11/19/2025
Foley, MN
Brianna (Bria) loves that she’s just her – “I don’t have to be what I was raised to be. I don’t have to be what others expect me to be. I am a wife. I am a parent. I get to be a counselor now and all of these look differently than what a lot of people expect me to be. I’m usually dressed in jeans and half renaissance clothing when I come into work because I’m just me. If I can’t be myself, how could I ever expect a client to be? I’m raising my children almost the complete opposite of how I was raised. I was raised either to be completely broken or to be a sniper for the military.
I am 47 years old and I was born and raised in Elk River, MN up until I was 14 and then I lived in Colorado Springs CO until I was closer to 20 years old. My father would pop in and out of my life and my mother was just horrific. My father was incredibly violent to me. My brother was wanted and I was not. That was made clear to me from the earliest stages that I can remember. It was challenging growing up in Elk River. I didn’t really get to have a lot of friends because of the life I was living at home. I grew up so isolated. The only place I was allowed to go to was the Catholic Church in town and the elderly priest there was so nice. I actually thought about going into the priesthood just to escape the life I had.
By the time I was 14 years old, I had attempted su***de 9 times. It all started at age 5.
My father passed away in 2009 from cancer and the relationship that I had with him as an adult was conflicted. He tried to kill me a few times as an adult and he also saved my life a few times. Before he passed away, we had a heart to heart and he owned up to the bastard he was. I haven’t spoken to my mother since 2019. She told me to kill myself because I came out as transgender.
When I was 9 years old she had put me through conversion therapy and that kind of therapy in the 80’s really sucked. I do not miss electroshock therapy. It really made me hate myself. My teenage years were spent withstanding torture, how to hunt, how to shoot, how to kill. My step father developed his own program to make me into a soldier. He was teaching me to eventually do this to humans for the army.
My stepfather caught me wearing a woman’s dress and so on my 17th birthday, I was kicked out. I spent a year in Colorado Springs completely homeless. During that time, my mother, stepfather and the siblings moved to Wyoming. I didn’t even know they left the state. While homeless, it felt like I was free even though it sucked.
All those skills that my stepfather had literally beaten into me, came in handy because I knew how to survive under almost any conditions at that point. I lived in an abandoned warehouse for about 6 months until I was able to afford my car. Even through the winter, I managed to stay warm. I sold the only thing I had available to me, which was my body for that year. When I was 18, I managed to get into an apartment and get a job.
When I was 19 years old, I was still in Colorado Springs. One night when I was 19 years old, I was at a farm party and a guy gave me a drink and I took the drink. The guy and his friends wanted to go have a smoke all the way out back. While walking with them I started stumbling and I couldn’t concentrate and they continued what they were originally planning to do. I was beaten and left for dead in a ditch. I wasn’t found until the next morning. After what happened, I de-transitioned and just massively escalated into violence. I then moved back to MN for a bit with my grandparents.
Once I got back to MN, I eventually got married and she is the most caring, loving, and intelligent individual I have ever met in my life. She’s an RN. In 2017, she was diagnosed with a progressive type of MS. She started having strokes in August 2024 and so she needed to medically retire because she could no longer do her job.
When I told my wife that I was transgender, she was really upset at first. She actually went to Italy with a friend for 2 weeks to think about things. When she came home, she stayed. She has been my biggest cheerleader. I got my bachelors in History and I’m a historian. I also did my Masters in clinical counseling and she supported me all the way through that. It’s what brought me here to Seal Dwyer Counseling. I am a pre-licensed counselor and Seal is my supervisor.
Our world needs more kindness because we’ve reached a point in society where so many people are self-centered. So many people are just worried about themselves, their own position, their own authority, their own power, their own control. We’ve lost the world where people care about what happens to somebody else. We’ve lost the world where people would see somebody hurting and stop to help them. We need more of that. I was raised to be the opposite of that and so I got to choose who I was. If you can ever choose, always choose kindness and happiness.
Advise: Just be you. No matter how much you fight it, no matter how much you bury it, not matter how much you try to be what you were raised to be, it will never be you. You will never be able to be happy and feel safe within yourself until you are just you.”
