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 Friend of Love
The Friend of Love My best friend is moving away. She’d been dropping hints for months, but I decided to retreat behind a wall of denial and hope for the best. The best was not to be. Ellen is...
Childhood Sexual Abuse During COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has been brutal on us all. Rising depression and anxiety plague our world more than any time in recent history, and it is not only adults who are affected. Children have...
Orange Trees in the Desert, Fight or Flight and Emotional Regulation
The desert of the Southwestern United States has a strange, stark beauty all its own. Gorgeous sunsets, rock formations and deep canyons accented with spiky cactus resemble another world. If you...
The Wind – A Survivor Poem
The Wind always feels so free to me I wonder daily about life and its peculiarities, the sense of unfulfillment versus stability. The deep-seated longing but not knowing what it is or where it...
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
First grade was the first time in my life I felt understood. I loved everything about school. The snacks, the smell of mimeographed worksheets, learning how to read and write, the playground, and...
Childhood Sexual Abuse and Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
***Trigger Warning: this article will address childhood sexual abuse and may not be suitable for all audiences.*** As our readers know by now, CPTSD Foundation is not afraid to tackle tough...
Build Reliable Resources to Help Navigate life with Childhood Trauma and CPTSD – Part II
Become a Student of Healing and Build Reliable Resources to Navigate life with Trauma In case you missed Part I of this II-part series, click here. Over time you developed survival resources to...
Build Reliable Resources to Help Navigate Life with Childhood Trauma and Cptsd,
What do you do before you go on a journey?…You prepare. Preparing to journey through life with childhood trauma and Cptsd requires reliable resources. Throughout my practice and training, I have...
Attachment Trauma: The Unique Impact of Trauma in Infancy
It’s around 8 or 9 on a Saturday night and I’m on a 3-hour drive home. I’m returning from the field research I do every weekend in California’s Central Valley as part of my graduate studies. I’m...
Be Brave Little One
Thank you for coming back for the next step in our journey. We are going to dare to go there. Together, we will explore the movie clip-like lifetime of memories in your mind and find the parts...
Relentless Flashbacks
Trauma recovery is a painful struggle to find your sanity, your voice, and happiness. My experience with dissociation, amnesia, flashbacks, nightmares, insomnia, panic attacks, anxiety,...
The Thumb-Sucker
The Thumb-Sucker Fight or flight: the instinctive physiological response to a threatening situation, which readies one either to resist forcibly or to run away. **Please be kind to yourself as...
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”.
