Becoming the Parent Your Inner Child Needed

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a quote on Facebook that really struck a chord with my followers. The image went on to be shared 102 times, with 12,825 people reached. The quote was, She held herself until the sobs of the child inside subsided entirely. I love you, she told herself. It will all be okay. (H. Raven Rose)

I believe that this quote resonated with so many people because the words finally put a scenario that they had dealt with so often into simple words. It’s a strange situation to explain but one that I guarantee most, if not all, people have experienced often. After a particularly hard day or after a triggering event, you might feel overwhelmed, upset, angry, and sad but confused because they don’t feel like your feelings. The feelings are in your body and something is pushing you to feel them but it doesn’t feel like it originated from you, or at least from your adult self. So where are these feelings coming from then?

They are coming...

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Reconnecting With the Power of Your Breath

Self-awareness is an ongoing part of the trauma healing journey. It can feel a bit overwhelming in the beginning, as you are literally choosing to counter your biology in choosing discomfort, learning how to navigate stepping outside your comfort zone and taking a hard look at your helpful but toxic coping strategies. Are you aware of your coping strategies? We can also call them habits.

Part of what I do to support my clients is to provide a bit of trauma education. I know it provided me with comfort to know that there was nothing wrong with me in how I had responded to and lived through my trauma. In fact, I was in many ways a textbook example of a child that grew up in a household with domestic violence and was being abused emotionally, physically, and sexually. The outcome, like so many others, was my living with toxic stress (Learn more about ACE study here) as a child and growing into adulthood with the toxic stress keeping my systems on high alert, all the time.

As I began to...

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Giving Yourself the Gift of Compassion

On Periscope Live this past Friday, I wore my heart shaped glasses. We had been digging deep that week, asking some hard questions about healing, so it was time to lighten the mood and laugh a little. 
 
Not only do these silly heart shaped glasses help us to laugh, they also remind all of us to lead from our hearts. To lead with warmth and kindness and love and to choose to see the best in ourselves and in other people. This is called self-compassion.
 
These are stressful times in our world and for many survivors the holidays are hard and can be very painful. Either you are being reminded of the past by your family's presence (more than usual) around the holidays or you are triggered by the fact that you have cut off your family as a part of your healing and feel alone. For many survivors, the holidays rarely feel safe or enjoyable.  
 
So I wanted to send out this reminder, that no matter where you are on your journey and despite whatever hard...
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My Hope for Healing Weekend Retreat

Over the years, as I struggled to find the perfect solution to healing, the winning combination that would lead to my breakthrough and initiate the deep healing I so desperately wanted, I always felt like I was missing something. I tried many things for my healing but still I was struggling.

I’ve talked about one of the key ingredients to my healing before and it’s the same answer I give to my clients when they ask me what the turning point was on my own healing journey. And I am here again today to talk about it once more, not just because it is so important and I want to share the secret to success with all survivors, but also because I have exciting news.

I am hosting a weekend retreat next year in April, to bring together survivors in a safe place to explore their healing, learn from myself and others, celebrate their story and their strength, and create a community that will support one another for years to come. Why?

The turning point in my healing was when I found...

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Your Special Invitation to Join My 2019 Online Support Group

Hi friends,  

I know I have been MIA for a couple of months. This fall was very busy with travel and learning. I am enjoying being back home for the holidays and no more travel until the spring of 2019. But I do have some exciting news that I plan to share with you over the next few weeks. You may have seen some of the announcements if you follow me on social media. I am getting back to my blogging and newsletter routine here in December and regular blog posts scheduled for 2019.

I have a special invitation for you, especially meant for those of you who are feeling alone and behind in your healing.

For so long, I had this nagging feeling that I was always behind. Like I was chasing my tail, always almost there, so close but always falling short. So much of my time was devoted to taking care of others and busy work but I never felt like I was making progress towards my goals, doing what I wanted or needed.  And at the end of the day, little progress made. It was exhausting...

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Healing is a Lifelong Journey

Healing after years of child abuse and rape takes a long time. I am still a work in progress and each time I find another layer, I welcome it because it is the only way I can work through it to let it go.

Part of my healing journey now is to challenge myself as a human being. After years spent managing internal pain and uncertainty, in survival mode I am on a mission to become the best version of myself. Not perfect, but experience all that life has to offer.

This past weekend, I attended a retreat in Sedona with like minded people. I have been blessed to find a group of entrepreneurs that are both looking to build a successful business and do it with integrity and in alignment with their highest and best good. I have been a part of this group for almost a year now. Just like I recommend to my clients that they find a group or join one of the groups that I provide, I also need a group of peers for encouragement and support and, most importantly, to celebrate our strengths and...

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Reflecting on the Importance of Prevention

 This past week I was invited back to be a keynote speaker at one of the children's advocacy centers in Oregon. I can still reflect on the speech I gave 3 years ago. I had just moved with my family to Oregon and was honored to participate in such an important fundraiser.

 When I spoke at the event 3 years ago, they were raising funds to expand their center and asked me to tailor my message to help their supporters understand the impact of trauma on children and how important it is to have services like CAC's in their community. The event was successful! They had over 700 people join us for lunch to hear about Liberty House's impressive goal to not only continue to provide services to children that have been abused but to continue adding healing services for adults as well. But the focus of this fundraiser was to emphasize the importance of prevention.  
 
They asked me to share my experience from over 14 years of educating adults about how to keep kids safe...
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How to Stop Resisting Healthy Change

Why do we resist healthy change? Why does resistance rear its stubborn head every time we decide to do something good for ourselves? It makes no sense!

 Or does it?

The purpose of resistance is to protect you. It is a biological occurrence, it happens without your say once you have experienced trauma because it is your brain’s job to keep you safe. That’s one of its many skills. And the brains attempt to keep you safe involves minimizing change, because change comes with mystery, risk, and uncertainty. After a traumatic event, the brain comes up with a way to survive it. It comes up with an answer to why it happened. It comes up with a way to deal with the pain, which is usually by burying it when one is too young to deal with the complexity of it. The brain then makes you hyper aware of future situations that are similar to the previous one, to do anything to prevent it from happening again. And once that trauma, especially recurring trauma, has occurred, your...

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Trauma Makes Us Believe Change Is Impossible. It Isn't.

The biggest reason why we don't change and why we find ourselves stuck is because we simply don't know how to change. For so many years, I thought there was something wrong with me and that everyone else was moving along in their lives, reaching their goals and sorting out their challenges, and that I was the one who was missing something to be able to do that. This was the logic of my trauma brain, my overwhelmed, fight/flight exhausted mind and body thinking and collapsing into thinking there is no hope and certainly not for me.

I got tired of reading books about how broken I was, the terrible impact of child abuse and trauma. The broken relationships, the addiction, lack of self worth, the mental health challenges, the sick bodies that we are left with after our coping strategies fail because our body simply cannot continue with decades worth of toxic stress lodged into our nervous systems, our hearts, and beliefs. I was learning about all the negative impacts but still...

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How Survivors Can Safely Feel and Accept Negative Emotions

All survivors of child abuse and trauma are afraid to feel, accept, trust, and appreciate their uncomfortable or negative emotions. And there is a reason.

We fear and avoid these emotions because we never had a positive role model to teach us how to express sadness, grief, overwhelm, anger, pain, and anxiety in a healthy way.  Instead, we got hurt when the adults in our life felt these challenging emotions. So we have no reason to believe that there is a safe to feel them.

However, developing the ability to feel, accept, trust, and appreciate all your emotions (the good, the bad, and the ugly) is a vital step on the healing journey. It’s impossible to heal if you skip over feeling the bad ones. You can't selectively numb feelings. When you numb the bad, you are numbing your ability to feel the good too.

So where do you start?

Feeling begins with awareness. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? But it's not for survivors. The human brain is programmed to avoid pain at all costs....

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