Sunday is my one day off from working out, my rest day (though it is often chaotic and stressful in other ways), but my body and mind haven’t felt good doing nothing. I don’t get to sleep in with a toddler anyway, and getting up to exercise tries to ensure that I can get a …
Confession time: when I started both my weight loss and personal healing journeys, I did so with a severely flawed premise, that this process would somehow transform me into who I might have been. I spent so much time thinking about the impacts of trauma, my childhood, and the various impacts of my weight, so …
I’ve started reading Reconciliation: healing the inner child, by Thich Nhat Hanh. The five pages of the introduction have already had me openly weeping several times, and my favourite purple ink underlines nearly half the words. Beautiful and painful and horrible and wonderful. And through it all, I fight with myself that I am worth …
When I started writing, I really struggled with why. Why would anyone want to hear from me? Why would I matter, my story matter? Why would anyone want to read my words? I want to be heard. Ok, so does pretty much everyone. Why me? Why should anyone listen to some middle class American white …
There’s an Instagram account I follow, @survivingchildhoodtrauma, that posts daily writing prompts about trauma and recovery. I always read and think about them, but I’ve never written in response to one before. Until now. And not because I feel inspired, but because I feel called out and ashamed. And just sad. “How do I show …
In Inner Child work, there is a concept of Inner Protectors, basically defence mechanisms created during or following trauma to help a child deal with the event or events and to protect the child from future threats. Inner Protectors are often visualized and addressed as separate entities, and part of the recovery process involves “recruiting” …
So I’ve been doing some reading on Inner Child work as a method of working through past trauma. While parts of the process trigger the “bullshit alarms” ingrained from my father about “New Age crap,” I can see the merits and the potential for real change in myself (Man, I swear I need to be …
A couple of weeks ago, I took the huge step of meeting a wonderful friend for drinks and appetizers. In a restaurant. With other humans. It was both nerve-wracking and awesome, the first time I had been in a restaurant in more than a year and a half. But that’s not the point of this …
In thinking about my mom for my last post, I had an odd, and rather uncomfortable, realization: I think of my mother as two different people, with different names: Mom and Mother. Even in my own head, they are distinct, and when I talk with people about her/them, there is a very clear line between …
I’ve lived my life this way for so long, it begs the question: why bother to fight my way out? Why go through the messy ugly painful confusing process of trying to understand why I am the way I am and figuring out how to be different. Both the process and the possible end results …