What Fall Teaches Us About Identity
You can’t tell what shape a tree is in July. The leaves are in the way. Come November the structure’s right there, every fork and angle and the one heavy…
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Releasing What Was Never Yours to Carry
There’s a certain kind of tired that sleep doesn’t fix. You get eight hours and wake up heavy. You take the vacation and come back the same. You keep thinking…
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Strength Looks Different in This Season
We’ve got a picture of strength in this country and it’s all summer imagery. Full canopy, heavy fruit, everything visible and abundant and going. Nobody puts a November tree on…
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You Are Not Failing, You Are Shedding
A woman sat in my office last fall and gave me a list. Marriage in trouble. Quit a job she’d had eleven years. Hadn’t been to church since June. Kids…
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When Life Looks Bare but Isn’t Empty
Farmers around here will tell you a field in November looks like nothing. Stubble and mud. Drive past it at dusk and you’d swear the whole thing died. Underneath, there’s…
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When Roles, Relationships, or Dreams Fall Away
When somebody dies, we know what to do. There’s a visitation, there’s food on the counter you didn’t ask for, there’s a line of people at the funeral home saying…
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Fall Reminds Us That Change Can Be Beautiful
Here is a piece of grade school science that changed how I see the fall coming. Leaves do not turn colors. Not really. The yellows and the oranges were in…
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The Quiet Beauty of Letting Go
I put the garden up every September, and every year there is a strange minute in the middle of it. I stand there with the tomato cages in my arms,…
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Boundaries Without Guilt: Why a Screen Door Is Still a Door
I had a client tell me once that she felt like a hallway. Everybody walked through her to get somewhere else. However, nobody stopped to see what was on the…
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You Are More Than What You Survived
A woman sat in my office a while back at the good end of hard work. Years of it. She had stopped bracing when doors shut. This woman could say…
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What Healing Actually Looks Like Over Time
A client of mine, years into good, brave work, hit a hard anniversary and spent a weekend flat on the mat. Old symptoms, old thoughts, the works. She came in…
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Co-Regulation: Healing Happens Around Safe People
Watch a mama with a crying baby and you will see the oldest medicine on earth. She does not explain to the baby that the situation is manageable. She picks…
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Fawn Mode: When You Lose Yourself to Keep the Peace
I asked her what she wanted, and I meant it as a small question. What do you want to see change in your marriage, your week, your life? She laughed…
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Flight Mode: When You Can’t Slow Down
She showed me her calendar like it was evidence, and honestly, it was. Three months, not one white square. Work, church committee, kids’ ball, the extra project she volunteered for,…
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Generational Trauma: What Gets Passed Down Quietly
Every family hands down a recipe box. Some of the cards are pure treasure. The cornbread dressing, the way your people tell stories on the porch, the hymns everybody knows…
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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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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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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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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…