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.
The Two Types of Trauma (and Why to Know the Difference)
Learning about trauma is like learning about gravity. Some things are so simple that once you learn them, it's hard to remember how you saw the world before. For many of us, understanding trauma is like that. It suddenly makes a lot of things make sense.
The Mother Inside
In the same way that we have younger parts, we can also have parts that want to protect and care for us in our inner world. They can be any type of caregiver, but I find that most of us have an inner mother and an inner father that we relate to inside.
Why We Need Radical Rest
When the entire world is telling you to keep going, resting is a radical act of self-care. When we rest, we let ourselves know that whatever we’re doing, it’s safe to step away.
Numbness Means You Don't Feel Safe
When we think of numbness as part of a stress cycle, we experience more agency in ourselves. When we see it as the body’s survival mechanism, we can have more compassion for ourselves.
Why Stress Keeps Looping (and What to Do About It)
If you don’t know how to complete the cycle, the stress is going to build and build, until you’ve reached your threshold and collapse with overwhelm. As a leader, unless you know how to complete a stress cycle, you are eventually going to burn out.
Aid and White Supremacy
When I became an aid worker, I absolved myself from examining whether I could be racist. I gave myself a free pass because I was a changemaker, and I thought that racism didn’t influence me. We think “I’m a good person, I can’t be racist,” but it’s a defense mechanism, constructed to protect our sense of self from discomfort.
The Prison of Optimism
I know that some people make incredible meaning out of their trauma and life's challenges. Some people don’t. No matter what, telling someone in the midst of their process that they should be more positive does not help their trauma.
How to Support Survivors
I crowdfunded and created the Rape Crisis Counseling app, with partners from women's human rights groups around the world. It needed to be an app because I wanted every single person to be able to find out how to support a friend, family member or colleague in the aftermath of sexual assault.
Fear and the False Self
Trauma happens when the body's systems are overwhelmed and get stuck digesting the traumatic experience, so the impact of it stays in the system rather than being processed and discharged. This can be experienced many ways, particularly as fear, which is often described in self-help programs as "false evidence appearing real."
Me and White Supremacy
If you’re identifying your bias and racism for the first time, remember that most people could already see it, so don’t be too embarrassed or ashamed to do your work.
It is Not Okay
We are at the beginning of rapid change towards something new, so it's natural to experience a bit of vertigo and stress about it. We look for safety and security, and if we don't find it, we grab and clutch at something to take its place.
It's a Relay, Not a Marathon
COVID has shown me gaps in our empathy and support systems that I am unable to stomach. All around me, I see people paralyzed by the misplaced hope that someone will come to help or save them. You've heard the line from June Jordan’s poem, "We are the ones we have been waiting for.” Right now, that statement feels like both a blessing and a curse.
Say No to Martyrdom
It’s a bad feeling, watching health care workers plead for support and supplies, and tell us that they’re willing to sacrifice themselves for us. It’s hard to keep reading the news after seeing a message like that, but because of our leadership stories, we do. We consider martyrs an inevitable outcome of the system, but what if that wasn’t true?
Help with Hypervigilance
Hypervigilance means being overly attentive to your environment because you are afraid something terrible is about to happen. It’s like we don’t want to be surprised by bad news, so we think we can anticipate it. Only, that’s not how it works. Hypervigilance actually does the opposite of protecting us.
F*ck Productivity
Anyone telling you that you need to optimize your time right now is deep in their own freak-out and acting like a robot. Posting about how we can optimize our work output during this crisis feels off when so many of us are losing jobs and afraid our loved ones will fall sick (if they're not sick already). Reaching for quick fixes points to a deep denial about what is going on.
Self-Care and COVID-19: An Invitation
We need to learn how to do the work ahead of us in a way that doesn't consume us, that is not just sustainable but in fact deeply nourishing. I know that it's possible. What it requires is self-care.
Safety Planning for Coronavirus (COVID-19)
If you understand exponentials, you can see that like a slow-moving tidal wave, COVID-19 is becoming a serious pandemic. Because of exponential growth, what seems like a slow rise of cases can quickly surge to overwhelm our health centers. We all want do our part to avoid this, so let’s explore some risk mitigation…
Leadership in the Time of Coronavirus (COVID-19)
The public health system undertakes pandemic preparedness to be ready for a time like this. Almost everyone underestimates how much can be done to prevent more cases with simple behavior change.
The #1 Reason You Shouldn’t Meditate
People with active Post-Traumatic Stress (PTSD) or other types of trauma should not meditate the way that other people meditate. People with active trauma symptoms or who are easily triggered into flashbacks need to create alternative pathways to meditation that work for their brains and bodies.
5 Signs that Changemaker Stress is Impacting Your Life
Things are getting more chaotic as the pace of change accelerates. There are lots of reasons for this, but around the world, old systems are under tremendous strain. We're already in transition towards something new, but probably not prepared for the toll this uncertainty is taking on us as leaders.