I am Clarissa Alves. I was born on September 21st in the Bronx, a place that raised me with rhythm, sharp edges, and unexpected beauty. My childhood moved in fragments. Different homes, different states, different schools. I never knew what version of life I would wake up to. As a neurodivergent child, I was not someone who naturally understood people. I learned to survive by noticing shifts in tone, changes in energy, the way someone inhaled before speaking. It was not intuition at first. It was protection. Over time that hyperawareness softened into something grounded and intentional. It became the foundation of the way I now support others.
I did not grow up with softness, but I grew up resilient. I did not grow up with safety, but I developed an inner world that protected my truth until I was old enough to claim it for myself. Trauma, displacement, silence, pressure, and the weight of expectations shaped the way I see people today. I see the histories carried in their bodies. I see the lineage behind their fears. I see the child they once were and the parent they are becoming. Every person brings a story with them. I bring mine too.
Before adulthood ever arrived, I also survived what should have destroyed me. I survived being kidnapped. I survived rape. I survived molestation, torture, and abuse that tried to separate me from myself. These were experiences that taught me hypervigilance long before I knew language for it. They shaped the way I read pain without needing it explained, the way I notice discomfort before someone names it, the way I honor boundaries as sacred instead of optional. That survival is part of my story, not because it defines me but because it sharpened the way I hold others with care.
Today I live in New Jersey with my husband, someone who taught me that love does not have to hurt to be real. He offers a steadiness I once believed did not exist for people built from survival. Together we raise two daughters who carry both fire and softness. They remind me that cycles can be broken gently, that joy can take root in the places where pain once lived, and that motherhood is as much about reparenting our own inner child as it is about nurturing the children in front of us.
Motherhood became a spiritual rupture for me. Both of my daughters were conceived after miscarriages that shattered and reshaped me. Recurrent pregnancy loss taught me the duality of hope. It can be delicate and unstoppable at the same time. My pregnancies were marked by hyperemesis gravidarum, a condition that stripped me of strength. Standing became an accomplishment. Breathing felt like work. My spirit felt thin. My body felt foreign. I spent months living in survival mode while growing life inside me.
During that time my doula was the first person outside of my husband to offer emotional safety without me having to earn it. She did not turn away from my pain. She did not silence my fear. She held space for me with compassion that felt timeless and ancestral. With her support I became the first in my family to have a vaginal birth and the first to exclusively breastfeed. These moments were not only about birth and lactation. They were about reclamation. They were about healing generational wounds. They were about remembering something I was never meant to forget.
Birth felt decolonial in a way I did not have words for at the time. It felt like refusing the narratives forced onto my lineage. It felt like reclaiming a bodily intelligence that colonization, medical racism, and generational trauma tried to sever. It felt like honoring the people before me whose stories were erased. It felt like stepping back into a power that did not come from institutions but from ancestry, intuition, and spirit.
Breastfeeding felt like learning a language my body had been told it could not speak. It felt sacred. It felt ceremonial. It felt like sitting at a table with my ancestors and hearing them say you were never broken. Over time I produced more than ten thousand ounces of breast milk, enough to nourish not only my own children but others as well. Every ounce felt like a blessing, an offering, a continuation of a lineage interrupted long before I was born.
Before motherhood, I survived what should have ended my life. I endured overmedication by psychiatric providers, multiple overdoses, and a suicide attempt that left my throat slit open. I survived because my body fought for me and because medical intervention carried me back into this world. That history lives inside me. It is not a shadow. It is a source of clarity. It taught me how it feels to unravel without support. It taught me how sacred compassion becomes in a moment of crisis. It taught me to listen in a way that does not require words.
My work is shaped by lived experience rather than by certificates on a wall. I check in more because I know what it feels like to be forgotten. I listen deeper because I know how much can be hidden beneath the surface of a steady voice. I show up in ways I once needed someone to show up for me. My empathy runs so deep it sometimes aches, but I would rather risk feeling too much than offer someone less than they deserve. I support neurodivergent parents, anxious parents, traumatized parents, queer parents, Black and Brown parents, first-generation parents, and anyone who carries complicated histories. I understand complexity. I understand the tenderness beneath it.
I believe fully in autonomy. I oppose routine infant circumcision and any non consensual procedures on children. I honor the right to decline interventions, change providers, choose pain management, choose an elective cesarean, choose formula, choose whatever protects your body, your boundaries, and your peace. Birth does not ask you to sacrifice yourself. Parenthood does not require erasing your own needs. You deserve informed choice without manipulation or fear.
My spirituality is quiet but present in everything I do. I move with moon softness and ancestral strength. I approach birth as a sacred transition rather than a medical event. I see matrescence as a spiritual threshold, a reordering of identity, lineage, and self. I witness people the way I once wished someone could have witnessed me. Fully, gently, and without judgment. Every part of my story informs the way I hold space. Every layer of my life is present in the care I offer, not because I announce it, but because it lives in the way I show up.
