Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 26: Zeal & Zest

Author Note: If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
 Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

Today is our last Wellspring Wednesday for Season One. While it has been an honor for the last six months to share internal resources, self-care advice, and education about your trauma care — this week, I had the idea to share one of my own internal strengths. Zest and Zeal. What do I mean by that?

What I mean is walking my own tumultuous trauma recovery road (and still journeying), I have found my passion in advocating for others through this podcast, coaching, and being a light for trauma survivors around the globe. Having come to a place in my own recovery where I have done the work and will not stop doing the work, I found my home as a trauma recovery coach. This summer, I’ll complete my Advanced certification with the IAOTRC. By September, I’ll have completed the IFS Institutes’ Online Training Circle when I’ll be able to officially call myself an “IFS-Informed, Trauma-Trained, Advanced Recovery Coach”. I literally couldn’t be more thrilled to have found this zeal of working with other trauma survivors in their healing. I love that I am able to talk to strangers that I meet daily via work and travel about their traumas and wounds and that I can support them in finding a good regimen of care for themselves. Gaining more knowledge as I continue self-study, I am working on developing a program for “trauma prevention” by educating people on fetal stress, infant attachment, and how important a healthy foundation of life is for raising healthy humans in later years. I’m also currently obsessed with Epigenetics and Fetal/Maternal Microchimerism. More on that topic to come soon enough!

My current work receiving IFS coaching and becoming an IFS informed Coach is at the heart of everything I do and love. Inner Child Healing is SO possible, and I have fallen in love with IFS with a special sort of zest. I’ve had been years of reading and studying IFS, but now experiencing healing myself and helping guide others in their inner realm is magical. Doing IFS sessions with my clients literally feeds my soul!

I don’t say all this to be boastful, but to help others in finding their zest for life and what they can be truly zealous about. For a couple decades, I had heard so many times, “Sara, you should become a life coach.” Something about it never stuck even though it seemed really cool and a pretty good fit for my personality. The day I heard the term “Trauma Recovery Coach” that fateful day on Guy MacPherson’s podcast, my heart exploded, and I knew I had to chase it. Sitting in the right place at the right time is really possible. Chasing your dreams, finding your zeal, and moving toward your best reality is all possible. True, deep, long lasting trauma recovery (while it’s an ongoing process) is truly possible. There is nothing else I could be more zestful for — to help others hear that, believe it, and actualize it for themselves.

If you are ready to add some support to your journey, reach out. Let’s see what resources I can connect you with or find out if coaching is a next great step in your healing journey. I am here ready, working on myself, and waiting for whoever wants to cross my path next. Until next season’s Wellspring Wednesdays return — stay healthy, dig into your own Wellspring, and have a ton of great moments!

***Don’t miss out on a special discount on the final episode of Season One of Trauma Survivorhood’s Full Circle Friday called “Zig Zag” which launches on July 1st! Have a great summer!

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 25: YOLO

Author Note: If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
 Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

So, YOLO, right? You know — You Only Live Once. The acronym is said to be similar to the Carpe Diem phrase, in that it should ignite folks to really go out and capture it all before it goes away forever.

For Trauma Survivors, carpe’ing anything usually takes a back burner to just trying to survive, working on our healing, retraining our brains, reframing our thoughts, and finding new, healthier coping skills. So who has time for YOLO fun, right?

Consider this your invitation to just think about it. Maybe you need permission to carpe stuff right now. I give you full and utter permission; can you accept that for yourself? Maybe you don’t want to carpe the day, maybe just these next 5 minutes. Maybe for you, you already KNOW you only live once, but you are tired of just living and want to try to live in a new way … more powerfully, louder, larger, with more excitement, healthier, with a fresh start, or in a more positive way.

If you find yourself in the dark part of your trauma recovery journey where you feel like you aren’t free to dream yet — that’s okay. What if you just took this time while listening to/reading this episode to make a mental note that soon in the future it will be safe to try? Can you even imagine the place in your healing where you start having freedom from maladaptive coping skills and addictions, having new healthy friendships and supportive people to encourage you, having boundaries that protect you from those who want to take advantage of you, and having self-care regimen that fills you up from the inside? Can you begin to fantasize about what it will feel like when you can trust yourself and your gut instincts again? Just even recognizing those things today, can that be enough for right now?

If you are down the road a ways on your healing path, are you starting to make a bucket list? Are you allowing yourself to play and be creative? Have you given yourself permission to find happiness in the small wins and celebrate yourself? Are you ready to start carpe’ing things — recovering the peace and joy your trauma tried to steal from you?

Sure — YOLO! Instead of it being some kind of call to action, what if it could mean a quiet space to meditate on this one life you have been given? Yes, you do only live once, but your one life has brought you a lot of pain, misery, fear, suffering, and protective instincts to try to keep you alive. So now that you’ve come to this place of trauma recovery — is restoration of your happiness possible? Remind yourself that you only get one shot at this life — in this time, this body, this space. For some, YOLO is an anthem, a battle cry to live life to the fullest. And for you, maybe you are there now. And if you aren’t, YOLO can be a reminder that your life matters, and every day brings small gains, small progress. For us, each day, we are carpe’ing the hell out of our recovery. And that’s worth something amazing.

If you need a hand or help getting a leg up in the recovery process, feel free to reach out. I’ll do my best to resource you in any way I can. Schedule a free consult today to see if coaching is right for you in your process right now. Maybe it’s the next best thing for you to carpe this week! Your one, amazing, honest, true, authentic, best life is already here right now! Happy seizing!

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 24: X-Factor

Author Note: If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
 Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

Coming full circle in this trauma recovery path means recognizing your innate goodness and your inherent self-worth. If you are still struggling with that, that’s okay. We are all at different places in our journey. If you are truly starting to love yourself, cherish your worth, and realize your amazingness, I’d like to share this topic to help you suss out what makes you so great. I find this to be more of an exercise than just an informational episode. You are more than welcome to just listen and ponder, but you may get a lot out of this one by actually pausing this as we go and really thinking on the answers or maybe journaling them out. If you get stuck on any questions, that’s fine. You can just write them down for later, bring them to your therapy or coaching session, or get some insights from your close friends.

Doing an exercise like this really roots down into an important part of trauma recovery: reclaiming your authentic self. This is the magical power where self-awareness meets self-love. It’s okay to love yourself completely as you are now and also to want something even better for yourself. It’s great to really appreciate your hard work and know that you aren’t done yet. It’s also amazing to realize your full potential and then take your time actualizing it. I guarantee, though, we all have x-factors that make us unique who we are as an individual — no matter where we came from, what we went through, what our last name is, who we want to be, what others think of us, or anything about our physical shape and size. Let’s give this a try.

What is something noteworthy about you?

What is a special talent or gift?

What are some of your best personality traits?

What is your strongest, easiest moral to comply with?

What makes you uniquely you?

What are the top three compliments you get from safe, loving people in your inner circle?

What are the top three compliments you get from people who just meet you?

What remarkable characteristic seems to flow from your soul?

What would you do with three magic wishes?

What was the best day of your life, and why?

What five main things would you do or say if you knew tomorrow was your last day on earth?

What makes you great?

What momentous achievement have you had?

What is an accomplishment you have always wanted to reach?

What components make up the favorite person in your life?

What elements make up the three most influential people, in your opinion, in the whole world and span of history?

What are some of your most crucial desires?

What quality do you admire most in people?

What in the past has stopped you from being everything you ever dreamed?

What is the source of your strength and resilience?

Taking these questions to heart, you are finding your own x-factor. The superhero that lives inside of you is hidden inside these answers. When you feel ready, take some time to pursue these like riddles of your soul. We all have an x-factor; we all have greatness deeply rooted and organically ingrained in us. Accept nothing less than that for yourself. Maybe you aren’t ready to discover all these answers today, and that’s okay. When you are and when you find it, I’d love to hear about it. If you get stuck and need insight, I can help with that too. Trauma recovery can be so hard that we forget to stop and recognize all the amazing work we do. Finding your x-factor, take a Jubilation Moment to celebrate yourself. You are nothing short of remarkable!

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 23: Wellspring

Author Note: If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
 Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

The reason I love the concept of the wellspring is because it means not just an abundant, continual supply, but also because it is the original, true source of that bounty. Isn’t that beautiful for trauma recovery? To know that all the work you are doing is coming from this original, authentic place inside you, to help you return to the authentic Self that trauma tried to destroy. To me, that’s majestic. Here inside of you lies this amazing wealth of resources.

You are born with this inherent deserving of love, care, attention, respect, and safety. From your inner wellspring, you created your identity by digging the hole and building the well. The trauma you suffered tried to damage or destroy this identity. (See the term for “victima” in the episode called Victimhood.) However, you have this life-giving abundance at its original source that has been with you since birth — the true and worthy Self that trauma tried to force you to surrender and lose by breaking or blocking the well that accesses the supply. And, yet, here you are. An overcomer. A marvelous feat of fate, and you are doing this arduous work.

Now is the time to fully realize and fully accept that you have all the healing inside of you, below the surface, in a beautiful, true, overflowing, natural river. Yes, you may need to unblock the dug hole, repair the old well, and even (for some of us) rebuild an entirely new one. The wellspring is in there, flowing away, deep below the surface. Your access point via the well has been altered, damaged, corrupted, dilapidated, or destroyed. But nothing, in my opinion, can poison the wellspring underneath because it is by definition a continual flow — ever replenishing itself by inherent goodness.

The work we do as trauma survivors is to first remember we have the wellspring, believe it’s there, and believe it’s your authenticity. We can learn to trust this wellspring as we dig down and create a connection from the earth to its wondrous flow. This looks like trusting yourself for your own healing and regaining connection to your body, mind, and spirit. Once you’ve dug down, you can tap into this unadulterated river of self-knowing, self-care, and self-love. From there, we can build a beautiful fountain or well, so that you can sustain the connection to the true source and have it more readily accessible anytime you need its abundance. That’s where creativity, play, and true joy can be ever present for you to use at your disposal. It’s when you start losing touch with your trauma identity and start returning, full circle, to your authentic self. Boundaries and healthy relationships will become a new normal. Trauma responses will start to be supplanted by new coping mechanisms. New habits of regular self-care can begin to flourish in your life.

And it all starts with finding and re-connecting to that authentic wellspring. It doesn’t matter where you are in this process. I am always here to support in whatever way I can. I’ll bring the shovel and some lemonade and help you dig the hole, or I’ll bring the supplies for the well building or help you map the blueprint. Whatever you need, feel free to reach out, ask any questions, give feedback, or schedule a free consult to see if coaching is a good next step for you. This is amazing and hard work, and I am definitely here for it.

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 22: Victimhood v. Survivorhood

Author Note: If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
 Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

Disclaimer: This is an educational and opinion piece. This in no way reflects on a person who prefers to be considered a trauma/abuse Victim or a Survivor. This episode is food for thought to help you see both sides to each word, to think on your own preference, and to gain some insight into the lives of people living with trauma if you aren’t in the traumatized person category at all. As always, I am open for comments, questions, or concerns. As a trauma recovery coach — I want to offer you options to sort through so you can find what makes most sense for your journey.

In very recent history, the society has moved away from calling someone an assault victim, a domestic violence victim, a victim of abuse, or trauma victim to this more acceptable term of “survivor”. What does victimhood mean? What does survivorhood mean? Why do both terms have such different connotations?

Before I speak on my personal opinion — here’s some etymology.

The definition of Victimhood is “the state of a being a victim”. The term Victim comes from the Latin word ‘victima’ meaning to slaughter or kill. The dictionary says now that a victim is one who is killed, harmed, or injured, as a result of a crime, accident, or other event or action. To be a victim means that one is hurt, killed, damaged, or destroyed by (fill in the blank). In simple terms: something or someone did damaging actions, or you were killed or hurt by a destructive event.

Survivorhood as a noun does not exist in the dictionary yet. It comes from the usage of the term “victimhood” but with the survivor/survived/survival concept tailored to the first part of the compound word. The word survivor itself means “a person that survives/lives” and a “person who continues to function and prosper in spite of opposition, hardship, or setbacks”. So to define a Trauma Survivor — this would be a person who lived through and is prospering post traumatic hardship.

Either way you slice my forthcoming opinions — if you want to be called survivor, it means you were at some point, for some length of time, a victim. Victimhood comes first. You must be someone who is hurt, damaged, or destroyed by something or someone which executed a criminal act, accident, or traumatic event or actions on you. By pure definition, if a victim survives the pain and lives through it — they can be still considered a victim by choice or may prefer to switch to the term Survivor.

I believe the societal shift from victim to survivor has a beautiful purpose. I believe it is used in order to bring power back to the victim by acknowledging their survival. I can also understand that for some victims — they don’t feel like survivors. I hear you. Some victims feel irrevocably damaged, and they don’t feel they are at the place of prospering or even able to move forward. Some victims barely feel they are even alive. Victims sometimes also like this term for their personal story because it reminds people that they were victimized. By terminology, you cannot be victimized if you did not have an offender. This term victim may help you hold accountable the evildoer who damaged you in this traumatic or abusive way. There are some that believe the word “survivor” is for cancer patients, childhood illnesses, car accidents, violent acts of nature, and other traumas that didn’t have a villain to blame. I honor a victim’s feelings and will use that term with someone who prefers it. It’s their story, so I can listen and be moved to use their suitable title.

I can also explain the survivor’s side of the story and why they believe that is the more accurate title for them. A survivor, we saw by definition, is one who survived through any hardship — in this case, trauma. They didn’t just survive but are able to continue on and find prosperity. There is first a stage of victimhood where they must admit they were the victim of a crime or injustice or physical harm by someone who did terrible things to them. This is part of the process. Walking through what happened to you is a huge part of this. From there, one can move through the stages toward “survivorhood” by processing their past trauma, moving into the truth of what happened and how they respond to the trauma, and doing the deep work. Then, on the other side, they can now find glimpses of regaining trust with themselves and others, reconnecting to their authentic self, and reframing their experience to use it for surviving and thriving.

As you can tell from the title of this podcast (“Trauma Survivorhood”) that I personally prefer and associate more with the term Trauma Survivor. Some have argued that victimhood is a phase of survivorhood is a place where victims get stuck and don’t want to or can’t yet move forward or prosper. I wouldn’t be quick to judge someone in that space because the same has been said for someone who is “merely surviving” instead of going all out thriving. They could argue ‘why don’t you call yourself a Trauma Thriver?’. That’s why I can say with confidence — these are just words, terms, monikers, designations. The term itself doesn’t define where you are in this very difficult trauma recovery journey. There is no room, in my opinion, for us to be judging other trauma victims/survivors/thrivers.

Let’s all just continue to plug along winding our way through the trauma recovery labyrinth and encourage each other as we go. If you are in the place in your journey where you’d like to learn more about the trauma recovery process, please reach out to connect with me. I’d love to hear from you to resource you and encourage you.

Wellspring Wednesday|Week 21: Unnecessary

Author Note: If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
 Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

I speak a lot about coping skills on these episodes. It’s really important to acknowledge and honor your coping skills. Whatever regulation methods your body has been using, mechanisms of safety and comfort, and everything that brought you even a bit of peace while you endured what you endured — those are coping skills. The cool thing about the brain is that when something works, it can stop looking for ways to accomplish the end result. For instance, it wouldn’t need to spend energy keeping you calm in stressful situations if it found that food or medication temporarily did that for you throughout your teen years enduring an abusive foster home.

The saying that “neurons that fire together, wire together” is true. Now when the brain picks up the cue of overwhelm like it did during your teenage span, it can just temporarily pacify your nervous system with binge eating because that was working then. The brain thinks “problem solved” and can file that tool in the “use again next time that ‘overwhelm’ starts to spike”. This doesn’t matter to the brain if the overwhelm came from a perceived fear, stress of prepping for a college exam, a sighting of a look-alike to your abuser at the grocery store, or your boss asking you to work overtime. The feeling is the same, so the firing sets off to go wire that emotion to binge eating to dull the sense of the overwhelm. This is true for every coping skill. It started out as a high-functioning, adaptive mechanism for your traumatic situation. It was helpful, useable, and had a well-intended purpose.

Now, you are in the place in your healing where you are recognizing not only the aftereffects of the original trauma(s) but also the aftereffects of the coping skills. This is where the journey gets a little intense, and I’m speaking from experience. Taking a further step back looking at your trauma, you can now recognize that the coping skills you’ve adapted are no longer helpful. In fact, they have become unnecessary in reality, even if your brain still stamps them as “works just fine”. Some of these coping tools, you’ll begin to see, have become unhealthy along with being unnecessary. This is where you start examining the aftereffects of the coping tools themselves. Binge eating may have started to cause GI or other biological issues. A substance misuse tool to numb might have now led to dangerous drugs with dangerous consequences. Self-harm may have kept you grounded during your trauma, but now may just be an obsession anytime you feel triggered that is causing scarring or infection. Overworking kept you away from the house from your narcissistic spouse, but now is keeping you from finding a new relationship or enjoying time that you have with your children. Keeping you away from potential abuse using strong trust issues may now cause social isolation problems and lack of healthy intimacy. On and on and on the list can go.

See, your brain wasn’t caring about future effects of your coping skills back when it was just trying to keep you alive. Its concern wasn’t specific to the quality of your life, just making sure you could survive beyond the trauma. That was the goal then. Now, outside of the trauma, these are exactly the types of discoveries that are available for you to work on and through. Sussing out unnecessary coping skills, the mechanisms of survival that no longer serve you, is a great way to explore where they stem from, the origin of the tool, and why your brain still feels it needs to use this under duress.

It’s imperative that we don’t confuse the brain by using the word “unnecessary” in a hurtful way, though. I find it very important to the intrapersonal bridge and your self-trust building for your brain to know that you aren’t saying the skill itself was always unnecessary. Part of the internal healing is to find gratitude for your adaptive coping during the trauma and to really be thankful that you had that comfort, safety, protector, or numbing tool available. If you spend some time really thanking that once-useful tool and your brain for creating it, you will find that this part of you can relax when it’s time to tell it that you no longer need it. This is where you want to gently find ways of exploring the now-unnecessary mechanisms — really rooting around to let it help you with your deep healing, asking it what it wants you to know and why it’s there, and making peace with its once-important job in your life. From there, it’s much easier to call it unnecessary and to de-throne its role in your life now. Once you’ve built a relationship with this coping skill (“Protector” — if you are following IFS language), you can now let it know some of the consequences it is creating in your life, some of the negative after effects, and how and why it is no longer serving you — why it’s no longer needed.

Sometimes this looks like it truly not being needed because the part of you that it was trying to protect you from (severe pain, suffering, potential harm, shame, fear, being hurt by family, etc) is no longer a threat. Yet sometimes it means that that threat is still sometimes there but that you’d rather not use this particular tool anymore because it’s unhealthy to your overall wellbeing. This is where we supplant maladaptive tools for new, healthy ones — like exercise, emotional release, a coaching relationship, singing, breathwork, travel, boundaries, work/life balance, writing, etc.

Each person will be different as to how to handle these old coping skills. Many clients need to continue using their coping mechanisms during the first part of coaching while they are unpacking all the bitter turmoil of the past. If you still need it, then listen to your body and use it if you feel you must. However, there will come a time in your journey where it will be time to put down a burdening pack of stuff and leave it on the trail as you march forward. That’s where support from a coach or a therapist is really helpful — to know when, know how, and to follow through.

If you have questions about this episode, any of the IFS language used here, or want to learn more about unburdening and deep inner healing — feel free to reach out with a message. I’ll resource you and help advocate for you as you find your footing on the trauma recovery road.

Wellspring Wednesday|Week 20: Time

Author Note: If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
 Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

“Time heals all wounds.” The end. Episode over. Go out and just wait for your healing to come magically to you.

…

I find this statement to be personally unnerving and a bit offensive. I don’t think the Greek poet 2,000 years ago who seems to be the author meant it to be hurtful. In fact, I think he probably meant it for good. A soothing salve to help others get through their difficulties, losses, and grievances. I get the heart, but I don’t like the statement.

Not that it doesn’t have some truth. As you remember from episodes Nearsightedness and Objectivity, there is a quality to time and distance that allows for your mind to expand outward to even be receptive to healing. That is true. I agree with that. However, it’s not just some magic wand that waiting 15 years after a sexual assault that you’ll be wound-free. Just as there is not prescription of “add 17 months after you leave your abusive mother’s home and you’ll be cured”. In fact, beyond the original abuse, we know that trauma survivors — especially of childhood trauma — are much more likely to have recurring traumatic relationships, have a more reactionary trigger to new traumas like the death of a friend or a car accident, and are more prone to addictions, crime, and other coping skills that shorten their lifespan. So should we really be waiting around for time to fix all our woes?

I know that sounds dramatic, but as years go on with unhealed trauma, survivors are still suffering the aftereffects, struggling to keep the hope, and can become more isolated away from treatments that can help as the days go on. For some survivors, there is a desperation.

In the practice of IFS (like I spoke on weeks ago), strong protectors are working hard to keep the vulnerable, exiled inner children inside of survivors protected from pain and more suffering. As time goes on, a protector that has a lot of trust issues — for example — will only be proven right again and again as people fail them and the world remains scary. Ultimately, they are doing a great job protecting the ‘exiles’ inside — but they are doing a disservice to the system as a whole. As time marches on, this protector may indeed become more and more resistant to help, and another protector who is “tired of the trust issues” can come to cover that original protector. So now you have an inner child who was taught that people are scary from their original abuse, a protector who works to keep that exile safe by not allowing it to trust anyone, and then another protector who layers on top who is sick and tired of not trusting and getting hurt. Then your Self is sick and tired, and yet days are marching on. It can seem to be getting worse.

Again, I know the author of the saying meant well. I just feel the need to add on here that no matter the trauma, time is just one of the players in the game. It’s what you DO with that time that most matters. Even if it wasn’t childhood trauma, this is true. Let’s say you are in a really terrible accident and lose the ability to walk. You wouldn’t just sit in your wheelchair waiting for time to heal your legs. You would work hard with PT, special treatments, and therapies. With time, multiplied by a lot of work and tons of pain, you can relearn how to walk. Let’s also say that there are no therapies that will help you regain the ability to walk. Now you are just sitting in your wheelchair — but it’s still about what you do with the days after that reality. It takes time to rebuild self-confidence, and that’s only after accepting the truth and dealing with the grief of the loss of your legs as well as all the freedom that goes with it. It takes time to allow others to take care of this new dependent you, and it takes time to work at the small ways you can learn some independence even with your new condition. That’s time multiplied by work and tons of pain again.

Same is true for all types of survivors. Truth is, here you are — a Survivor! Let’s stop and take a moment to applaud that. Next, what can you do with your time post-trauma to work at your healing? What’s the next right step for you? How are you manifesting your healing in the time you’ve been given? Do you need to allow yourself to be angry at your abuser? Do you need to forgive yourself and recognize you aren’t even to blame? Can you learn to be okay with your aftereffects that trauma gave you all the while working to supplant some of the maladaptive coping mechanisms with new, healthy ones? Are you ready to try some modalities of therapy? Are you at a place where having a coach is right for you? Have you allowed yourself to grieve someone you lost? Have you sought out help for your addiction? What do you need in order to be successful at a new relationship or a career move? Are you happy in your current living situation or do you need to make some changes? Have you designed a regimen of self-care and accountability to help you along the way?

Time multiplied by nothing is nothing. Time multiplied by hard, arduous work is healing. Time alone can’t heal all wounds. Time and doing “the stuffs” — that can heal all wounds. Trust me, I know that, eventually, with enough of the time, patience, work, and support — you can heal. If you need a hand, reach out and let me know. Keep on keeping on. Time is marching on, and so come the opportunities to heal and return to your authentic Self. You are amazing!

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 19: Stagnation

Author Note: If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
 Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

Learning to love yourself is exactly that — a learning process. Accepting yourself as you are in this exact moment, in this exact part of your healing journey, that is the secret sauce. No matter how far you’ve come or how far you think you should have come by now — none of that matters to your true self. Your authentic self only cares about the effort that you put in and the work that you are currently doing. It is proud of who you are right now. You can remember that this whole trauma recovery road is a process. Because of that, there are going to be times where you feel like you are flying through this growth thing and then times that you feel stagnated.

I heard something powerful this week on Glennon Doyle’s podcast from her guest Chanel Miller, a trauma survivor, who was talking about feeling stuck. Glennon asked her “So that’s what you’re saying, you bring it back to yourself? All these things were happening, and you were swept up… Going to that art class, was that your way of insisting that you were still in there?”

Chanel replies: “Insisting that I’m still there and that things are still changing. Because when you are in your past, you feel like you are stuck. And you have to look at the small changes. It’s even helpful to go on a walk. If you walk the same loop of your neighborhood every day, I would challenge you to look for the certain factors that are different each time that you walk. You have to know that life is in motion and that it’s impossible to get stuck even if you feel that you are… Art is what forces me to pay attention to these smaller changes. Art also helps me because when I create these creatures or people, I create really whimsical, odd landscapes and beings. I think about how if I am to put my pencil down and mute myself and not do anything at all, if I am to give up on myself, I would also be giving up on all of them…Protecting the things that I make is non-negotiable. That helps me respect myself and my work.”

Glennon’s wife, Abby, answers “My gosh … the beautiful metaphor here is that all of us have an interior world, some of us don’t know how to draw or create beings, but we have an internalized space that if we don’t get it out of ourselves, then we are only actually living in our past, and not able to create a day or create something that could save us or heal us — that is so f*****g amazing.”

So sometimes as survivors, we feel stuck in our world … but the beauty is that the world is always in motion. Time is going to continue to tick. If you take a moment to notice, nothing is stagnant. No matter how slowly something is moving, it’s still moving. A rock may be planted down heavily into the soil, but the earth itself is rotating, so therefore the rock is technically rotating as well. The same air that is around the rock this second is now a different bubble of air around it the next second. Like Chanel said, “it’s impossible to be stuck even if it feels like you are.” The work that you have inside of you — whether it’s focusing on your trauma recovery, advocating for other survivors, creating anything from art to writing a book, sharing your story with a stranger, becoming a more present parent, learning self-compassion — that’s your work. And if you want to choose (yes, because it is a choice) to not show up, not participate in your calling, not pick up your pencil and create whimsical characters — then you are choosing to not actively participate in the movement and growth of the world around you. It doesn’t mean that the world stops spinning or that time quits ticking along. It just means that you are left living in your past. What’s beautiful is that at any moment, the opportunity to rise out of it and participate in your healing and growth is available to you, and you can rejoin the already set-in-motion reality of the present moment.

This is just food for thought for you today. I am still chewing on this myself, but I think it’s a great opportunity to discuss how we heal, how we grow, and how the work never ends even when we don’t want to keep showing up. I’m interested to hear your thoughts on this, so please reach out with comments or questions. As a trauma recovery coach, I think it’s important to share impactful things with curiosity and then see how it lands for my clients. I guess, for today’s episode, I’m kind of seeing how it lands with the entire interweb community of survivors.

So on a final note: Accept yourself wherever you are in your journey; respect your progress. Share your insights. Keep going, even when you feel stuck. Keep going even if you do something really small — even if it’s just a moment to celebrate something small that you have done. Love yourself no matter how slow the growth. Keep the momentum going. You aren’t stuck; nothing is stagnant. Practice makes progress. You are doing amazingly well.

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 18: Red Flags

Author Note: If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
 Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

One of the key internal resources you gain in your trauma healing is to be able to hear, trust, understand, and follow your gut instincts. I listed those out separately because it’s very common for trauma survivors to have self-trust injuries. It’s a relational aftereffect of the trauma or abuse they have endured. During the period of trauma, if it involved another person, which we call interpersonal trauma, the survivor may have been manipulated, coerced, or controlled. Because of that, they struggle to allow their own feelings and thoughts to be welcomed in their life. They may consider themselves the “bad one” in the relationship — which is often true for parent/child abuse if the trauma was during childhood. We’ve talked about how it’s unsafe for a child to think their caregivers are evil, unwell, or unfit, so they often take the blame on themselves. This can happen with any type of relationship trauma. If someone is used to being lorded over, controlled, disrespected, unheard, and belittled for making a choice for themselves — the period of that traumatic relationship will leave them out of touch with their own sense of self. It actually can break their own intrapersonal bridge — the self-trust mechanism inside themselves.

So the first part of the process is to reconnect a survivor with their own self — body, mind, and spirit. This will allow them to even be able to identify a red flag feeling however it presents to them. From there, once a survivor can even begin to hear their own gut instinct again, they then have to work on trusting it. This comes with practice, often by re-enforcing a gut instinct that wasn’t responded to. This can be a painful process because now the survivor feels or even hears something inside them, they still don’t trust it but instead ignore it, and then they learn a hard lesson.

If this has happened to you, I can offer a bit of a reframe. This is exactly the right place to start because this is the working part of re-trusting yourself. The hindsight of the experience, which can have devastating consequences, can show you that you COULD HAVE trusted your instinct and that also in the future you CAN trust it. This re-frame can take the sting away from the situation a bit and allow for a calmer response next time. Remember that what fires together wires together in the brain, so as you work on retraining your brain’s intuition you want to not feel angry toward yourself for NOT following your knowing. Instead, you want to allow for a lot of grace and calmly allow the visceral feeling that you got BEFORE the situation to be praised because it was right. This allows for deeper self-trust to development for next time.

After working to trust, the understanding comes in. What exactly is your gut telling you in a circumstance? Is it just afraid of something — like failure? Does it not want to take the leap into a new career path or an online course because it’s nervous to try something new? In this case, you can now work on trying to grasp what your intuition is trying to get you to do. Not always does your gut throw up a red flag because it’s definitely something potentially dangerous and you definitely should run away. Delineating between a red flag and a trauma response is really important. It takes time to listen to what’s behind your intuition. Does it just not want you to get hurt? Is it feeling like something is too good to be true? Is it worried you may get embarrassed? Those are trauma responses that may keep you from a really good thing or an opportunity to grow. You’ll start listening to, trusting, and then finally grasping what your feelings and hunches are actually about. You get curious about them, ask them questions, dig down to the roots of where they are coming from. You can work on your trauma responses differently than just fight, flight, freeze. That’s a main focus with several clients as they start to identify their trauma reactions v. their gut.

When it is truly a red flag, lastly comes the following part. This is always a work in progress. Figuring out how to sense your intuition, learning to trust it, and then training your understanding are all hard enough sometimes. However, when you’ve heard it, self-trust it, and then decipher that it’s an actual red flag that needs to be attended to — you have to take the leap and just follow that. This is obeying your own best knowing, honoring yourself with respect as you make a different choice, and move away from the red flag. This is often going to occur in a relationship where the co-worker, friend, or intimate partner starts showing you their true colors. Your insides start churning with info about how this looks similar to an old relationship that you’ve been through before. Their red flags start looking like the red flags that you ignored in the previous abusive relationship, and your whole being wants you to run. You can take some time to understand your intuition with curiosity, and if it does seem like this person is resembling something controlling or dangerous, you can follow it. It’s not just that your heart is nervous about caring about someone again, or the trauma response of fear of intimacy, but these are legitimate red flags that you need to honor. In this way, you can have confidence to get as much distance as you need and then congratulate yourself for following your instincts (maybe with a Jubilation mindfulness moment?)!

These are not easy tasks. I have done a lot of work on my self-trust bridge inside, and yet I still sometimes waiver in my intuition. I recently was headed somewhere that my gut kept telling me not to go. I could hear it, feel it, and trust it. It was a legit circumstance to avoid. I knew it. My gut knew it anyways. I even almost asked the Uber to turn around three times while on the ride. I didn’t listen and put myself in an unsafe situation. Later, I really gave self-compassion and praised my gut for recognizing the red flags and for trying to keep me safe. I forgave myself for not listening and then was able to re-affirm that my red flag button works just fine. In the future, I’m much more likely to listen to it and be kind to myself. That story comes after years of doing really good work and making big strides against self-abandonment and not being connected to my body. So, you know, this is a process, and no one is going to be perfect. Be patient with yourself.

Trauma taught you to be small, quiet, invisible, in self-doubt, to self-abandon your wants and desires, to put down all your own emotions for your abuser’s, and to not speak out. Your trauma recovery now is teaching you the exact opposite — to reconnect to your true self, show up and speak out for yourself, reunite with your emotions and desires, and go after them with your whole heart. It starts today and will continue as a journey for the rest of your days. Its prize comes even in the small wins, small gains, small choices, and small insights. You got this!

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 17: Quantity v. Quality

Author Note: If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
 Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

I love math. I am a human who just loves math. I get it; I can work with it. I like to solve equations. An algebra workbook would be what a coloring book is for others. I like figuring out problems; I love solving for X. There’s an actual true solution to every equation. There is an exact calculation once you understand the problem and know the formula. Oh, how I love formulas! To me, math just makes sense.

I digress because this show/blog isn’t about math. It’s about trauma recovery. The beauty of healing is that there is no finite solution. There is a lot of system creating, formula following, and problem solving — sure. Yet, with healing, you can’t know those things in advance. You are making them up as you go. Healing isn’t a math equation; it’s an art. It’s creative. It’s a dance. It’s a poem, a prose, an essay. It’s getting up every morning and trying to find joy while drudging through miles of pain. It’s exploratory, unpredictable. There are no X and Y to solve for or anything you can punch into a calculator to get an answer. Healing is the answer. The art of healing is the solution. The mitigation of the aftereffects of your trauma is the result. The calculation is whittled down to how much relief you find in your day-to-day life. The secret sauce is finding peace within yourself as you loop around in wild fanciful circles, small pivots, and untamed brush strokes. You are recreating your authentic self; you are putting together puzzle pieces and making something beautiful.

There are no rules, no way to quantify your experience. What works for you may indeed trigger another. What your best picture looks like today may feel like a 4-year-old’s drawing the next. You rip it up, and you start over — over and over again. You take hours learning the choreography of this healing dance, only to discover you hate dancing. Then you walk away for a year or more. You come back, and healing is waiting for you to pick back up wherever you left off. There is not a magic equal sign that means you’ve completed the work. There’s just a fresh canvas every morning waiting for you to design something from scratch. The hope comes from knowing the blank canvas is waiting and knowing that you are the only one who can create this thing.

We’ve talked about how the healing road is dizzying with curves and bumps and twists. You can’t find an end because the end is not the goal. Learning to love the journey is the goal. Would it be easier to have a specific gauge to check in on how much healing you’ve accomplished? Sure. Would it be lovely to have a meter to see how much farther you’ve got to go? Of course. (Although, depending on the person, both of those may be devastatingly pessimistic measurements, so let’s be thankful that they don’t exist.) So if you are like me and really like to find solutions and fix things, how can you value your healing if not by ranking it in size, shape, and distance? That assessment can only come from your soul. Once you’ve hit one plateau of healing, you can relish in that for a while, only to be assured that even deeper healing is around the corner. How is the journey going? How do you feel day to day? Can you give a quality to your current mood and mental state? Can you feel the internal changing happening? Can you be okay with the small wins and build momentum on those?

That qualitative condition in your heart, mind, spirit, lifestyle, emotional state, mental health, and overall well-being — that is measurable. You can do much more; you could do way less. None of that matters if something isn’t working. Also, nothing can compare to finding that thing that serves you really well — a creative outlet, a new friendship, a coach you connect with, the replacement of an old coping skill, or a good night’s sleep. You don’t judge that with ounces, weeks, or inches. You compute it with your feelings, your instinct, your true self.

If you need support along the journey — maybe you aren’t happy with your current quality assessment or you’ve hit a plateau and are hungry for more — feel free to send me a message or schedule your free consult today. A road trip is always better with a friend to support you; I’ll even chip in a little for gas. Either way, never give up on yourself. You never know when the next level of healing is around the corner. No calculators needed.

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 16: Processes

Author Note: If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
 Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

I want to chat about the word process in all senses of the definition today. Trauma recovery starts with a lot of processing — in the sense of “sorting through” the trauma you’ve endured whether that means thinking on it, talking about it, facing your emotions about it, finding professional help to cope through what you uncover, etc. This fire-starter of processing can be a lengthy ordeal. It takes patience with yourself as you move through the truth of your abuse or trauma, but eventually you will be at a place of some sort of acceptance where real healing can begin. You can also process through your trauma — as in “refine or rectify” — not as easily as you can distill water or decontaminate hazardous areas though. In the sifting and sorting that you are already experiencing, you can find some purification. Some may call this purging — maybe a cleansing of things that remind you of your abuser, going no contact with a toxic family member, moving out of a house where your tragedy happened, or anything you need to find solace.

From there, the process — as in “a fixed series of actions leading to a result” definition — is now the trauma recovery. You are looking for a combination of events or activities that start improving and healing the aftereffects of your trauma. This is a good time for coaching to begin — when you feel in more of a growth mindset and are at the place where you are examining the traumatic disturbances and looking to find relief. The groundwork that you do here is like setting into motion a path toward recovery. You can continue to sift through the side effects that you are suffering from — not just the trauma but the coping skills you adapted to survive your trauma. This is the pivot point we talked about weeks ago where now you are ready to begin thinking about helpful resources, therapeutic interventions, support groups, and getting your mind, body, spirit realigned and reconnected.

This is where a good routine becomes the blueprint for your healing. This may mean trying medications for the psychological struggles — which can be a difficult road to travel to find the right one and the right dose. This takes time, patience, and cooperation with your medical care team. This may mean trying bodywork or energy work to destress your nervous system, or meditation to begin to slow your mind and allow a new adaptation of mindfulness to emerge. This may mean a dedication to your therapist or coach — which also can take some hit or miss chances before settling into the right one. Once there, building a bonded relationship will be paramount to explore safety in yourself and others, and to grow in trust and intimate conversation. This is also a time in the process of strategizing to find creative outlets and long-lost passions to move you from trauma identity back to your authentic self.

After you’ve developed the system, you are in the process — as in “forward movement” — which is the progression phase. This is where the headway you made begins to reap benefits of healthy life functioning, a solid mind, body, spirit connection, peace, good relationships, improved sleep and physical health, replacing trauma lies with beautiful new affirmations, and supplanting harmful coping mechanisms with new, safe ones.

This of course is all under the umbrella of one, big, years-long process. The healing work is the healing, remember. The recovery road is the recovery. You may never find an end to it, to be honest. Some professionals say there is no truly “healed” trauma survivor, but along the way, the journey becomes more sustainable, more productive, more healthy, and more enjoyable as you grow and do the work. Remember that it’s not a linear road, and sometimes the process has detours and cul-de-sacs. Keep your head forward though, so you can also be proceeding onward.

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 15: Objectivity

Author Note: If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
 Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

To start off today, I want to give a shout out to Feedspot. They ranked “Trauma Survivorhood” as #32 on their most comprehensive Top 60 Trauma Podcast’s list this month! I appreciate that and am honored to continue to bring solid content three times weekly to survivors around the globe. Ranking #1 on this list, as it should is Guy Macpherson’s “The Trauma Therapist” podcast. This is the podcast I was listening to that fateful day years ago when one of my Association’s coaches came on to explain the modality of Trauma Recovery Coaching. It’s all been forward motion for me since then. I’m honored to even be on a list with his amazing podcast, and he is now weekly helping me to develop a solid coaching business helping survivors find their full circle healing as a trauma recovery coach myself! That’s a full circle moment, for sure!

Now let’s dive into today’s topic: on being objective. I love this word and its many meanings. The dictionary defines objective as: a) expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations, b) of, relating to, or being an object, phenomenon, or condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers : having reality independent of the mind, c) something toward which effort is directed : an aim, goal, or end of action.

Similar to last week when I discussed nearsightedness, objectivity is a perception free from distortion. Although no longer talking about actual vision, this concept comes with time and energy and space and distance. Being able to have an undistorted perspective, one must have a bit of distance from the emotions and biases of the situation. This can be hard to do for yourself and by yourself. Not impossible — as I believe all things are indeed possible. Yet, a lot of what coaching is for my clients to be an outside shift in their perception. Not at all to say that I take away from the pain and reality of their trauma. We never downplay the emotions that come up during your trauma healing. We aren’t trying to get rid of your past — just looking for new ways to cope in the future. I just personally believe that having another’s view of the aftereffects from your trauma is really insightful when moving forward as a survivor. I do think that an individual needs to be able to see the affirmations that their trauma left with about themselves — all the lies that come out subtly of what we believe to be true about ourselves. This sometimes sounds like an affirmation of something a survivor says: “I can’t do X” or “I can’t figure out Z”, or something they limit themselves to like: “I will always be this way”. Those black and white statements that we say so subconsciously continues to wire into the brain the things your abusers made you think about yourself and the world around you. Having some internal space and distance from your trauma allows you to see things from a more objective view. Never, ever condoning the abuse or forgetting about the trauma, but in a way seeing things from a fresh view. This can be challenging and comes with a lot of practice.

Beyond that, objectivity also serves to allow for more concrete evidence to present. You can step back and recognize that you still speak illy of yourself when stressed or that you use your parent’s words to describe your lack of accomplishments. You can question those all or nothing statements, asking yourself if they are really true and why you believe them and when you started believing them. This is a powerful internal resource for yourself — similar to CBT training to challenge your thoughts. Can you begin to have some objectiveness when you think and talk about yourself? Is there room for reframing? Are you looking for other ways to feel differently about a situation so you can unstick from the misery?

What I most love is that a whole other definition of objective means a goal. It’s almost as if once you allow objectivity to work its way into your life, you can start setting recovery goals based around this new view and way of thinking. It’s just really beautiful to me that this change can occur with just a few questions — asked of yourself or your coach. Small challenges to your mindset can turn it from doom and gloom to a growth mindset over time. You can begin to see yourself the way your friends and loved ones do; you can hear and speak your trauma story in a new light with a new hope for the future. Then, you can set aside goals that you want to move toward and start growing right before your very eyes.

If you think you are ready to begin this kind of journey of healing and reframing, setting goals, and changing your life from the inside out — send me a message or schedule a free 20-minute consult today to see if coaching is the next best step for you. I’d love to support you as you start exploring your way from subjectivity to objectivity.

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 14: Nearsightedness

Author Note: If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with, check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

When it comes to trauma, in the moment, safety and survival is all that matters to your brain.  When it comes to trauma recovery, shifts in perspective become of utmost importance.  Trauma has many effects.  A lot we have talked about in the last weeks, and later this week, we’ll dive into more about what trauma does to the brain.  For today’s topic, nearsightedness, I’d like us to think about how trauma distorts our lenses – how we see ourselves, others, and the world as a whole.  In terms of eyesight, myopia is caused by an eye shape issue that causes the eyeball to refract light incorrectly.  Light rays are supposed to focus on your retina, not bend in front of it.  This slight misshapenness changes the entire way that a human’s eyeball is able to see objects far away from it.  It may see things fine up close, but looking more broadly causes distortions, blurriness, and inabilities. 

Relating this to trauma, as I imagine you know where I’m going, trauma misshapes how we feel and think about many things.  We may able to handle well-lit situations, well-understood concepts, black and white ideas, or closely tuned circumstances.  However, when life throws us all the nuances, demands us to plan and prepare for future things, or creates a bit of width in front of us with relationships, careers, goals, and lifestyles – these things can become distorted.  It is easy to see ourselves in this one color – as if we are wearing the same persona every day.  It’s also simpler to just accept that the world is scary, and that people are bad.  Trauma taught us that, after all. 

However, a lot of healing can be had by creating some distance from your trauma, challenging some of the lies about yourself that your trauma made you believe, and reframing your perception by recognizing that the trauma is over and that you can now choose to live in a different mindset than your trauma brain wants you to be stuck in.  With coaching, a lot of what I do for clients is help them see some other options of how they could think about everyday stressors, triggers that occur, relationship patterns they are suffering, and their toxic shame and guilt of themselves.  Every bit of insight that you gain about your trauma brain, how to rewire your neuropathways, and those “aha” moments – this is all new data that widens your perspective.  When you can start seeing yourself in a way separated from your trauma and to see other people as separate from your abusers, this allows for intra- and interpersonal healing.  Reshaping your lens with healing work gives you a fresh and more expansive view of the world around you. 

Trauma created a chasm between your trauma self and your authentic self.  That chasm was cut with pain and abuse that made you feel unworthy, unloved, and not able to trust yourself or anyone else.  The further away you are from your authentic self, the harder it is to see your true self clearly, in focus, and accurately.  You begin to identify with your traumatized self, and it starts to feel so familiar that sometimes it’s hard to know it’s not even you.  Sometimes the real you on the other side of that chasm is so distant and the chasm so wide that, even when you squint, you just can’t see that self anymore - like a ghost lost in the fog. 

Trauma recovery is meant to help you bridge that gap, heal that deformed perspective, clear out those lies so you can begin to change your attitude toward yourself, give you a new point of view so you can reference what happened to you without associating with it anymore.  Appropriate distant can’t be measured in days or years or miles or amounts.  Distance from your trauma is about creating a landscape of extension, and the recovery is the glasses that correct the warped shape of yourself so that the bend of light can amend.  This will allow for clear vision of self, others, and the world.  This will create room for precision, improved sight, healthy observations, curiosity, and will remove the blurry film layer that brings confusion over your authentic self.  

If you need help along this part of your healing journey, feel free to schedule a 20-minute free consult with me or send me a message if you need resources or have questions.  Nearsightedness is a condition of circumstance.  It is correctable and manageable.  Let’s try on some glasses together and find a good fit for you! 

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 13: Middle Way

Author Note: If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
 Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

This is one of my favorite topics and best life practices. It’s this week’s Wellspring Wednesday — which focuses more on internal resources and lifestyle choices rather than on Full Circle Friday — which is more focused on external resources, adjunctive services, and usually philosophies. I placed the Middle Way today because it is indeed a philosophy, a way of life. Personally, though, for me, it’s more of a lifestyle and an internal journey. It’s a personal choice and a way of being. This isn’t the only way of life of course, and some may even disagree with this philosophy. That’s okay; this is just a personal endorsement that has changed my way of thinking in my life.

Essentially, the Middle Way is a life free from extremes. Taoism and Buddhism are often referred to as “the Middle Way”. In a non-theistic way, this is a lifestyle, a way of being that doesn’t allow for one-sidedness. It’s a kind path because it attempts to see all points of view and then finds a median to walk down. I find a lot of logic in Taoism because of the way it finds peace in an unpeaceful world. It offers kindness in an unkind environment.

I firmly believe that anything can and most everything is on a pendulum. There is a perfect center — to relationships, to conversations, to personality traits, to reactions, to moods, to general lifestyle choices, etc. When the swing of the pendulum pushes out too far into an extreme, it’s important to recognize it’s going to swing back too far the other way in order to balance itself back to its perfect center eventually. This is important to recognize because trauma survivors often suffer with black and white thinking. Especially with developmental trauma, survivors can see the world and others and even themselves in an “either/or” context. This is very common. However, life doesn’t work in the black and white way. Life has nuances, multiple angles to the same story, intonations, contradictions, and a lot of grey areas with no solid answer. We survivors like things cut and dry, predictable, and tolerable. I wish it were that simple.

Learning the Taoist way of life, the Middle Way, teaches you the harmony of life by not allowing your thoughts and emotions to be swung too far away from the center. The core tenants of this philosophy are non-doing and non-attachment. Picture the pendulum swing. The belief here is that all things in life are looking for a core center. If a relationship is out of balance, if a job is making you feel unfulfilled, or a child is going through a life crisis — there will eventually be a homeostasis because that’s the design of life. Non-attachment to the outcome is key here because while the pendulum swings wildly, you can walk away from dizzying situations that are dysfunctional or unhealthy. They can keep swinging wildly, and you can stay in your center. Life doesn’t have to take you off your course. Taoism teaches that the world is constantly in fluctuation but that things will return to their origin. The Middle Way also affirms that things don’t have to be mutually exclusive. My first ‘Trauma Survivorhood’ episode called “And” is a good reminder that things can be “both/and” instead of “either/or”. For instance, you can experience two emotions at the same time. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, experiencing two things at once that are powerful like can actually help to bring back the centered balance when you fully allow both of them.

In order for you to stay in your harmonious center, you must allow all the uncentered things around you to fall into the background. In non-doing and non-attachment, you can liberate yourself from being caught in the middle of the natural chaos of life. What we mean by non-doing is not to not do anything, but to monitor your emotional involvement in the natural things in life. If there is a relationship that is causing more stress or harm than wonderful times — the involvement of constantly trying to fix it without the other person putting in any effort for instance — the “non-doing” thing to do would be to step out of the relationship. Carrying both partners efforts will never amount to enough effort to make positive changes in the relationship. The “non-attachment” here doesn’t mean to not be attached to your partner, but to not be attached to the outcome. If you start trying to make positive changes and your partner matches that, you can continue to work on the relationship. Meeting in the middle, this will result in a stronger, healthier relationship. If you are making changes and the other person is not, the distance between you both will gradually, naturally widen. That’s okay because you aren’t attached to the outcome one way or another. Not to say you don’t want your partner to match your efforts or that you don’t have the desire to save the relationship, but non-attachment means you are going to be alright in either outcome. Taoism, following a Middle Way lifestyle, can help you learn to be centered and safe inside of yourself — no matter the rocky world happening around you. You can be okay with whatever the universe throws at you. No, this is not toxic positivity; you don’t have to be extremely happy with every bad thing that will inevitably come. You can learn though to not fall off the wagon, go into the gutter, or fall apart when negative situations arise to challenge your peace. You don’t have to necessarily “trust the universe” (although you can if you feel safe to do so), but it’s important to trust yourself that you will be alright, or even be better, no matter what life throws at you.

There is a safety within yourself — a Middle Way of calm and serenity and inner peace. That harmony from staying in the safe center of your personal pendulum will allow you to stay patient, keep things simple, let go when letting go is necessary, and walk in a space of harmony with yourself, others, and the universe.

This sounds very flowery, and maybe for you, it’s too flowery. As I’ve said, I’m not woo-woo, just a little woo. I personally can vouch for the progress my heart has made with living the philosophy of the Middle Way. It may not be for everyone, but I wish it was for more people. I believe the world would be more harmonious if others would learn to be okay within themselves. Centering, grounding, and trusting yourself are all very hard for trauma survivors. With interpersonal trauma specifically, many survivors find themselves struggling with their intrapersonal bridge of trust. There is healing to be reconciled within yourself, to yourself, by yourself, for yourself. Learning that internal trust, not allowing self-abandonment, and finding a Middle Way — this will be a stepping-stone to healing your relationships with others and the world around you.

If you are interested to learn more or are curious about my story, feel free to send me a message on the “connect” tab of my website or schedule a 20-minute free consult today to see if coaching is right for you. I’ll offer the wisdom that I have in this area if you are open, and I also will not judge you if you’re not. Everyone is on their own path, and I believe each survivor is able to command their own healing in their own way. I would love to help you along the journey in whatever way you choose.

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 12: Labyrinth

Author Note: If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
 Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

I often refer to this thing we do as a “trauma recovery journey”, a path, a road. If I’m really honest though — it’s basically a labyrinth. It’s complicated, dizzying at times, twisty, and topsy-turvy. There’s not just steps forward and steps back, like with any lifestyle goal or achievement worth doing. Because trauma is messy, the recovery will be so as well. There’s really no easy way around this, and for that I am truly story. For myself and for anyone reading, I’m really sorry. It’s heartbreaking to think about how much more pain we must go through in the name of healing. In the sake of rebuilding the puzzle, we must dump the puzzle box over. In order to find the regimen that works for you and the right meds or therapeutic interventions, one must fail again and again. Failing forward is really important though because when you fail, you must learn and then not give up and keep going. However, while in the throws of trauma recovery, you often want to (or do for a time) give up. There isn’t a timeline on this like other medically intricate healing types. There isn’t a trauma recovery surgeon who’s going to set a pre-op, a surgery date, and then a post-op follow-up care routine that lasts 10–12 weeks.

This so far sounds really bleak, so let me pause for a moment and remind you that THIS IS WORTH IT. Also, you should know that there are so many GOOD twists and turns on this labyrinth. This is where it gets good because even though you may still be in a muddy patch of your trauma road, you may have an eye-opening revelation about yourself, you may make a lifestyle change that makes a huge difference, or you may learn something important about your attachment style that helps you even more in your healing. These twists of the maze seem to take you down a great path momentarily, and you get a fresh strength with even a small insight. Maybe you finally (through mindfulness and lots of practice) have a healthy trigger reaction that blows your own mind, and now you are so excited to run down the corridor of this thing, recognizing that you are starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Just keep in mind that around another labyrinthine corner, a big life event or a family get together may not be such an enjoyable stretch. You also sometimes will return to old habits or addictions. There will be times when you wake up and your trauma brain is so loud for no apparent reason that you get stuck in bed for days feeling sorry for all your “failed hard work” (and other lies your trauma brain will tell you). A friend’s comment about their parents may derail a moment of your painful adventure of having no-contact with your parents. Let us not forget that while we are working on this trauma recovery mess, we are also humans living a regular life just trying to work, go to school, have a social life, and live our dreams. In the mix of all these other wild, winding ways is actual real life — where friends let us down, jobs get lost, pets die, kids get sick, cars break down, and other normal human stressors. Sometimes it’s appropriate to put your healing work on hold while you handle a regular life crisis.

Okay, see I’ve gone back to bleakness. Let me ‘re-calculate this route’. Recalibrating back onto a positive track, another day in our healing may look like: a therapy session that leaves you with a smile, a good cry maybe makes you feel so whole, or a friend’s encouragement to you after noticing some healthy changes in you. These days we are enthusiastic about walking the maze another step or two or ten.

There is no right or wrong way to do this. There is only forward — even if it’s a dead end. Yes, sometimes you have to backtrack — even if it’s not pretty. Even if you have to consult a map, and then still get lost. It is worth it, even if you somedays you are in the intricate, confusing journey by yourself. And also, there are checkpoints along the way — I promise. Moments of no return, like a Mario Kart video game; it’s like life’s redemption to give you a leg up after you’ve worked so hard. You can “save your progress”, so, if the whole system crashes, it’s all there whenever you are ready to go back at it. Along the way, like a marathon, there are people throwing water on you, giving you gel packs of nutrients, cheering you on, and waiting at the finish line to snap your success photo.

Truth be told, though, I don’t know if the trauma recovery maze has a complete finish line, but I do know that not all the days are bad and hard. Eventually, with the right psychological support, finding your stride and self-care regimen, and sticking with it long enough — things do seem to have more ease. When you get knocked off the path, it does get easier for your brain to recognize the importance of getting back up and trying again. Kicking old habits, for instance, is hard, but the more you conquer them each time, the more readily your brain will respond to minor slip ups going forward.

This is not the most comfortable post I’ve made. I’d rather be here telling you that within 10–12 weeks, your trauma will be reversed — that after 3 months of treatment, your pain will be in remission. I wish it was that easy, for myself as well. We are in this together. As a trauma recovery coach, my pledge is to see you through this maze — not promising to know a trick to get out of it but a promise to support and guide you as you figure it yourself. If this episode was painful for you to hear or if it all seems too daunting, feel free to message me on the “connect” tab of my website. I’d love to encourage you and resource you, so you don’t feel so trapped in the labyrinth alone.

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 11: Know Better, Do Better

Author Note: If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
 Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

Today’s title comes from one of my top favorite quotes, from Dr. Maya Angelou. The whole quote says “Do the best you can. When you know better, do better.” I love the perfect balance of appropriate blame with personal responsibility. It’s one of my life mottos, and I’d like to take a few minutes to share how I find this to relate to trauma recovery.

What I meant by appropriate blame mixed with personal responsibility is really simple. So often, trauma survivors of childhood abuse or developmental trauma (specifically) blame themselves for being bad, carrying undo shame, and feeling a burden to life itself. The reason for this is also simple. In developmental trauma, a young brain is trying to rationalize why they are being abused, hurt, neglected, yelled at, called names, sexually assaulted, manipulated, etc. The brain can reason between two choices, either: “my caregivers are bad” or “I am bad”. In this quest for logic in a very illogical situation, a child has to choose the “I am bad” logic simply out of safety. If a child determines their caregiver is bad, that will unearth even more dangers, problems, and possibly life-threatening harm to the child. They must decide that they are the bad one, and they somehow deserve the treatment they are receiving. That, my friends, is the best the child can do. It doesn’t have the reasoning faculties to do much more beyond that at that point. Who would sit here and blame a child for feeling that way when the alternative of them being in the care of an evil parent is even more disruptive and harmful?

However, since then, you’ve grown. You’ve learned about yourself; you are even on a self-exploratory path right now even listening to or reading this. You have somehow found yourself on a trauma recovery journey, and, in that, you are discovering that you are inherently good. The truth of that means you are realizing you did not have Good Enough Parents like we spoke on weeks ago. That’s where the grief comes in as you mourn for the world you grew up in. This also means that you have not just a right to do better, but a responsibility to do it.

Now — all you perfectionists out there (myself include), sit back down. I know you already got up and grabbed a pen and paper to start writing down all the ways you have to do better. Or worse yet, you are already grabbing the car keys to take off to start all your wonderful do-bettering. Calm. Breathe. Hear me out.

I’m not saying that with every tiny new bit of wisdom you hear, read, or are told from your therapist or coach means that you have to immediately implement changes. Trust me. Something huge like finally realizing why you binge drink or recognizing your intimacy issues doesn’t automatically solve your behavior and fix you. What I mean is more that you have a responsibility to pursuing your healing. Like in the United States, we don’t have a right to happiness but the pursuit of it. Here, I think, you have a responsibility to give yourself the chance to do better going forward in your future. Once you start learning the truth about your trauma, come to terms with your abuse, flesh out the lies you were told to believe about yourself, and start some self-inquiry (feel free to try out this guided meditation to ignite some of that) — you then are able to make the NEXT BEST STEPS (whatever it is) based on the new info you’ve gathered. If you don’t have the resources, time, energy, or wisdom to know exactly how to do something, you can still choose to pursue those answers to determine which way to start moving.

This also highlights another issue we survivors need to work out — where to place appropriate blame for what did happen to you back then. Just like you wouldn’t fault the child for self-abandoning and self-blaming when they don’t know how to do anything else, you can recognize that now and start figuring out who and what is to blame for the trauma(s) you endured. Once you are able to unburden yourself of that and forgive yourself, you can start the real healing.

You didn’t know anything else but your trauma world. Now you do, so you can shift your pain onto the right person and give yourself appropriate levels of self-responsibility going forward. You can keep listening to this podcast, keep showing up for yourself, start a trauma recovery coaching relationship, read the books, do the work, press on, and push forward. You don’t have to do this in a drill-sergeant way. If fact, you mustn’t. You do this with self-compassion, kindness, gentleness, forgiveness, grace, and perseverance. This is a journey — a long and arduous one at times. But now you know, so now you can do. As you learn, you can heal. As you make small steps, you can grow.

If you need coaching support as you come to these realizations, feel free to send me a message on the Connect tab of my website or schedule a 20-minute free consultation to decide if coaching is right for you. Always do your best with what you can at the time — with what you know, what you have, and who you are. Then, once you know better, you can make the changes and do better. You got this!

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 10: Journaling

*Author Note* If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
 Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

For trauma survivors, we can often be caught “in our head”. We analyze, quietly observe, and examine people and places and things due to hypervigilance. We tend to criticize ourselves to ourselves a lot. Survivors suffer from seeing things “black and white”, and we have a bent toward overthinking what others are thinking about us. Our mind can be on overdrive reading facial expressions, checking other people’s emotional temperature, and losing ourselves in old scripts and patterns that we learned from our trauma.

Being creative is often stunted for childhood trauma survivors — like we talked about weeks ago. Writing is not just creative, but often cathartic. Journaling, in its vast number of forms, is a high recommendation from much therapeutic counsel. The idea of getting thoughts out on paper, writing a letter to your abuser and then burning it, allowing your mind to have an outlet for all its over analytic tendencies, and having a space to write down your growth and struggle points — without anything but your own inner resource of your mind (and a writing tool and paper) — this is a beautiful way to find an outlet for your grief and put your trauma into a new perspective. Essays, short stories, and books are all wonderful things that trauma survivors write to share psychological education, normalize their story, or allow others to find strength and hope via their survival. These are all so special.

But what if the world wasn’t going to read it? Is there healing in just the writing itself? That is a hard yes! The power of journaling has even been documented scientifically as a means of bringing out things that are trapped inside, words that you can’t necessarily say out loud, and a way to find a flow as well as a structure to your ideas and story.

I personally love journaling about my day, my emotions, quotes that I hear, revelations that I get throughout the day, small wins of what I call Jubilation Moments, and hardships that I endured. I do this throughout the day on a small app called “Grid Diary”. This app allows you to set out your own daily writing prompts, and then I just put a few sentences in each box every day. I also have a longer “diary style” journal that I write all kinds of things in. This is a place to get out frustrations, work out my social anxieties, talk to myself, talk to a future generation that probably will never read it, talk about my insecurities, write out my ideas and hopes and dreams, and so much more. I highly believe in gratitude lists as well. This is where you write out things you are thankful for — with no end point or count happening, just writing and writing blessing after blessing. I also have an anonymous blog out there lost in the interweb where I write out all my angry thoughts to the people who have hurt me the most — without anyone knowing they are my words. I often am writing any number of entries in any of these journals through tears. The pain flows out my hands, into the world, and I let go. I use the iPhone notepad when I have a really big revelation, and then sometimes read it to my therapist if I need further help working something out. I have a long memoir style word doc where I write my story on a continuous basis that’s just been going on for years — even though probably no one will see it until after I’m gone. It’s really just for me and my healing in the present. All these outlets of just writing with abandon, just writing to write, sitting down, and pouring my mind on paper without judgment — these are all so cathartic.

This year during this self-exploration phase that I’m finding myself in, I recently was challenged to have a pen and pad of paper by my bed and to write out my dreams the second I wake up. I’ve been told that our dreams are always trying to share something with us, even if we have no idea what it is. The more we can remember and write out before it’s a faded thought, the better. This is a new practice for me, so I can’t comment on its healing properties yet — but I’m excited to see where it takes me.

This practice of journaling has been listed as a therapeutic intervention for many years. There are writing therapists who even help you write down your abuse story. Some people are even finding they are able to uncover repressed memories in this way, and the vast majority of us are able to uncover repressed emotions by journaling. There are creative writing courses for the trauma survivor, and so many great resources.

My challenge for you today is to dig deeper by getting your insides outside of your mind and body and down onto paper. If you don’t have any practice yet at all, just start small by setting a five-minute timer and writing whatever comes out. If you already do a smaller journaling practice, maybe expand on that with a notepad just for gratitude or try with me the dream journal in the first moments of the morning.

Whatever bit you are able to do, you will start to see small benefits. When taking a course at school, science has shown us that writing (with a real writing utensil) is the best way to lock in the concepts you are being taught. The brain hears the info, has to regurgitate it to your hand from the professor, which then reinforces the idea that you are trying to study and memorize by writing it out on paper. So, in the inverted way, to release info back to the universe from your mind, unstick your thoughts, and release your emotions, writing a free-form journal without judgment is a beautiful practice indeed.

I encourage you to give it a try. If you are struggling, feel free to reach out on the “Connect” tab of my website and I’ll link you up with my best recommendations or resources. I’d love to hear from you if you take the journaling challenge. Let me know how it’s working, what avenue works best for you, and what releases you are finding through writing.

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 9: Inner Child

*Author Note* If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
 Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

This episode has a lot of references to season 1/episodes: #11 on week 4 entitled Developmental Trauma and #20 on week 7 entitled Good Enough. It may be helpful to read/watch/listen to those along with this.

For starters, everyone has an inner child no matter their trauma status. This is the internal self that has stored memories from conception through birth into all your developmental years. There’s not actually a child in there (unless you’re pregnant, congrats). This colloquial term is used to talk about the kid we are were at one time. Infant’s brains start developing in the womb, and every interaction and word is recorded and stored internally like a computer hard drive. Even when you erase the memory and empty the trash can, a good hacker can recover all that stuff. If it crossed the path of the computer, it’s still in there somewhere, even if you can’t find it easily. The inner child is you when you were developing. A vast majority of adult responses, reactions, patterns, behaviors, and beliefs were all formed in the developmental years of their child. That inner child is still at work encouraging you to do the same behaviors and tactics it used as a child.

That inner child has a heap of issues too. If you weren’t heard or believed when you were young, your inner child still carries the pain of being invisible. If your inner child used dissociation during sexual violence, it could keep you disconnected well into your adult years. When the inner child is bullied or mocked, it will continue that pattern of self-criticism — even though it may be things you’d never say out loud though your inner voice says harsh words all day long to you.

When we discussed Developmental Trauma weeks ago, I was serious when I said how devastating it is to endure trauma in your early-age years. Back then, anything that happened to you was because you were not in control of your circumstances. As a child, without the freedom to just leave an abusive situation, this left an impact that can barely be described in words. As a kid, you also couldn’t grapple with everything going on. You simple didn’t understand. You also have an innate sense of love for your caregivers — so it’s very common for a trauma survivor to turn on themselves rather than their abusive caregivers because it’s too hard to comprehend why the adults in your life are hurting you. You surmise that YOU must be the problem; you must be bad. You can carry that burden for your whole life.

When I spoke on “Good Enough Parents”, I talked at length about healing the inner child. This is what the psychology world calls “Inner Child Work”. That thing that I called really really hard work, but also the most beautiful. That. Inner Child healing is about mourning for the childhood that you had — good or bad. Sometimes non-trauma survivors feel like they missed out on much, or they just simply miss being a kid so much. It’s okay to feel this way. A lot of people wish they could return to childhood and fix all the things that happened. They say things like “I’d go back and tell that little girl that she is worth more than gold and not to let anyone tell her otherwise.”

Well, my friends, you can do just that. With Inner Child Work — you can grieve what happened to you, what you lost, what you miss now, what didn’t happen to you, and more. Then, you can actually go back and find the scenes that star the little hurt inner child, and you can rescue them, tell them you are grown now, and are safe. You can tell them they are worth gold, and you can tell them perhaps that as an adult you no longer talk to that abusive stepfather or maybe even that he died. The inner child is actually listening to you. You can visit them, spend time listening to them, let them know you are grown and healing now. This is real. This isn’t just woo-woo; it’s not even a little woo. It’s science; psychology at its finest to be honest. It’s that powerful, in my opinion.

You can also, in present time at the age you are now, write down things that need healing — like the things that didn’t happen that should have when you were a kid. Maybe you never learned how to ride a bike or how to save money. Maybe you never learned how to set boundaries. Back then, maybe you weren’t told “my body my choice”. If you were told you are ugly over and over, you can begin doing some mirror work and learning to find your true beauty now. You can start working on those things right now, and that is part of your inner child healing.

This isn’t going to reverse all the trauma and abuse and damage that you went through. Those years may be marred with horrible things, and there’s nothing that can you back those moments. This is not about undoing; it’s about uncovering what can be healed now to get moving forward. You won’t forget what happened to you, but you can recover from the pain and addictions and patterns and behaviors now that are only making your current present circumstances worse. You can make a shift, start the inner child work, and find your true self again.

On this week’s Full Circle Friday being released in a few days, we are going to learn about IFS and how having conversations with your inner world, your inner self, and your inner child is especially magical in healing developmental trauma. In the meantime, take a moment to try to connect to your inner child. Ask it some questions. Stay curious. Don’t judge what comes up. Just observe and be ready to hear whatever it wants to share with you. Be inquisitive and not pushy.

A lot of what I do with clients with developmental trauma is inner child work — finding the roots of where behaviors and feelings about themselves started and then working on healing through what we discover. If you are interested to learn more, I encourage you to schedule a Complimentary Discovery Call with me to see if coaching is right for you.

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 8: Hypervigilance

*Author Note* If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
 Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

Ah, yes, my old friend, Hypervigilance. I don’t mean “old” as though it’s gone; I mean “old” as in how long it’s been with me! Let’s start with defining what hypervigilance is. “The state of being highly and abnormally alert to potential danger or threat” is a good start from the dictionary, but with psychology in mind as we learn about our inner world, let’s add the phrase “accompanied by behavior that aims to prevent danger”.*

To be clear, this has nothing to do with being paranoid. Paranoia is based on a misconception about a current threat, believing there is a very real, specific threat befalling you right now. Hypervigilance is an ongoing lifestyle of anticipation and staying ready for any threat that may happen. This is a constant, overwhelming alertness — staying in a state of arousal to be ready to turn the engines on for a 4F response (like we discussed a couple of weeks ago). It’s a watching, waiting, scanning, and hyperfocus or expanded view observance. Hypervigilance comes in a few different flavors of what one is waiting for and why. For some, it’s always at the ready to run and hide. Others may be looking for things, people, places to avoid altogether. Still others stay guarded and poised to fight or lash out. While still others, my particular flavor, are at the ready to rush toward any threat like a firefighter. For me, this is a combo of fight and fawn response, it’s also why I said weeks ago that I believe there are several more that the Four F trigger responses where I added things like “fix” and “function”. It’s because those were some of responses I have to danger or threats. In fact, my flavor isn’t talked about often — so much so that for a while I rejected the term Hypervigilant for myself for a long time because I thought it was mainly about running, hiding, or preventing danger. Sometimes it’s about stopping it, calming it, or saving people after it. To the body, the hypervigilant responsibility is similar no matter what the brain plans to do when the threat actually arises.

The brain’s choice of what it’s waiting for, why, and what it plans to do about it is how the symptoms present for each person. Any number of things can happen to a person with hypervigilance. Most have a hard time following conversations in a room of people because their brain is so occupied with scanning the room. Many will be jumpy at loud noises, vocal tones changing around them even from strangers in a restaurant. This also looks like overanalyzing other’s body languages or hyper focusing on one person and all their movements if your brain perceives a possible threatening attitude. For some, it means that, around others or in unfamiliar groups, the hypervigilant person is always sweating, has dilated pupils, rapid breathing, etc. Even if they appear normal, the uncomfortability felt in the body can be overwhelming. This is all very distressful, often exhausting, emotionally taxing, and can be a conflict with our social norms.

For me personally, while driving on the highway, my brain is constantly playing out scenarios of what I would do if I was in or witnessed a car accident. For me, it’s about being ready to safely and quick pull over to help, while calling 911, and simultaneously not worrying about whether I would get hurt or not. In a room of people, I am a scanner for sure. I have learned really well how to carry on a conversation — but my peripheral is always aware of its surroundings. I am hyper aware of people’s tones and will start moving closer to anyone who seems they are getting angry or distressed because my brain’s specific course of action will be to try to calm the person and protect anyone that they may be getting angry at. If I hear a loud crash, bang, or yelling voice — my entire system revs immediately into overdrive in order to save anyone who may be hurt WHILE my brain is using logic to try to decide what I even just heard and where it came from. By the time my brain realizes it was just a kid at the playground squealing with joy, my body still takes several minutes to calm down from the pumped-up adrenalin it produces thinking it had to save said child from a kidnapping. My hypervigilance, to be honest, has actually saved several people and potential real-life problems. I have barged into a neighbor’s home and grabbed their children during a domestic violence incident where I heard them yelling about a weapon. I have (against 911’s pleading with me) walked up to a window-covered car to stop what I thought was a woman being raped. I am still very fuzzy on what actually was happening in that car, but those siblings were definitely harming one another. I stopped the last 60 seconds of it before the police came. There are even a few other large case scenarios where my firefighter instinct was very helpful. However, on a daily basis, what this constant state of hyperarousal has done to my body is immeasurable.

For others, this would be a constant state of ready to run, ready to hide. So much so that most hypervigilant people will just avoid a lot of life’s social situations — for example, never entering any room with a lock where they are alone with someone else even a harmless co-worker. This also means that we aren’t generally relaxed enough to enjoy ourselves or kick back and let our guard down for anyone, ever, in some cases.

So — this doesn’t sound healthy, right? So, let’s just stop doing this, right? Well, I can say that after years of working at it, I have learned how to at least calm the arousal state as soon as I realize that the threat I perceived is not real. I use breathwork to come back to a relaxed state as quickly as I can. I am also learning to be slower with my reaction periods. This has taken years of diligent work, but now I can sit on the couch and hear someone yell in a neighboring apartment, and I won’t ratchet up until I hear it at least twice. That’s progress! It doesn’t seem like much, but I’m still working on it. I constantly (like a meditation practice) am now able to draw myself back to the present moment in the road and driving rather than getting too far swept up in the visions of car accidents all around me. Yes, years later, I still, every few miles, have to catch myself in the car accident POV, ask my brain to stop thinking about that, take a few breaths, and refocus on the present moment. Mindfulness practice is a regular for me in a car.

What’s important to realize is that for trauma survivors — hypervigilance is very common and normal. Also helpful to remember is that everyone’s brain is just trying to keep them safe. So for someone who’s been through something horrific or a lifetime of trauma responses in developmental trauma, your brain uses the same tools of vigilance as a normal brain. Because it knows things that a non-trauma person doesn’t know, it has to do everything extra to protect you. Common sense is what keeps you from not walking down a dark street alone at night, but if you MUST, you are going to be happy your brain knows how to be vigilant. Vigilance is useful when you are in a different country and don’t know the language, areas of danger, the laws, or exactly where to go if you do need help — so it’s best to just try to avoid danger altogether by being cautious of your surroundings and keeping your personal items close, etc. Vigilance is healthy when you have a new baby, and you have to remind people to wash their hands before they touch your infant. Vigilance is what a normal brain uses to avoid a car accident, and arousal will happen IF and WHEN a normal brain is in an accident or witnesses one and can decide what to do. Hypervigilance and hyperarousal is driving in that constant state of being activated and ready for an accident at any moment, like what I was describing. Do you see the difference? Vigilance, like most things, can be really purposeful. It’s the extreme of these things that it becomes an issue.

So your brain learned hypervigilance as a child to sustain your abuse or neglect or dysfunctional home, right? Great! Thank your brain. Maybe life was great for you until a horrible trauma happened at college, and now you are hypervigilance around anything that reminds you of that incident. Thank your brain. If your spouse is abusive, you have learned to constantly be watching tones and facial expressions of everyone around you because you are so used to doing it at home with your partner. Thank your brain.

However, your inner world can learn to realize that you are safe now and to retrain itself if you recognize hypervigilance as a problem. If it’s become a maladaptive coping skill that you no longer need and is now actually damaging you (by not being able to relax, the physiological effects happening, the inability to sleep well because of it, and problems within new healthy relationships), this is what we say as “no longer serving you”. It WAS adaptive in your trauma season. Now, it doesn’t serve you anymore, and instead, you may be serving it by continuing on the path of damage to your nervous system, poor social habits, and lack of physical and mental wellbeing because of it. There are great therapies for this. Like we discussed a month ago, Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) is a key one. EMDR, hypnosis, exposure therapy, breathwork — these are also available.

Firstly, by recognizing that you may suffer with hypervigilance, understanding the effects it has on you and your body, and being ready to make a change, you can start to believe there is a better way. And that, to me, was the very foundation inside me to want to pursue calming my hypervigilance. The primary step to healing is always to take all the wisdom and knowledge into your inner world, show yourself the reality of what’s going on, and decide you want something new. That is the Full Circle Pivot I spoke on recently. There is a better lifestyle beyond the constant anxiety of hypervigilance.

If you need help in this area, it’s a space I feel very confident coaching in. Not only from all the knowledge and training I’ve received for myself, but my fresh perspective as a person healing-from-hypervigilance, I would be honored to help support you on this journey. Feel free to send me a message on the Connect tab of my website or schedule a Complimentary Discovery Call to meet with me to discuss coaching. We don’t want to aim to become absent-minded, but we can find a proper balance of mindfulness without hyperarousal attached. You got this!

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 7: Good Enough

*Author Note* If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

You may have heard the term “good enough parent”. If you have, bear with me while I quickly explain it because I’m actually going to turn the tables and bend this toward trauma recovery as an adult. For those that haven’t heard this term, it’s a concept that comes from British psychoanalyst and pediatrician, Donald Winnicott. He coined the term “good enough mother” which was his observations about how mothers hold and nurture their children, while attending to their needs. He called this the devoted mother, and further realized how the mother’s holding techniques helped the child recognize they were safe in their own body as a tiny human. He went on to see how this holding and safety translated to how the child felt safe around others as its human circle grew with other relatives, eventually friends, then lovers. Later, Bruno Bettelheim’s book, A Good Enough Parent, really psychoanalyzed this idea. A lot of the focus in his book is on a good enough parent’s ability to not attempt to be perfect, which in turn lets them recognize that the tiny human they created also isn’t perfect. It allows for flaws, and in willingness to accept said flaws, it teaches the child how to cope someday with a world that also will not be perfect. The author insists that there is a proper balance between too much parenting and too little parenting. (As you probably remember from weeks ago, I’m a huge fan of balancing things. It’s the Libra in me!)

One can over-parent into oblivion with massive expectations of the child’s accomplishments, servanthood, always demanding the child have a great attitude, and helicoptering to ensure the child is always safe. This teaches the child that they are only as worthy as their achievements. That they are only loved by those who they are serving and only when they are serving. That any emotions are not welcome because they interfere with the need to whitewash the family dynamic to look perfect. That the child is only safe when a caregiver is there to make certain they are. It creates a perfectionist tendency, an inability to feel and live out their own dreams and desires, a lack of emotional intelligent, and a feeling of being unsafe with oneself as an adult.

Of course, we know more about the under-parenting dynamic because this often looks like neglect, abuse, or abandonment. However, it’s important to understand the coping skill developed by an under-parented child is often parentification of their caregivers, themselves, and to anyone else who looks like they need it. This begins an adult power and control cycle from a child who felt like nothing was in their control. Neglect is one of the trickiest psychological abuses because, in those developmental years that we spoke on a couple weeks ago, this leaves a child with a void that can be nearly impossible to fill. It’s said that, as painful as what happened to you was, sometimes it’s what didn’t happen to you that was worse. And not being loved, cared for, heard, respected, chosen, sought after, or attended to as a baby/child has devastating after effects.

The good enough parent allows a child to be a child and is more focused on their current development than on what they’ll become someday as an adult. They parent them because they love them not because of what value they’ll bring to them someday by way of pride and accolades. A good enough parent allows the child a safe space with some distance to learn to trust themselves, and a place to grow, play, laugh, be free, make mistakes, learn some consequences, apologize, forgive, understand that all this is part of the human experience. Good enough parents don’t overreact at one bad grade or blame the child’s worthiness on a lack of ability to do something. Good enough parents allow their kids to make mistakes and make atonements. They even admit their own mistakes as well and allow the child to see humility and reparations! They include their child in just enough adult activities and conversations that they get a taste, but not enough that the child gets overwhelmed by adult problems. They give their child just enough responsibility to foster skills of diligence and industry, but not so much that they are workaholic perfectionists who feel terrible resting and playing as adults.

So what does all this have to do with trauma recovery? For me and most other trauma survivors, one of the hardest things we have to work through in our journey is re-parenting ourselves. In my opinion, it’s also one of the most beautiful parts. Re-parenting is a topic for an entire other episode, but in re-parenting yourself, you can actually find for yourself a “good enough life” along the way. You can be a good enough parent as an internal adult now and be the good enough parents you maybe didn’t have.

With that, I also can attest that this re-parenting has layers — layers that look a lot like a childhood path from infancy to independence. Starting the re-parenting process can look like giving birth to yourself all over again. It’s painful because the first thing you have to realize and accept is that you didn’t have good enough parenting in your childhood. You spend the next while of your recovery in the infancy stage — which is a bit overly self-focused. You need to cry and attend to yourself, hold space for your big emotions, be gentle with yourself, allow yourself to be needy as often as you must, and to give yourself the basic unconditional, tender love an infant is innately worthy of having.

From there, you are sifting through re-parenting yourself like a toddler and preschooler metaphorically looking for independence by trying new things, encouraging yourself along, giving yourself comfort when you fall down and get hurt, allowing yourself to try and fail and make mistakes and to be okay with all that.

Then comes the primary grade stage re-parenting yourself with symbolic self-help talks as you build (or rebuild) your adult social life — one that has boundaries, where you have a voice and choice, deciding who you want to hang around with, and what kinds of activities you want to engage in.

Middle school parabolic self then enters into being good enough as your voice grows stronger, you start to discover who you are and who you want to be, looking at yourself in the mirror and (no matter what) being okay with the weird body that’s staring back at you. (If only we could go back to crazy hormonal junior high and not say all those creepy things, not wear those weird styles, and not announce to everyone we were definitely going to be X career because that’s what your parents want!)

When you step into the maturing stage of re-parenting the inner teenager, this is where you really start to shine on your trauma recovery journey. If the inner infant and inner child can have some serious healing and post traumatic growth by learning to be okay with themselves, to feel safe inside their body, use their voice and boundaries, make healthy relationship choices, fall in love with who they are, understand that failure is just a perception, and not be afraid to try new things because they know they’ll always have their own back — this is the good stuff because now you’re re-parenting of teenagehood doesn’t have to be as painful as it was when you were a bag of trauma bones. You will know that as your now-stand-in-good-enough-parent-self that you are free to decide who you actually want to grow up to be, what you are good at, what you love, and to never be afraid to follow your dreams. This part of the recovery road can often look like a few big life changes. When you start realizing you’ve been living your life without proper love or care for yourself, going along with societal norms, trapped for years listening to your own inner critic, afraid of your own body and wants and needs, too nervous to speak your mind or reveal your true self with the world — that’s when you now have built good enough freedom through trauma recovery to leave a bad relationship, walk away from a job you aren’t passionate about, take that mini-retirement trip, end a friendship that’s been holding you back, not accepting indifference or ambivalence in any area of your life.

Well, friends, to me that looks like Full Circle healing if I do say so myself. The self-loved, confident, non-judgmental good enough person you can become is the reason you started making the pivot and changing the course of your path in the first place. Like I said, I know personally that re-parenting is an uppermost step in healing. I welcome you to start small by just letting yourself mourn for what happened to you, or for what you lacked, in your developmental years. One of my favorite passions right now is helping people heal inner child wounds. If this episode has you recognizing a need to re-parent yourself, I’d love to hear from you. Click on the “connect” tab on my website in the link below and send me a message. Maybe it’s time to see if my “good enough coaching” is right for you. Either way, never give up on your inner child. Healing is completely possible and possible to complete. You’ve got this, Survivor.