Corrie Dunkin is one of the coaches that we found this month and we did a little interview with her. She impressed us with her strength of character and passion for health and wellness.

She was just beginning a new chapter (launching a nonprofit center to support foster youth) when the pandemic struck and everything changed. Almost overnight, what was meant to be a haven of mentorship and mental health support became a crisis response center. Despite the overwhelming challenges, she stayed grounded in service, adapting to the moment by listening closely to the young adults she mentored, learning from them, and creating a sense of safety and connection in the midst of chaos.

She found healing not just through her efforts, but through the stories and spirits of the youth themselves. They invited her into their world, taught her what real support looked like, and revealed the extraordinary resilience that can exist alongside unimaginable trauma. It was through their honesty and courage that she began to understand the limits of her own knowledge, and the need to go deeper. This led her to become a Certified Trauma Informed Integrative Health Coach.

She now brings that same compassion and wisdom into her coaching practice, offering clients a space where they feel seen, safe, and empowered. With a deep belief in the power of the human spirit, she helps others reconnect with their inner voice (the one that trauma often tries to silence) and reminds them of their inherent wholeness. Through her work, she transforms pain into purpose, creating ripple effects of healing far beyond the sessions. Here is what she said…

Meet Life Coach Corrie Dunkin:

Name: Corrie Dunkin, BA, TICC

Pillar: The Mind, The Body, The Heart

Who is this coach for: Anyone who is interested in trauma recovery and restorative relationship to self.

How they can help: By using a customized, trauma informed approach focused for each individual’s needs.

First of all, how are you and your family doing after these Pandemic times?

In many ways me and my family are healthy and well.

And at the same time, I feel like even after 5 years, I’m still trying to figure out a new social, relational, and professional norm.

How did the coronavirus pandemic affect your clients? Did it affect you at all?

When the pandemic struck, I was working with a team to found and build a nonprofit center to provide foster youth transitioning to adulthood with wraparound services like mentoring, education, and mental health support.

Within a month of opening our doors (to a flood of youth and young adults in need) the pandemic hit.

Because of the nature of the work and the size of the need, we began operating more and more as a crisis response center as the pandemic unfolded.

I was running the mentoring program and mentoring several young adults at the time, and yes, it profoundly affected us all.

We did our best to shift as many of our services (like mentoring and tutoring) online as we could.

But homelessness, instability, unemployment, lack of education, lack of healthcare, incarceration, and unplanned pregnancies were constant barriers even before the pandemic.

So when we finally got a few things going online, it seemed highly insufficient.

I was lucky many of the foster youth liked me enough to tell me the truth about what they needed.

They let me know how boring an online peer support group I had planned ended up being for them.

They also offered really helpful suggestions about ways we could spend our time that they would be excited about.

Like listening to each other’s favorite music and letting the group know what they appreciated about it.

Playing music trivia.

Sharing poetry.

Doing writing prompts together.

And so, they gave me a second chance and allowed me the great privilege of being in their lives and learning to listen to them above myself.

They became the start of the therapeutic trauma informed education aside from my own story.

And the relationships we built started changing my life for the better.

Not long after, we transitioned the support group to a park with masks.

With my continued quest to give them (and myself) a sense of normalcy, we celebrated birthdays, ate lots of cake, fried chicken, and veggie trays.

We played games, carved pumpkins, did art, talked, laughed, and I grew to know a bit more about their stories.

Not just the horrific trauma so many had been exposed to from such young ages, but the incredible resilience I could see in their spirits to love so easily and freely, like children.

In a way, that support group and the relationships I grew to have with these young adults played a huge role in my desire to further my education about trauma.

I ultimately left this organization after witnessing how insufficient my own (and the general population’s) trauma informed knowledge was to support these young adults in a way that supported their healing rather than causing further harm.

This is what led me to study trauma and become a coach.

What are the biggest lessons that you learned in this pandemic?

One thing I heard a lot from the heroic young adults I was mentoring before and during the pandemic was how much and how often they craved a sense of normalcy throughout their young and abnormally trauma filled lives.

So when the pandemic hit, I began an online peer support group with most of our clients in an attempt to provide some normalcy.

It reminded me, in my own story through trauma healing, how healing often comes just through the simplest care of a person who reminds you that you matter enough to be delighted in and celebrated, just because you’re you and for no other reason.

Also, trauma has a bigger impact on our health and lives than we realize.

And the more we can educate ourselves on why that is and what we can do about it, the better off our whole world will be.

The Origin:

Tell us about you, your career, how you started with your coaching career?

Although my coaching career started in health and fitness over a decade ago, there are really two paths of my life story that converged about five years ago and led me to become a Certified Trauma Informed Integrative Health Coach.

The first was a journey of self discovery and a need for healing from childhood trauma that I began over 20 years ago as a young wife and mother of three incredible children.

Looking back, after all three of my children left for college and began transitioning to adulthood, I’ve realized that the work I did to heal my own childhood while raising them was, and still is, the work I am most proud of in my life.

It’s also the work that continues to inform my purpose, integrity, and values, both personally and professionally.

And, along with my communications degree, it’s allowed me the privilege of working across several fields in education, leadership, coaching, mentoring, and nonprofit building to serve young adults transitioning out of foster care.

The second path toward coaching was born out of a necessity to better support the developmental needs of one of our children who had been struggling with significant neurological and developmental delays since birth.

Having exhausted most of the medical resources available to us at that time in search of help for her, it was my husband who discovered what would ultimately have the greatest effect on her development (and all of our health and lives): the essential role functional fitness and nutrition play in healthy human development.

He ended up inspiring not just me, but our whole family and an entire community to improve our health and reach for our greatest physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual potential.

This is how I became a fitness coach and personal trainer, and spent many years as a Certified Coach in CrossFit, Gymnastics, and CrossFit Kids.

All of it together has intersected and culminated into where I am today, a forever student of my own healing and health as a Certified Trauma Informed Coach Practitioner with a focus on integrative health and well being.

What was your biggest obstacle that you had to overcome in your life that made you who you are today?

After the birth of our third child, I hit the lowest point in my life and became suicidal.

The therapy I began during this time not only saved my life, it was the beginning of understanding my own trauma.

It was the best and most profound change the healing journey has led me through, and the purpose I get to live out so authentically today.

The Coaching Style:

How do you innovate with coaching your clients?

The innovation I bring as a trauma informed health coach starts with offering every client intentional and heartfelt unconditional belonging.

I do this by providing them with a psychologically safe space to support nervous system regulation, a wellness focused coaching partnership, and a compassionate listening presence so they might better hear their own inner wisdom.

This space gives clients an opportunity to reconnect with themselves, while the coaching partnership calls them to use the space to restore an active, healthier relationship with themselves.

The work of coaching is not healing, helping, fixing, or offering advice.

The innovative work of all coaching is to listen deeply in order to empower anyone to remember how to listen to (and then live fully out of) their own wisdom, or “inner voice of well being” as I like to call it.

Innovation is often required when, as I’ve experienced in my own life, the inner voice of well being can easily be drowned out by constant autonomic nervous system alarms triggered by the pain of trauma.

It can be replaced with a pretty convincing voice telling us we must be broken, defective, worthless.

I treasure the moments my voice might break through those distortions to quiet them.

I’m privileged to bear witness to so many heroic stories, including my own.

As we learn to make tangible sense of it all by recognizing the million different miraculous ways we are already, miraculously (who we were born to be) well.

And that all pain is an opportunity to harness our greatest power, to transform pain into purpose for the sake of a greater good beyond ourselves.

What’s unique about your coaching approach?

As a Certified Trauma Informed Integrative Health Coach, I approach coaching from a wellness focused, trauma informed perspective.

This approach has been uniquely informed through my own experience with trauma.

What benefits do your clients get after working with you?

They often tell me they feel safe, seen, heard, valued, and empowered.

Not always, but often.

I am very much human and always in practice.

I believe in the value of coaching, but I’m not perfect and never will be.

The Impact:

If you had a super megaphone that, when you speak into, the whole world will hear your message, what would you say?

Do not underestimate the power of a trauma informed and healing life.

What is the greatest lesson you have learned in your life?

Prioritizing the work of understanding trauma and healing, and improving my own mental and emotional health as a result, is the most valuable and best work I’ve ever done (and may ever do) in service to contributing to improving life for the next generations.

Where Can You Find Corrie Dunkin?

If you liked this interview and if you would love to witness the power of healing while working with a trauma informed coach who makes you feel safe, seen, heard, valued, and empowered, go to yourcorcoach.com and see how Coach Corrie can help you do that.

If you’d like to peak a glimpse into her coaching, feel free to follow her Instagram account.

And if you’d like to connect with her more personally, you can do that through LinkedIn or by sending her a direct message on her Email corrie@yourcorcoach.com. It was an honor having this interview with her.