Betty Jean

Betty Jean is a global trauma expert, certified Trauma Healing Master Facilitator, Licensed Professional Counselor, humanitarian, teacher and helping professional whose focus is on helping people and communities across the globe transform from broken to healed.  Through her own journey with sickness, trauma, grief and loss, she feels called to help others in their journeys.

She views her work with people as an experiential integration of body, heart, mind and spirit.  Her counseling approach seeks to explore all facets of the human experience, including spirituality, in order to maximize the counseling process and to promote genuine healing and wholeness to individuals.

Her 14+ years in the mental health field, began with a focus on counseling children and naturally expanded in scope to include women and families. Her broad yet unique base of experience includes counseling children with emotional and behavioral challenges as a result of chronic conditions such as HIV/AIDS, Cancer, developmental issues, sexual abuse/neglect, and varying degrees of trauma.  In addition, she provides treatment services for women faced with depression, anxiety, grief, and other significant trauma; counseling for families, marriages and relationship; community grief work; and trauma recovery.

A 9-year survivor of advanced staged cancer, Betty is able to connect with clients with much empathy and navigate them through the emotional and cognitive upheaval that characterize traumatic experiences.  She is particularly concerned with the impact of loss and trauma on entire communities in various parts of the world.  This concern has led her on a mission to equip women and girls, throughout the world with culturally-sensitive interventions that better support the trauma recovery journey of those in their villages and communities.  Now her passion, Betty travels as a Global Trauma Healing Consultant, teaching, training, supporting, and empowering women, children, churches, villages and communities in the US, countries in Africa & Brazil, and Haiti in trauma healing and recovery.

Through the non-profit, ElevateHer International founded together with her sisters,  Betty trains and counsels women in trauma healing and leadership development so that they in turn would elevate their fellow sisters.  As a Certified Trauma Healing Master Facilitator with the Trauma Healing Institute of the American Bible Society, Betty continues to develop faith-based communities worldwide in their capacity to respond to trauma that impacts their communities.  Her most recent non-profit venture called Anchor of Hope International, is focused on building rehabilitative safe houses for girls and women victims of child sex-trafficking and prostitution in the DR and Haiti.

Betty is currently employed at the Mental Health Association in New Jersey as Senior Coordinator of the Mental Health Call Center, a helpline dedicated to providing mental health and suicide support, resources, and referrals to residents of NJ.  She also teaches as Adjunct Professor of Psychology and Counseling at Pillar College in NJ.

She earned a B.S in Human Ecology with a concentration in Health and Environmental Policy from Rutgers University and an M.A. in Clinical Counseling with a focus on child and play therapy, from the Alliance Graduate School of Counseling, Nyack College.