THE
323 PERSONALITY
Healed Healing AND
Life coach Felicia Dilbert sows confidence by SANDRA HALVORSON, PH.D.
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omething — she’s not sure what — compelled Felicia Dilbert to answer a call from an unfamiliar number. “You are on my mind, and I want to pray with you,” said a woman with whom Dilbert had worked years earlier. Dilbert, newly diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, was hospitalized. She had lost her mother and chief support to lung cancer a few days earlier. Dilbert’s health had been in decline since her mother received her diagnosis, and her will to go forward was waning. In response to the phone call, however, Dilbert reversed course. Tears streamed down her face, and her breathing eased. “I saw life in a new way, and I began to heal,” Dilbert said. She
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counts the phone call as a miracle, one among several she says she has experienced in her life. Dilbert, for most of her life, has battled anxiety and depression. Her difficulties went untreated for many years. She is better now. A therapist has been helpful to her. She made peace with her father. She believes that healing occurs over life, not overnight. “In 2020, my father called me and asked me if I would talk to my husband and prayerfully consider moving in with him to be his caregivers in what I refer to as the dream house,” Dilbert said. “When I was a little girl, I prayed that there would be room for me in the dream house, the house he promised my mama he would build for her.” That house for a time became a home to Dilbert and her husband, Louis. “I prayed for the strength to honor him unconditionally in actions and words,” Dilbert said. “Four months before he died, he thanked me for everything that I had been doing. We became the best of friends that day.” For a woman on the mend, it was a beautiful healing. Dilbert has gotten around to accomplishing something most people only think about doing. She has published a book, Beautiful Healing: Seven Love Letters for the Truth Seeker’s Soul. It’s a book, she said, about not giving up.
photography by THE WORKMANS