A common question we've got is people asking if their memories are "real" if they "made it up" and similar concerns. This is distressing to us because it comes from a place of not only misinformation but the effects of a deep culture of victim-blaming, the denial of sexual abuse and dates back to truly … Continue reading The False Memory Myth & Memory Repression
Understanding attachment can help people understand why they are dealing with what they are and to make sense of specific experiences with our caregivers and abusers (for many of us these are the same person) Attachment theory can help people know what is making relationships so hard and begin to address what it is and form better relationships going forward. Knowing it's a piece of other mental health struggles can also help be a piece in recovering from DID, BPD, or C-PTSD. It gives us words to explain our struggles and find others dealing with similar.
Attachment theory is a bedrock of our current understanding of child development in their ability to form relationships, have a stable affect, understand emotions and self-sooth. It is one of the earliest and most important stages of development when talking about emotions and relationships.
Our culture has a huge problem with separating and atomizing us. This has a huge effect on the general world and an outsized effect on the recovery trauma, I also see a huge impact of eating disorder recovery (there is a high overlap in trauma survivors and disordered eating). We are told that our body … Continue reading Informational Article: Being Our Whole Selves Brain & Body
Post Traumatic Disorder (PTSD) is a relatively common disorder in those who have experienced trauma. It includes much of the cultural assumptions of what trauma causes like flashbacks and reactions to reminders of the trauma. The depictions are often done with some real misinformation so hopefully, this will help flesh out how PTSD is understood … Continue reading Diagnosis Primer: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Trauma bonding is a way to understand patterns of abusive behaviour and how that affects the neurochemistry of the victims, and how that, in turn, relates to how the people in the relationship bond with the abuser. This helps survivors understand why they can miss abusive relationships and why they continued to love their abusers … Continue reading Informational Article: Trauma Bonding
We’ve all heard of the “Fight or Flight Response”. When looking at the physiology this is the sympathetic nervous system response. The sympathetic nervous system is part of the autonomic nervous system, the involuntary functions of the nervous system. It is the way our bodies handle input that we read as fighting and/or a threat.
What are Flashbacks? Flashbacks are a psychological phenomena during which a person relives a past event or fragments of a past experience. They generally occur involuntarily, abruptly entering a person’s minds without the aid of premeditation or conscious attempts to recall the memory. They can be extremely intense. As flashbacks involve past events, they may … Continue reading Symptom Explainers: Flashbacks
We can Create systems of care for ourselves that understands all parts of our lives are connected and important. That view makes life make so much more sense, and I hope that going forward we can wok to make a world that treats our health as interconnected and important.
In this post, I’m going to give an outline of Dissociative identity disorder (DID) and Other Specified Dissociative disorder (OSDD). These two disorders are terribly misunderstood due to horrible representation in media, a lack of education on the topic. Many people still refer DID as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) an outdated term from when DID … Continue reading Diagnosis Primer: Dissociative Disorders
Survivors Healing Survivors 