Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 19: Stagnation

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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 17: Quantity v. Quality

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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 12: Labyrinth

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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 10: Journaling

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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 4: Developmental Trauma

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Our Wellspring Wednesday tries to offer a focus of the inner resources each human innately has as, I believe, they are in charge of their own healing and well-being.  Something special to note is that sometimes our conflict is actually within us, which is especially true for trauma survivors.  I find for myself and clients that we can’t necessarily heal from something that we don’t understand or identify with.  So if this word, developmental trauma, is new for you, consider this your introduction.  In learning more about this, I hope you are able to start finding ways to mend your inner wounds so that you can continue to flourish in your trauma recovery journey.  This is in no way a means to provide a diagnosis.  If you align with this type of trauma, please seek professional help from your trauma recovery coach, therapist, or even your regular doctor to seek the next steps in the process.

The first eight years of life is considered to be the formidable years.  Many believe these years are the shaping of your whole personality, roles, career objectives, likes and dislikes, social understanding, and moral judgments.  This is because our brains develop from the bottom up.  The lower parts of your brain are responsible for survival.  These are your “physiological needs” as Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs lists as: air, water, food, shelter, clothing.  The basic of all basic to survive outside the womb.   As you enter this world as a helpless infant, your brain is responsible to find you nourishment and shelter from the elements. 

As the brain grows, it is now looking for safety, connection, proper health (beyond just survival), friendship, intimacy.  This is right at the start of infancy when your brain is seeking out what and who is safe and forming the ability to trust.  In survivors of early trauma – this is often where problems begin to arise.  And because the brain is still developing toward its next stages to identity, self-esteem, eventually more and more independence, etc – thwarting the foundation of the lower brain’s functioning is devastating. 

What does this look like?  This could be an abused mother who is nursing her newborn while in a terrified state.  Her nervous energy is actually not just transferred into your baby’s milk supply via stress hormones, but also creating confusion in the infant as they sense the mother and watch her.  The brain is recording her fear and trying to decide if it should also be afraid.  Or perhaps this could look a mother nursing while angry at her own circumstances.  The baby again is feeding off of the mother who may be making the baby scared.  The baby may not drink as much so that the feeding can be over.  The baby may even not want to alert the mother to its hunger eventually when it is met with resistance and frustration most of times that it asks.  This the beginning of another topic called ‘Self-Abandonment’ for another day.

Another example would be a preschool age child who is sexually abused.  The brain is learning during this trauma.  The brain is always watching and holding everything it learns from the outside world.  The physical pain of this experience tells the brain to get away.  However, when you are small, you simply cannot get away.  So now your brain has to find another way to get through the torture.  It may learn to dissociate.  Maybe afterwards, the brain seeks something that used to be a comfort to the child like food to try to sooth the physical and emotional pain.  Also, at this early stage of learning, the child has not yet discovered any of its sexual or reproductive abilities.  The brain has now been introduced to something so foreign that it cannot comprehend what actually just happened. Yet somehow now has to learn to cope with this trauma and any further circumstances of it.   

While moving into the upper parts of the brain with something like Friendship, per se, in first grade, if a child is being assaulted at home, that is what the brain has learned that connection with others is – abusive.  The brain learns how to appease their classmates in order for the tribal skill of Connection to be earned.  This child is operating in fear and seems shy or weak – which then makes them a bigger target for bullies.  The child may be trying to make themselves very small and invisible so that they aren’t a target.  Unfortunately, this actually makes you more so.  *On a side note, childhood bullies are simply trauma victims themselves whose brain has learned to lash out for survival instead of lashing in.*    

I digress.  All of these parts are developing as we build on this rocky foundation to now - as executively functioning adults.  We are simply all moving around the globe using our brain’s knowledge from past experiences.  For you, if your infancy through childhood had physical abuse, neglect, anger or raging parents, often fear, alcoholism, drug abuse, sexual trauma, dysfunction, poverty, chronic stress, family lies and secrets, harsh or distressing environments, harm or perceived harm, racial inequality, food insecurity, witnessing violence, or any other atrocity – this is what we call Developmental Trauma.  This is often connected with our Attachment Style.  Attachment trauma is a wounding between the baby and their main caregivers.  This becomes a style of bridge that the survivor walks across to every relationship from there on forward.  Again, another topic, but highly interwoven.

“Ok Sara”, you may be saying, “This is so doom and gloom.  What’s the prognosis?”  I’m glad you asked because as you may guess, I believe healing from all of this is completely possible.  However, once you understand what developmental trauma is and determine whether you are a survivor of early-age abuse or neglect, this is where you start figuring out the steps to heal because now you know. 

This is just a very surface level introduction to Developmental Trauma, but if you are resonating with any other this, here’s some suggestions.  In the show notes, I’ve linked my website.  Click on the “Resource” tab and you’ll find some powerful written work on this topic.  There is a link to take an attachment style quiz, and more.  From there, I highly recommend finding some professional help.  If you are looking for a trauma recovery coach, this is one of my specialty topics, and I’d love to help you find your way healing your childhood wounds.  Remember that some of the wounds you experienced are not part of your conscious memories in the first years of life.  So this takes time to find, process, root out, and heal from.  If you feel like you align with some of the developmental trauma symptoms or discover an attachment trauma but can’t pinpoint what the issue was – I offer that it was in the first few “forgotten” years.  As you see, your brain still amazingly remembered all the things you “learned” from those years.  The healing comes now when you uncover what your brain learned and discover how to become well again from the inside out.  There are many resources available for your type of trauma.  Starting with your inner wellspring of resilience, it just takes you making that first step to find help.  Feel free to send me a message on the “Connect” tab on the website in the show notes below with any further questions about how to begin this journey.

I don’t just know you can do this; deep down, you know you can do this too.  That’s your survivorhood taking right there!  Be proud of yourself for coming this far!  

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 3: Compassion

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One of my most favorite self-practices now but that was the hardest to learn and utilize was compassion for myself and then for others.  The dictionary defines compassion as “sympathetic pity and concern for suffering and misfortune”.   As a trauma survivor, once you are able to fully recognize what sufferings and misfortune you have endured, you can start to realize how much compassion you deserve.  Once you can see your inner suffering, really truly see it, you will begin to understand how important this self-compassion thing is.  If you heard your own story of trauma and abuse but from a friend, you would immediately grasp how much compassion they are due.  You may even be able to look from the outside in at some of their life choices and coping mechanisms without judgment but more of “sympathetic pity”.  You may want to hug your friend, cry with them, feel angry at their abusers, and try to help your friend heal. 

You see, compassion is a motivating factor in how much care, grace, and love we give to others.  Self-compassion, when truly felt in our being, is a motivation to give ourselves allowance for failures and give ourselves kindness.  That is what is so powerful about this practice.  It also makes it the most difficult.  By sheer humanness, your abuse and trauma actually made you feel worse about yourself, especially from early childhood neglect.  Once a survivor has learned to turn on themselves as the “bad ones”, “deserving of abuse”, “worthless”, or “unlovable”, they are now locked in a cycle of self-hatred, feelings of unimportance, depression, self-harm, and suicidal ideation.  Even after the trauma and abuse has stopped, us survivors can be stuck wallowing in distaste for ourselves – which actually re-traumatizes our own self over and over.  One of the mental tolls of trauma is the ongoing self-degradation that we learn from our abusers.   

Having a felt sense of compassion (truly understanding what happened to you and allowing yourself to feel pity for yourself) can begin to repair all these fears, maladaptive coping skills, and mistrust of yourself.  Embodying self-compassion literally unclouds your judgment of yourself.  Imagine being in the grocery store, and you see a young woman rushing around paying more attention to her phone than the direction of her shopping cart.  She stops in the middle of the aisle to text, looks lost and disheveled, seemingly not seeing all the other people trying to go around her.  You’d be annoyed, most likely.  You’d want to tell her off as you pass her - “I’ve been watching you since produce – you are knocking things over and getting in everyone’s way!!”  However, if you REALLY watch her and actually take time to SEE her, maybe you’d realize the tears in her eyes.  Turns out that she is running around quickly to find some dinner for her children after leaving the hospital where her mother just passed away.  She’s stressed; she’s got family texting and calling her, yet she still has to get dinner for her small kids at home waiting.  Once you can know her pain and suffering, your whole perspective on her “annoying” behavior changes.  Now you find yourself feeling badly for even being frustrated with her, and now you want to help her or give her some encouragement or maybe a hug.  Maybe you want to pay for her groceries or tell her you know what’s she’s going through because you lost your mom too.   THAT’s why Compassion is transformative.  That shift in how you perceive someone who’s been through something – that’s where you remember your humanness and how you would feel if you were them.  Judgment ceases, and powerful concern, care, and love come rushing in. 

Now – apply that situation to YOURSELF - your traumatized, abused, neglected, hurting self.  Sit with that and feel it in your bones.  How can we learn to love ourselves?  Self-Compassion.  How can we be motivated to seek therapeutic help?  Self-Compassion.  How can we be gentler with ourselves as we heal?  Self-Compassion.  When will the cycle of self-hatred, self-blame, and unworthiness be broken?  When we learn self-compassion. 

Compassion will never give you a pass to play the victim or hurt someone else or act out of revenge.  Compassion will always lead with more love for yourself so you can love others even greater.  That’s why I say it’s my favorite personal practice and also was the hardest to fully embody.   It is SO easy to berate myself.  It is SO easy for that inner critic to flood to the surface and tell me I’m pointless, worthless, unnecessary, stupid, fat, and ugly (sometimes all that same time).  AND THEN … my learned self-compassion practice bubbles over ALL those voices, all that noise, and comes to my rescue to remind myself that I’m a work in progress, that I’m learning and growing, that I’m not JUST doing the best I can but that I’m doing a damn good job.  A compassionate wellspring inside you will flood out all the neglect, emotional abuse, and other learned mechanisms that are still trying to hold you down. 

It’s tough to learn fully, but it’s easy to start.  Try by filling your tank every morning with some compassion before you are annoyed with yourself or triggered or stressed out – like kind talk, affirmations, looking earnestly at yourself in the mirror, hugging yourself, doing one nice thing for yourself, closing your eyes envisioning warmth and love surround you.  You will then spend the day with a friend on your side helping you battle the forces of evil that are trying to be annoyed with you, hating you, making you feel like nothing.  If you can start with a morning routine of loving yourself in whatever way feels good to you, you can be on your way to fully embodied LOTS of chances to fill your self-compassion tank back up even throughout a difficult day.  It’s a practice that is for sure!  In fact, one of the first chances you’ll get to test this out is when you start noticing yourself being mean to yourself for failing at self-compassion! It’s then actually your trauma brain and your new learned compassion brain battling each other.  That’s a great sign because you are recognizing that you failed and yet the compassion is STILL coming to your rescue.   

Compassion will be a warrior to remind you how far you’ve come.  Compassion will forgive you when you fall back into an old coping skill or break your boundaries.  Compassion will ride in like a knight in shining armor with a fresh wind of understanding that (yes) while you have a ways more to go in your post-traumatic healing, (but yes) you have already come a very long way.   Compassion will quiet your inner critic and start replacing it with an inner cheerleader.  Compassion will allow you to re-father and re-mother yourself.  Compassion makes room for mistakes.  Compassion gets you to your trauma coach or therapy appointment so you can keep healing your inner child.   

Compassion takes hard work, but the reward is immeasurable.Self-loathing is also a lot of draining energy work but with no benefit at the end of that tunnel.Choose self-compassion.Learning to love yourself is one of your most powerful weapons on this healing journey.

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 1: Acne of the Soul

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Fitting with the New Year, I want to talk about something that I think is an overarching topic when it comes to trauma recovery.  As a trauma recovery coach, the first thing (after establishing trust and safety) that I need to let my clients know is that I believe in their ability to direct their healing.  It’s important for Survivors to be given full permission to decide what works for them and what doesn’t.  That’s why in trauma recovery coaching I never give a diagnosis or any prescription of care to my clients.  It’s an exploration to find a regimen that works for them – a toolbox of coping skills, healthy techniques when triggered, and finding ways that makes them feel alive in their true self. 

Skin is the largest organ of the human body.  With all its cell and pores, it is truly our window to the outside world.  Yet, no one’s skin is alike. Everyone has a different type of skin, various allergies, special sensitivities, types of birthmarks and sunspots, many kinds of skin tones, varieties of medical conditions, each with our own skin problems and challenges.  What one person may completely swear by as a necessary lotion, potion, or ointment could quite literally kill someone else.  One human with one type of skin may need a face wash for their acne that destroys the pores of another human.  Some people swear by popping their zits; others admonish the practice vehemently.  Some skin seems to never scar while still others seem to scar on a regular basis for minor things.  The skin’s stretch and sag is all built into our DNA when we are born.  People from all over the world are nearly guaranteed to never find someone with the same skin complaints and tips or tricks as themselves.  The beauty product makers and media would like to have us think that their latest product is perfect for every skin type and that every person across the board NEEDS their product.  However, we know that’s simply not true.  For those of us a little older in life, we remember the fussing we’ve done over the span of teenage years through adulthood to find just the right way, right product, right amount, right frequency of lotions and potions to either clear up or cover up our acne.  There of course are those annoying people that never had acne, but everyone has SOMETHING about their skin that bothers them.  I think a lot of us can agree that in different seasons our skin needs different care based on the dryness of the air and the harshness of the weather.  Some shades of skin need tons of SPF all year round, while others never touch the stuff.  People with freckles have their own set of regimens, and yet others have actual medical conditions that prove to have their own specific medical needs. 

How foolish then for any of us, not living in anyone else’s skin, to tell someone else how to best care for their largest organ – the piece of their body that is the most forward facing to the world.  In that same thread, imagine having never walked in someone’s shoes or experienced their traumas or problems or relationships.  There would be no way for anyone else to decide what that person needs.  I know some people, like myself, who LOVE yoga.  And yet I haven’t yet been able to convert everyone because some people I know have tried it and hated it! Can you imagine? (Sarcasm) Some trauma survivors do extremely well to learn breathwork to calm themselves when triggered, while for others deep breathing actually makes things worse for them.  Many survivors have been further traumatized by non-trauma-informed therapists, and yet others (myself included) are blessed with a consistent healthy relationship to regular therapy.  The modalities of therapy anyways are so far and wide and deep; they are expanding with every passing year.  How can we even say that we have the best thing when maybe our personally best thing hasn’t even made it to market yet to be added to our therapeutic menu?

A trauma survivor knows themselves the best – even if the trauma has temporarily (even long term) created a chasm between their trauma identity and their true identity.  My job is to help them find their way back to their body and their authentic self so that they can trust their intuition again.  Then together we can come up with tools and coping mechanisms and trigger techniques and all the lotions and potions they want to put in their box to carry on as a trauma survivor in the real world.  I’m passionate about this because I want people to know that NO MATTER WHAT YOU’VE BEEN THROUGH that you are not broken.  Survivors don’t need MY fixing.  They just need inner healing back to themselves.  There are TONS of inner resources that they have had to use for surviving.  So if you’ve made it here to where you are reading or listening to this right now, you still have your inner wellspring f strength keeping you alive and trying to figure out how best to live in this world following the traumas you’ve been through.  I can help give you some ideas to try, recommendations of what has worked for me, and point you to some great places – but you, my friend, you know thyself.  Trust thyself.  I’d love to come along in the passenger seat and encourage you along your way to finding the perfect regimen for the acne of your soul – the right meds, the right therapeutic interventions, the right exercise and eating routine, the right relationships, and jobs, and all the lotions and potions for your soul to keep you as you walk diligently down your own recovery journey.