About Angela

I’m Angela Johnson, Certified Adult Chair® Coach. I offer coaching sessions that allow you to heal old pain and trauma, rediscover your peace and joy, set boundaries, and learn to love yourself without agenda – with Open Hands – all in a judgment-free environment. 

I found myself growing more and more overwhelmed when my youngest child was born. Holding down a corporate job, caring for growing kids, managing school drop offs and homework and sports practices, the pressure of cooking healthy meals, trying to keep the house just above the mark of “clean enough if you don’t look closely” – it was a lot. I was trying to do it all…if not perfectly, then at least as well as I could manage. 

Enter my mother’s terminal cancer diagnosis. One by one, the plates I’d barely been able to keep spinning started to wobble and crash. 

I found The Adult Chair® not long after, and the model has been pivotal for me to realize the impact my own unhealed pain and triggers were having on my life and relationships…and how the pain and triggers were MY work to do, not someone else’s job to avoid.  

I learned to *feel* my life instead of *thinking* my life. I learned that my answers had always been within me – I just hadn’t known it or known how to find them. Finding those answers meant finding healing. Instead of fearing pain or the parts of me I didn’t love, I learned to steer toward those parts, to turn the light on, see all of me, and say, “Thank you; I love you.” 

The image of Open Hands is powerful for me. It speaks of my mother’s love for me and the ways I have learned to love my own people better: to set boundaries, speak to myself as kindly as I’d speak to a friend, and to embrace all of my parts and truly love myself. I also had to learn to Open my Hands… to let go and move on through and beyond pain.

I wish I could say my journey of being humbled through the fire of life was a short one, but it was years (and years) in the making. Eventually, I was an adult woman who looked fine – but who was in reality battling depression and anxiety, chronically overwhelmed, reacting to triggers, and grieving the death of my mother so deeply that it frightened me. I was afraid to feel those feelings, sure I would never find the bottom of them, numbing with food and escapist fiction because I didn’t have time to collapse. 

I had been lucky enough to have a wonderful mother – a woman who loved me without agenda every minute of my life – and it was only after she died that I understood the rare gift of being loved with Open Hands. 

I realized no one else on earth would love me quite like that and that it was MY job to start loving myself the way my mom had loved me – the way I love my kids.