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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Forming Your Treatment Team
In the first part of this series on treatment planning, we focused on what constitutes a treatment plan. If you remember, "A treatment plan is a document outlining the proposed goals, plan, and...
Safe vs. Trust
For the survivor of childhood trauma, safe is lack of attention. Safe is invisibility. And invisibility comes in many forms. It can be running away from the situation. It can be procrastination or laziness. It could be feigning ignorance. It could be excessive helping. It could be silence. It could be angry outbursts. It could be throwing and breaking things. Invisibility can sometimes be physical violence towards others or the self.
The Importance of a Treatment Plan with Your Mental Health Provider.
Upon seeing a mental health specialist, we are often unclear about what brought us there, our purpose for seeing them, and our goals for the future. One method mental health professionals use to...
The Archaeologist
A survivor poem... And through all of this messiness and brokenness and trauma I begin to piece together a more cohesive story of me I discover forgotten, wounded parts of myself Sealed into...
The Importance of Self-Love
Self-love can feel dangerous, selfish, or vain if you’ve grown up in an abusive environment. The adults in your life most likely spent an excessive amount of time negatively focused on you, using...
Dissociative Amnesia and the Memory Wars
“I tried my insurance, Kaiser Permanente, for therapy. They assigned me to an intern because I wasn’t suicidal. He diagnosed me with PTSD on the first appointment. But on the second appointment,...
Hope in the Face of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
This series has focused on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and how it affects those who live with its symptoms. PTSD is, as we have seen, a life-altering disorder that changes the direction...
The Dissociation House
This post details how dissociation feels for me personally.
Transforming Self-Harm into Self-Care
In bringing closure to self-harming expression, the process may inadvertently place inordinate emphasis on the symptoms. It happens when valuing the disorder overrides the underlying cause and...
Co-Occurring Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
In previous posts in this series, we have discussed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as though it occurs alone. Unfortunately, thinking that PTSD acts alone would be incorrect. Many other...
CPTSD – the Thief of Time
There is no word to describe the feeling. I tried time after time to define this knot of emotions. It is a task that is beyond my ability. I cannot find a singular word that describes the...
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”.
