Catherine Dockery MA

Catherine Dockery, MA, is a holistic integration coach and started the Center for Conscious Aging helping older adults understand their developmental changes and transform their lives. Through my support groups, individual consulting, and conscious aging workbook, I help people see that our brains makes sense, and that those things we’ve thought of as emotional difficulties or character defects are actually very normal reactions to coping with life. How does learning about conscious aging and neuroscience help us heal? Once we start learning about the developmental stages of aging and the neuroscience of self-development we find out how self-blame and isolation gets in the way of gentleness with the self. We often think we are broken, that we have character flaws, when in actuality we make perfect sense, given the challenging experiences of aloneness, isolation, relational distress and more that characterize most modern, capitalist colonial cultures. We humans are uniquely vulnerable to emotional harm, but we are also uniquely available to hold each other and ourselves with warmth and resonance in ways that re-establish real relationship and engage our brains’ capacity for healing.