Dispatches from the front lines of trauma healing.
I’ve been writing about trauma healing, PTSD, CPTSD, and wellbeing for almost 15 years, exploring what it means to be a high-performer making impact in the world — without sacrificing health or happiness.
Belonging and Self-Betrayal
When our sense of belonging is threatened, it's easier to give up our values and needs than risk abandonment. It's easier to sacrifice personal values and needs to remain connected, rather than face the terror of being cast out, alone.
The Fallacy of Catharsis
We assume that because our experience of trauma is intense, healing must be too. We’re easily seduced by the promise of catharsis, hoping that if we dive back into the pain, this time we can release its hold on us.
Creativity and Trauma Healing
When a stress response interrupts our creativity, the best thing to do is move through it. We can work with the nervous system to get to the other side. We don’t want to fight it, but rather find ways to complete the cycle and return to our center, where we feel safe and empowered to create.
What Most People Get Wrong about Boundaries
Shifting the responsibility for our boundaries onto other people keeps us from effectively using boundaries for our wellbeing. It’s no wonder that we end up in power struggles, trying valiantly to stand up for ourselves, only to feel frustrated, manipulated, or resentful of others.
Complex Trauma and Emotional Safety
Our attachment styles emerge from how our nervous systems patterned in response to our earliest caregiver dynamics. Far from being fixed traits, our attachment styles continue to shift and evolve.
What They Don’t Tell You About Trauma and Meditation
Everything in the science and the research supports the fact that traditional meditation is not helpful for people with active trauma. Asking us to sit down, sit still, and close our eyes is almost always too much for our over-activated nervous systems.
How We Sabotage Relationships Without Knowing It
When we were made wrong and punished for actions, where we didn't have the psychological development or self-control to choose differently, we assumed a sense of wrongness as part of our identity. That shame distorts our development in several ways.
How to Create Secure Relationships (With Trauma in the Mix)
Attachment styles are dynamic and can shift over time. They offer a potent place to focus when we're looking to heal trauma within the container of a loving, committed relationship.
Mapping Our Attachment Style
Even if we have had difficulty forming and sustaining rewarding relationships in the past, we can train ourselves to relate in healthier ways. When we do, we enjoy all the benefits of supportive, secure connections — advantages like improved mental wellbeing and physical health, increased resilience, and a stronger support system.
Escaping the Trap of Performativity
Performativity is when you align with sexual stereotypes or how you think you’re “supposed to” act, rather than exploring and expressing your own way. It happens when we subconsciously copy what appears desirable in our culture and try it on for ourselves.
Supporting Survivors with Dr. Indira Henard
Sometimes a conversation will shift how you see the world and your place in it. My conversations with Dr. Indira Henard always have a way of doing just that. I’m honored to share our most recent conversation here.
Why to Plan for Aggression (in Trauma Healing)
When we’re healing from shutdown, we naturally move through momentary aggression on our way to feeling safe with others again. That’s because activation from the original stress response (that caused the shutdown) is still locked in the body. The stress response needs to release and complete before we return to our natural state of wellbeing.
Trauma and Self-Loyalty
Those of us with unresolved trauma tend to orient outwards to get safety, rather than learning how to generate inner safety. It might feel safer to betray our boundaries and needs, in favor of what others want, but doing so does not create real safety.
Thrive on Purpose
Trauma healing restores our connection to ourselves. It centers us right where we should be, not as spectators, but in the middle of our wild and precious life.
The Path of Healing in Relationship
Trauma tends to take away our sense of agency and choice. It's overwhelming and exhausting, putting us on an endless cycle of over-activation and collapse that makes us feel we’ve lost our power. I want us to step out of the powerlessness of the trauma response and onto the path of healing.
The Holidays Require Special Skills
One of the hardest things about the holidays is how they bring up memories from the past. For those of us with developmental trauma from things that happened — or didn't happen — in our childhoods, this can be particularly challenging.
Trauma Skills for the Holidays
It’s easy to shut down and want to hide from the feelings of vulnerability, helplessness, and loneliness that can surface around the holidays. For those of us with developmental trauma, these feelings are flashbacks — signs of unresolved trauma, constellations of emotional states from the past still held in our nervous system.
How Trauma (of Any Kind) Impacts Intimate Relationships, and What to Do About It
If you find yourself having a stress response — going into Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn — that makes it hard to stay present during intimacy, it’s an indicator of unresolved trauma in your nervous system.
More is Not More
I hope to show you that “More Is Not More.” That, in fact, all the good stuff in life happens when we slow down enough to be present for it.
Dismantling Myths about Relationship Abuse
Knowing more about relationship abuse is the only way we can collectively change things. I hope that reading this will support you to intervene and speak up, with your friends or family members, to give them the support they are so desperately hoping someone will offer.