Propelling others forward is what Demarra West, 44, has been doing for nearly two decades. Through her company, Change Agent Consulting, West worked as an executive coach and trained others in organizational and community development and business development. She was also the founding director of the Educating for Freedom in Schools program, providing out-of-school educational enrichment for youth in Kalamazoo. After getting a graduate degree in clinical mental health, she became a licensed therapist, a move that made her face her own complex childhood trauma. She chronicled that process in the book Me Too: A Therapist’s Journey to Heal, Find Liberation, and Joy, which she released in December 2023.
“I wrote my book based on my own lived experience with complex childhood trauma, and then a lot of things started shifting for me after that,” she says. The experience, West says, made her want to dedicate herself to making trauma recovery and healing accessible to those most affected by it. She launched Be Well Beautiful People, a nonprofit organization that focuses on trauma recovery and wellness, especially for those of the BIPOC, LGBTQI+ and low-income populations and those impacted by incarceration and foster care.
How did you get where you are today?
I have been an entrepreneur for the last 16 years, running Change Agent Consulting. My work takes me all over the world, focusing on things like strategic planning, business development and executive coaching and anti-racism training and a lot of things in between. During that time, I became a licensed therapist and have done clinical work as a school-based, home-based therapist, working in the substance abuse realm and in the holistic wellness space. I started Be Well Beautiful Woman in 2009, a program for female leaders and entrepreneurs that prioritizes wellness so they can heal, live joyous, abundant lives and have business success.
After the book was released, I realized that I only wanted to focus on healing and liberation work, particularly trauma recovery and trauma advocacy. And this beautiful business that I built (Change Agent Consulting) and that has fed me in a multitude of ways no longer fit in terms of my identity. I made the radical decision to close Change Agent Consulting’s doors and launch Be Well Beautiful People, which is all about accessible healing and liberation support for the communities and the identities that need it the most. I also host the Be Well Beautiful People podcast and have a blog that’s connected to that work.
Everyone, of course, can be supported by Be Well Beautiful People, but I’m really focused on the groups of people that are more susceptible to experiencing trauma across their lifespan and creating a safe space in the form of organizational and individual wellness. That could be assessment strategy, planning day and overnight retreats, therapeutic support, leadership development in the form of coaching, racial healing and everything in between.
It is a lot. It’s huge. But with all the things that I’ve done over the years, I knew this is what I was born to do. Anything I put out there in the world and I talk about, I live it, I’ve been trained in it, I embody it, I practice it.
How did your childhood influence your work?
There’s this saying that when you set out to heal the world, you realize that you have to heal yourself.
Even when I was doing clinical work, I didn’t have any level of awareness that I had my own trauma recovery to do. The more of the ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) you have, the more complex your trauma. I had lived experiences with eight of 10 ACEs, including physical, emotional and sexual abuse, poverty, neglect and domestic violence. The more I became certified to work with individuals on these issues, the more I started getting an awareness about my own trauma.
I didn’t even say out loud that I was a survivor until about two or three years ago, which is actually much more normal than we think because of people believing that the past is the past, not being ready to share their story, the shame that they may carry as a result of that story, or the lack of awareness about the impact of how what they went through may be playing out within their lives.
This book was 26 years in the making. It was a lot of on-and-off writing, because when you’re writing about your trauma, there’s a re-traumatization that happens. It meant that I had to tell the story of my mother. I had to tell the story of my father. I had to talk about my siblings. I had to talk about all of the individuals who harmed me and the most painful things that I had endured.
I believe in divine timing. I wasn’t supposed to write the book until now. I needed to go through my own healing. My healing allowed me to see the people who harmed me through the lens of trauma and through the lens of their own healing This allowed me to write the story with a level of neutrality, of truth telling with compassion, and an understanding of the humanity of someone who caused you grave harm.
This work has also caused another shift in your life.
I grew up and had my business in Kalamazoo and was laying the groundwork for Be Well Beautiful People to be here. But I felt that my time was coming up here, that what I was supposed to do here I had done. And Detroit was a place that, for whatever reason, just kept calling me. I moved there at the end of May. My work will continue to bring me to Kalamazoo. I have projects here that I’m working on right now. But I felt that I needed to be in a place that was beyond Kalamazoo to do the work that I know that I’m being called to do.
— Interview by Marie Lee, edited for length and clarity
