How Do You Know When Trauma is Healed?

How Do You Know When Trauma is Healed?

I’ve been working with a client who recently realized, and then confided in me, that they were carrying trauma from childhood abuse and it was making their life unmanageable.  What struck me was that they hadn’t known this before - they’d been living this way for so long that it just seemed normal to them.  The experience of constant anxiety, hyper-vigilance for perceived threats, and extreme willingness to blame themselves for anything that went wrong was just the air they’d been breathing for the past 30 years.  They hadn’t been having flashbacks to the trauma, they had been living it every moment of their life.

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How to Keep Your Heart Beating

How to Keep Your Heart Beating

Before I went to sleep last night I reminded myself that I had a blog to write, and ran through the general outline of my idea for this week.  I woke up, enjoyed some breakfast, sat in the sun for a bit, and checked facebook.  Suddenly I didn’t have a plan anymore - my calendar was immediately and coldly cleared, as my hopes for the day were suddenly pulled and distorted into the black hole of tragedy.  Lucky as I am to not know anyone personally involved in the shooting at Pulse, I can’t keep the pain of such a horror from entering my chest.  This is the reality of tragedy, that it is impersonal in its ability to cross boundaries, insatiable in its ability to demand attention, and implacable in its ability to cause pain...

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