Chantaeu Munroe spent nine years in Jamaica’s financial sector before a loss she kept buried for four years became the foundation of CKM Healing Consultancy. She is now one of Jamaica’s only trauma-informed specialists doing what she does. The business was always the destination. The grief was the road.
Key Takeaways
- Chantaeu Munroe lost twins in December 2017 while working at Sagicor and spent four years functioning at a high level before the grief collapsed in a single moment on Mother’s Day.
- She left Sagicor in December 2023 after nine years in Jamaica’s financial sector, launched CKM Healing Consultancy, and booked her first corporate client, a regional credit union, for a JMD $400,000 trauma-informed retreat.
- Munroe is pursuing a PhD in trauma neuropsychology and is building toward a one-stop healing facility in Jamaica that she intends to expand across the Caribbean.
It was Mother’s Day when it finally happened.
Four years after losing the twins. Four years of showing up to work with a smile, of convincing everyone she was fine, of being so good at composure that the people around her believed it and moved on with their own lives. Four years of buying her first apartment, switching jobs, starting a car loan, building toward everything she had planned before December 2017 changed it all.
Then someone said Happy Mother’s Day.
She was at home. And in one moment, four years of held grief collapsed at once. Anger. Bitterness. Hatred, directed at herself, at God, at her body, at every woman who had a child when she did not. Trauma from as far back as seven years old coming up alongside the loss of the twins as if everything her body had been storing for decades decided it was done being stored.
“All of it came crashing down. I just started to ball uncontrollably, as if somebody had just died for me.”
It was not a breakdown in the way the word usually gets used. It was a reckoning. And it is the reason Chantaeu Munroe now runs one of Jamaica’s only trauma-informed healing consultancies, working with corporate executives, individuals, and organizations who do not yet have language for what is happening inside their bodies but know that something is wrong.
Munroe Spent Nine Years in Jamaica’s Financial Sector While Building the Emotional Architecture of Everything That Came After
Before CKM Healing Consultancy, before the grief, before any of this, Chantaeu Munroe was doing what the path asked her to do.
She had a Bachelor of Arts in Marketing. She worked at a bank, then moved to Sagicor Life in the employee benefits division, providing healthcare packages to corporate entities. She was building a relationship, saving money, selling her car to save more, planning to buy her first home.
She was also carrying a quieter knowledge: that psychology was where she was supposed to go, not surgery as she had once imagined. She was preparing to go back to school when she found out in November 2017 she was pregnant. Three pregnancy tests. Then an ultrasound in Jamaica showing not one heartbeat but two.
Everything shifted. Her mother was already putting names together at eight or nine weeks. Both families were excited. She was on track for the home, the relationship, the plan.
Then something felt off. She went back to the doctor. No heartbeats.
“The doctor said, you’re not pregnant anymore. And I said, okay, cool. Who says that?”
It was a missed miscarriage, what her doctor called a silent abortion. Her body had not registered that anything was wrong. Her cervix was closed, still preparing for twins that were no longer there. Surgery followed. And after the surgery, she says, she could feel that something was missing inside of her, the way you feel the absence of a watch you have worn every day.
She went home. She kept going. She bought her apartment in September 2018. She started a new role at Sagicor. She performed.
“Everything felt normal. At least, so I thought.”
The Crash Came Four Years Later. She Did Not See It Coming Because She Had Convinced Everyone She Was Fine, Including Herself.
The four years between December 2017 and that Mother’s Day were years of high-functioning numbness. She showed up. She progressed. She was the person people sent other people to.
What nobody saw was that she had been holding herself together since age seven, when home dysfunction between her parents made her the person who held everyone else. When the crash came, it was not just the twins. It was decades of unprocessed experience surfacing at once.
“It was not only trauma processing coming up. It was trauma from as far back as seven years old. Everything that had happened over my lifetime that had not been processed came back into this one moment and everything crumbled.”
Her boss at Sagicor noticed she was not showing up mentally the way she usually did. He gave her three weeks off. She describes it feeling like three months. She switched off WhatsApp. She forced herself to face the pain, to face God, to face herself.
And then she went back to school.
She Studied Neuropsychology While Working Full-Time, Then Left Sagicor on December 18, 2023, After Nine Years.
Munroe returned to school while still at Sagicor, studying a short course in neuropsychology alongside the psychology work she had already begun. She describes this period as on-the-job training. She was doing the academic work, sharing her story publicly for the first time, and being the support system for other women going through pregnancy loss who were finding her because she had started to talk openly about what she had been through.
She wrote her first book. She planned a small cafe-style launch and ended up with a trauma symposium that fifteen volunteers organized for free. A project manager appeared. The book launch happened at a level she had not planned for.
Three years before she left Sagicor, she says, God told her it was time to go. She ignored it because she was comfortable. Then in 2023, coming back from Panama, she heard it again with the kind of certainty that removed the option of delay. She wrote her resignation letter and sent it in.
“I left and then wrote the book, did the big launch, officially registered the company, fine-tuned the services, found a name for what I do: trauma-informed specialist.”
Her First Corporate Client Paid JMD $400,000 for a Four-Hour Retreat. Then 2025 Arrived and Six Months of Nothing Followed.
CKM Healing Consultancy launched in 2024 after Munroe left Sagicor in December 2023. Her first major client was a regional corporate credit union that brought her to a hotel with their managers and middle managers for a full day of trauma-informed education and emotion regulation work.
“It was about $400,000 and I was like, okay, this can work.”
Then 2025 arrived. For six months, nothing moved. She sent proposals. She attended speaking engagements. She engaged with potential clients. Doors opened partially and then stopped. She applied for jobs as a contingency. None of them came through either.
“I had to stay focused, stay the course, ball at times, lose weight that I did not have because I didn’t understand what was happening.”
In May or June of 2025, the season shifted. People who owed her from 2024 started paying. Individual bookings came in. Corporate clients she had been in conversations with came back. The stream opened. And then, she says, what felt like a waterfall.
She attributes the timing entirely to God, including the six months of silence. She now reads that period as the space in which she learned that this is not her business to control. It is a ministry. And ministry does not run on proposals and pipeline. It runs on assignment.
Munroe Distinguishes Trauma-Informed Care From Talk Therapy in Terms Every Caribbean Business Leader Needs to Hear
One of the most important services CKM Healing Consultancy offers to corporate clients is the distinction between talk therapy and trauma-informed care, because in Jamaica and across the Caribbean, the two are often conflated or the latter is not yet on the table at all.
Talk therapy, Munroe explains, works with the mind. It addresses thoughts, perspectives, and the stories a person tells themselves about what has happened to them. It is valuable. It is not enough.
“Trauma-informed care looks at what has happened inside your body, what has happened to your brain, your nervous system as a result of going through a particular experience.”
Unmanaged stress becomes stored trauma. Stored trauma manifests as diabetes, heart attack, stroke. It shows up in why a phone ringing makes someone anxious, or why they sabotage opportunities they genuinely want. She is building a practice that addresses the nervous system, not just the narrative.
She Is Working Toward a One-Stop Healing Facility in Jamaica and Plans to Expand Across the Caribbean
CKM Healing Consultancy is, in Munroe’s own framing, still at the stage of the seed in the paper cup from the biology experiment, roots just forming, ready to be moved to a pot. She is two years into the business and working toward a five-year vision that includes a physical facility nestled in nature.
The facility would offer multiple modalities of healing under one roof: gym space, art therapy, a rage room, mindfulness and meditation, nature access, and trauma-informed care. Mind, body, and spirit. Not just talk.
“A layers of healing facility nestled in nature where people can come and receive healing of different kinds.”
Her second book, Drop the Ball: The Harsh Truth About Letting Go, has fifteen chapters written. She is pursuing a PhD in trauma neuropsychology. She is not waiting for the full picture to be clear before saying yes.
“As scary and as big as it is and I don’t know how I’m going to accomplish any of those things, my answer is yes.”
Chantaeu Munroe has no regrets.
“To say that there is regret is like saying I doubt that God knows what he’s doing. And no matter how life turned out, even in the chaos, I strongly believe that God is working out everything for my good and his glory.”
CKM Healing Consultancy | Follow Chantaeu Munroe on Instagram and LinkedIn
Foundpreneur covers the Caribbean founder economy. Subscribe to The Foundpreneur Weekly at foundpreneur.co
Stephen Stanberry
