Articles on Trauma and Relationships
How We Let Anger Sabotage Our Intimate Relationships
Angry complaint will never get you more of what you want. But seeing anger as a strategy gives us space to work with it, because strategies can be adapted and improved.
The False Safety of Withdrawal
When distance is the only way we know to create safety, closeness naturally feels risky and vulnerability codes as 'unsafe.'
What’s Wrong with Being Right
As a relational strategy, “being right” backfires spectacularly. Yet we often don't realize the damage we're doing until it's too late.
How to Heal CPTSD Over the Holidays
Most of us misunderstand complex trauma flashbacks and have little confidence we can handle them. Let’s change that.
Masking Complex Trauma (CPTSD) and the Holidays
Most people with complex trauma (CPTSD) approach the holidays with a sense of dread and endurance. Most people step backwards, instead of creating new ways to offer — and receive — care.
Trauma and Responsibility (when Healing CPTSD)
When we act out of unresolved trauma, we usually lack empathy and an understanding of the negative consequences of our behavior.
The 7 Steps of Relationship Repair
Knowing how to do relationship repair neutralizes perfectionism. We aim for our best behavior — and when we miss the mark, our ability to quickly and easily repair the rupture creates emotional safety.
When Close Isn't Safe
It's easy to label someone “rude,” “needy,” or “frustrating,” without understanding that they’re behaving this way because closeness doesn't feel safe.
How We Retraumatize Ourselves (and What to Do About It)
Much of what passes for "healing" or "personal development" can cross into risky territory for those of us with complex trauma.
Stop Shaking the Baby
It took me decades to realize that my high sensation seeking wasn't healing, but a sophisticated form of avoidance.
The Entity Will See You Now
We have a right to our own mind and cognition – to our cognitive boundaries of selfhood. We can’t prevent ourselves being manipulated by AI systems that are smarter than us.
When Tolerance is a Bad Thing
I would've said that I was mostly fine. But underneath that “fine” was hopelessness and exhaustion that I’d learned to tolerate because I couldn’t find the way out.
Not Alone in the Dark
It was many decades into my trauma healing journey that I gave up my fear in the dark — the flashbacks of childhood terror that awakening in the middle of the night would inevitably summon.
Why It's Hard to Savor the Good Stuff (in Trauma Healing)
Most of us who carry unresolved trauma find it easier to go towards the pain and the struggle. We often balk at the invitation to explore pleasure, dismissing it as frivolous or out of touch with reality.
The Mask of High-Performance
It’s a trap to focus on high performance as a way to gain love, safety, and belonging. There's always another task to excel at or a new level of high-performance to attain.
Transforming Touch in Trauma Healing
Our nervous systems are wired to relax into profound states of healing and restoration when we receive safe touch from people we care about.
The Disloyalty of Healing
Healing means betraying the values and beliefs of our families and venturing into new territories, uncertain yet determined to create our own cultures of care.
The 3 Foundations of Intimacy (and Relationship Repair)
All relationships experience inevitable shifts from harmony into disharmony. With skill, we can reliably shift into repair and reconnection.
You Are Not Food: Breaking Free from Non-Reciprocal Relationships
One of the harmful impacts of growing up in homes with entitled or grandiose caregivers is an ongoing vulnerability to non-reciprocal relationships.
Perfect is the Enemy of Safe
Many of us who grew up with complex trauma (CPTSD) in our families learned, from an early age, that getting it "right" is a precondition for attention and love.