Jayne Payne was born in Forth Worth, Texas, but spent most of her early childhood in Australia where her father worked as an engineer. At age fifteen, her father was transferred and the family moved back to the United States where she and her family settled in Oregon. Jayne married her first husband when she was seventeen and had her son Mark the following year. Jayne’s first husband was an active alcoholic and drug addict, and they divorced when Mark was only eighteen months old.

At the height of the Vietnam War, Jayne worked in Thailand for a civilian contractor who evaluated American soldiers for PTSD. In 1972, she returned to the US and decided to return to school – eventually becoming an alcohol and drug counselor. Jayne later continued her education earning a degree in Social work and PhD in Religious Philosophy. She has held a number of positions in counseling over the last 35 years. She has worked as a Crisis Interventionist in the ER of Houston’s Ben Taub Hospital. She was director of Adolescent services at Bell Park Hospital. For four years she was head of Chemical Dependency Services for Post Oak Psychiatry and later became Director of Outpatient Psychiatric and Substance Abuse Services for St Mary’s Hospital. During this period Jayne also taught classes on substance abuse counseling for the University of Houston.

In the early 1980s Jayne began work with Dr. Patricia Corke, who was a student of the work of Elizabeth Kubler Ross. It was here that Jayne was first exposed to the grief process and its connection to trauma. After personally experiencing the healing power of Elizabeth’s work, Jayne eventually went to work for Elizabeth as a facilitator of her grief weekends. Jayne worked for Elizabeth for over 10 years before developing her own program. This program, initially called Resolutions, was offered as a nine-day inpatient program at Gulf Pines in Houston.

In 1994, Jayne’s life took a dramatic turn when she was involved in a near fatal car accident. On release from the hospital, she was diagnosed with a permanent spinal injury, causing paralysis on the left side of her body. She was told she would probably be in a wheel chair for the rest of her life. Refusing to accept this diagnosis, over the next ten years, Jayne used many of the techniques she had learned from her own work and applied it to heal her herself. During this time she began researching and studying why she had manifested this event in her life. The answers came from many areas of study including spiritually, mind-body healing techniques, as well her continued studies in Religious Philosophy. Jayne’s Theories on Abandonment come directly from this period in her life.

Over the last few years, Jayne has returned to teaching and currently teaches chemical dependency classes at the Institute of Chemical Dependency Studies in Houston. She also launched her program as a three-day weekend event. She has appeared on Larry King Live and has had the pleasure of working with some of the field’s best known authors and therapists including Wayne Dyer, John Bradshaw, Claudia Black, and Deepak Chopra. She is currently working on a book on Self Abandonment to be released in 2010.