Healing Trauma: A Conversation with Lisa Ketcham-Hendrickson

Lisa Ketcham-Hendrickson has spent thirty years around trauma, first as an ER nurse, now as Serenity for Life's Integrative Wellness Director. She's the one who sits down with every client when they arrive and asks a question most treatment programs never think to ask: what does wellness actually look like for you?

We asked Lisa to share more about the program she built, called Human Recovery, and why she believes healing has to include the body, not just the mind.

From the ER to Integrative Wellness

Lisa's path into this work wasn't abstract. It came from decades of watching people carry pain in ways that never got addressed.

"I'm an old ER nurse, and I’ve worked in trauma for 30 years," Lisa says, "and that especially is such a profession of just numbing."

At Serenity, her role starts the moment a client arrives. "When the clients come in, I develop an integrative wellness plan with them," she explains. "We talk about what different modalities we offer, and then we develop a plan on what they'd like to start incorporating into their treatment while they're with us." It's not a one-time conversation. She meets with clients weekly to revisit their goals as treatment progresses.

Building Human Recovery

Out of that work, Lisa developed Human Recovery, a 16-week coaching program rooted in yogic theory, polyvagal theory, breath work, and Western medicine. The first eight weeks happen in residence at Serenity. The second eight weeks form a bridge program, either in person for clients local to Denver, or over Zoom for those who've returned home.

That bridge matters more than it might sound. "There's a 40 to 60 percent, sometimes even higher, relapse rate in that first 90 days," Lisa says. Human Recovery is built specifically to hold clients through that window, keeping them connected to the work instead of leaving them to navigate it alone.

"The Issues Are in the Tissues"

Ask Lisa why integrative wellness belongs inside a recovery program, and she doesn't hesitate.

"The issues are in the tissues," she says. "We spend so much time in our culture avoiding discomfort, and discomfort is necessary. It's necessary for growth and for us to evolve."

She describes the deeper purpose behind the work simply: "This is really about coming home to yourself. Really rediscovering who you are, what your values are, where you stand, what struggles you have avoided addressing, and being able to sit with those struggles and learn from them, so that we can alter or change past behaviors and move forward with healthy habits."

It's the kind of line that could sound like a slogan coming from someone else. From Lisa, thirty years into this work, it sounds like something she's watched prove true time and again.

What a Day of Healing Looks Like

Consistent structure is a critical component for successful healing. Ask Lisa to walk you through a typical day at Serenity, and the structure reveals itself as anything but abstract.

Every morning starts with a 90-minute mindful movement session. The first half is intentionally the same each day. "Consistency is key to building new healthy habits," Lisa explains. "Repetition is really, really important." Clients begin by checking in with their bodies, noticing tension, warmth, a knot in the stomach, sensations they may have spent years learning to ignore. From there, the group moves into breath work and a short talk tied to that week's theme in the Human Recovery curriculum, followed by ten minutes of meditation.

"Meditation actually changes our brains," she says. "It allows us to start building new neural pathways and releasing these past stories that we continue to tell ourselves. Eighty to ninety percent of our thoughts are the same thoughts from yesterday. Forty to sixty percent of those thoughts are negative. When we can sit with ourselves and really pull ourselves back, we're creating new neural pathways."

The rest of the session moves into physical movement, yoga most days, sometimes a walk or a Peloton ride, depending on who's leading. From there, clients move through three more 90-minute groups over the course of the day. Each morning also includes setting an intention, something Lisa is careful to distinguish from simply naming a hope for the day.

"It's not just writing an intention," she says. "It's putting attention to the intention."

Meeting Skepticism With Science

Not every client arrives ready to embrace a variety of healing modalities that they might not be familiar with. Lisa has heard the hesitation plenty of times, that this can feel like "mumbo jumbo" to someone walking into the program unsure about the program's curriculum.

Her response isn't to convince people to believe. It's to show them the research.

"My coaching program really is science-based," she says. "I think the pendulum is really shifting right now, and we're moving away from this ill care system, which is Western medicine, and really moving into well care." She points to the physiological evidence that movement, meditation, and breath work measurably affect anxiety, depression, blood pressure, and cardiac health. "Really, I think it's just stepping into some of the science that backs it and being able to speak to that."

Separating the Person From the Diagnosis

One of the more striking parts of this conversation was Lisa's reflection on identity, and how Human Recovery was built to work differently than more traditional recovery models.

"In AA or NA, which have been wonderful practices for many years, you go into those settings, and you immediately tie your identity to your disease," she says. "You sit down, and you're like, 'Hi, my name's Lisa and I'm an alcoholic.' And then you've tied your identity to your disease. That's really hard to separate. We are so much more than our diseases. We're humans working with all of these different aspects in our lives. But we are not our diseases."

That philosophy extends to who Lisa believes the program is actually for. "Human recovery is for everybody," she says. "We are all recovering. Some people have a name for it, and that's alcohol or drugs. But some people numb by working 48 to 60 hours a week. There are so many ways we avoid what's happening within our bodies. We're all on the same healing journey."

Staying Connected After Discharge

Recovery doesn't end when a client leaves Serenity, and Lisa's work doesn't either. As a nurse, she coordinates directly with each client's primary care physician and outpatient therapist to maintain continuity of care after discharge. She also works to place clients in "Karma Yogi" memberships at yoga studios near wherever they're returning to, an arrangement where clients work a few hours a week in exchange for full studio access, keeping movement and structure part of their lives long after treatment ends.

It's part of a larger alumni support system Serenity is currently building out, including peer recovery coaches and regular check-ins designed to catch clients before a hard moment turns into a full relapse.

Improving the Human Experience

Lisa's ambitions for Human Recovery extend well beyond Serenity's current walls. She's begun exploring how the model could support people in high-stress, trauma-adjacent professions, ER staff, first responders, anyone doing work that quietly asks them to numb in order to keep functioning. This fall, Serenity and Human Recovery will bring the program to a wider audience at the Denver Yoga Summit, held in September at Chatfield Botanical Gardens, with more than 1,500 attendees already registered.

Asked what she'd want people to understand most, Lisa's answer wasn't clinical at all.

"We just need to come back to the fact that we're all human, and we're all here to experience this world the best we can… and what a beautiful experience that is when we can truly touch into that," she says.

If Lisa's approach to healing resonates with you, or someone you love, Serenity for Life is here to help.