How Can I Help?

That’s the main question I want to ask. How can I help? To better serve the people who trust me, I continue to learn and develop myself every year through certifications, trainings, books, and podcasts.

Without further ado here’s a glimpse of me!

My Training

Brainspotting Practitioner

I’ve completed Phase 1 of Brainspotting with Dr. Pie Frey and Dr. Christine Ranck in May, 2024. While there is more training for me to do to earn my certificate, I am a practitioner and can do Brainspotting in person, via Zoom, or over the phone.

Recovery Coach

I’m a certified recovery coach through the Connecticut Community of Addiction Recovery, completing my certification in February, 2023. I’m able to work with individuals who desire to overcome addiction, whether behavioral or chemical. My personal areas of focus are pornography use, food, and video games/technology.

Inner Child Recovery Specialist

I completed the Inner Child Recovery Process certification through Pure Life Academy in February of 2022. A brief overview of this process is through our trauma growing up, we develop and Inner Child (more more than one), that takes our present day experiences and applies our past trauma to them, often times making a gross misconnection to our present experiences. This Inner Child is what sends us to our coping mechanisms, which when we were younger served us quite well to distract from our overwhelming emotions. These behaviors no longer serve us and in fact cause us more harm. This process helps us to attune to this Inner Child, help the child heal, and keep us from the unhealthy coping behaviors.

I graduated from Central Washington University with a degree in elementary education and minored in teaching English as a second language. After seven years of substitute teaching, I realized it wasn’t a teacher I wanted to be, but a writer.

Elementary Educator

Plans for the future

I’m always looking for more ways to learn and grow. My hope is to complete my Brainspotting training along with learning some modalities to better help those who are suffering from trauma of any kind.

I’m Marcus Spaur, founder of Between the Covers Coaching,

My partner and best friend, Libby, I live in southeastern Washington state in the same town I grew up in most of my life, in the rolling hills and tumbleweed filled desert many don’t know exists in Washington state. She grew up on the west side of the state and now we both call Kennewick our home. We live with our adorable bundle of chaos we named Odin, who joined our family back in February of 2024 when we fell in love with him at our first ever puppy adoption event we attended.

Funny story: we both agreed that we were only going to look and weren’t going to adopt a pet during that visit. We didn’t expect to both fall in love with tan tornado, croissant, or blur.

I grew up Christian, having attended a Methodist, Southern Baptist, evangelical charismatic, and non-denominational churches. However, after suffering some spiritual trauma over the years, Libby and I stepped away from the church and have been asking tough questions about the nature of the faith we were told was right and the harm it has done to us and others.

If there’s one thing I learned in my time in the Christian church, it’s that everyone is deserving of love and compassion, regardless of their gender identity, race, beliefs, or sexual orientation. Everyone deserves respect and honor, and unhealthy people or groups are navigating their lives as best they can with the trauma.

This is the picture where I found my voice, something I never believed I had because of the trauma and neglect in my own past. How fortuitous it happened the same day I wore my I Have Spoken t-shirt. Now, I use my voice to help people discover their negative core beliefs and begin to challenge them so we all can become the heroes of our own stories.

It’s with this voice that I share every week what I’m learning in my Between the Covers Podcast. Trying to keep the past in the past doesn’t help to address how it’s impacting the present and will continue to direct the future. It’s as they say, those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. My desire is to help others learn from their past by getting between the covers of their stories so they can write a brand new future.

I’m a husband, son, brother, identical twin, friend, writer, and gamer. I wear my favorite nerdom every day and treasure the friendships I have today. I live to be me and no one else. My friend group is the family I’ve chosen. We laugh, cry, support, and enlighten each other every day we are together. We experience adventures together and love each other even when our beliefs differ. We are a crazy mix of Christians, Agnostics, Atheists, heterosexuals, and homosexuals who find the common ground between us and aren’t afraid to call each other out in compassion. My life wouldn’t be the same without this awesome group of friends who have broadened my horizons in every aspect and challenge me to be a better person every day.