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Raised in a fundamentalist religious community in rural New Hampshire, Anena Hansen left the church in her mid-20s, got married, got divorced, and ran away to Africa. During her eleven years in Kenya, she worked in business development for a global brand, wrote for business and travel publications, and taught soft business skills to female entrepreneurs from the slums to C-Suite level. She worked with individual and corporate clients on five continents. Her highlight was spending five years as a Kenyan founding trustee of the pan-African organization for female financial inclusion run by Nelson Mandela’s widow, Graca Machel (the embodiment of feminine power!).
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With Mama Graca, Nairobi, 2015
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It makes sense that she was so impressed by Mama Graca, because behind the scenes, Anena was desperate to access feminine power of her own. Still only a few years out of her religious community and its systemic disempowerment of the feminine, she had started drinking alcoholically as soon as she got to Kenya, and for years she gave her power away, particularly in romantic relationships and always under the influence. In 2012, she was asked to adopt a teen mother’s baby, a sudden lifestyle change which required a lot less partying and a lot more self-awareness.
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Becoming a single working mother made Anena more driven than ever to find an empowered feminine way to show up in the world. She began writing and developing content for female entrepreneurs to help them succeed in business by being women. In 2016, just before her daughter’s fourth birthday, Anena quit drinking and hasn't had a drink or drug since. (Except sugar. That's another topic.) While she soon came to realize that alcohol was only one area where she'd behaved addictively, sobriety has become her touchstone: she can have no external power in the world if she’s not exercising her internal power to maintain healthy boundaries for herself.
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Anena returned to her New Hampshire hometown in 2019, then lost her life partner to an overdose in 2021—a devastating course-correct. She became active in advocacy for better addiction and recovery policy and shifted her professional focus to trauma. She has since expanded her women’s coaching practice to address trauma, from something individual like a sense of chronic overwhelm to something collective like the experience of systemic female disempowerment. She sits on the board of three state- and nation-wide non-profits and she has been an advisor to multiple Congressional committee panels. She is a writer, public speaker, TV show host, and the project manager for Trauma Responsive Monadnock. |
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