Unresolved trauma acts like an internal abrasive, leaving the survivor’s nervous system feeling raw. After trauma ruptures both emotional and physical boundaries, the survivor feels exposed and endangered. Each change in the environment has to be evaluated as a possible threat. Healing practitioners can provide a calm refuge for overwhelmed survivors by offering a stable… Read More
Healing Tools
When Help Means Rescue
While survivors of childhood abuse are often wary of receiving help, we also long for rescue. Dreams of rescue Children growing up in abusive or neglectful homes dream of their “real” parents sweeping in and scooping them up, or running away and finding a better home somewhere else, or being careful and quiet and good… Read More
Practice Kind Language
Content Note: Ableist language used as negative examples. As we walked along, my friend tripped over a raised bit of sidewalk. “Pick up your feet!” she scolded herself. I could imagine her four-year-old self being dragged by the hand as her mother scolded her in exactly those words a half-century earlier. Oppression by default We… Read More
Relieve Pressure: Replace Should with Could
When we simultaneously feel that we “should” get a lot of paying work done and “should” do self-care and “should” maintain a clean home and “should” make the world a better place, we feel shame that we are failing in so many ways. We can reframe our thoughts by replacing “should” with “could.” “Should” makes… Read More
Presence After Trauma: Introduction
Presence After Trauma: Reconcile with Your Self and the World is a non-judgmental companion for your healing process after the initial crisis is over. Years into your healing work, you might feel that you have largely come back to yourself, and at the same time wonder why you still have trauma-related problems. Or, you might… Read More
Prefer Narratives with Hope
In her presentation for Write/Speak/Code 2016, Naomi Ceder describes how our narrative about a situation controls the options we have. When she was young, the narrative she saw about trans people was one of sickness, wrongness, and absence of hope. The only way to transition was to renounce contact with all current family and community…. Read More
Heal Around the Edges
As you may remember from getting scraped knees as a child, physical wounds heal from the outside in, at the borders with healthy tissue, where they receive the resources needed to rebuild. Trauma heals that way, too. Somatic Experiencing techniques help us navigate the border between traumatic memory and present time. When we have access… Read More
Weave Your Body Whole
Trauma fractures us internally and externally, splitting our sense of our bodies and sundering our connections with the rest of the world. Spiritual tools like Jewish Kabbalah and the process of counting the omer can help us weave ourselves back together, looking at qualities of kindness, boundaries, compassion, endurance, Nature, connection, and sovereignty. Any tool… Read More
Check In With Your Chakras
The chakras are energy centers along the front of the spine from tailbone to crown. They are a key part of the energy map of the human body, developed around 3,000 years ago in India. Some people dedicate years of focused yoga and other meditative practices to refine the connection between body and mind, allowing… Read More
Choose an Easier Road
I rode my bike down a freeway on-ramp the other day. I expected a symmetrical interchange with a bridge across the freeway, and was halfway down the ramp before I saw it was freeway-only. Fortunately, it was a sunny afternoon and traffic was light. I cautiously crossed the on-ramp to the paired off-ramp, waited for… Read More