Triggers

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  Adult Children of Narcissists - Adverse Childhood Experiences - Boundaries - Breaking the Cycle - cPTSD - cPTSD Healing - Emotional Abuse - Empty Nest - Gen X - Generational Trauma - Gratitude - Holiday Triggers - Holidays - Narcissistic Abuse Recovery - No Contact - Recovery - Survivor - Trauma - Triggers

  The Bright Spot Between the Ruins

  May 10, 2026 - By Andrew Pumpelly

  Mother’s Day, Two Years Later There are dates that split your life into “before” and “after.” For me, Mother’s Day 2024 was one of them. That was the day the mask finally shattered. The day decades of confusion, contradictions, emotional manipulation, and hidden truths stopped feeling like isolated incidents and…

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  Adult Children of Narcissists - Adverse Childhood Experiences - Boundaries - cPTSD Healing - Gen X - Generational Trauma - Hypervigilance - Narcissistic Abuse Recovery - Narcissistic Parent - Recovery - Survivor - Trauma - Triggers

  When the Line Was Busy: Gen X Trauma and Modern Life Overwhelm

  May 3, 2026 - By Andrew Pumpelly

  There was a time when being unreachable wasn’t something you had to fight for. It was just… how things worked. If you were online in the 90s, you remember it. That screech of the modem. The slow crawl of a download. Logging into a BBS or early internet connection and…

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  Adult Children of Narcissists - Adverse Childhood Experiences - cPTSD - cPTSD Healing - Emotional Abuse - Generational Trauma - Narcissistic Abuse Recovery - Narcissistic Parent - Recovery - Survivor - Trauma - Triggers

  I Didn’t Just Get Angry — I Detonated

  January 27, 2026 - By Andrew Pumpelly

  What childhood silence teaches the nervous system For a long time, I thought my relationship with anger was broken. When I finally spoke up, it didn’t come out measured or tidy.It came out cataclysmic — a scorched-earth eruption that left people stunned and me wondering how things escalated so fast.…

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  Adverse Childhood Experiences - cPTSD - Emotional Abuse - Hypervigilance - Narcissistic Parent - Recovery - Survivor - Trauma - Triggers

  Preparedness, or Paranoia?

  January 6, 2026 - By Andrew Pumpelly

  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…

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  Adverse Childhood Experiences - Boundaries - cPTSD - Emotional Abuse - Financial Abuse - Hypervigilance - Narcissistic Parent - No Contact - Recovery - Survivor - Trauma - Triggers

  Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back: The Part of Healing No One Warns You About

  December 18, 2025 - By Andrew Pumpelly

  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…

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  Adverse Childhood Experiences - Boundaries - cPTSD - Emotional Abuse - Financial Abuse - Financial Stability - Gratitude - Hypervigilance - Narcissistic Parent - No Contact - Recovery - Spirituality - Substance Abuse - Survivor - Trauma - Triggers

  Faith & Trauma — Part 3: When Faith Stops Being a Performance

  December 14, 2025 - By Andrew Pumpelly

  I was raised in an extremely conservative expression of Christianity — the Church of Christ. I’m not here to bash that tradition. There are good people there.Sincere people.Faithful people. But inside my family system, church didn’t feel like refuge. It felt like performance. Who I Thought I Was Performing For…

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  cPTSD - Intimacy - Narcissistic Parent - Recovery - Survivor - Trauma - Triggers

  The Kind of Freedom I Was Really Afraid of Losing

  November 28, 2025 - By Andrew Pumpelly

  After Thanksgiving dinner this year, sitting across from my sister and her husband, something landed in me that I hadn’t fully named before. I watched the way they moved around each other — the subtle ease, the quiet partnership, the shared language that only years of safety can build. And…

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  cPTSD - Narcissistic Parent - Recovery - Substance Abuse - Survivor - Trauma - Triggers

  Why Triggers Hit Harder After You Start Healing

  November 27, 2025 - By Andrew Pumpelly

  Once Your Nervous System Has Tasted Safety, The Old Triggers Move at Relativistic Speeds For a long time, I couldn’t understand why re-engaging with my mother in 2019 hit me so much harder than it ever had before. I’d already survived decades with her.I’d already been through multiple recovery attempts.I’d…

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  Boundaries - cPTSD - Narcissistic Parent - Recovery - Survivor - Trauma - Triggers

  The Mistake I Thought I Made — And the Truth I Finally Saw

  November 26, 2025 - By Andrew Pumpelly

  There’s a part of the Missouri story I don’t talk about much — not because it’s dramatic or explosive, but because the shame around it lingered long after the dust settled. It’s the part where my daughter told me she was pregnant. November 13th, 2023. I remember where I was…

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  Boundaries - cPTSD - Narcissistic Parent - No Contact - Recovery - Survivor - Trauma - Triggers

  Before the Mom-pocalypse, I Had a Preview

  November 25, 2025 - By Andrew Pumpelly

  —a reflection on my first “accidental” no-contact break Most people assume my No Contact journey started in 2024, when the truth finally blew the doors off my life. But in reality, the first crack in the system happened years earlier—long before I knew what narcissism was, long before I had…