Trauma-Informed Blog
New content weekly! Survivor Stories, Research Articles, Poetry, and more written by clinicians, coaches, survivors, and mental health professionals.
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What Do Your Clothes Say About You?
I was helping one of my friends move house recently. We’ve been friends since college, and she asked me to help her box some of her old stuff for the movers. Her teenage girls were packing up their...
The Overlap of ADHD and PTSD: Why the Brain Works Overtime
Understanding Increased Vulnerability and Symptoms: Beyond the Diagnosis and Survival Instincts During all those years before I finally got the right diagnosis of PTSD and AuDHD, chronic...
The Birth of the High Performer
Some children become adults before anyone notices they were children. They are not always the loudest child in the room. They are not always the child getting into trouble, asking...
Why We Remain Silent
Frequently, a sexual abuse victim comes forward after many years of silence--sometimes much later in life. Doing so means facing skepticism. Why did you wait? How can you be credible now? Aren’t...
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...
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:...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
The Trauma Survivor Who Can Handle Crisis but Not Rest
Some trauma survivors look strongest during emergencies and most unsettled when life gets quiet. That is not contradiction. It is conditioning.
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...
What is Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?
“Complex PTSD comes in response to chronic traumatization over the course of months or, more often, years. This can include emotional, physical, and/or sexual abuses, domestic violence, living in a war zone, being held captive, human trafficking, and other organized rings of abuse, and more. While there are exceptional circumstances where adults develop C-PTSD, it is most often seen in those whose trauma occurred in childhood”.
