Your nervous system is designed to respond to changing circumstances. Ongoing emotional, physiological, and sometimes trauma-related demands can overwhelm the system, and don’t give it enough opportunity to fully recover.

You keep going.

Because you have to.

Eventually, surviving stops feeling like an emergency response and starts to feel more like your default way of living.

Eventually, the body can begin saying:

“I can’t keep doing this.”

This is where dissociation can become interesting–and confusing.

Dissociation is frequently depicted as something dramatic, but it can be subtle. It can be the experience of sitting across from someone you love and realizing you’re not really there. Or driving somewhere and barely remembering the journey, or like your body goes one way and the car goes the other. But somehow you make it around the bend.

Many describe it as moving through your day on autopilot and being detached from your body. Or spending hours inside your thoughts while your body quietly carries on underneath you. Sometimes disconnection becomes a way of managing too much connection with an experience that previously felt impossible to tolerate.

The system learned:

If I can’t escape what is happening, perhaps I can escape my experience of it.

That strategy can be protective, but what once protected you can now be holding you back and your life in suspension. This is one of the most important things I want people to understand.

Your nervous system does not follow a calendar.

It doesn’t necessarily know:

“That happened twenty years ago, so we’re done with that now.”

It learns via predictions that become patterns.

Through repetition.

Through expectation.

Through what has happened before.

If your system learned that rest was followed by danger, rest may feel uncomfortable.

If it learned that saying no caused conflict, no may feel dangerous. Or that other people’s moods determined your safety…

You may continue scanning faces long after you have left that environment.

If it learned that your body couldn’t be trusted, every unusual sensation might become a reason to worry.

This is why simply telling someone:

“You’re safe now” does not always make you feel safe!

The body needs experiences of safety.

Without force.

This is why I think the word “regulation” can sometimes feel too limited. I don’t want trauma recovery to become another project where we try to get ourselves into the “right” nervous system state.

Because life isn’t one state.

Sometimes you need activation or rest, and the goal isn’t permanent calm.

It’s flexibility.

It is the ability to move through different feelings without getting completely lost in them.

And perhaps even more importantly, staying connected to yourself during those times.

The question becomes: what helps you stay?

With your body when it is uncomfortable?

With yourself when someone is disappointed in you?

What helps you stay present when uncertainty arrives?

What helps you stay as you notice fear without immediately becoming its story?

What helps you stay with anger so that you can speak for it rather than from it?

What helps you stay with the feeling of sadness without deciding that you are broken?

What helps you stay in a restful state without having to earn it first?

What helps you stay with receiving without immediately giving something back?

What helps you stay with your needs and ask for help before you’re completely depleted?

These are not simply psychological skills. They are strongly supported by the practice of embodiment, which helps build those capacities to stay with yourself.

And in truth, it takes practice.

Recovery isn’t about becoming the person you would have been without trauma

I really think this is worth saying. I know I personally fell into the trap of thinking that I needed to erase my history, to rip all the layers off before I could move on. I have since grown a lot, and believe that healing is a living experience.

Recovery can be much simpler than that.

It can look like noticing you’re tired before you’re exhausted.

Leaving before you’re overwhelmed.

Eating before you’re starving.

Saying no before resentment arrives.

Asking for help before you collapse.

Feeling your feet while you’re having a difficult conversation.

Noticing that you’ve disappeared into your thoughts…

and gently coming back.

It can mean learning that your body is not your enemy.

This is where nurturance becomes more important than control

There is a lot of nervous system work that begins with:

How do I regulate this?

Sometimes I think we need another question first, like how I relate to myself.

and

“Can I stay with myself while I learn what this sensation is telling me?” It’s important that your body does not become another battle. We can prevent this by building a different relationship with it.

Our bodies are always trying to help us heal, and a trusting relationship can be built slowly through contact.

Attuned Attention.

Subtle movement that invites you to feel more connected to this moment.

Boundaries are super important, and I go a step further by saying, “Become the embodied boundary.”

As I shared with my LinkedIn following recently

You cannot have inner peace without boundaries, and over the years, I’ve come to realize something that changed the way I understand healing.

You have to become the embodied boundary.

Most people think boundaries begin with words.
“No.”
“That doesn’t work for me.”
“I need space.”

But long before a boundary is spoken, your body has already spoken.
It contracts.
It tightens.
It knows.
And you’re either shrinking, flinching, or noticing as you gather yourself and the information … that your body is constantly gathering anyway.

If you’re disconnected from your body, you’re disconnected from the very intelligence that knows what your needs are to maintain your sovereignty.

I see and teach boundaries as acts of embodiment with far more powerful communication signals than just … words you hope will work …

Here is my potent addition and conviction to embodied healing
➛ if you don’t claim the intelligence of your whole body, your soul has nothing to live through.

Without embodiment, you lose more than the ability to say “no.”
You lose your precious time and place.
Your beautiful energy and vitality slowly wilt; cloudy clarity becomes convincing; intuition is tricked by your fear, and your physical health counts the toll as you lose your sense of home within yourself.

Your body is here to protect what is sacred, which is you and your life and what you bring to this world without an imbalanced physical, emotional, energetic expense account… that is the personal accountability of upholding your boundaries …

Become the embodied boundary, and don’t leave yourself outside your own home…

Everything else has the potential to grow very soundly from there.

• Sensory awareness.
• Connection.
• Appropriate challenge.
• Recovery.

And sometimes medical care, therapeutic support, or other professional help.

This is the heart of what I mean by CoreNeuroCare®.

Not simply teaching someone how to calm down.

But helping them understand the layers beneath the experience, and the ways accumulated stress can alter how we recover and return to some semblance of what we define as life, living, and feeling alive again.

Maybe this short reflective practice can shift something within you today

Instead of asking:

“What’s wrong with me?”

You can begin asking:

“What happened?”

“What have I been carrying?”

“What did my body learn?”

“What is it still attempting to protect me from?”

And then…

perhaps the gentlest question of all:

“What does my body need from me now?”

Not forever.

Not for the rest of your life.

Just now.

• Maybe it needs rest.
• Maybe it needs movement.
• Maybe it needs food.
• Maybe it needs a boundary.
• Maybe it needs another trusted person.
• Maybe it needs medical attention.
• Maybe it needs to cry or laugh.

Maybe it needs to feel the ground, and if all else fails, healing feels really confusing or maybe even disappointing. Always prioritize grounding as a first port of call; it will help to orient your body and reduce the stress of trying to work things out from a disembodied state.

As a final note: your body has always been trying to do its best to help you, and it’s doing so with the information it has at the time. Survival does not have to remain the only way you know how to live.

There can be another chapter.

One built not around forcing yourself forward…

But around learning how to remain connected, centered, and present while seven worlds collide and life is actually happening.

I believe this is where the real work lives and truly begins.

Thanks for stopping by to read, and I’d love to hear how you would define embodiment in the comments.

For it’s a deep feeling that my soul is finally relaxing into this lifetime.

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Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer

What adjustments actually do

Work modifications reliably improve the thing they were designed to improve, which is work functioning. What I almost never see is the underlying picture resolving because the workload changed.

The shape is consistent enough to predict. Things improve for a stretch. Everyone is relieved and concludes the problem has been handled. The improvement flattens. And somewhere in the second year the same conversation happens again, usually with noticeably less goodwill available the second time and a manager who now believes the person has already been accommodated.

Why cognitive symptoms get read as workload

Mood and anxiety conditions produce functional effects that look exactly like being overworked, which is how they end up filed under scheduling.

• Impaired concentration reads as too many meetings
• Indecision reads as a complicated portfolio
• Slowed processing reads as tiredness
• Irritability reads as a difficult team
• Exhaustion that sleep does not touch reads as a busy quarter

Every one of those has a plausible environmental explanation, and the environmental explanation is usually partly true, which is exactly what makes the misattribution so durable. Indecision and impaired concentration are diagnostic features. They are not incidental consequences of a heavy schedule.

The inversion that separates load from disorder

One pattern is worth asking about directly, and it distinguishes the two far better than any question about hours worked.

Under genuine overload, decisions slow down across the board and recover with rest. In a mood or anxiety picture, something stranger happens: cheap reversible choices get deferred for weeks while expensive irreversible ones get made quickly, because sitting with an open question has become more uncomfortable than closing it wrongly. People experience that as decisiveness and get praised for it. It is much closer to what chronic indecision actually looks like from the inside.

The second distinguishing question is about timing across the day. Degradation that builds through a working day and clears by morning points toward load. Difficulty deciding from the moment of waking points somewhere else entirely.

Judgment goes before output does

Output holds long after judgment has started slipping, which is the whole reason this goes unaddressed for so long.

Nothing visible fails. The reports still go out. The meetings still happen. What degrades is the quality of the calls nobody is reviewing, and by the time a number reflects a bad decision the decision is eighteen months old. In CEREVITY’s own survey work, 62 percent of high achievers reported making worse decisions while concealing strain. That is self-report and should be read as such, but it matches almost exactly what people describe in the room once the concealing stops.

Anyone waiting for performance to signal distress is waiting for a lagging indicator of a lagging indicator.

What to do with an adjustment offer

Take it, and refuse to let it close the question. Capacity is exactly what someone needs in order to begin treatment, rather than a substitute for beginning it.

The failure mode I see repeatedly is a reduced workload that removes just enough pressure to make everything tolerable. At that point the assessment never happens, nobody is worried any more, and the underlying picture continues quietly for another two years until something forces the issue in a less convenient way.

These are composites drawn from patterns I see repeatedly, not from any individual client.

The twelve-week question

If an adjustment is the only intervention in place, book a review for twelve weeks out and ask exactly one thing: has anything changed on a day off? Work functioning improving while days off stay identical is the clearest possible signal that the adjustment is doing what adjustments do, and nothing more.

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Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer

I came across this sentence by Melanie Beattie, who was an American self-help author. Her bestselling books and pioneering voice were in the addiction, recovery, and codependency genres.

Her words struck me like a bolt of lightning about the transformative power that love has within us.

Our world is negative right now, and in all the carnage of war, conflict, and political turmoil, we can forget what’s most important.

Love, in the here and now.

We all need a reminder of the love we have in our lives. The gifts and talents that we possess. The way we live in the world with others.

Look around you. Who are the people closest to you? Who are your colleagues and friends?

Our environment and the way you interact with others have a huge impact on who you are. Do you feel the love from others around you? Are you valued for who you are?

We are all unique, and the way we think and act has the power to change our own lives and those around us.

Melanie’s words remind us that love isn’t just an inner experience, but something that has the potential to emanate from us, and into the world.

Think about it for a moment. If you wake up and walk around as if you have a permanent shadow around you, are you likely to talk to people? Will people want to talk to you? The answer is probably no.

If you go for days without talking to people, you will eventually start feeling lonely. Humans are social creatures, and we need others to lead better lives.

How about instead, you wake up with a positive vibe — even if you’re not feeling it that day — fake it. Pretend you are happy and content. Smile as you mean it and see how many people return that smile.

Do you notice the change in yourself and your surroundings?

Positivity leads to happiness, and if you and those around you are happy, who knows what you can achieve!

Once love has dispersed from you into your wider surroundings, you notice the change immediately through positivity and growth.

Your day feels lighter, and so does your outlook on life.

That deadline doesn’t feel quite so heavy.

You take things in your stride, and it’s infectious. Other people start to notice the happy vibe and copy you.

Only love can empower us to heal ourselves and our world.

Can you harness that healing power into your life?

Sure, you can.

Think about a time when you chose to support a friend or loved one. That is love. Nurturing our relationships makes our bonds with the world stronger.

You become a source of inspiration for others by showing up and allowing positivity into their lives. That is love. By spreading love, empathy, and compassion, you can give a brighter day for everyone.

A smile.

A compliment.

A thank you.

A listening ear.

A small act of kindness.

That is love.

Giving someone a pat on the back for a job well done. Bringing someone a donut because you notice how hard they are working without a break.

Giving your surroundings some love makes you feel great, too. It feels good to make someone smile after giving them a compliment.

What will you do to brighten up your tomorrow?

Everything begins with you.

My name is Lizzy. I’m a trauma survivor, a wife, a mom, a teacher, and an author.

If you like reading my posts, then please follow me.

For more about me: www.elizabethwoodsauthor.com

Support your fellow writer:

https://ko-fi.com/elizabe69245484

• The 1% Ripple Effect
• What Do You Overcome Every Day?
• How Do You Manage Your Stress Levels?

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Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer

Rachel

P.S. If you’re ready to take the next step in healing from abuse and would like to explore enrolling in the Beyond Surviving program, start by applying for a Discover Your Genuine Self Session.

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Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer

Unlucky.

What an interesting way to describe ten years of someone’s life.

I had never heard of CPTSD.

I had been diagnosed with PTSD, as were my wife and daughter, by separate therapists, but I had never heard any of them mention CPTSD.

My son moved out of state at 19, not for college, the military, or a job; he just left with about three weeks’ notice. He even chose the day before my wife’s birthday, though he postponed it when I brought it up, if only for a few days.

He left most of his belongings, even his car. I drive it now and then just to keep the oil in the engine and the battery charged. To my knowledge, he hasn’t missed a payment since he left. It’s been three years. I text or call him once a week, but he leaves me on read most of the time—for months on end.

Recently, my wife and I started downsizing; our house is too big for just the two of us. When I was cleaning out my son’s room and putting his things in storage, I came across a book, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Then I came across another book, The Complex PTSD Workbook, and then another.

He’s the only one of us who hadn’t sought professional counseling over the last ten years of our lives; he wasn’t ready to.

I sat down on his bed and started thumbing through the books. There were underlined and highlighted passages—pieces of paper with notes about how he was feeling on certain days—a journal of loose pages and corner scribblings detailing his emotional health over the year before he moved away.

It is bittersweet to see your child seek the help they need, knowing they need the help.

I know he has been through a lot—we all have.

I was never one for flight

A family of four, each one of us with a form of PTSD. Our family looked so different ten years ago. I loved coming home to them. It was the best part of every day, but life can turn sharp and quick. When it does, it doesn’t right itself easily.

For us, it was a decade we never saw coming.

We did manage to turn it around, but it was never the same, and there were many casualties—time being the biggest one.

I spent so much of that decade in fight-or-fight-harder mode that it nearly cost me everything.

I was so dedicated to supporting everyone else—so dedicated to being the rock that couldn’t afford to break—I missed the cracks forming.

My wife needed me; my daughter needed me. My son needed me—so did work, my mortgage, and groceries.

HR, some executives, and peers at work knew what was happening in our lives. They would sometimes ask, “How are you still going?” I would give a suppressed, half-hearted laugh and say, “The same way you would, if it were you—no choice.”

They told us not to Google it

They knew my son had gone into the hospital one day years ago and didn’t come home for nine weeks. When he finally did, he had lost a third of his body weight, and he was legally blind.

After taking a prescription for an ear infection, the same one he had taken multiple times before, he had a reaction that almost killed him. Toxic epidermal necrolysis, or TEN—the doctors told us not to Google it—they were right.

Over the next four years, my son would go through 40 surgeries and procedures on his eyes. It was like having a newborn again; we would put medicine in his eyes every two hours, every night, for nearly two years. He had both eyes sewn shut at different times and had to have his eyelids reconstructed.

His eyes had become so sensitive to light that he lived in the darkest corners of our home. It’s the reason I tinted all of the windows—so he wouldn’t have to hide in his own home.

At 13 years old, the pain was so bad and so constant that he begged to have his right eye removed. He knew it was an option; the eye doctor had spoken about it.

I couldn’t do it.

If there was the slightest chance his sight could be saved—we needed to try. But I wasn’t the one in pain.

The light was clearly in view

Just as we were nearing the end of our dark tunnel—the light clearly in view—my daughter disclosed that my father had been abusing her over the four years since my son had gone into the hospital.

We spent the next five years in a criminal legal battle attempting to get some semblance of justice for my daughter. She eventually got it, but the fight was hard and long. Lines were drawn, and the only people left on our side of it were my wife, daughter, and son.

Those nine years shaped my children, and they reshaped my wife and me.

Fatigue and microfractures

I remember sitting in the courtroom for sentencing, thinking We made it through; somehow, we made it through.

I know—naïve.

Within a year, in a momentary realization of what my life had become—how far it was from anything I had ever hoped for my family—I would almost make a mistake no one could come back from.

A decade of fighting for my son’s health and eyesight, my daughter’s justice, trying to hold my family and marriage together—through the worst decade of our lives—and a year later, after it was all over, I finally hit the wall.

It’s what engineers call a catastrophic failure—fatigue and microfractures accumulating slowly over years, the very weight of the burden being the same thing that holds a structure together while slowly destroying it. When the burden is finally lifted, the stress removed—everything collapses.

As I sat on my son’s bed, thumbing through his notes and highlights and reading about CPTSD, I realized not all of his notes or observations were about him.

He had been making notes about me.

He was always a really smart kid.

My son has been through more physical and emotional pain than most people three times his age. I imagine that his room, the house he grew up in, even his mother, his sister, and I are all painful reminders of everything he has gone through—everything our family has gone through.

Maybe that’s why they call it complex.

I talk about this often with my wife; she always asks, “What else could we have done?”

She’s right; it’s very hard for people who are drowning to save each other, and we were all drowning.

I just thought we would have time to heal afterward—time to recover as a family. But we all surfaced at different times.

And I guess I am still waiting for my son to surface.

I just left him another message.

God, I miss him.

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Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer

Complex PTSD From Surviving to Thriving: Pete Walker MA, MFT
The Complext PTSD Workbook, Arielle Schwartz, PhD, CCTP-II, E-RYT, EMDR-C

It took years, a career path that led me to the halls of the U.S. Senate, and the eventual passing of my abuser for those walls to finally come down. This is the story of how my trauma hid in plain sight, how my body tried to speak when I couldn’t, and how I am finally understanding the language of my survival.

The Invisible Fortress of Mind and Body

Looking back, the signs of deep dissociation were woven into the fabric of my earliest years. I just didn’t have the words for it then.

A Teacher’s Hidden Concern

In elementary school, one of my teachers sensed that something was deeply wrong. I vividly remember being called into a small room with her and a few other adults. They began asking me direct questions about being abused. I sat there feeling completely confused. Because my mind had locked the trauma behind an iron door, I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. Though I couldn’t answer them then, today I want to deeply thank that teacher who noticed, cared, and tried to help me.

Disconnected from Physical Pain

That same survival mechanism completely severed my connection to physical pain. My mind didn’t just mute emotions; it muted my nervous system:

• The Junior High Hockey Game: An opposing player threatened to hit me if I took the ball. I took it anyway, and she struck my ankle with her stick as hard as she could. No one saw it, so I simply kept playing. It wasn’t until the game ended and I pulled off my shoe that I discovered a severely swollen, sprained ankle.
• The Pencil Incident: In high school, I was standing in the kitchen chatting on the phone. My mother looked down in horror—there was a pencil sticking straight out of my foot. I felt absolutely nothing and had to be taken to the hospital for removal.
• Severe Kitchen Injuries: On separate occasions, I cut my fingers so deeply while cooking that I required stitches. Yet, I never felt an ounce of pain.
  Today, I understand that severe physical analgesia is a classic, profound sign of trauma-induced dissociation.

When Sanctuary Becomes a Trigger

I have always loved God and loved going to church, but traditional environments hold a strange, involuntary trigger for my nervous system.

Throughout my entire life, I would often begin to weep uncontrollably during church services. Later, when I worked as a photographer for the U.S. Senate, I eagerly joined the staff Bible studies. But the pattern followed me. Every single time, I would start to cry. It was incredibly embarrassing. I would frequently flee the room in tears, eventually forcing me to stop attending the Senate studies altogether.

Now, at 56 years old, I still struggle in traditional church settings. I know now that many of my memories are still repressed, and the environment itself acts as a somatic trigger. To protect my peace while feeding my faith, I do my Bible studies every single day in the comfort of my home. Every once in a while, I test the waters and try going back to a service, honoring my spiritual needs at a pace my body can handle.

The Phantom Illnesses: Stored Trauma in the Body

For all of my adult life, I have been plagued by sudden, severe stomach pain and overwhelming sickness. Time and again, I have rushed to emergency rooms and doctors’ offices. Every time, the results come back identical: my blood work is perfect, and doctors find absolutely nothing physically wrong with me.

My body was crying out, staging protests when my boundaries were crossed:

• The Senate Office: While standing for a long assignment taking photos in a Senator’s office, I suddenly became hot, sweaty, and weak. A coworker noted I looked deathly pale and walked me to the nurse. Physically, I was fine.
• The Patio Conversation: I love my neighbors. One evening, I was enjoying the view of a pond from my patio when a neighbor stopped to chat. We had a wonderful, long conversation. But mid-chat, a wave of sickness hit me, and I had to cut it short.
• The Museum Collapse: I volunteered for nearly three years at the Corning Museum of Glass. Working quietly on a solo project in the library was wonderful. But when I transitioned to the museum floor—answering guest questions and interacting heavily—my body hit a wall. I couldn’t handle more than an hour of a two-hour shift. The interaction exhausted and stressed my system. One day, my body simply shut down, and I collapsed to the ground. My mother had to rescue me and drive me to the hospital. Again, medically, nothing was wrong.

The Slow Road to Cohesion

My memories only began to resurface as fragmented, strange childhood recollections and isolated, frozen images during my time working at the Senate. It wasn’t until my retirement, followed by the passing of my abuser, that the timeline finally became fully cohesive. The threat was finally gone, and my brain finally deemed it safe to remember.
Just today, I went back to the Corning Museum of Glass to take a public tour as a guest. It was a fantastic tour, and I learned so much. But true to form, 30 minutes in, the heat, dizziness, and nausea crept back.

This time, something was different: I understood why.

I knew it wasn’t a medical emergency; it was stored trauma waking up under social and sensory stimulation. I chose to stay on the tour. I pushed through, and I am so glad I did. It took a couple of hours afterward for my body to settle down and feel good again, but I survived it consciously.

Healing from severe dissociation isn’t about suddenly becoming “fixed.” It is about learning to listen to your body without fear, recognizing your limits, and thanking your mind for the radical, quiet ways it kept you alive until you were strong enough to face the truth.

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Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer

.

I recently had the pleasure of connecting with Josephine McKinney, a truly inspiring woman whose life and work are deeply rooted in faith, creativity, healing, and service. Raised in California’s East Bay and now living in the Central Valley, she has spent years encouraging and supporting others through ministry, community outreach, writing, music, teaching Bible study, and even cooking – bringing people together in meaningful and heartfelt ways.

As we began talking, I was immediately struck by her warmth, resilience, and the beautiful way creativity has been woven throughout her healing journey. What began as writing poetry in her late teens during a difficult season became both an outlet and a lifeline – and continues to shape the way she connects with and uplifts others today. I’m so grateful to introduce you to her and share a little of her story with you.

—

RACHEL: What inspired you to start writing about/exploring this topic?

JOSEPHINE: When I found myself trying to survive one of the most traumatic moments of my life, I realized just how much I had kept buried for years. I carried a heavy mixture of guilt, shame, embarrassment, and silence, and for a long time, I struggled to process what had happened to me. As someone who has always loved reading and learning, I naturally began searching for books, workbooks, and faith-based resources that could help me heal while still holding onto my relationship with God.

What shocked me was how difficult those resources were to find within the faith community. I found many conversations centered around “purity” but very little that spoke directly to the pain, confusion, and healing journey of surviving s*xual assault and harassment in the church. I knew I could not have been the only person feeling unseen in that space.

That realization is what gave birth to When My Brother Touched Me: A Look at S*xual Assault and Harassment in the Church. Writing became both an act of necessity and a part of my own healing journey. My prayer is that through sharing my story, others will feel less alone, find the courage to heal, and experience freedom through truth.


RACHEL: What key insights or lessons have you learned through your experiences with this subject?

JOSEPHINE: One of the most important lessons I’ve learned through this journey is that forgiveness is far deeper than simply saying, “I forgive you.” Real forgiveness began when I stopped seeing myself only through the lens of shame and started extending grace to the broken version of myself that was trying to survive. For a long time, I carried guilt for what happened to me. I replayed every decision, every red flag, every moment I stayed silent, and I condemned myself long before anyone else had the chance to.

What I eventually learned is that accountability and self-hatred are not the same thing. I could acknowledge where I ignored warning signs or stayed trapped in unhealthy cycles without taking responsibility for the abuse itself. That distinction changed my life. Once I began forgiving myself, I no longer needed to stay chained to bitterness toward the men who hurt me. Forgiveness became less about excusing them and more about freeing myself. I realized I could remember what happened without allowing it to own me. That freedom became a major part of my healing journey and my relationship with God.


RACHEL:  What challenges do you think people face when dealing with this topic and how can they overcome them?

JOSEPHINE: One of the biggest challenges people face when dealing with s*xual assault and harassment, especially within the Church, is the discomfort that comes with confronting hard truths. In many faith communities, there’s often a strong desire to protect the image of the church, preserve leadership, and avoid conversations that feel divisive or “too heavy”! But as I discuss in When My Brother Touched Me: A Look at S*xual Assault and Harassment in the Church, silence does not protect people, it protects patterns.

Many survivors struggle to speak because they fear shame, disbelief, gossip, or being blamed for what happened to them. And many churches struggle because they’ve never been taught how to respond to these situations in a trauma-informed and compassionate way. Unfortunately, discomfort often causes people to minimize pain instead of making space for healing.

I believe overcoming this begins with courage and education. We have to create environments where truth and grace can coexist, where survivors are listened to without judgment, and where accountability is seen as an act of love rather than an attack. Healing starts when we stop avoiding the conversation and begin responding with honesty, wisdom, and compassion.


RACHEL: Are there any common myths or misunderstandings about this topic that you’d like to address?

JOSEPHINE: As I discuss in Chapter 4 of my book, one of the most dangerous misconceptions surrounding abuse is the belief that only children or young girls are vulnerable to grooming and exploitation. The reality is that abuse can happen to anyone across the lifespan, from infancy to the elderly. Vulnerability is a human condition, not an age category.

Perpetrators often look less at someone’s age or gender and more at emotional need, access, isolation, trust, insecurity, or the desire for affirmation and belonging. Men and boys can be groomed and abused just as women and girls can, yet many suffer silently because society and even faith communities often overlook their experiences. Likewise, adults are frequently dismissed because people assume maturity automatically protects someone from manipulation.

Grooming is often subtle and relational. It can happen through mentorship, spiritual authority, emotional dependency, secrecy, or gradually crossed boundaries. That is why these conversations are so important. We cannot truly protect people if our understanding of abuse remains narrow or incomplete.


RACHEL: What resources, tools, or next steps would you recommend for readers who want to dive deeper into this topic?

JOSEPHINE: One resource I highly recommend is RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network). Their 24-hour National S*xual Assault Hotline, 1-800-656-4673, as well as their online chat support, became a tremendous source of support and education for me during my own healing journey long before I ever found the strength to write When My Brother Touched Me: A Look at S*xual Assault and Harassment in the Church. RAINN offers compassionate support, educational resources, safety information, and guidance for survivors and loved ones navigating the effects of s*xual violence.

For those wanting to continue deeper conversations around healing and faith, my book is currently available alongside two upcoming companion workbooks. The first, The Work of Healing, is a survivor-focused workbook designed to help individuals process trauma, reflect honestly, and move toward healing through guided exercises, journaling, and faith-centered encouragement. The second, A Blueprint for Cultivating Safer Sanctuaries, is a leadership workbook created to help churches and ministry leaders build safer, more informed, and trauma-conscious faith communities.

My Book, Resources as well as My workbooks can be found at www.BalancewithJosephine.com by navigating to the Purified for Purpose Publishing Co. page.



—

What I appreciate so much about Josephine’s story is the courage it takes to speak honestly about something so many people have been taught to keep silent. There is such power in the way she names both the pain and the healing – especially the distinction between accountability and self-hatred. I know so many survivors carry shame for things that were never theirs to carry, and her words offer such an important reminder: healing begins when we stop abandoning ourselves in the aftermath of what happened.

I also deeply resonate with her call for truth and compassion to coexist. Silence does not create safety. Honest, trauma-informed conversations do. My hope is that her story helps others feel less alone and reminds anyone struggling that healing, freedom, and self-compassion are possible.

To raising our voices,

P.S. If you’re ready to take the next step in healing from abuse and would like to explore enrolling in the Beyond Surviving program, start by applying for a Discover Your Genuine Self Session.

Rachel

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Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer

I spent over 10 years with my first psychiatrist. She thought my biggest issue was depression, and medicated me for it. Then, I spent almost 10 years with my second. He felt depression was still present, but there was anxiety as well, which meant more meds. And now I was with my third. We’d only been together about a year. She agreed with all prior diagnoses and prescriptions, but felt there were mood issues too. She added even more meds. 

If the reason I switched doctors was that I felt like my diagnosis was wrong and the medication was wrong, why did they just keep adding a new diagnosis and more pills? Isn’t that wrong? In my high school years, I was a science nerd, so I’m familiar with the scientific method. Mrs. Martone would have certainly failed us if we designed an experiment like that! As a doctor, how can you ever know whether you’ve fixed the original problem with the first pill, if you just keep adding more pills?

By the time the third psychiatrist wrote another prescription, I was fed up with the bad science. I finally said to her, “You can’t possibly know what’s wrong with me. What are we even treating anymore? I’m on like six different pills! My side effects have side effects.” 

And here’s what she replied, “But you need the pills to be happy.”

I laughed. Snarfed. Probably scoffed. And then, the hysterics. Once I could take a breath, I offered this, “I adamantly believe that I don’t need your pills. They make me miserable. I need to understand who I am and what my issues are without taking any meds.” 

“But Denise, you can’t just stop taking your meds.” 

And she was right. I had already done my research and designed a week-by-week plan to step down off everything safely. And I wasn’t going to go it alone. I was going to step down with my psychologist by my side. The one who I actually trusted. The one who actually knew how to listen. The one who eventually diagnosed me correctly: I had PTSD.

Because in all those years of seeing psychiatrists and getting medicated for things like depression, anxiety, and mood issues what they all missed was the problem wasn’t me, but my marriage. No one gets PTSD—particularly not chronic PTSD—from a happy marriage.

As my brain started to heal from all the over-medicated madness and my mind was becoming my own again, I noticed strange things about my marital memories. 

First, after the PTSD diagnosis—as I was doing intensive work with my psychologist—I’d bring up newly surfacing memories. She’d respond: “You never told me that.” It was as though certain marital memories had gotten lost in my brain somewhere. As though the memory storage got messed up–and now they were all coming back.

Now, I hear what you’re thinking. Perhaps I have a wild imagination. Maybe I’m lying. But my experience matches what the research says: some patients report memory issues after long-term use of antidepressants. We are also starting to see more memoirs about reclaiming ourselves and our memories after long-term psychiatric drug use. Obviously, I’m not alone. 

Also notable about my newly remembered memories—they were the kind you really don’t want to remember. Blocking out bad memories is just a run-of-the-mill psychological defense mechanism. Those symptoms of depression, anxiety, and mood issues that I’d presented to psychiatrists over the years are all common signs of emotional abuse. I was grateful to have my psychologist to help me handle my difficult past that I hadn’t even realized was derailing my present.

Sadly, when memory storage and processing are messed up by medication, we can’t even react properly to the events we’re experiencing. Recently, I’ve been recounting some tough memories with my mom ranging from: 

• Small things like I was never allowed to buy a new bike even though I’ve been an avid cyclist my whole life
• To larger things like I did not spend my daughter’s first birthday with her because “someone” and his mother took my daughter away on an unnecessary trip
• To completely life-altering stuff–like I wasn’t allowed to move anywhere in pursuit of my academic career.

Now that my mom and I can be truly honest about my marriage, she says, “I never understood why you just let those things happen, and didn’t consider leaving him.” 

Honestly, I blame the meds.

Thanks to those meds, I spent my marriage blissfully unaware of what I was enduring. On the day my psychologist diagnosed me with PTSD from just one marital memory, I thought I was in a loving marriage to a loving man and that I had a beautiful life. But my newly resurfaced memories reveal that I was with someone who did not know how to listen, support my career, or acknowledge and address my emotional needs. I’m sorry, but that’s not true love.

My psychologist even believes I was dissociated most of my marriage. According to Mental Health America, dissociation is when a person loses connection to their thoughts, their memories, and their sense of identity. It’s a coping mechanism for chronic stress. That would explain how I developed chronic posttraumatic stress disorder while thinking I was in a loving marriage. 

In terms of healing from my symptoms of C-PTSD, I’ve taken a non-prescription approach. My supplements include:

• ashwagandha to reduce stress
• magnesium to aid sleep and ease anxiety
• Omega 3 to increase blood flow to my brain and expedite healing
• and L-Theanine to calm my mind at night and promote sleep.

Sure, some days are hard and I feel “down.” But as my close friends now know, I have my own way of powering through. Maybe I’ll write an angry poem. Maybe I stomp around my kitchen to an angry song. But I’ll never again take a med that numbs me to my own emotions, memories, or reactions. That’s dangerous. I’d rather use my own resilience. That’s my superpower.

My chronic PTSD diagnosis forced me to wake up from my manufactured reality like Neo in The Matrix. The “reality” of my marriage was a medicated illusion. And when I woke up from my Matrix—it wasn’t pretty. 

At the time of my diagnosis, I was blissfully unaware of many things about my life. So just like Neo, I took an arduous journey of personal transformation. Now, I’m blissfully aware and ready for whatever the future may hold—provided it’s prescription-free. 

Photo Credit: Unsplash

Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer

The quiet isolation of your life as time goes by and the days mesh and interweave to create your reality as best as you can see it, view it, and feel it.

They can keep underestimating your strength to surrender and the strength to fail over and over if it means staying around in whatever capacity that will be. It is easy to be alone; so many people can go it alone and have seemingly everything and even seemingly wonderful relationships of all various kinds. Is it authentic? Who really knows.

A willingness to accept people where they are is fundamental and necessary, and it’s missing from a great many people; that is why you hide, and that is why the few people around you are cautious too.

You are different, and you don’t need to justify that to anyone. As long as you are not intentionally going around hurting people, then you walk your path as you wish. People misunderstand you, and that’s OK. People are hard to understand, let alone put the right words to a situation where your body feels one thing and your mind is rationalizing their behaviors whilst probably questioning your own all at the same time.

I’d rather accept injustice than be unjust. I would rather accept pain and suffering than be arrogant and ignorant. To survive and to be alive are different, and maybe because you have never really been able to come out of survival, things are not what they seem; your body’s perspective is different from your mind’s. That’s OK too; it’s all proportional to your pain and suffering that no one ever saw, and well, if they did, you are here reading this; so, it’s unlikely it was acknowledged and worked through.

Establishing trust after betrayals is an arduous task and takes perseverance, something people in survival mode usually understand. However, different brain stems will take those survival instincts and use them differently in this world. If you do no harm, do not expect all others to view this world the same as you. For some, you are the perfect prey, the perfect light, the perfect societal scapegoat, or simply useful, yet made to feel a burden or a blessing, all time dependent on their needs and wants.

Does this mean that your life and your world is insignificant, no, for inner rivers run deep and the movement of your energy, soul will vibrate through this world in quite a different way. Call it what you will, but all we do here will have lasting ripple effects in the energetic fields of this planet and beyond. Just as water flows, freezes, cracks, rains, pours etc we are human and we are at the mercy of something much greater than us and what legacy can you leave, well does it matter really? Your life speaks for itself and will be written on the winds, in the ocean; your very bones will be of this earth.

Keep your inner light; keep the people you love dear, even if they don’t seem to hold you dear or show it; and radically accept the circumstances of your life. Some will try to tell you that it is completely your doing, the bad in your life, especially if it makes them feel uncomfortable. Some will want to take what is yours, some will steal from you, some will mar, and some will bless. It’s all part of the sum of human happiness, and all the bad in your life is simply not possible to be all your own fault. Nor can others’ reactions be your fault either. It’s an excuse for someone to blame you for their reaction, especially if you are to be held to account for your own consistently, if not constantly.

Let inner strength flow through, you cannot control how another treats you, speak of you, what you can do is be you.

You can own your own mistakes as best you can, and you can change all you like; that will be good enough for others to walk beside you. Yet if others point out all your wrongdoings whilst actively not following through on any promise to you or doing what they said they will do, that is not a reflection of you. That is a choice they are making. Actively making every day of their life, every breath that they take, every excuse they make, and every time they try to pass blame.

You are allowed to grieve the loss of a life you once had or never had. You are allowed to be sad and blue, in your own time for healing, but make sure it is transient by nature. Always stand back up and get out there and get what it is that you need to do done. No excuses; just do what you can each day. Love will be all-encompassing; anyone who professes to love you will stand by you. They will not keep you on the outside; if that is the case, then accept that and let them be. Any emotional reaction that occurs towards that person will be viewed differently by you, so watch and wait and breathe. You are worthy of respect, you are worthy of basic care, and you are worthy of affection, a cuddle, a hug, a goodnight, an I’m sorry and everything in between. Do not dismay if you are discarded, for all are discarded; you are no different. Their time will come.

Think of the beauty in the world, your favorite things; they may be animals, the beach, the wind on your skin, whatever it may be. Then sit with that; even if you don’t pursue it, just think of those things.

You have enough inner strength to sit in quiet reflection and simply observe for a little while rather than doing and trying to be.

The quiet beauty in the world is that many underestimate you, as do you yourself.

There is a quiet knowing underneath…….. so just breath for a little while and it will all flow with a quiet stir from inner inscape once again.

Gemma Sky

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Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer

She did not arrive with that figure. I asked the question, and she worked it out in the room, moving backward through two moves, a job change, and one hospital stay, until she found a date. Then she said, with no particular feeling, that it had never occurred to her to count.

Most people bring me a problem they want solved. She brought one she had already solved, many times, alone, and she was in my office because the solution had finally stopped working.

The One Nobody Interrupts

Complex trauma produces a small set of recognizable adaptations, and three of the four eventually get you into trouble.

Fight gets you disciplined. Flight earns you a reputation. Freeze surfaces at your performance review. Fawn gets you used, and sooner or later somebody says so out loud.

Hyper-independence gets you promoted.

It is the only one the world actively rewards, and that single fact explains most of what makes it so difficult to treat. The person who overfunctions is relied on at work, leaned on at home, and described by everyone who knows them as strong. No friend has ever sat someone down, concern on their face, to say they had noticed you never ask for anything. From the outside, it does not read as a symptom. It reads as character.

So it runs unchallenged for decades. And every year it goes uncorrected is another year of evidence that it works.

What It Actually Is

Hyper-independence is rigid self-reliance that continues well past the point where accepting help would be safer, faster or kinder.

The rigidity is the clinical feature. Self-reliance on its own is not a problem and never was. Healthy autonomy keeps both doors open: you can carry it, or you can hand it to someone, and you choose based on what is actually in front of you. Hyper-independence closes the second door and then explains the closure as a personality trait.

Clients describe it in exactly that register. I am just independent. I have always been the responsible one. I would rather do it myself. Each of those is offered as biography, the way you would mention being left-handed, and each is in fact a description of a door that no longer opens.

Where It Starts

Children do not decide to be independent. They become independent when depending on someone did not work.

That failure is frequently undramatic, which is part of why it goes unrecognized for so long. A parent who was loving and unpredictable in roughly equal measure. A caregiver who was in the room and somewhere else at the same time. A household where a child’s needs were met with irritation often enough that the child quietly stopped producing them. None of that meets the threshold for anything nameable, and it produces the adaptation about as reliably as things that do. It is the ordinary texture of growing up with a parent who was not available for the job, and it leaves almost no story behind.

Which is why so many of these clients open with a version of the same sentence. Nothing really happened to me.

What the child concluded was not that people are bad. It was something more economical. Needing is expensive. Better not to need.

That was an intelligent conclusion. It was correct for the environment it was formed in, and I say so out loud in session, because clients arrive braced for me to treat it as a defect. The difficulty is not that the strategy was wrong. The difficulty is that it never expired.

The Shame Underneath

The usual explanation is attachment, and that is partly right and incomplete. Plenty of these clients have warm marriages and friendships going back thirty years. What they are avoiding is not closeness. It is exposure.

The distinction that matters here is between guilt and shame. Guilt says I did something bad, and guilt has an exit: you apologize, you repair, you carry on. Shame says I am something bad. There is no exit from that, so people build a life that never requires them to test the claim.

Recent research supports the split, and does it in the precise language of complex trauma. A 2025 study in Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, co-authored by Thanos Karatzias and Mark Shevlin, whose work sits underneath the ICD-11 complex trauma criteria, tested both emotions as mediators between trauma exposure and symptoms in 160 young adults. Guilt carried the strongest effect on PTSD symptoms. Shame carried the strongest effect on Disturbances in Self-Organisation, the cluster that distinguishes complex PTSD from PTSD.

Put plainly: if needing something reveals that you are a person who has needs, and you learned early that having needs made you a burden, then every request is a small confession. The cheapest way never to confess is never to need.

What It Is Not

Three lines worth drawing, because they blur easily and the treatment implications differ.

• Not healthy autonomy. Autonomy is situational and reversible. The autonomous person declines help because they do not need it today. The hyper-independent person declines because declining is the only move available.
• Not avoidant personality. That involves fear of criticism and rejection driving withdrawal from relationships. These clients often sustain long, close relationships. They simply occupy one role inside all of them.
• Not introversion. Introversion concerns where a person’s energy comes from. Hyper independence concerns what a person believes it costs to be seen needing something. An extrovert can be profoundly hyper-independent, and will usually hide it better.

One question separates all three: what happens when help is offered and genuinely available. Relief points one way. Discomfort, deflection, or a fast counter-offer to help the helper points the other.

The Tell

What follows is a composite drawn from patterns I see repeatedly, not from any individual client.

A woman comes in for what she calls a sleep problem. When I ask who she leans on, she names four people without hesitating, and every one of them is someone who leans on her. When I ask again, more precisely, she goes quiet for a while and then says she is not sure she would know how to answer honestly.

Three sessions later she mentions in passing that she drove herself home from a colonoscopy. She is not bragging. She does not register it as unusual.

That is the tell. Not the behavior. The absence of any sense that the behavior was remarkable.

The rest of what I listen for:

• Offers of help producing discomfort rather than relief
• Fluency about plans, paired with real difficulty naming a want
• Every relationship converted into one where they are the competent party
• Symptoms that arrive on holiday rather than during the crisis
• Pride in never having burdened anyone, held slightly too tightly

That last one separates hyper-independence from ordinary isolation. This person is not alone by accident or bad luck. They built it, they maintain it, and if approached directly, they will defend it with some heat.

The holiday one surprises people, so it is worth stating plainly. For a nervous system mobilized for years, time off does not deliver relief. It brings everything that was being outrun. Somewhere around the third day, the adrenaline drops and what surfaces is not rest but dread, which is why so many capable people are more miserable on holiday than they are at work, and why another week off almost never fixes it.

Why Insight Does Not Move It

Nearly every hyper-independent client I have worked with can already explain the pattern, often in more detail than I can, and trace it to its origin without any help from me. Explaining it back to them accomplishes nothing at all. They have been explaining it to themselves for twenty years, and it has never once loosened its grip. And a fair amount of what passes for reflection in this group is self-criticism wearing the costume of self-awareness. The two feel identical from the inside and produce opposite results.

What moves it is repeated, tolerable experience of depending on someone and having it turn out fine.

If shame is the engine, then the work is not about learning to ask. It is about surviving having asked. In small doses, many times, until the nervous system revises its estimate of what asking costs. Nervous systems are not persuaded by argument. They are persuaded by repetition.

A concrete place to begin, if you want one. Use the smallest viable request. Pick something you could comfortably do yourself, ask someone to do it anyway, and then pay attention to what happens in your body in the ten seconds after you ask. That sensation is the thing being treated, not the outcome. Most people are surprised by how much shows up over something as small as asking a colleague to send a file.

Then do it again next week. The goal is not to become someone who needs help. It is to become someone for whom asking is available again, so that self-reliance goes back to being a choice rather than the only door in the room.

To whoever recognized themselves somewhere in the first three paragraphs: self-sufficiency is not your enemy. It was an intelligent answer to a situation in which depending on someone genuinely did not work, and it deserves more respect than most people will give it. It is simply still running at a scale the situation no longer requires.

Setting part of it down will not cost you the part that is actually yours.

If You Want to Keep Reading

Three pieces on the part that comes next, which is the part most people find hardest.

• The most common therapy fears, and why they are normal. The six worries that keep capable people out of the room, and what is actually true about each one.
• 14 things clients apologize for in therapy. If you recognized yourself in the apologizing, this is the list, and almost none of it warrants an apology.
• Is my therapist judging me. Written for the specific fear that the shame will finally be confirmed by someone whose job is to look closely.

Photo Credit: Unsplash

Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer