When I started therapy, I thought I just needed a tune-up. I knew there were things inside me I needed to work on. What I got instead was an emotional excavation. Turns out, growing up in chaos teaches your brain some pretty creative survival strategies, hypervigilance, dissociation, people-pleasing, and the uncanny ability to anticipate everyone’s […]
Loving Someone with CPTSD: A Survival Guide
Loving someone with CPTSD means, first and foremost, loving someone with a complicated past. We might not always say it, but we crave connection, deeply. Sometimes more than we know what to do with. And yet, every so often, we flinch. We pull back. We get quiet when things get too close. It’s not because […]
Is CPTSD Considered Neurodivergent? Here’s What I Found
The other day, I fell into one of those classic spirals: trauma vs. identity crisis vs. internet rabbit hole. You know the ones. It started innocently enough, I was trying to figure out if CPTSD counts as neurodivergent. Before I knew it, I was eight tabs deep, reading about brain scans, childhood trauma, and how […]
Healing from CPTSD: When Hurt People Hurt People
There’s a phrase that gets thrown around a lot: hurt people hurt people. Sometimes it’s said with compassion, sometimes as a defense, and sometimes as a throwaway line. But for me, it’s a truth I’ve had to look directly in the eye. Because I was hurting. And I hurt people. I was one of them. […]
Emotional Whiplash in a Trench Coat
Let’s talk about attachment styles, shall we? You know, those deeply ingrained survival strategies we picked up in childhood that now wreak absolute havoc on our adult relationships? Yeah. Fun times. Mine is what therapists call disorganized and what I call emotional whiplash in a trench coat. If you’re unfamiliar, disorganized attachment is what happens […]
The Truth About Healing No One Told Me
Here’s something I wish someone had told me early on, like, tattoo-it-on-my-forearm early on: Healing isn’t linear. Like, at all. I know I’ve said this before, and I’ll probably say it a hundred more times before I’m done, but that’s because it’s one of the most grounding truths I’ve learned. The sooner you realize it, […]