Sexual Trauma and the Long Road Back to Feeling Safe
I am going to write this one carefully. I will tell you up front what I tell clients: nothing here will be graphic. Some of you need this post. Then…
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Emotional Abuse and Domestic Violence: The Wounds Nobody Can See
“He never hit me. So why do I feel like this?” She asked me that with her hands twisted in her lap, apologizing for taking up an appointment somebody with…
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Religious Trauma: When Faith Got Used as a Weapon
“I can’t open my Bible without my chest getting tight.” The woman who said that to me loved God. That was the part tearing her up. She was not an…
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Medical Trauma: When the Place That Saves You Also Scares You
I can still tell you what the monitor sounded like. Anybody who has spent real time in a children’s hospital can. The particular chirp of the pulse ox. That alarm…
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Betrayal Trauma: When the Wound Came From Somebody You Loved
A wreck never claimed to love you. The tornado did not sit across the supper table for eleven years. Whatever else those storms take, they do not take your history…
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Complex Trauma: When the Harm Never Let Up
When I ask some clients to tell me about the worst thing that ever happened to them, they go quiet, and not because the answer is too painful to say….
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Childhood Trauma and the Wounds Nobody Saw
“But they fed me. I always had a roof over my head.” Grown adults say that to me all the time, usually while trying to talk themselves out of the…
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God Is Near the Broken, Not Disappointed in Them
“I thought I was a bad Christian because I still flinch.” A woman said that in my office years into her healing, and she said it the way people confess…
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Trauma Responses Are Survival Skills, Not Flaws
“What is wrong with me?” A grown man asked me that in my office, ashamed to his shoes, after describing how he goes completely blank when his wife raises her…
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Why Trauma Lives in the Body, Not Just the Mind
You are driving along fine until you pass a certain exit, and your chest tightens before you even register where you are. Or a stranger in the grocery store wears…
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Big T Trauma, Little t Trauma, and Why Comparing Keeps You Stuck
“Other people had it worse.” If I had a dollar for every time somebody said that on my couch, I could pave my driveway with the dollars. It usually comes…
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Trauma Is Not What Happened, It Is What Happened Inside You
I have lost count of how many people have opened a first session with some version of the same sentence. “I don’t even know why I’m here. Nothing that bad…
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Forgiving Someone You Still Have to See
Most forgiveness advice has a quiet assumption baked into it, and once you spot it, you can’t unsee it. It assumes you can leave. Block the number, move the membership,…
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When the Person Who Hurt You Never Says Sorry
Somebody reading this has an empty chair at the table. The conversation you were owed, the one where they finally look you in the eye and name what they did,…
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What Forgiveness Looks Like on the Other Side of Betrayal
A client asked me once, near the end of a long stretch of work, how she would know when she had actually forgiven him. Not the churchy version. The real…
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Forgiveness That Protects You
We’ve reached the last stretch of this series, and I want to open it with a picture from every Southern porch I’ve ever loved. The screen door. A screen door…
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Learning to Speak Kindly to Yourself Again
Try something for me. For one day, just listen to how you talk to yourself. Write down the actual sentences. “Stupid.” “You always do this.” “No wonder.” Then look at…
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Shame Is Not the Same as Responsibility
There’s a sorting job that has to happen in this stage of healing, and most of us were never taught how to do it. Somewhere in the pile of everything…
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Releasing the Version of You Who Didn’t Know Then
There’s a woman you keep going back to visit, and every visit is the same. It’s the you from before, the one who said yes, who stayed, who believed him,…
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When You Ignored Red Flags to Survive
The cruelest part of hindsight is how loud the signs get after the fact. Now that you know, you can’t unsee them, and the question starts circling: the flags were…