THE BOOK of BECOMING

How to Rebuild Confidence After Trauma: A Frisco, Texas Story of Identity, Resilience, and Becoming

There is a wall in my studio. It has six books on it. My name is on the spine of every one. (I can’t help but smile as I write that.)

Brian and I built it right after we moved in, before almost anything else was unpacked. I wanted it to be one of the first things I saw every morning. Especially on the days rebuilding confidence after trauma still felt like an active practice rather than a finished project.

Furthermore, I wanted proof nearby. Because before there was a wall, there was a notecard.

It hung on our refrigerator when I was growing up. My mom put it there, because I studied harder than anyone I knew and still could not get above a C.

Flash cards.

Study groups.

Tutoring after school.

Nevertheless, none of it moved the needle.

So she wrote on a notecard, in her own handwriting, and stuck it to the fridge where I would see it every day.

Getting a C = an A in our house.

I didn’t find out why I was struggling so much until I was a senior in high school.

What Auditory Processing Disorder Actually Feels Like

I have Auditory Processing Disorder. My ears hear perfectly fine. My brain simply does not always catch what they hear. Consequently, I miss pieces of conversations. I lose words in loud rooms. For years before anyone had a name for it, I just thought I was slow. Stupid, even. Our high school guidance counselor once suggested I consider a vocation school instead of college, not unkindly, just matter-of-factly, as if that settled something about who I was.

By the time I finally had a diagnosis, I had already spent years absorbing old stories in the brain about what I was and was not capable of.

Here is something my own kids grew up knowing about me: if I am not looking at you, there is a good chance I did not hear most what you said. I taught them to pull on my shirt if they needed me. Not because I did not care. Rather, because my brain needed my eyes to catch what my ears missed.

Some of you may be reading this and think, ‘I have this happen all the time!”

It happens to most people occasionally.

However, APD is a particular kind of frustration when it is just you and your child at home, or you and your husband in the kitchen, and something was said, you literally saw them say it, but your brain didn’t register any of it. It’s like seeing someone’s mouth move but not hearing anything.

So I learned to read people instead. And I got really good at it. I watched their facial expressions. Body language and posture.

The small shifts in tone that tell you what a sentence meant even when you missed half its words.

I did not know it then, but I was training the exact skill I would spend my career building a business around: seeing what words alone do not say. (And that makes me want to cry. Only God.)

College Anyway

I fought my way through college with a notetaker sitting beside me in every class, because I would only catch about half of any lecture on my own. My notetakers were lifesavers! I can’t tell you how many times I’d look at their notes and be shocked! When did the professor ever say half the things in their notes that I missed?!

But I was determined to keep going. I even went on to finish a Masters in Teaching with a 4.0.

And I kept going.

My first book, Beauty Restored: Finding Life and Hope After Date Rape, took ten years to write. It came out twenty-five years ago, before the world had language for what I had survived. Pascaline, our first, was born the same day the book released. It was also the first day of spring. A new season had begun.

When she was three months old, we hit the road and did 40 national TV and Radio interviews in a season when some interviewers were openly skeptical that what happened to me was even real.

I wrote it anyway.

In 2011, Random House published Your Baby in Pictures, the first of a three-book series. It has been translated into languages I cannot read myself. It is still, all these years later, one of the most gifted baby shower books out there. I still get a royalty check. Smaller every year. But still. Can you believe it?!

In 2007, Brian and I made a DVD series in our kids’ playroom on a shoestring budget. Refuse to Say Cheese and Beyond the Green Box. Sony licensed it, reshot it with their own production team, and called it Kids in Focus.

A few years later, Disney gave me a show of my own. Capture the Story with Me Ra Koh which ran for ten years.

There is a photo I took of our kids running down a beach that ended up on SD card packaging in Best Buy stores across the country, my name and my face right there on the front. That is also on the wall in my studio.

I co-authored Work Happily Ever After with Jeff Jochum, about the future of business depending on the who of you. And in November of 2020, I published Four Minutes to Hear God’s Voice.

Why I Almost Never Talk About This

I rarely talk about my Auditory Processing Disorder publicly. Part of me has always worried that if people knew, they might wonder whether I can really hold a room from a stage, or really listen to what someone needs.

Here is the irony I am sitting with as I write this.

Our entire business is built on listening.

FIORIA exists because Brian and I believe that when someone is truly heard, something in their nervous system settles enough to be seen. We call clients before their Rising Phoenix Experience specifically to gather the words their people have written about them, so they can hear themselves loved out loud.

Listening is not a soft skill in our work.

It is the method.

And I am the woman who processes less than half of what her own ears take in.

I have thought about this a great deal, and I no longer think it disqualifies me from that work. In fact, I think it might be part of why I am good at it.

I learned decades ago to read what a lecture, a conversation, a room, could not tell me through sound alone.

I learned to notice faces, and posture, and the pause before someone answers a hard question. That is not a lesser form of listening. It is simply a different one, and it happens to be the exact kind of listening identity work requires.

How Do You Reclaim Your Identity After Someone Else Defined It First?

None of this happened because information ever came easily to me. Instead, it happened because I decided a learning disability could describe how my brain works, but not what I was capable of building.

That wall is not a trophy case. It is evidence, for the version of me that almost believed the notecard was wishful thinking, that my mom was wrong. (Thank God for moms who always believe what we can’t see for ourselves.)

This is also why I believe so deeply in the work FIORIA does today.

The same girl who once could not process a lecture without a notetaker beside her is now doing groundbreaking research into how the brain sees itself, and how a photograph and a nervous system talk to each other. (Writing that makes me want to cry even more. The kind of “in awe” tears.)

If you would’ve told me twenty years ago, even ten years ago, that all my life’s challenges and triumphs were leading me to this work, I don’t think I would’ve been able to believe it.

I think my first thought would’ve been “How can someone who has thought their brain was broken for most their life help other people’s brains heal?”

Can you see God smiling at that question as He leads me into rooms with 20K women?

Ultimately, our ongoing research exists to help other people stop seeing themselves through what happened to them, the same way I had to learn to see myself as more than a diagnosis.

I am currently working on an extended anniversary edition of Beauty Restored, twenty-five years later, in a world that finally has language for what I wrote before there was any.

This is why I believe in rising from the ashes.

Not as a metaphor.

Rather, as something I have had to do more than once, starting long before I understood what my own brain was doing to me, and continuing every time someone decided my limitations were the whole story.

They never were.

What limitations did someone set on you?

And is there something deep within you that wants to challenge whether those limitations are actually true?

If so, you’re in great company.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you rebuild confidence after trauma or a learning disability shaped how you see yourself?

It rarely happens through willpower alone, and it rarely happens in a single day either. In my experience, and in the work we do at FIORIA in Frisco, Texas, confidence rebuilds when the body is given proof, not just told encouraging words, and then given time to actually believe it. The Rising Phoenix Experience is a full day, but it is also a full year that follows. You meet with our therapist to learn how to do daily integration neuroscience exercises, a mood log, and ongoing support from our team as everything settles into your nervous system over time.

Why do old narratives about not being smart enough or capable enough stick around even after you’ve proven them wrong?

Old stories in the brain do not update automatically just because your life has changed. The subconscious identity formed early tends to stay in place until it is shown something more convincing than the original story, again and again, not just once. That is part of why the Rising Phoenix Experience includes a full year of walking alongside you, rather than ending the day of.

Can a learning disability or difficult childhood really be reframed as part of your strength later in life?

Yes, though reframing is different from erasing. The disability and the hard years do not disappear. However, they stop being the only lens through which you see your capability. We built our team around helping that shift take root for real, with two advising neuroscientists and two therapists shaping how we support you, and an optional Brain Analysis available if you want to actually see how your cognitive function is responding over time. That shift from surviving to feeling alive again is what the Rising Phoenix Experience is designed to help you experience, not just for a day, but over the course of a full year.

Is Rising Phoenix only for people recovering from a specific major event, or also for something like a lifelong struggle with confidence?

The Rising Phoenix serves both. Some people arrive at a clear threshold moment. Others, like the story in this post, are stepping into a new chapter after a lifetime of a quieter, more chronic ache, either mental or physical. Both are welcome in that room, and both receive the same full year of support afterward.

If You Are in a Season Where Something Wants to Rise

If you are in a season where you sense something wants to be seen, something wants to be named, something wants to rise, we would love to talk with you about your own Rising Phoenix Experience.

This is one full day of neuroscience-informed identity work in Frisco, Texas, designed for the person who is ready to see themselves the way their calling has been asking them to.

It’s not therapy.

And it’s so much more than a photo shoot.

This is a threshold day.

The kind that reshapes what you believe about who you are.

Schedule a Clarity Call with Brian or me at any time. We would be honored to walk into that room with you.

Explore the Rising Phoenix Experience

With so much love, still we rise.

Me Ra Koh

p.s. If a teacher, a counselor, a parent, or your own inner voice ever told you what you couldn’t do, I hope this reaches you today. You get to decide what the notecard on your own refrigerator says.