Could Your Anxiety Be Connected to Childhood Adversity?
Anxiety is a beast. It clutches your gut, sits on your chest like a weight, or causes your imagination to flood with worst-case scenarios at the worst possible times. Perhaps you’ve coped with it for as long as you can remember. Perhaps you’ve discovered how to operate in spite of it—white-knuckling through the day, busying […]
What Is Agency? A Fundamental Concept for Understanding Trauma and Healing
Let’s discuss agency; it’s one of those topics that, once you grasp it, changes how you’ll perceive everything. Agency is fundamentally your capacity for free will and meaningful action in your own life. It’s the reason you feel in control of your own direction. Because life is chaos, it doesn’t give you control over everything; […]
Escaping the Trap of Learned Helplessness: A Way Forward for Trauma Survivors
For those of us actively working toward healing, there will eventually arrive a point when the depth of our scars becomes painfully clear. Years—sometimes decades—of wearing the masks of confidence, competence, or control as we negotiate life suddenly reveals how much fear, anxiety, and impotence have been guiding us all along. Many trauma survivors find […]
Why Do I Push People Away? Understanding One of the Hidden Impacts of Childhood Adversity
I’ve spent years yearning for actual, closer relationships. Friendships with a genuine sense of safety. Relationships that allowed me to be totally myself. Still, I’ve continued to push folks away somehow. To keep them at arm’s length. I never intended for this to happen. It just did. Someone would reach out, and I would hesitate. […]
Mapping Trauma Impacts onto the Daoist Body-Mind-Spirit Model
Let’s discuss something many trauma survivors deal with: trying to figure out just what the hell is actually happening to them. If you’ve been exploring trauma recovery for a while you’ve likely come across the Western answer to this question. In this model, everything is reduced to tidy little categories: psychological problems, nervous system dysregulation, […]
Key Developmental Milestones: Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Growth in Childhood
To be honest, child development is one of those things we sort of take for granted until we start examining our own past and asking, “Wait… did I truly achieve those benchmarks?” Much of this growth occurred organically if you grew up in a consistent, loving atmosphere. But if your childhood was marked by trauma, […]
Why Secure Attachment is the Foundation of Emotional Well-Being
Ever wondered why certain people manage life better than others? They’re adaptable, handle relationships well, and don’t snap when things get unpleasant. Others struggle with lack or trust, fear of abandonment, or walk on emotional eggshells. There’s a reason. Before we could talk, our early attachments, or bonds, shaped how we handle emotions, relationships, and […]
What is Attachment? Understanding the Bonds That Shape Us
Let’s consider something so basic to life that we rarely ever give any thought: attachment. I’m talking about the deep, natural relationships we create with the individuals meant to look after us, not attachment in the Buddhist sense of clinging to things. Attachment is not only a catch-phrase in psychology. Babies scream when left alone […]
How the Five Root-Level Impacts of Trauma Interact
Many childhood trauma survivors view their problems as separate entities—anxiety, relationship problems, chronic stress, self-doubt, addictive behaviors, or even physical symptoms. It can seem like an endless catalog of unrelated issues. Trauma, however, disrupts fundamental systems in the body and mind. And though they may seem that way, the resulting symptoms are definitely not random. […]
Addressing Trauma Impacts – A Root-Level Healing Approach
People beginning trauma recovery sometimes search for answers to particular problems—how to lower anxiety, get better sleep, or avoid repeating terrible relationship patterns. These are great objectives, but real healing goes beyond only symptom relief. Trauma disrupts the body, mind, and spirit at a profoundly deep level; it doesn’t produce isolated problems. If we just […]