There’s a kind of shame that wraps itself around trauma survivors like smoke after a fire. Invisible and suffocating. If you’ve lived through abuse and now live with CPTSD, you know exactly what I mean. It’s not the shame of doing something wrong. It’s the shame of having survived something that never should have happened […]
Coping Strategies CPTSD Recovery Mental Health Relationships & Attachment Self-Care Therapy & Healing Trauma Recovery
Post-Therapy Fog? How to Beat the Therapy Hangover
It’s wild how, surprisingly, no one really talks about therapy hangovers. Sure, everyone says “therapy’s great,” but almost nobody warns you that right after your session, your brain and body might throw a full-on tantrum. But you know what? you’re not broken or doing it wrong. Rather, your nervous system is just throwing a little […]
Stop Misusing Attachment Theory in Relationships
I have a bone to pick with how we’re misusing one of the most powerful tools for emotional healing and turning it into feel-good slideshows and “this-is-why-you’re-toxic” infographics. Attachment theory is one of the most powerful frameworks I’ve found for understanding how we connect, disconnect, and survive emotionally. It’s helped me unpack decades of complex […]
Hypervigilance and CPTSD: Why I Face the Door
There is something that I do, and have done for as long as I can remember, and that is, I don’t sit with my back to the room. Ever. It’s not about being dramatic or antisocial. It’s because somewhere deep in my bones, my nervous system never really got the memo that the emergency ended. […]
Flashbacks: Not Always a Five-Alarm Fire
There was a time when every flashback felt like a fire drill. My body would light up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve, bright, loud, impossible to ignore. The moment something triggered, I’d bolt straight into survival mode: cancel plans, cancel people, cancel myself. No questions asked. It didn’t matter if the memory was […]
Attachment, Detachment, and the In Between
Living with CPTSD means relationships, whether romantic or platonic, can be both incredibly comforting and completely overwhelming. On one hand, I have always craved closeness, connection, the sense of warmth and safety. But on the other, the idea of losing that felt like the worst thing ever. Detachment, to me, has never been as simple […]