You’ve probably noticed it’s been a couple of weeks since my last blog post. Creating content for a business (blog posts, newsletters, Facebook posts, etc.) is work, and sometimes I run out of things to say. Other times, I run out of time to say them. Now that I’m relaunching my romance author pen name and will be releasing a book every other month for the foreseeable future (into 2027, at least), not counting the…
Some people are genuinely positive and happy all the time. This is their natural state of being. They don’t have to put work into it; it’s simply who they are. When they talk about feeling positive emotions and thinking positive thoughts, they are speaking their truth. For many of us, though, “all positive all the time” is not who we genuinely are. We feel potentially problematic emotions like anger and fear. We think negative thoughts.…
In talking about or teaching the concepts of energetic attraction (a/k/a manifestation or the “Law of Attraction”), people often state that in order to bring positive things into your life, you have to be positive all the time. According to them, if you think negative thoughts, feel emotions such as anger or fear, or say negative things, you’ll create negative outcomes in your life. In other words, to their way of thinking, bad things only…
At times, someone who is on a healing journey is told that in order to heal, they have to eliminate their “shadows” and have and project “only love and light.” This is not the case. The parts of you that are sometimes labeled “shadows” are, often, the parts that have been the most damaged by your experiences. Seeking to eliminate or deny those aspects doesn’t move you toward healing; it simply furthers the rejection and…
In some corners of the spiritual community, practitioners claim that in order to heal, you have to think “only positive thoughts” and feel only positive emotions. They preach “love and light” and even go so far as to tell trauma survivors that they have to stop thinking about the past because they’re lowering everyone else’s vibration. Yeah. I’ve actually had that said to me when I tried to explain one of my triggers. “You aren’t…
In discussing trauma and how it impacts people, one thing I’ve seen overlooked repeatedly is the fact that not everyone is traumatized by the same things. I’ve actually been told my traumatic experiences weren’t traumatic because “that wouldn’t have traumatized me, so it isn’t a traumatic thing.” That’s not how that works. That’s not how any of it works. There are a lot of variables behind how an experience effects someone and whether those effects…
NOTE: This was originally a post on my personal Facebook profile. It fits what I’m discussing in this month’s blog posts, so I chose to share it here. Trauma rewires the brain. This has been shown scientifically. When you experience trauma, especially long-term trauma, the basic functioning of your brain is altered. This leads to things like constantly feeling like you’re “on red alert,” because your brain has become wired to read danger signals where…
As a trauma survivor, I’ve encountered many people who think trauma is just a matter of “holding onto the past” or “not getting over something.” They believe trauma is just an emotional reaction that someone can choose or not, and that people who live with post-traumatic stress or other issues related to their trauma are choosing not to get better. These beliefs can be incredibly harmful to trauma survivors–and they are incorrect. Trauma is caused…
Note: This is a slightly revised version of my post which originally appeared on the Wellness Universe blog on August 2, 2020. My marriage to my children’s father included a great deal of emotional and verbal abuse from him, along with behavior that can only be labeled toxic. That behavior and abuse continued off and on even after I ended the marriage, until last year when I finally severed all possible means he had of…
As a child, I was taught not to use my voice, especially when it came to speaking about the things I knew to be true. My mother became easily overwhelmed when I talked “too much” (meaning, talked the way a young child typically would), and my father was horrified and upset if I talked about magic, having invisible friends, trees talking to me, or any of the other things that made up my world at…