Paraclete Recovery
Paraclete (PAIR-uh-kleet)
The word Paraclete means "one who walks beside"—an advocate, a guide, and a compassionate presence. It comes from the Greek word Paraklētos, meaning one who is called to stand alongside another by offering comfort, encouragement, support, and guidance.
I chose the name Paraclete Recovery because it embodies the kind of presence I hope to offer every person who walks through this door. Not someone who rescues, fixes, or defines another's path, but someone willing to walk beside them with compassion, honesty, and unwavering belief in their capacity to heal, grow, and discover their own way forward.
A Different Approach to Recovery, Healing, and Personal Growth
Paraclete Recovery brings together recovery, healing, personal growth, and self-discovery through an integrated practice of healing alchemy. This work honors the interconnected nature of our experiences and the transformative potential within them.
Rooted in both lived experience and professional credentials, I created Paraclete Recovery to offer a space where people can be met with curiosity, compassion, and respect for their own inner wisdom. Rather than following a predetermined path, this work honors the unfolding of your own experience, trusting that healing is as unique as the person living it.
Healing is not a destination. Recovery is not an identity. Growth is not a checklist.
Each is part of an ongoing process of remembering who we are, reconnecting with our inner wisdom, and creating what becomes possible when we engage fully with our lives.
- Honoring the Journey - Awakening the Spirit - Embodying Wholeness
- Honoring the Journey - Awakening the Spirit - Embodying Wholeness
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Recovery is deeply personal, and what we need from it can change as our lives change. Over time, the questions may begin to reach beyond recovery itself and into identity, purpose, relationships, self-trust, spirituality, and what it means to build a life that actually feels like your own. There can also be a deeper process of recognizing what has shaped you, what you have learned to become along the way, and what feels genuinely true to who you are now.
Recovery Coaching & Life Path Guidance creates space for that exploration. Recovery remains part of the work, but it does not have to define the boundaries of where we can go. We can work with what is happening in your life now while exploring the patterns, experiences, relationships, questions, and parts of yourself that you want to understand more deeply. The intention is not to give you another path to follow, but to help you become more connected to your own.
Human Design and integrative healing practices can become part of that process, offering different ways to explore what you are discovering about yourself. Your Human Design reading is personalized around what brought you to Paraclete Recovery and the questions that are meaningful in your life, rather than simply interpreting your chart in isolation. From our work together, I create an individualized integration plan to help you carry what you have learned, felt, and recognized into your everyday life in a way that is personal, practical, and meaningful to you.
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I believe some parts of healing happen within us, and some can only really be understood through our connection with other people.
There is something different about being in a space with people who bring their own lived experiences, questions, perspectives, and ways of understanding life. Sometimes another person says something that helps us recognize something in ourselves. Sometimes being understood without having to explain every part of our story is healing in itself. And sometimes we simply need opportunities to be around other people while exploring parts of ourselves that we have spent a long time navigating alone.
That is what I want Peer Support, Workshops, & Healing Circles at Paraclete Recovery to make room for.
Each gathering may look different because they are created for different kinds of experiences. A workshop may begin with learning, conversation, or exploring something in a new way. A healing circle may move more deeply into energy, sound, meditation, creativity, spiritual practice, or an experience that is felt more than it can be explained. Peer support brings something entirely its own—the understanding that comes from lived experience and the recognition that sometimes the person sitting beside us understands something because they have lived through something too.
I don't believe those experiences need to exist separately from one another. We can learn something with our minds and experience it differently in our bodies. Sound can reach somewhere conversation doesn't. Creativity can give expression to something we haven't been able to put into words. Spiritual practices can exist alongside practical tools. And the wisdom someone has gained through their own life can be just as meaningful as anything I could have planned to teach.
That is also why I don't want every gathering to be so structured that there is no room for what naturally happens when people come together. I can create the intention, bring the practices, guide the experience, and hold the space, but I cannot predict what another person will recognize in themselves because of something they hear, feel, share, or experience while they are there.
There is no expectation that everyone will connect with the same thing or leave having had the same experience. Something that feels deeply meaningful to one person may not be what another person needed at all. I want there to be enough freedom within these spaces for people to notice what speaks to them, participate in ways that feel right for them, and carry forward what becomes meaningful in their own lives.
For me, that is part of what makes gathering together so powerful. We each arrive with our own story and our own way of experiencing healing, but we do not always have to do that healing alone.
Sometimes we discover something by going inward.
And sometimes, another human being helps us see something in ourselves we could not have seen in quite the same way on our own.
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Paraclete Recovery LLC offers non-clinical, peer-based support, recovery coaching, and integrative services designed to support personal growth, recovery, and healing. These services are not a replacement for licensed medical care, mental health treatment, or substance use disorder treatment.
Christina Bakker brings both lived experience and extensive professional training to this work. Her professional credentials include:
Certified Alcohol and Drug Counselor II (CADC II)
Qualified Mental Health Associate II (QMHA II)
Certified Recovery Mentor II (CRM II) with Forensic Peer Endorsement
Oregon Peer Support Specialist - Adult Addictions (PSS)
Oregon Traditional Health Worker - Adult Mental Health (THW)
Although Christina holds these professional credentials, all services provided through Paraclete Recovery LLC are offered exclusively in a non-clinical capacity. Services are not psychotherapy, counseling, case management, medical care, or clinical substance use disorder treatment. They do not include diagnosis, assessment, treatment planning, or any other licensed clinical services.
Instead, services focus on supporting personal growth, self-discovery, recovery, resilience, skill development, and overall well-being through education, peer support, recovery coaching, Human Design, somatic practices, energy healing, and other integrative approaches.
When appropriate, support may also include helping you explore and connect with additional resources such as medical providers, licensed mental health professionals, substance use treatment programs, or other community supports. While Paraclete Recovery LLC does not provide these clinical services directly, guidance and support can be offered in identifying appropriate resources and navigating the next steps in your care.
The Alchemy of Energy & Healing
Energy healing is an ancient art of working with what exists beyond the boundaries of the physical body. Across traditions, cultures, and sacred practices, healers have worked with life-force energy through different forms and frequencies, giving different names and teachings to something that, at its source, I experience as deeply connected.
This is the lineage of healing that my work belongs to. My own path has been shaped by the teachings, attunements, initiations, and sacred practices I have received, but the deeper I have gone into this work, the less separate it has become. I do not experience energy, body, spirit, consciousness, or the unseen as different places healing moves between. I experience them as parts of the same whole, continually affecting, reflecting, and moving in relationship with one another.
This is also how I understand alchemy.
Alchemy, to me, is not another healing practice added alongside energy work. It is an understanding of transformation itself. Energy changes form. What we carry can change form. Our relationship with what we have lived through can change form. Something does not always need to be removed in order for healing to occur; sometimes what is already there is asking to be met differently, understood differently, or transformed.
This changes the questions we can bring into healing. Not only, what can I release? But what is here? What does it carry? What within this still belongs to me? What has become separated that may be ready to return? And what becomes possible when we allow healing to transform rather than simply remove?
For me, this is where life-force energy and alchemy are not two different things. They are part of the same understanding that everything is in relationship, everything carries energy, and healing can move through what is physical and what is unseen without requiring us to separate one from the other.
My Sunday in-person sessions are an expression of that understanding—a sacred space where healing is allowed to move through the whole of who we are.
The Ripple Effect
A Place for Healing for Loved Ones
Paraclete Recovery is not only for individuals navigating their own recovery. You don't have to be the one struggling with addiction to be deeply affected by it. Addiction and substance use often impact partners, spouses, parents, adult children, family members, and loved ones just as profoundly, leaving many searching for guidance, healthy boundaries, support, and a way to care for themselves while navigating someone else's addiction.
At Paraclete Recovery, your healing is just as important. Rather than focusing on changing another person's path, our work centers on supporting you—helping you reconnect with yourself, strengthen healthy boundaries, and find steadiness while navigating an incredibly difficult experience.
Motherhood & Healing
I recognize that caring for a baby or young child can make it difficult to access the support you need. For many mothers, finding uninterrupted time for themselves simply isn't the reality of everyday life.
At Paraclete Recovery, you don't have to arrange childcare in order to receive one-on-one telehealth support. Your baby or young child is welcome to simply be with you during our session. Whether they are nursing, playing nearby, resting, or needing your attention, our time together remains centered on you while honoring the realities of motherhood.
This openness is intentional. It reflects my belief that recovery, healing, and personal growth happen within the life you are already living—not separate from it.
