Finding Worthiness
From trauma to transformation, Heather Marie Estus is building a healing haven for survivors
What does it mean to be worthy?
That’s a question Heather Marie Estus has been pondering for more than 10 years, and it’s become a lifechanging one. Heather Marie is the author of “The Worthiness Formula,” a book due to land on shelves in 2026. She’s also a speaker and coach and is in the process of establishing Worthy Ranch, a place of healing for human trafficking survivors.
“Worthiness is something we already have. It’s innate. We can’t erase it, and we can’t build it. We just need to remember it,” Heather Marie says. “That takes soul work.”
At 51, she speaks from experience.
“I could easily have been a statistic,” she says. She credits grit, divine intervention and luck for breaking free from her past. The oldest of 11 children, she is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. It took her years to come to terms with it.
“I just buried it and moved on,” she says. “Trauma shows up in your body and in your choices if you don’t deal with it.”
She now recognizes many of the events earlier in her life as a pattern of self-sabotaging decisions.
“I lived a double life. I was in student council, in sports, but I partied and drank,” she says.
In her first semester of college at Arizona State University, she became pregnant and dropped out.
“I was constantly making choices that didn’t align with who I was,” she says. “I didn’t know what it was to be worthy.”
It took seven years for Heather Marie to get back on her feet. She moved to Las Vegas to live with her mother, went back to college and worked full-time in the hospitality industry while earning a degree in Communications and Public Relations at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Her drive and work ethic helped her quickly climb the corporate ladder. Even still, poor decisions continued to weigh her down.
“There were areas in my life that I didn’t feel I deserved so I was constantly making decisions that didn’t benefit me,” Heather Marie says.
She married and had four more children, but the relationship was manipulative and abusive. After divorcing, reconciling and divorcing again, her ex-husband moved the children to California and cut off her finances, leaving Heather Marie destitute. After a long court battle, she lost custody and could only see her children on weekends.
“He left me with nothing,” she says. “But that flipped a switch in me. In a way, that needed to happen.”
Heather Marie once again built her life back up, focused on her career and became a successful fundraiser in the nonprofit sector. Still, she felt her life lacked purpose.
That’s when an unlikely coincidence started her on a new path. Her mother revealed to her that her father wasn’t her biological father. She gave Heather Marie the name of her birth father: Richard Villa. All she knew was that he lived in Arizona. She hired a private investigator and a few days later, she was staring down at a list of 60 Richard Villas. Instead of starting at the top, she dialed a random phone number in the middle. It was her father’s number, and before she knew it, she landed in Buckeye, Arizona, to meet him for the first time.
“He was a Mexican vaquero, a rodeoer, a Navy Seal, and a Vietnam vet. A tough guy,” she says.
On the first day, they saddled up for a ride. Heather Marie didn’t mention that her only experience on horseback was pony rides as a child. When her horse acted up and started bucking, she didn’t panic and easily calmed the horse.
“I was fearless. It felt natural to me,” Heather Marie says. “I knew right then I wanted horses.”
When she returned home, she started shopping for horse properties and found a lease-to-own parcel that included a horse-boarding facility. Before she knew it, she was caring for seven horses.
“Even though it wasn’t what we consider equine therapy, I knew something was happening with me. Working with horses was grounding me,” Heather Marie says.
In her career as a major-donor fundraiser, Heather Marie had access to many influential people. She began to ask questions to discover how they had become successful.
“I just listened to their stories and started paying attention to what they were saying,” she says.
The difference, she realized, was that they knew their self-worth. Some came from a place of trauma and healing, while others were raised in homes where they were allowed to be themselves and be guided by their intuition. When she discovered worthiness is an innate right of all human beings, Heather Marie began to look at everything in a new light.
“We were never broken to begin with,” she says. “We always deserved everything in the universe. It’s our thinking that’s the curse.”
In the years that followed, Heather Marie interviewed more than 100 women, asking them the same two questions: What does it mean to feel worthy? And where did that worthiness come from?
In almost every instance, the subjects of her interviews told her that worthiness was nothing they had to earn. It was honored by living their core values and trusting their intuition.
While Heather Marie first used those interviews to understand her own worthiness, the answers led to opportunity. She launched “The Worthiness Formula” and began teaching workshops and coaching. More than 3,000 people have attended her workshops. The interviews were also the foundation for her book, “The Worthiness Formula.”
“My book is for people like me,” she says.
She’s also working on an online course she calls Worthy You-niversity, set to launch at the end of the year.
“It’s about learning more about who you are and trusting that and allowing it to become part of your life,” Heather Marie says. “You’re earning a degree in you.”
Four years ago, she moved to Billings for her ultimate dream: Worthy Ranch, place of healing and growth for survivors of abuse and human trafficking. Heather Marie has coached human trafficking and abuse survivors for years and has established partnerships with numerous local organizations that provide support to survivors. She wants Worthy Ranch and the Worthiness Formula to be a part of their healing and recovery.
Worthy Ranch was incorporated as a nonprofit in 2020, and Heather Marie and her board are on track to purchase the ideal property.
“I want it to be near water and mountains,” she says. “To create healing, you need a healing space.”
In addition to providing a place for survivors to heal, Worthy Ranch will also be an event center with space for retreats, conferences and special events. It will be home to Worthy You-niversity, and may also include a recording studio, a restaurant, and catering company, which could all provide career training opportunities for survivors.
“It’s for everyone, not just survivors,” Heather Marie says.
Even without a physical ranch, Worthy Ranch is taking off with such financial backers as The Gianforte Foundation, Murdock Trust, TDS Fiber, Alpha and Omega Disaster Restoration, and Black Hills Federal Credit Union among others. Programming is already being delivered to survivors with the help of local partnerships.
As Heather Marie looks to share what it means to be worthy, she’s still learning to embrace it in herself, not only as an abuse survivor but as someone who struggled with a mixed ethnic identity.
“I wasn’t white enough, Mexican enough, or Native American enough to fit in anywhere,” she says.
Today, she celebrates that heritage knowing that when you know who you are, it can be a game-changer. She can’t wait to share that message with others on a bigger scale.
“Understanding my core values and listening to my intuition, that’s when everything changed for me,” she says. “It’s a constant evolution of that formula.”
