IS IT REALLY MENTAL "ILLNESS"? Maybe the name should be changed to "Survivor Reaction Suppression"? This is a phenomenon where as children, we froze because we could not either flee or fight off our attackers. Freeze is one of 4 biological stress responses to trauma and unhealed people live in a functional variation of unexpressed... Continue Reading →
For those who think childhood sexual molestation is rare or believe that those in power are doing everything they can to get justice for the victims, think again. This is a long article, but is worth the read if you truly care to be trauma-informed. I think every client and psychologist should read this. It... Continue Reading →
Nobody ever forgets what happened to them as every traumatic event is stored and remembered by the body and subconscious mind --- especially in the case of preverbal wounds. We remember everything, but for now, for some of us, those memories are blocked from our conscious mind until we can get all parts of self... Continue Reading →
....or remember...... When we are being abused as children, if the abuse is severe enough, we might leave the body and temporarily go off into another dimension. This might help us survive the abuse so that we can function in the world afterward. Our coping strategies serve us as children, but as adults these dissociative... Continue Reading →
I am always fascinated by how repression works because I know how it had worked within me. It is simply amazing how our bodies remember every single thing, but our conscious minds do not. All of us have stuff repressed. It is either fully repressed or partially repressed. We are not supposed to remember what... Continue Reading →
I think your dreams stem from the subconscious aspect of yourself that exist to help you become more aware of the issues that you need to work on. Dreams, if we pay attention, help us become self-aware and more in tune with how we feel inside the deeper aspects of ourselves. Dreams show us what... Continue Reading →
When I heard of my friends being molested back in the 90's, I had always felt so much heartbreak for them. I understood what it might have been like. At those times, I felt how lucky I was to have never been sexually abused. I remember myself saying, "Thank God I was never molested". Then... Continue Reading →
More often than not, we don't remember our trauma or have only partial memory of it. We might only have memories of the parts we can dissociate from as adults. We are not supposed to remember trauma as a means to survive it and what we DO remember, we might be desensitized from as... Continue Reading →
Our culture says that anger hurts you but we are only getting a half truth here. Anger only punishes you when you keep it inside and suppress it. When you, however, give it full expression in a safe place, once released, you might find that grief was underneath it. Then finally, we feel the grief... Continue Reading →
The phenomenon of the resting bitch face explained from my lens: I had people call out my resting bitch face all my life. If I am not smiling, there it is. Are you sad? Why are you angry? What's wrong, Karen? Right? Don't we hear this a lot? I started looking at my own RBF... Continue Reading →
Trauma is likely to be repressed or partially repressed from childhood. However, whether the trauma is consciously remembered or not, it is likely to be normalized into adulthood as a means of survival and false empowerment unless there was something in that child's life that taught them what happened to them was wrong and not... Continue Reading →
Off the Beaten Path 