Trauma Recovery Coaching That Meets You Where You Are

There’s a particular question that doesn’t arrive as a whisper or a scream. It just… settles in. Familiar. Persistent. Am I the problem? It slips in when something ends. When someone pulls away. When you finally speak. When you set a boundary, you should’ve set ten years ago. When you stop performing a version of yourself that kept everyone else comfortable. Some people ask this once in a decade. Others, people like us, ask it as a kind of reflex, the way the body reaches for

Most people assume grief shows up right when something ends. The moment the loss happens, we expect tears, collapse, clarity, something. But that isn’t how it worked for me, and it isn’t how it works for a lot of people. More often, grief shows up when the room finally empties. It arrives in the spaces where we’re no longer performing the version of ourselves that kept everyone else comfortable. It waits until we step out of the roles, relationships, and environments that did

❗️Spoiler-Free Intro Post❗️ A Woman is no Man By Etaf Rum Some stories are so quietly devastating you almost don’t hear the crack until you’re halfway through. This is one of those. For this month’s Book Club selection, we’re reading A Woman Is No Man, a novel that follows three generations of Palestinian-American women navigating the weight of inherited silence, the cost of cultural loyalty, and the impossible choice between family and self. Without giving anything away, t

A true story of karmic comedy and quiet resistance: when her ex-husband angered a hive, the bees attacked, and he thought she summoned them. A tale of intuition, consequence, and letting the universe handle it.

How families, cultures, and institutions shape behavior, and why understanding systems supports accountability without denial or self-erasure.

Why relationships often feel more complicated after awareness grows, and how misalignment, grief, and sensitivity are normal parts of waking up.

Collapse after awareness is often mistaken for failure. In reality, it is a protective nervous system response that allows integration and recovery.

Many people expect that gaining awareness will bring clarity, relief, or empowerment. Instead, they feel more anxious, more tired, more sensitive, or more withdrawn than before. Old coping strategies stop working. Emotions surface without clear reasons. The body seems to lag behind what the mind now understands.

Moral injury describes the quiet disorientation that can follow new awareness — when values wake up faster than the nervous system can integrate.

This novel opens conversations about identity, belonging, secrecy, and what happens when parts of a person’s story are taken from them before they ever have language for the loss. It asks us to sit with questions that don’t have easy answers... about family, power, survival, and the long echo of choices made in silence.

I taught at a small private school once.... one of those places people call a “safe option” because the public schools were failing our Black kids. So families did what families do when the world won’t protect their children: they sent them to the nearest place that might be gentler. On paper, it was a refuge. In practice, it was something else entirely.

Trauma survivors are often called “challenging” when they’re simply asking curious, thoughtful questions. This Step 2 entry explores how emotional illiteracy leads to mislabeling, and how reclaiming curiosity becomes a powerful step toward identity healing.

There’s a strange kind of clarity that comes at the end of a long healing cycle. It’s the clarity that shows up when you realize your personal life didn’t just change, it synced.

There’s a strange moment in adulthood when you realize that belonging is no longer something you chase; it’s something you choose. But only after you’ve lived through enough rooms where you were tolerated at best, misunderstood at worst, and miscast somewhere in between.

Some people grew up in families where their existence made sense at a glance. They spoke and were understood. They felt something, and it was believed.

There’s a particular kind of surrender that doesn’t feel like giving up, but it also doesn’t feel like determination. It feels like… floatation. Like a leaf that finally falls into the water.

For years, I carried the belief that I was “too much.” Too intense. Too inquisitive. Too emotional. Too direct.