Tag: Trauma

Spiritual pursuits are meant to offer hope and comfort. They can provide value, meaning, community, and even structure to our lives. But for many people, religion and spirituality mean none of that. Instead, the mere mention of these things are reminders of pain, violation, and trauma. Churches, ...

For thirty days I slept on our green second-hand couch despite my fiancée’s pleas that I join her in our bed. Every night I fluffed the couch cushions, tucked myself in under a weighted blanket, looked out to the streetlights, and asked for a peaceful sleep. Yet every night I awoke to n...

Sitting in a room with three women twice my age, I realized: I couldn’t run this support group anymore. We were in the middle of a reflective listening exercise. The point was first to listen, then to repeat the story back to the person who shared it. This was a way of letting them know the...

In the original version of “The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Anderson, the Little Mermaid makes a deal with a sea witch to exchange her voice for a pair of human legs. According to the witch, if the Little Mermaid can go to land and convince the prince to marry her, then she...

I just spent six days with family at the beach on vacation. Six years ago, I couldn’t have done this. I’m not even sure I could have done it six months ago. My nervous system was far too dysregulated to navigate family history and complicated emotional triggers. But trauma therapy&n...

I stared, deadpan, at the perky coed who just offered this helpful quip after I shared a particularly devastating story, an actual narrative of events that happened to me, with my creative writing class in college. The classroom had gone mostly silent, the rustling of an uncomfortable audience sh...

Life’s a wild ride, filled with ups and downs, right? Sometimes, though, it ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. We’re talkin’ ‘bout those messed-up moments that stick with us — past trauma. It’s like a ghost that just won’t quit haunting’ us. In thi...

The human memory can be a curse, as well as a blessing. After a very stressful incident, we can suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. In PTSD, triggering memories or sensations can bring back vivid memories of the traumatic incident, along with intense negative emotions. Current tr...

Sometimes I’d lie on my back among the sleep-breathing sounds of my bunkmates, thinking about how in bunks similar to these — shoddily constructed wooden barracks — just over 50 years prior, Jews slept the sleep of the almost-dead. They starved and burned with fever, scratching at ...

Having a traumatic physical health event can have a deep impact on someone’s mental, emotional, and psychological health. For many, these traumatic health events create long-term and even life-long effects that leave people disabled or in debilitating chronic pain. Trauma is defined as...

One of these days, I’ll write a piece about Baltimore’s workforce landscape and why it should be studied using a #traumainformed lens. Not familiar with the term? According to Google, “Trauma-informed pedagogy is a field in education whose objective is to acknowledge t...

It starts with bravery. You know… feeling the resident fear of something deeply and doing it anyway. Life whizzes by, window by window, stranger by stranger, friend by friend. Some stops are yours, and some aren’t. I’m not the only one here. Painfully aware of that. People fill...

We live in a capitalist society that places work, money, productivity, and consumption at the core of everything that we do and think about. It is tied to the politics that have a direct impact on our everyday life. We participate in capitalism through our labor and spending, not because we want to,...

Dennis Kim is a second generation Korean-Canadian marketing executive, proud father and husband. This is a story about depression and how it took hold of my family, and how I’m still working through the trauma it left behind. It’s a very personal story and one that is hard to share...

Let me start off by saying the first time I even heard the term Trauma/Oppression Olympics, was while watching Ginny and Georgia (Season One) on Netflix in 2021. The show is not my cup of tea, but there was a scene in there where biracial girl( main character ), and her now ex bo...

During the Middle Ages in Europe, torture, mutilation, and other forms of savagery particularly on women were seen as normal aspects of life. Public executions were literally a spectator sport. As a result, when European “settlers”first came to this country centuries ago, they brought...

Ishould start by pointing out that when I say “we,” I do mean people of color in general. However, that doesn’t mean white people can’t gain anything from this article. If you are interested in learning more about racism, it’s important for you to learn that racism...

It’s not that we’ve been lazy or insincere. But my experience as a therapist tells me that we’ve focused our efforts in the wrong direction. We’ve tried to teach our brains to think better about race. But what if white supremacy doesn’t live in our thinking brains? What...

The human memory can be a curse, as well as a blessing. After a very stressful incident, we can suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. In PTSD, triggering memories or sensations can bring back vivid memories of the traumatic incident, along with intense negative emotions. Current tr...

Post-traumatic stress disorder, also known as PTSD, is a neuropsychiatric condition. Each year, roughly 5% of the US population is affected by the disorder. The gold standard treatment, trauma-focused psychotherapy, does not yield desirable results as patients have persistent sympt...

I came across the default mode network (DMN) while researching psychedelic treatments for depression. The Psychedelic Scientist on YouTube has some good explanations of the DMN and other brain networks. I also found a review and synthesis paper by Vinod Menon (Stanford University...

Have you heard the hippest new way to complain about people who are guilty of oversharing? Let’s talk about Trauma Dumping. When you hear someone talk about trauma dumping, it’s typical that they’re referencing a situation of a person oversharing, particularly in ...

Trauma is an insidious knife. It slices through the marrow of existence, cutting us off from the very life that cradles us in its bosom. It freezes a person in time, encapsulates them in a moment that becomes their eternity. Like a fly trapped in amber, we are suspended there, dangling between what ...

Judith Herman’s “Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror” is a seminal work in the field of trauma studies. Originally published in 1992, this book has become a classic in the field, influencing both clinical practice and re...

Complex trauma either exists, or it doesn’t. Choose one. (It actually exists, sadly, but some people are too busy licking boots, kissing ass, or looking out for themselves to even hear that.) We survivors don’t get to pick and choose when it exists. We barely get any say at all. (W...