendencies and anger. I learned early to make myself small, to not shine too brightly, and to manage everyone else's emotions so the atmosphere stayed a little safer. I became the family peacemaker without realizing that this is a heavy burden to quietly carry.
These early experiences shaped me in two directions at once: they planted seeds of deep insecurity (I was anxious, worried, fearing the worst case scenario, blaming myself for anything that went wrong, constantly criticizing myself, and feeling like I could never get anything right), and they ignited a fierce desire to be a force of good in the world. As a teenager, I decided that I wanted to become a therapist. What I didn't yet understand was that I would need to do my own healing first - and that this healing would become the very foundation of the work I now offer.
It took me a long time, and a lot of inner work to shine light on my self-destructive patterns because they felt so normal and in some ways comforting and familiar. I realized I needed to start giving myself the kindness and compassion that I so easily gave to others.
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It wasn't until much later in life that I understood that I was AuDHD - autistic and ADHD - as well as what's called "gifted." Understanding this has been one of the most profound gifts of my adult life. So much of what I had pathologized about myself - the intensity, the sensitivity, the way I processed the world differently, the exhaustion of masking who I was to try to fit in - finally made sense. I wasn't broken; I am just wired differently.
This understanding also revealed the enormous cost of a lifetime of masking: slowly losing trust in my own knowing and my own worth.
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My marriage brought this to a crisis point.
What began as love gradually revealed itself to be something that was slowly destroying me. I felt like my soul was being erased, bit my bit - like the most essential parts of me were being extinguished. I felt like I couldn't do anything right, and I was walking on eggshells, trying so hard to keep the peace, but nothing ever really worked. I kept trying and trying, thinking that if I could just explain myself better, or just try harder to do things exactly as he liked, then he would go back to being the person I thought I married. For a long time, I believed I was the problem.
Then eventually I recognized the pattern I was living, which was the same one I first learned to navigate as a child, with my father. I had unconsciously sought the same type of person in my romantic relationship, as we often do if we haven't yet truly healed. The familiarity of it made the pattern almost invisible to me for years.
I turned to intuitive healing and energy work because regular therapy was helping, and I desperately need to find a way to feel ok again. What I found in the process of my own inner healing changed everything for me - and eventually became central to the work I now offer others.
I learned how to love myself. Not just love the easy parts, but how to love the shadows - the dark, messy, ugly parts that have long been rejected. I am much more at peace. I trust that things happen the way they are meant to, and it is not my fault if things don’t go the way I would want. I have built a strong foundation for myself where I can stand solidly in who I am.
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Leaving my marriage didn't happen in a single moment - it was a long, slow, sometimes terrifying process of reclaiming myself from the inside out. I am still in parts of that process. I am still navigating a separation that has been neither quick nor simple, and I am still rebuilding my life financially, learning how to parallel parent, and how to find my footing in chapters of my life that I didn't expect to be writing at this stage.
I am not someone who healed completely and then set up a practice from a tidy distance. In fact, I have been developing myself as a therapist and healer for years alongside my own personal experiences and growth. In November of 2021, I left my previous employment as a mental health clinician to start my own private practice, both so that I could preserve the integrity of my body's health and well-being, and so that I could have the freedom to use less conventional practices such as intuitive energy healing in my work. I am someone who continues to do my own inner work alongside you - with more ground under my feet than I once had, with a hard-won capacity to trust myself that I reinforce daily, and with a genuine understanding of how non-linear and unglamorous real healing actually is.
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What I know now - and what I bring into every session - is this:
You are not broken. The ways you learned to survive made complete sense given what you were surviving. The sensitivity that made you a target also makes you extraordinary. The path back to yourself is not about fixing what went wrong, it is about clearing enough space to hear what was always healed and whole.
I am not a guru or expert. I don't have a proprietary method or a promise of transformation in a set number of sessions. What I have is presence, deep attunement. clinical training, intuitive ability, and an unshakeable belief in the innate wisdom of the person sitting across from me.
My work is for the ones who are done being managed and are ready to be truly met. For the sensitive, the neurodivergent, the soulful, the gifted, the ones who have tried the standard approaches and still feel like something essential is missing.
If that's you, I would be honoured to walk alongside you.
My name is Rosemary Messmer, and I am both a Registered Clinical Counsellor and a Certified Intuitive Energy Healer. My practice is in North Vancouver, BC. I work with clients in person here, and online (and phone) across BC and beyond.
