A life built on turning pain into purpose

Rebekah Demirel R.Ac., L.Ac., MPCC is a classically trained acupuncturist and East Asian medicine practitioner, a registered clinical counsellor specializing in post-traumatic stress and loss, and the founder of Trauma Integration Programs. Her clinical work spans more than three decades and includes fourteen years as a BC Ambulance paramedic and over twenty-two years training paramedics for St. John Ambulance — experience that gives her an unusually direct, practical understanding of crisis, the body’s stress response, and what actually helps a person in the middle of it.

Her own history informs all of it. When Rebekah was three, her mother fled a violent home. She grew up in a chaotic and abusive household, and left at thirteen for an uncertain life on the streets. That lived experience of trauma, homelessness and the foster care system gives her a rare and unmanufactured empathy for the people she serves and for the workers she trains to serve them — and it is the subject of her memoir, Nothing’s for Nothing.

When the physical toll of paramedic work began affecting her own health, Rebekah experienced such a powerful response to acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine that she changed careers, and has never looked back. She is a NADA-certified Registered Trainer of the National Acupuncture Detox Association protocol, a daily qigong practitioner, a student of martial arts, and a Reiki practitioner trained in the Usui style. She remains an active volunteer and advocate for people who are unhoused, in her community and beyond.

Credentials at a glance

• Registered Acupuncturist (R.Ac.) and Licensed Acupuncturist (L.Ac.)
• Master Practitioner in Clinical Counselling (MPCC), specializing in post-traumatic stress and critical incident stress debriefing
• Fourteen years as a BC Ambulance paramedic; twenty-two-plus years as a paramedic trainer
• NADA-Certified Registered Trainer, National Acupuncture Detox Association
• Presenter and panelist, University of Washington School of Medicine / MHTTC Network
• Author, Nothing’s for Nothing: Transformation Through Trauma
• Reiki practitioner (Usui style); qigong and martial arts practitioner

“Rebekah’s greatest gift is resilience. She truly is one of the most resilient people I know, and her writing conveys that effortlessly.”

— Dr. Gabor Maté

→ Read her full story in Nothing’s for Nothing