Dispatches from the Frontlines of Trauma Healing
The Holidays Require Special Skills
One of the hardest things about the holidays is how they bring up memories from the past. For those of us with developmental trauma from things that happened — or didn't happen — in our childhoods, this can be particularly challenging.
Trauma Skills for the Holidays
It’s easy to shut down and want to hide from the feelings of vulnerability, helplessness, and loneliness that can surface around the holidays. For those of us with developmental trauma, these feelings are flashbacks — signs of unresolved trauma, constellations of emotional states from the past still held in our nervous system.
How Trauma (of Any Kind) Impacts Intimate Relationships, and What to Do About It
If you find yourself having a stress response — going into Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn — that makes it hard to stay present during intimacy, it’s an indicator of unresolved trauma in your nervous system.
More is Not More
I hope to show you that “More Is Not More.” That, in fact, all the good stuff in life happens when we slow down enough to be present for it.
Dismantling Myths about Relationship Abuse
Knowing more about relationship abuse is the only way we can collectively change things. I hope that reading this will support you to intervene and speak up, with your friends or family members, to give them the support they are so desperately hoping someone will offer.
Challenging Myths about Sexual Assault
It is almost impossible to live in our world without carrying false beliefs about sexual assault and intimate partner abuse that color our judgement and decision-making.
The Power of Now
Unresolved trauma can show up in hard-to-identify ways. The truth is, according to the latest neuroscience, we're not to blame for how we are reacting. The unresolved trauma takes up most of our attention and subconsciously steals the show. It's how our nervous systems are primed to react, because we’re primed to prioritize survival over our enjoyment of life.
Why Neuroception is a Trauma Healing Superpower
Neuroception refers to how pathways in the nervous system interpret for us whether someone (or something) is safe or dangerous. Because neuroception usually happens below the level of our conscious awareness, we don't realize when the danger signals we’re noticing may not be coming from outside — they may be coming from within us.
21 Signs of Unresolved Sexual Trauma (that You Can Heal)
Often, unresolved sexual trauma is held in the body by layers of tension and fear. The body doesn’t want it to escape because it fears the traumatic imprint might affect our ability to function. We keep it — and ourselves — on lockdown. Consciously or unconsciously, we push it out of awareness.
The Taboo of Healing with Pleasure
This is what so much trauma healing work gets wrong. It's not about intensity — it's about rewiring the body and mind towards goodness and pleasure. And the number one, most overlooked, yet scientifically proven way to move forward is through pleasure.
The Reality of Post-Traumatic Growth
Once we learn the skills to navigate and heal our trauma, we have the ability to do so for the rest of our lives. As time progresses, we see how we're able to meet life's challenges. These are new skills that we didn't have before, and they bring a multitude of blessings to our lives.
The Sacred “No”
Our “no” is something that belongs only to us, as we choose what we accept and allow in our lives. Our “no” sets a boundary. And we have the choice to put boundaries around everything that matters of us – our bodies, our energy, our attention, our time, and more.
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.