Articles on Trauma and Relationships
The Myth of Productivity (and What to Do About It)
Productivity makes us think we're getting ahead, when really we're on the fast-track to burnout. When we overwork, we run our immune systems into the ground. When we don't give our bodies the necessary time to rest and relax, our short-term physical, mental, emotional, and sexual health suffers.
Trauma and Intimacy
We often try to push through a freeze response with numbing or mood-altering activities. But trying to push through is one of the worst things we can do with unresolved trauma. Pushing through a freeze response risks retraumatizing us and it just makes things worse.
The Antidote to Trauma
Pleasure is the single most effective tool for gently and effectively resolving trauma. It forges new neural pathways that connect the thalamus (a sensing part of the brain) to the neocortex and helps us to literally feel again.
Foundational Trauma Skills for the Body (Part 2)
When we know how to navigate trauma when it arises, in ourselves or others, we become more powerful and effective leaders. We know how to stay present when others are suffering, and how to help them with tools that work. We gain people's trust because we know how to respond.
Foundational Trauma Skills for the Body (Part 1)
It sounds counterintuitive to go towards the trauma when your body, mind, and emotions are screaming at you to run away. But by learning to sit with what is already here, bit by bit, we gently befriend our responses and learn to tend attentively to our own needs. It’s an intrinsically healing process.
False Urgency (and a Simple Breathwork Practice to Help)
Even our bodies are accustomed to overstimulation as the norm. We don't notice that chronic overstimulation is an indicator of an over-activated nervous system and a sign that we need self-care. We have not been conditioned to read our bodies’ clear signals as a need to slow down.
Trauma and the Body
Trauma happens when a person is overwhelmed and responds with intense fear, even terror, and feels helpless. Trauma is an intense experience for the body, especially the nervous system. The state of being overwhelmed is highly uncomfortable and takes a lot of energy to process.
Escaping Hypervigilance
Hypervigilance is a state of high alertness that never stops. People who experience hypervigilance can't relax or let their guard down. We don't feel safe because we believe that at any moment, something bad is about to happen.
The Two Types of Trauma (and Why to Know the Difference)
Learning about trauma is like learning about gravity. Some things are so simple that once you learn them, it's hard to remember how you saw the world before. For many of us, understanding trauma is like that. It suddenly makes a lot of things make sense.
The Mother Inside
In the same way that we have younger parts, we can also have parts that want to protect and care for us in our inner world. They can be any type of caregiver, but I find that most of us have an inner mother and an inner father that we relate to inside.
Why We Need Radical Rest
When the entire world is telling you to keep going, resting is a radical act of self-care. When we rest, we let ourselves know that whatever we’re doing, it’s safe to step away.
Numbness Means You Don't Feel Safe
When we think of numbness as part of a stress cycle, we experience more agency in ourselves. When we see it as the body’s survival mechanism, we can have more compassion for ourselves.
Why Stress Keeps Looping (and What to Do About It)
If you don’t know how to complete the cycle, the stress is going to build and build, until you’ve reached your threshold and collapse with overwhelm. As a leader, unless you know how to complete a stress cycle, you are eventually going to burn out.
The Prison of Optimism
I know that some people make incredible meaning out of their trauma and life's challenges. Some people don’t. No matter what, telling someone in the midst of their process that they should be more positive does not help their trauma.
How to Support Survivors
I crowdfunded and created the Rape Crisis Counseling app, with partners from women's human rights groups around the world. It needed to be an app because I wanted every single person to be able to find out how to support a friend, family member or colleague in the aftermath of sexual assault.
Fear and the False Self
Trauma happens when the body's systems are overwhelmed and get stuck digesting the traumatic experience, so the impact of it stays in the system rather than being processed and discharged. This can be experienced many ways, particularly as fear, which is often described in self-help programs as "false evidence appearing real."
It is Not Okay
We are at the beginning of rapid change towards something new, so it's natural to experience a bit of vertigo and stress about it. We look for safety and security, and if we don't find it, we grab and clutch at something to take its place.
It's a Relay, Not a Marathon
COVID has shown me gaps in our empathy and support systems that I am unable to stomach. All around me, I see people paralyzed by the misplaced hope that someone will come to help or save them. You've heard the line from June Jordan’s poem, "We are the ones we have been waiting for.” Right now, that statement feels like both a blessing and a curse.
Say No to Martyrdom
It’s a bad feeling, watching health care workers plead for support and supplies, and tell us that they’re willing to sacrifice themselves for us. It’s hard to keep reading the news after seeing a message like that, but because of our leadership stories, we do. We consider martyrs an inevitable outcome of the system, but what if that wasn’t true?
Help with Hypervigilance
Hypervigilance means being overly attentive to your environment because you are afraid something terrible is about to happen. It’s like we don’t want to be surprised by bad news, so we think we can anticipate it. Only, that’s not how it works. Hypervigilance actually does the opposite of protecting us.