By: Emily Parker
The alchemical metaphor at the center of Kenni-Richelle King’s debut book, Alchemized, is not decorative. It is precise. Alchemy, in its original sense, is the transformation of base material into something more valuable through a process that takes heat, time, and specific knowledge of what is being worked with. King applies that idea to trauma, describing the sustained work of understanding what happened, what it cost, and what survival strategies it produced. Her framework looks at how those strategies can be consciously redirected, from the defense mechanisms they were at the moment of the original wounding into fuel for the life a person is building afterward.
King has described doing this work herself, and she has built her professional career around supporting others as a coach.
King’s path to coaching adds context to the framework she developed. She did not arrive at her practice from the distance of someone who studied trauma academically and then built a career around the findings. She arrived at it from lived experience, earning her business degree and multiple coaching certifications alongside her own personal healing. In her telling, the fight for herself became the work she now does with others. That continuity between the personal and the professional gives the book a voice that reads as personal rather than purely theoretical.
The book treats healing as a direction rather than a destination. The goal is not to arrive at a perfectly healed version of oneself. It is to build understanding, compassion, and agency, so that ongoing growth follows intention rather than the unconscious repetition of patterns installed by survival. In that sense, King frames the work as ongoing and intentional rather than a single event with a finish line.
King pays particular attention to survival strategies, the very mechanisms that helped a person get through the original wounding. In adult life, she explains, those same mechanisms can shape choices and situations that deepen the original damage instead of healing it. Understanding them and releasing them with compassion sits at the heart of the work she describes.
King released Alchemized on October 5, during Mental Health Awareness Week. The release marks an expansion of her work beyond her coaching practice, offering a format that can reach readers who have not yet had the chance to work with her directly. The book is written for people who have spent a long time surviving difficult experiences and have begun to suspect that surviving was never meant to be the whole story. Readers can find the book on Amazon through Alchemized on Amazon.
