Rooted Holistic Center is the home of Rooted Through Recovery
308 White Horse Pike, Haddon Heights, New Jersey 08035, United States
Rooted Holistic Center is the home of Rooted Through Recovery
My Name Is Jennie Claire
I am a trauma survivor, educator, author, and the founder of Rooted Holistic Center, a South Jersey 501(c)(3) nonprofit created to support trauma survivors through education, movement, meditation, sound, music, recovery programming, and community.
I could speak for hours about everything I have survived. But this work is not only about my story. It is about what happens when survivors come into contact with systems that do not understand trauma—and the additional harm that can happen when the people responding have never been taught how trauma affects the brain, body, memory, communication, and behavior.
In 2019, I created Rooted Holistic Center because I believed survivors deserved something different: support grounded in neuroscience, lived experience, safety, dignity, and choice. Today we offer trainings, group classes and more to survivors and those in recovery, all by donation.
Rooted Through Recovery
In 2024, I took that work further and published Rooted Through Recovery, a complete 12-step recovery program created for substance use, behavioral patterns, and mental health, not only alcohol or drugs.
Rooted Through Recovery explores trauma, neurobiology, shame, identity, relationships, coping patterns, and the experiences beneath addiction. Each step includes readings, meditation, journaling, and discussion.
The program was created for people who may not connect with AA, NA, or traditional recovery models. It does not tell people that there is only one way to recover. It recognizes that recovery is personal and that lasting change requires more than stopping a substance or behavior. It requires understanding what the substance or behavior was doing for the person in the first place.
Rooted Through Recovery is recovery reimagined.
In late 2024 after hearing hundreds of stories from survivors I began thinking I needed to do even more. And that brainstorming led here.
Throughout the past 6 years I have heard hundreds of survivor stories, most have a common theme: inadequate support. In 2025 I said enough and decided to take action. I began drafting a legislative proposal for the State of New Jersey that would require trauma-informed education for the professionals who respond to sexual assault, domestic violence, and human trafficking.
In January 2026, New Jersey Assemblyman Bill Moen agreed to sponsor the proposal. In September 2026, it was formally introduced as proposed legislation.
The legislation is intended to ensure that law enforcement officers, prosecutors, judges, judicial personnel, municipal prosecutors, Sexual Assault Response Team members, and other professionals involved in these cases receive meaningful trauma-informed training.
That training would include:
● The neurobiology of trauma
● The ways trauma affects memory and recall
● Why a survivor’s story may be fragmented or told out of sequence
● How fight, flight, freeze, fawn, shutdown, and dissociation may appear
● How to recognize distress and reduced capacity in real time
● How language, questioning, tone, and environment can affect a survivor’s ability to participate
● How to respond without increasing shame, fear, confusion, or loss of control
● The importance of survivor safety, autonomy, and choice
This legislation is not about asking these professionals to become therapists. It is about making sure the people responsible for responding to trauma understand what trauma can look like.
Legislation can describe what training should include, but it cannot fully show what happens when trauma is misunderstood.
Survivor stories can.
These stories can help lawmakers understand the difference between having a policy that mentions trauma and having professionals who can recognize and respond to trauma in real time.
They can show what it is like to be questioned while dissociating. To be treated as unreliable because memories were fragmented. To be judged for freezing, remaining in contact with an abuser, delaying a report, changing part of a statement, or being unable to communicate in the way someone expected.
These experiences are not isolated failures. They reveal gaps in how our systems understand and respond to trauma.
I am collecting stories from survivors in New Jersey and throughout the United States. Your experience does not need to involve a specific agency, court case, arrest, or prosecution. If a professional response to sexual assault, domestic violence, trafficking, abuse, or another traumatic experience left you feeling disbelieved, blamed, shamed, pressured, dismissed, or unsafe, your story matters.
The purpose of this project is not to publicly identify or accuse individual people. It is to document the patterns that show why trauma education is necessary.
Stories must be submitted anonymously. Please do not include names or identifying information about another person. Any submission containing names or identifying details will be deleted and will not be published or used.
Stories are not automatically published, they will be reviewed for anonymity.
You decide how much you want to share.
Statistics can show lawmakers how often violence occurs. Survivor stories show what happens after someone asks for help.
They show where systems failed, where trauma was misunderstood, and where better education could have changed the way a survivor was questioned, treated, protected, or believed.
You should never have needed to survive the response to what you had already survived. Your experience matters and your story may help protect the person who comes next.
Rooted Holistic Center is a survivor-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization providing accessible, trauma-informed education, recovery programming, and holistic support. Our work brings together neuroscience, lived experience, rhythm, sound, stillness, movement, and story to challenge the ways trauma and recovery are understood.
This story-collection project is intended for education and legislative advocacy. It is not a crisis-response service, legal representation, or a substitute for professional legal or mental-health support.
If you are in immediate danger, call 911. For confidential sexual-assault support in the United States, contact RAINN at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or visit RAINN.org.
This work began in New Jersey, but it should not end here.
If you are a survivor, advocate, educator, nonprofit leader, or community member who wants to pursue similar trauma-informed legislation in your state, please contact me. You do not need to understand the legislative process or already have connections with lawmakers.
I will personally help you understand how I began this process, share what I have learned, and help you think through the first steps toward creating change where you live.
Every state has survivors whose experiences with law enforcement, prosecutors, courts, and first responders deserve to be heard. We can use those experiences to push for education that should already exist.
My goal is to take this nationally.
"I was sexually assaulted at age 16 by a member of the police explorers. A friend who helped run the police explorers strongly urged me to allow him to handle it in-house. He didn’t want it to damage the work the explorers’ were doing helping local youths. I didn’t know better and I didn’t want to let my friend down, so I kept quiet. Nothing was done to my attacker and he went on to attack more kids. As time went on and I gained perspective on what i had endured, I felt betrayed and angry. Looking back now I wish they’d arrested and prosecuted my attacker to the fullest extent including mandatory reporting. The moment I told my friend what had happened, he should’ve been required to report and arrest my abuser."
-New Jersey
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