The cycle of abuse needs to be understood as it really is, not as a fate for all victims, an excuse for perpetrators or catch-all explanations of the culture of abuse we live in.
physical abuse
Informational Article: Attachment Theory (Pt 2)
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.
Diagnosis Primer: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
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)
Question: How do you Stop Mourning a Lost Childhood?
You don’t, not really. In complete honesty, the reason your grieving is because you have too. What is going to help you get over the pain is to let yourself feel sad, angry, scared, hurt,lost, depressed and so confused. It hurts like hell but healing is never pretty. It's good to think about someone who … Continue reading Question: How do you Stop Mourning a Lost Childhood?
Informational Article: Fight, Flight, Freeze & Fawn
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.
Symptom Explainers: Flashbacks
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
Informational Article: Childhood Trauma and Physical Health
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.
Symptom Explainers: Body Memories
Also called Somatic Flashbacks Body memories are a kind of flashback specifically of somatic symptoms. It’s a flashback that instead of visual or auditory memories of traumatic events being relived it's the sensations and sensory inputs of your other 3 senses (touch/smell/taste). Flashbacks are usually triggered by reminders of the abuse. These can be mundane … Continue reading Symptom Explainers: Body Memories
Informational Article: Factors In Traumatization, Presentation of Trauma Symptoms, and Development of Mental Illness
This line of thinking can become a bit of a suffering contest putting some conditions, often DID/OSDD as the most traumatized with the only real trauma and the person who might not be suffering from a severe mental health condition didn’t go through anything, that isn’t true either. There is no gold star way to experience trauma and making a hierarchy of suffering helps no one.When looking at experiences of trauma survivors, understanding the way kids develop mental health conditions, and how we can best support healing for kids we need a larger view of all of this.
Symptom Explainer: Anger from abuse, and ways to handle it
Hey! Trouble dealing with anger is common as there is often a lot of anger associated with the abuse in the first place. Anger at abusers, yourself and/or people who never protected them are common for many abuse survivours. Another factor is if you never learned to cope with anger as a kid, which is … Continue reading Symptom Explainer: Anger from abuse, and ways to handle it
Survivors Healing Survivors 