Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Older Adults: The Enduring Impact of Unresolved Trauma on the Aging Process
One of the greatest misconceptions I encounter is that trauma belongs in the past. However, trauma is not only a historical experience but is a psychobiological process that influences emotional well-being, mental and physical health, interpersonal functioning, and...
8 Things Survivors Need to Stop Apologizing For | Part 1 | Needing Rest (video)
So many survivors learned that rest was laziness or weakness. But when your nervous system has spent years surviving, rest is repair. What’s your relationship with rest right now? Click to watch: Opens in same window Photo Credit: Unsplash Guest Post...
Christmas in July – Redecorating My Heart for a Season of Healing
This project began with a piece of wood. In 2 days, I will send my two teen sons off to summer camp for a week. I will have the entire place to myself for 6 nights. I have decided to use the time to revamp my Christmas ornaments, which are an amalgam of inherited...
The Bridge You Thought Was Gone
There is a particular kind of quiet that follows trauma. Not the peaceful kind or the kind you choose. But the kind that settles in when something inside you has gone still… or far away. And in that quiet, a thought begins to form—sometimes softly or sometimes with a...
Peace at your own pace this summer
Summer can bring great weather, vacations, and gatherings. Though for many living with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) it can also induce, or bring with it, emotional exhaustion, loneliness, overstimulation, and/or painful memories. Summer can also...
The abuse without bruises: How emotional harm in childhood is overlooked
In August of 1992 I ran from my home on East Goldsborough Street to the local police station. I arrived sweating, panting, my face red with fury and with the oppressive Northwest Indiana heat. I was 17 years old, and didn’t realize what I was doing until I was...
The Trauma Survivor Who Can Handle Crisis but Not Rest
Some trauma survivors are strangely good in a crisis. Not pretend-good. Actually good. They can make the call, pack the bag, drive through the storm, calm the child, read the room, manage the drunk relative, talk someone down, hide their own fear, remember...
Not normal but typical. Four words that guided my healing from CPTSD.
For most of my life, I described my childhood as merely difficult. It was a sanitizing word, one that painted over abuse, neglect, and chaos with a veneer of normalcy. To the outside world, I seemed to be living the American dream. I was a successful...