There was a time I thought my reaction to the news meant something was wrong with me. That I was weak.Avoidant.Uninformed.“Burying my head in the sand.” But after naming my cPTSD — after finally understanding how my nervous system was shaped — I see it clearly now: The problem isn’t…
Adult Child of Narcissist (ACoN): what it really means, what it doesn’t, and why the term is about understanding trauma—not blame or immaturity.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Chester Bennington lately—not because of how his story ended, but because of how much of his living story feels familiar. Not the fame.Not the stage.Not the screaming crowds. The inside. Chester spent his life translating something unspeakable into sound. Rage, grief, abandonment, self-blame, shame—wrapped…
Let’s get something straight. If your life has been shaped by lies, emotional whiplash, shifting rules, and the constant requirement to adapt just to survive… “Fuck it, I give up” is not a failure.It’s a rational response. Because at some point, continuing to try becomes self-harm. You Can’t Win a…
I didn’t post last Thursday.I didn’t post Tuesday, either. And for the first time since I started this blog, that absence felt noticeable. Not dramatic.Not catastrophic.Just… different. For months now, I’ve been writing on a steady rhythm — Tuesdays and Thursdays, like clockwork. That consistency mattered to me. It was…
There’s a moment from when I was about fifteen years old that I didn’t talk about for decades. During the chaos surrounding my mother and step-father’s divorce, my mother once threatened to put my sister and me into the car and drive us all off a bridge. That wasn’t the…
I’ve been joking lately that hitting 50 made me feel a little like Walter White — just without the urge to build a meth empire. But the more I sit with that comparison, the more I realize it’s actually… not a joke at all. There’s something real — something psychological,…
For most of my life, Christmas came with a low-grade dread I didn’t have language for. On the surface, it looked like a normal holiday — lights, food, family photos. Underneath, my nervous system knew better. Holidays weren’t about joy or connection. They were tests. Performances. Emotional obstacle courses where…
For most of my life, I thought addiction was the problem. The shame.The struggle.The guilt.The constant attempts to “fix myself.”The belief that if I could just stop that, everything else would finally fall into place. But the truth — the truth I didn’t discover until the Mom-pocalypse resulted in the…
Been rereading Pete Walker’s Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, and one line hit me harder than it ever has before: he says cPTSD healing often looks like three steps forward, two steps back — and that grieving a lifetime of trauma commonly takes 2–3 years. I don’t know who…