She has been offering therapy, clinical supervision and consultation for over the last decade, but that barely scratches the surface of who she really is. She grew up the middle child of five and she jokes that this is where it all started.
“I like to joke that my counseling career started with me being the middle child and peacekeeper in my family. I have an odd combination of middle child and first child qualities, because there was such an age gap between the two oldest and three youngest kids in my family. It makes me a caretaker and leader in some respects, yet most definitely the unseen and unheard middle child who tried to tirelessly keep the peace.”
—Dr. Natalie on the topic of her upbringing
While Dr. Marr is undoubtedly intelligent and brings great insights in the world of self-love and self-actualizaion, her true claim to fame is in how she manages this. She is witty and smart, bringing a casual style of communication to very complex systemic issues that feed into how we operate as human beings. Basically, she breaks down the psychological underpinnings of what we see in our personal lives into bite size pieces that are digestible to the masses.
“I like to write like I talk. I use humor, metaphors, and my own crazy-ass life to demonstrate to my readers what it is they might be experiencing. I want the concepts I am trying to highlight to seem like common sense and give people tools that they can add to their street smarts of life. Nothing I talk about is new material. Hell, some of it has been talked about for centuries. What I want to do is make it applicable to every day people. Not everyone will pick up a book on the neuroscience of trauma or read the literature on best practices for helping individuals who want sustainable change in their life. But I do. I love that crap! I am a giant nerd with a prolific vocabulary, yet I cuss a lot and make these psychological concepts seem like second nature. I see no other way to help people help themselves. I need folks to understand that this psychological mumbo jumbo is real, is easy to understand, and can help them to take their lives back. My job is to be the translator and teacher. Their job is so much harder. They have to take this stuff and run with it. Humor is essential in my delivery, because if we can’t laugh at the absurdity of it all, we likely won’t want to make the changes we need to love ourselves as we are…not as our culture, society, or families of origin have led us to believe we should be. Love your story…your life is not an apology.”
—Dr. Natalie on her style of writing
One of the things people seem to like most about Dr. Marr is her down to earth nature. She is real and shares her own experiences as one of the guideposts. She has a story that she herself admits to trying to run away from for a good portion of her life.
“I haven’t been perfect in this life by any stretch of the imagination. I am the adult child of alcoholic parents, one who got sober and one who eventually was outdone by the disease. No one comes out unscathed from a family system like this, myself included. But I live my life on the principle that I am always doing the best I know how, and that the best I know how improves with each minute of my life. I make a concerted effort not to judge my own or others’ pasts through the lens of my present day knowledge, but with the compassion of an individual who has been there, done that, and sometimes barely survived the experience.”
—Dr. Natalie on how her own life struggles inform her work
She wants to normalize this experience we all have of wanting to “get to the next part” of our life and in the process missing the only life we have…the one we are living now. It is her life’s work in many ways. Both in her personal and professional life. She wants to help the world by helping us heal from our pasts, embrace our present, and let the future be what it is meant to…not here yet.
“Life is hard enough without the self-defeating notion that we always must strive to improve, achieve, or work to earn our “best life”. It’s a big fat lie that life is about trying to get to the next part of our lives, at which we arrive at this ideal place we have worked so hard to achieve. That is not what life is about. And our constant efforts to attain what we do not have, are killing us. Killing us! That is not an exaggeration. We cripple the very foundation of our mind, body and soul when we feed ourselves the underlying bullshit that who we are is somehow flawed and needs addressing. This premises leads us to tell ourselves everyday that we are not good enough. That somehow around the next corner, with the next goal or the next success that we will finally be satisfied. Yet the very nature of this premise is built on the fundamental idea that we are never good enough. If you haven’t been paying attention, this is the same vulnerable weakness that marketing is built upon. That there is always something else we can buy, obtain, or achieve to improve this flawed existence that we are living. The despair of the world has gone up exponentially with the advent of technology, because the scale of this lie has blown to a proportion outside our ability to cope with or comprehend. Now we are not pretty enough, wealthy enough, white enough, American enough, thin enough, smart enough, successful enough…on a social media platform the size of the world. What the fuck! No one can survive that. And our brains weren’t wired for being in tribes or communities of this size to compare ourselves. So what happens is our psyches start to shut down. We get depressed, anxious, and unable to handle the pressure. The problem is not us…the problem is the construct that we are not enough as we are. It’s this concept in particular that fuels my work. I want people to value their story now, not when the get to the next part. I want people to see themselves as already whole and worthy, instead of searching for that somewhere else. Indeed, I want the same for myself and my own family. That’s why I am so passionate about this stuff.”
—Dr. Natalie on her passion for her work
So it is really hard to have bio on Dr. Marr that totally encompasses who she is and what she is about. Instead, we will share a short video of her here and encourage you to subscribe to this blog. You won’t like everything Dr. Marr has to say, yet we hope that she will provoke you to think about the constructs underlying your own life and dig deeper. We hope that her work here may inspire you to love your own story.
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