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 […]
Boundaries CPTSD Healing Tools IFS Therapy Relationships & Attachment Therapy Therapy and Support Triggers
CPTSD and the Trauma That Gaslights You
There’s no polite way to say this, but CPTSD is a mindfuck. It doesn’t just hit you with trauma. It follows up with a fun little side dish of self-hatred that convinces you the trauma didn’t even count. You survive something awful, sometimes for years, and instead of your brain saying, “Wow, that was terrible, […]
How IFS Therapy Helped Me Heal from CPTSD
For those of us who’ve been diagnosed with CPTSD, real healing often begins the moment we stop asking, “What’s wrong with me?” And start asking, “What happened to me, and how did I adapt to survive it?” That shift is everything. It changes the whole lens through which we see ourselves. However, knowing the right […]
CPTSD Recovery: Embracing Feelings to Heal and Grow
I used to think being in my feelings was a weakness. Especially living with CPTSD and trauma. That if I let myself feel anything, sadness, anger, even happiness, it meant I was giving my trauma a seat at the table. Like feeling was the same as surrendering. So I armored up. Numbed out. Laughed things […]
When Therapy Turns into an Emotional Excavation
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 […]