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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The Role of Nurses in PTSD Recovery
Many don’t realize how vital nurses often are in PTSD recovery. When it comes to this topic, there’s a sort of standard image that comes to mind. It typically involves a mental health...
Traumatic Stress, and Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises
Traumatic stress causes many problems for survivors and others. We don't feel well enough to accomplish our life goals or to function in day-to-day routines. There is a new solution to traumatic...
Paying for Your Trauma Healthcare Team
Healthcare is one of the highest expenses most people will incur during their lifetimes. The high cost of healthcare has driven many to worry about how they can afford to pay for it, causing some...
How Do Adverse Childhood Experiences Affect You Today?
The answer will leave you speechless. Adults who experienced adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), aka traumatic experiences as children, still pay for what happened to them years, even decades...
A Trauma-Informed Mental Health Treatment Team
Healing from complex trauma takes time, and having a treatment team that is supportive and well-trained in trauma-informed care can be an enormous help. In this article, we shall discuss together...
This is how to feel all your emotions – and not be overwhelmed – with one little word
I learned an important concept about how to feel emotions again safely – especially after trauma– over 26 years ago from my favorite graduate school professor, the late Terry Taylor Smith, LMFT:...
The 4 Steps to Emotional Regulation
We all feel a wide range of emotions; sad, happy, mad, excited, scared, lonely, frustrated, bored, anger, the list goes on. Children’s behavior (and misbehavior) is guided by their emotions and...
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...
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”.
