Hi!
My name is Dr. Lorre Laws, and I’m a neurospiritual healer, author, and integrative nurse scientist. I’m so glad that you’re here! I help people prevent and heal from trauma en route to spiritual awakening and expansion.
I am uniquely situation at the intersection of spirituality and science. As a healer, oracle, and medium, I am an experienced healing arts practitioner with over 30 years of experience. My expertise, given that I’m a nurse neuroscientist, is helping people to clear and transmute their neurospiritual blocks that often create “static” in their spiritual expression, expansion, and awakening. Trauma healing is one universal rite of healing passage through which one must travel to live their most spiritually aligned and connected life. I am a trauma healing expert and authored “Nursing Our Healer’s Heart – A Recovery Guide for Nurse Trauma & Burnout“.
As a nurse scholar and scientist, I wrote this book for my colleagues and our profession, but it holds true for all helping professions. If you’re struggling with “burnout” that isn’t being resolved through the usual self-caring approaches, it’s highly likely that there is some un-healed trauma at the root cause. This book and my programs can help. Just swap in your professional role for “nurse” in the book to tailor it to your unique healing journey!
My story as pertains to bringing healing to nurses worldwide
I help nurses who are experiencing nurse-specific traumatization . . .which is frequently misdiagnosed as “just burnout”. Nurses worldwide are being told to do more self-care or work on their resilience. To that I say . . .
Nonsense!
We know how to take care of ourselves. We ARE resilient by virtue of surviving nursing school and transition to practice.
What we need is for healthcare systems and organizations to stop the systemic and oppressive practices that result in avoidable nurse-specific traumatization.
I conducted five years of research across four disciplines to discover that there is a silent epidemic that is driving nurses from the profession in droves.
Nurse-specific traumatization is real. It’s not “just burnout”.
We can help.
But let me share my own story first.
My first job, at the age of fourteen years, was cleaning toilets at a skilled nursing facility. It was the first time I really saw the effects of aging, physical limitations, and mental health conditions. As a teenager, I earned a Certified Nursing Assistant license, and provided direct patient care for the next six years. By the time I graduated from my undergraduate studies, I had cared for and facilitated many people in their end-of-life transitions – holding their hand while they breathed their last breath. I’ve been caring for people ever since.
Now, I facilitate healing with nurses who are experiencing traumatization and/or burnout — often secondary to health system inadequacies. The world will soon have just half of the nurses it needs. There isn’t time for us to wait for the system to fix itself. Nurses can and must do what we do best – facilitate our own recovery and healing first and then work from our healed scars instead of our open wounds to lead the changes we need to see in our profession and health care settings.
In 2010, I returned to school and completed my master’s and doctoral degrees in nursing, with the intention to make a difference however possible. Little did I know then that nurses, my colleagues, my heart, and my tribe, were suffering in profound and unimaginable ways – usually secondary to healthcare system inadequacies.
I began to question if there was more to the nurse burnout story. Is burnout just the tip of the nurse traumatization iceberg? After conducting exhaustive research on burnout, presenteeism, compassion fatigue, moral injury, and nurse traumatization it became clear that there was more to the story. This isn’t about nurses needing to take better care of themselves. It isn’t about us needing resilience training, free pizza, lavender lounges, or wellness rooms. It’s about avoidable nurse traumatization. Nurses are being traumatized, gaslighted, marginalized, and oppressed in their practices. Nurses do not feel safe in their practices because all too often, they are not safe.
Diving deeper down the research rabbit hole, I drew upon my neuroscience background and started exploring what was happening to nurses through the lens of Porges’ Polyvagal Theory and Badenoch’s relational neuroscience scientific advances. The more I researched, the clearer the impact of often avoidable nurse traumatization and its impact on professional wellbeing . . . which is directly connected to patient safety, outcomes, and quality of care.
As it turns out, nurse-specific traumatization is a global nursing workforce problem that adversely affects millions of nurses.
Here’s just a few examples to ponder:
~96% of nurses have one or more PTSD symptoms.
~1 in 4 nurses meet PTSD diagnostic criteria (higher percentage for ICU, ED, and behavioral health specialties).
~81% of nurses are burned out (or traumatized?) and don’t feel supported at work.
~80% of nurses work in understaffed units (a sub-category of nurse-specific traumatization).
~32% of nurses are likely to leave their roles, along with 75% of other health professionals.
~50% of first-year nurses are seriously considering leaving the profession
I spent over five years researching and writing Nursing Our Healer’s Heart: A Recovery Guide for Nurse Trauma and Burnout. This is my gift to you, our colleagues, and the global nursing community. It is written from my healer’s heart, to yours, as though we were sharing a cup of tea in your living space.
I invite you to join our worldwide community through The Haelan Academy, a nonprofit organization where we will work from our healing scars instead of our open wounds to shift the current nursing paradigm to Nursing 2.0 The Nurse Safety and Professional Wellness Edition.
Together, we can usher in a new era of nursing. The time is now. We can do this.
How to get started
1. Preorder the book and receive a free, heartfelt gift.
2. Subscribe to my YouTube channel for free content.
3. Join, follow and engage with other nurses in my social media communities @drlorrelaws.
References:
Berlin, G., Lapoint, M., & Murphy, M. (2022). Surveyed nurses consider leaving direct patient care at elevated rates. McKinsey & Company.
Elsevier Health. (2022). Clinician of the future: A 2022 report. https://www.elsevier.com/connect/clinician-of-the-future
Schuster, M., & Dwyer, P. A. (2020). Post-traumatic stress disorder in nurses: An integrative review. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 29(15-16), 2769-2787. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/jocn.15288
