If you feel stuck, suffer from burnout, or lack a clear purpose for your life, I wrote The AOVIA Principle: A Path of Unlimited Potential for you. This book can serve as a guide to help you bounce back from a crisis. You can use it by itself or as a supplement to traditional therapy. I began writing it during a time when I met all of the above criteria. Despite having a successful career, I felt burned out, stuck at a dead-end, and had a severe case of compassion fatigue.


Being on call 24/7 for ten years had caught up with me. I was exhausted physically, mentally, and emotionally from the disruptions of my circadian rhythm. Then a surgery triggered the re-experience of a repressed traumatic childhood event. I decided to go on a sabbatical and resigned from my position as clinical program director. In my thirties, I had ditched earlier attempts of writing professionally in order to become an expert in another field. During my time off, I realized that I had become just that: a seasoned clinical social worker with a postgraduate degree and a professional license to practice therapy and provide clinical supervision to postgraduates.


Through a series of synchronistic events during my sabbatical, I discovered that the desire to be a therapist and writer had been inside me since I was seven. I had imagined myself in those roles while sitting at an old, black typewriter without paper and missing the A-key. In retrospect I understood that I had been trying to heal from my traumatic experiences as a Verschickungskind (sent-away child) at the age of six while placed in a large group home in Sankt Peter Ording. That place had been marketed as a recovery retreat on the shore of the North Sea in Germany.


Instead of recovery at that facility, I experienced terror and a sense of complete severance from my family and community, accompanied by an unbearable emotional pain that manifested as a painful constriction in my throat. As a six-year-old, I did not know what I have come to understand today: I had been subjected to what psychoanalyst Alice Miller described as poisonous pedagogy, a practice that used authoritarian methods designed to break a child's will. For example, I was placed in a double-bind of having to choose between two forbidden acts-going to the bathroom and wetting my bed. The only possible outcome was punishment for breaking the rules.


Years later, a major part of my healing was discovering the Verschickungskinder Deutschland (Sent-away children Germany) on social media. When I learned that there had been 8-12 million of us between 1945 and 1990, I began to view my early childhood from a brand-new perspective. I connected to others who had been affected, began to support related research, and got involved in activities to prevent such atrocities from ever happening again. Finally, it included writing this book and starting to work again-this time as an independent social work contractor. In that role, I was able to create my own schedule and limit my number of referrals.


My writing this book is a direct result of becoming receptive to previously unknown information. Despite well-meaning but ill-suited advice, I neither created a self-help book offering promises of instant results nor wrote from a scientific angle to be passionately challenged and debated. Instead, I did what I encourage anyone in distress to do at the beginning of a major endeavor-get in touch with their inner self in order to effectively improve their life and the lives of those around them.


We must take care of ourselves to avoid burnout. I had lost the connection to myself during an upwardly mobile career that no longer worked for me. The AOVIA Principle: A Path of Unlimited Potential presents a reliable method to reinvent yourself from the inside out by connecting to your highest purpose.