Dispatches from the front lines of trauma healing.
I’ve been writing about trauma healing, PTSD, CPTSD, and wellbeing for almost 15 years, exploring what it means to be a high-performer making impact in the world — without sacrificing health or happiness.
Trauma and the Body
Trauma happens when a person is overwhelmed and responds with intense fear, even terror, and feels helpless. Trauma is an intense experience for the body, especially the nervous system. The state of being overwhelmed is highly uncomfortable and takes a lot of energy to process.
Escaping Hypervigilance
Hypervigilance is a state of high alertness that never stops. People who experience hypervigilance can't relax or let their guard down. We don't feel safe because we believe that at any moment, something bad is about to happen.
The Two Types of Trauma (and Why to Know the Difference)
Learning about trauma is like learning about gravity. Some things are so simple that once you learn them, it's hard to remember how you saw the world before. For many of us, understanding trauma is like that. It suddenly makes a lot of things make sense.
Numbness Means You Don't Feel Safe
When we think of numbness as part of a stress cycle, we experience more agency in ourselves. When we see it as the body’s survival mechanism, we can have more compassion for ourselves.
Why Stress Keeps Looping (and What to Do About It)
If you don’t know how to complete the cycle, the stress is going to build and build, until you’ve reached your threshold and collapse with overwhelm. As a leader, unless you know how to complete a stress cycle, you are eventually going to burn out.
The Prison of Optimism
I know that some people make incredible meaning out of their trauma and life's challenges. Some people don’t. No matter what, telling someone in the midst of their process that they should be more positive does not help their trauma.
How to Support Survivors
I crowdfunded and created the Rape Crisis Counseling app, with partners from women's human rights groups around the world. It needed to be an app because I wanted every single person to be able to find out how to support a friend, family member or colleague in the aftermath of sexual assault.
Fear and the False Self
Trauma happens when the body's systems are overwhelmed and get stuck digesting the traumatic experience, so the impact of it stays in the system rather than being processed and discharged. This can be experienced many ways, particularly as fear, which is often described in self-help programs as "false evidence appearing real."
Help with Hypervigilance
Hypervigilance means being overly attentive to your environment because you are afraid something terrible is about to happen. It’s like we don’t want to be surprised by bad news, so we think we can anticipate it. Only, that’s not how it works. Hypervigilance actually does the opposite of protecting us.
The #1 Reason You Shouldn’t Meditate
People with active Post-Traumatic Stress (PTSD) or other types of trauma should not meditate the way that other people meditate. People with active trauma symptoms or who are easily triggered into flashbacks need to create alternative pathways to meditation that work for their brains and bodies.
Post-Traumatic Stress is Not a Disorder
Trauma is simply a stressful event that gets stuck in the brain and body. There is nothing “disordered” or “not in order” about it. It is an orderly, predictable and very natural response to an event. Calling our body’s response to trauma a “disorder” creates shame and keeps our options in the shadows.