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chele_yntema

Complex trauma & dissociation specialist | Trauma-focused, somatic, relational psychotherapy | Brisbane southside

Repost from @the.trauma.educator • Women have been

Repost from @the.trauma.educator
•
Women have been taught to confuse goodness with the absence of aggression.

This can be trap especially for the empathetic woman with complex trauma.

We’ve been rewarded for being agreeable, accommodating, and easy to be around, while many expressions of healthy aggression have been interpreted as selfishness, hostility, coldness, being “difficult” or too much.

Unfortunately, therapeutic spaces that don’t take power asymmetries into account can perpetuate this harm, not out of malice, but because they don’t always understand how these asymmetries show up in real life and shape women’s responses within them.

The nervous systems of women need to learn, through somatic EXPERIENCE, that the opposite of domination and violence isn’t passivity.

It is embodied healthy aggression.

Effie 🦋

Repost from @myintegrativetherapist • For anyone w

Repost from @myintegrativetherapist
•
For anyone who has ever started a completely reasonable request with, “I’m so sorry, this is probably annoying, but…”

There’s a particular kind of conditioning that makes having needs feel like you’re creating a problem for everyone around you. So you soften it & over-explain. You offer five ways out & make sure they know you’re totally fine if the answer is no. Maybe apologize a few more times just to be safe.

All the while, you were asking for something completely normal.

A lot of healing is realizing you don’t have to make yourself incredibly easy to accommodate in order to deserve consideration. You’re allowed to have preferences & need support. You’re also allowed to ask for things without acting like you’ve just caused a three-car pileup.

#sorry #request #reasonable #toomuch #trauma

Repost from @thefeelingexpert • The autonomic nerv

Repost from @thefeelingexpert
•
The autonomic nervous system does not ask for permission. It does not consult your preferences, your values, your understanding of the situation, or your awareness that the current moment is technically safe. It scans for threat, constantly, automatically, beneath the level of conscious awareness, and when it detects something that matches the pattern of a previous danger, it responds. Immediately. Without discussion.

The response is not mediated by the thinking brain. It does not pass through the prefrontal cortex, the part of you that reasons, evaluates context, and makes considered choices.

By the time you are aware that something is happening, the nervous system has already acted. The fight or flight has already fired. The freeze has already taken hold. The dissociation has already begun. You didn’t make those things happen. Every single one of them is the output of a system that is doing its most fundamental job, keeping you alive, keeping you protected, responding to threat with the full force of its evolutionary design.

#survival #rage #fear #trauma #danger

Repost from @frank_andersonmd • A lot of us are tr

Repost from @frank_andersonmd
•
A lot of us are trying to stop patterns we’ve never actually understood.

Sometimes those patterns started because they worked. They helped us avoid conflict, stay connected, feel less exposed, or get through something overwhelming.

But a strategy can keep running long after the original threat is gone. That’s when protection starts creating new problems.

Healing means understanding what the pattern was trying to protect, what it’s costing you now, and what you may need instead.

That’s a big reason I created The Path to Healing Trauma. I wanted to give people a clearer way to understand what’s happening underneath these patterns and how healing can begin to look different.

#pain #trauma #cptsd #relationship #harm

Repost from @unfollowing_mum • “Healthy relationsh

Repost from @unfollowing_mum
•
“Healthy relationships don’t require a jury (or witnesses, prosecutors and defendants) during disputes.”

Triangulation often happens in a very unintentional and innocent way.

Triangulation IS a cycle to break in and of itself because if you consistently experience it growing up you become someone who struggles to believe in or trust their own judgement. And what do we do when we don’t trust our own gut or judgements? We seek validation and support from others… and off the cycle goes again!

#eelationship #family #systems #dynamic #trauma

Repost from @mytms_journey • Pretty much everyone

Repost from @mytms_journey
•
Pretty much everyone I coach reaches this point. They’ve learnt about mind-body healing and have practices they can turn to, but when symptoms, emotions or overwhelm arise, the question is still: “What do I do to make this go away as soon as possible?”

I recognise it because I’ve been there too. I could be doing something that looked like self-care while underneath was an urgency to stop feeling what I was feeling. Even the gentlest practice could become another expectation: “I’ve done this for you, body. Why haven’t you changed?”

What I’m inviting people into is a different relationship with themselves in those moments. Before searching for an explanation or another tool, can we acknowledge the experience we’re having? Can we meet the fear, frustration or exhaustion with some understanding?

This is what I mean by attunement. Opening a dialogue with yourself and allowing what you notice to matter in how you respond. “This is difficult. I’m listening. I don’t have to rush to make this disappear. What would feel supportive right now?”

For many people, that feels completely unfamiliar. They need help finding the words, recognising a need, or allowing themselves to receive something kind. That’s understandable when we’ve spent years learning how to escape or manage ourselves without much experience of being attentive or gentle with ourselves.

You don’t need to force yourself to stay with more than feels manageable, or uncover a meaning behind every sensation. Sometimes attending means taking a break, asking for company, or simply acknowledging, “I’m having a hard time”. And your tools and practices can be part of that care. But the care doesn’t have to depend on whether your body becomes quieter afterwards. There is room for your experience as it is, alongside your wish for it to ease.

Urgently trying to fix everything that shows up can add to the sense that it isn’t ok to feel it, whereas attunement offers another response: “You don’t have to feel differently before I’m willing to be here with you.”

That’s what meeting yourself where you are means to me. Change begins with m

Repost from @unfollowing_mum • “Estrangement is of

Repost from @unfollowing_mum
•
“Estrangement is often described by the final incident. It can only really be understood through the accumulation.

The last straw rarely explains the weight of everything underneath it.”

It’s never about “one” incident, but that’s often what it’s minimised down to. Like taking a screenshot of a beautiful park scene and only zooming in on one blade of grass.

#estranged #harm #family #laststraw #trauma

Repost from @awakenwithally • What does connection

Repost from @awakenwithally
•
What does connection with your body ask of you?

1. Presence before correction.

If your body feels unsafe around certain people, let it feel unsafe. Don’t immediately ask it to calm down, open up, or feel different.

Meet the unsafe body if that’s the body waiting to be met right now because that’s what connection asks of you.

Instead, let it sense: “I feel that you’re unsafe here. I’m not going to make you wrong for feeling this way.”

2. Receptivity to your body’s truth

Your body’s truth isn’t something you need to do something about but something you need to make space for and receive first.

Yes, it’s uncomfortable but how can connection grow when you’re constantly in conflict with your body’s truth?

Because the truth you can receive becomes safer to embody, express, transform, or allow to take whatever form it naturally needs.

3. Include your body’s perspective

Connection asks us to become curious about another’s perspective, right? Why would connecting with your body be any different?

Body connection asks you to see beyond what your mind fears, wants, or tells you and become curious about how your body is actually experiencing your life now.

How does your body experience this day or this stage of your life?

Be curious about this. Let your body experience being heard and considered by you.

Love,
Ally.

#body #trauma #cptsd #space #connection

Repost from @the.trauma.educator • Hope requires m

Repost from @the.trauma.educator
•
Hope requires much more than positive thinking. It requires remaining in relationship with a desire without knowing whether it will be fulfilled.

When our connection to hope becomes dependent on having enough certainty that we won’t be disappointed, we organize our lives around avoiding disappointment rather than moving towards what we want.

That’s why you might want reciprocal love, but you decide relationships aren’t for you. You want to start a new art project, but you tell yourself you’re too old. You want a different life, but you begin editing your desires around what feels least likely to disappoint.

Sometimes, this can look remarkably similar to acceptance.

You tell yourself you’re being realistic, that perhaps you never wanted it that much in the first place.

But there is a difference between consciously relinquishing something that is no longer right for you and relinquishing it because continuing to want it asks you to remain open to uncertainty, vulnerability and the possibility of another disappointment.

This is one of the less obvious places where healthy aggression is important.

Healthy aggression isn’t only what helps you protect yourself from what you don’t want. It is also part of the mobilizing energy that helps you pursue, persist and act upon what you do want, even when there is no guarantee that moving towards it will give you the outcome you hoped for.

about refusing to give up on something you want after repeated disappointment.

This can be particularly challenging for empaths who’ve learnt that being “selfish” is not virtuous.

Effie 🦋

#trauma #hope #cptsd #relationship #therapy

Yes 🙌🏻 I feel this deep within my soul as a #thera

Yes 🙌🏻 I feel this deep within my soul as a #therapist who learns from her clients daily and as a human with #cptsd and unrelenting embodied #shame…

Repost from @kayatoastforthesoul.sg
•
One of the things I love about therapy is that I get to learn from my clients too.

They bring in stories, ideas, books they are reading, and sometimes something stays with me long after the session ends.

This week, a client shared a book with me that she described as life-changing.

We talked about what it had taught her about Success.

But we also ended up talking about something else.

Unfairness.

And I think unfairness is something many of us struggle to make peace with.

Someone hurts us.
Something is taken away.
Things don’t turn out the way they should have.

And sometimes we never get the apology, accountability, or closure we were hoping for.

My client has had her fair share of that.
So have I, if I’m being honest.

And I think unfairness can shake something quite deep inside us.

Because when something feels profoundly unfair, our minds naturally want to understand:

Why did this happen?

How could they do this?

How can they just move on?

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with asking those questions.

Something unfair happened. We don’t need to INVALIDATE that or PRETEND it didn’t matter.

But I wonder how much of our life we want to keep giving to it.

How much of our TIME, ATTENTION.

Our future.

—

Maybe two things can happen at once.

We can acknowledge that the past was unfair.

And we can slowly begin putting more of ourselves towards what comes next.

Not because the past suddenly makes sense.

Not because we have forgiven it.

But because perhaps, one day, the life we build afterwards can become much, much BIGGER than what happened to us.

And maybe that’s one way we slowly take our power back.

Take care,
Hernping

💙

#unfair #trauma

Repost from @mindfulmft • If you’d like to read mo

Repost from @mindfulmft
•
If you’d like to read more on this topic, comment FEEDBACK and I’ll send you a link to my free essay.

Discernment is vital. It’s the thing that helps us sort whether something is about us or something is about them. All of those posts that say that others are simply just projecting their own pain onto you is a convenient way to both get a ton of likes AND also have you entirely sidestep any responsibility or reflection. Yes, of course, sometimes it’s their projection. Yes, sometimes it has everything to do with their own stuff and not much to do with you. But you can’t just take that as truth without checking in to see where the thing needs to get filtered. Same goes for those who tend to personalize everything, blame themselves for all, etc. Sometimes it’s just not about you.

The very important work we need to do is to make space to see if indeed there is something for us to look at and explore, or whether it’s not actually about us and we can put it down. Not all feedback is created equally. Some people are actually giving their observations to us so that we can see and begin to acknowledge a part of us that needs attention. And sometimes people are absolutely projecting their own stuff on you without any awareness at all.

“Is there any truth here?” might be a good question to begin with. “What informs my answer?” a good follow up to the one before. Notice any sensations in your body as you answer both. Is there any ease? Tension? Friction? Reactivity? Calm? Lots and lots of layers to this, but a beautiful place to start.

#trauma #relationship #repeat #reaction

Repost from @embodiedwithmichelle • I’ve heard ver

Repost from @embodiedwithmichelle
•
I’ve heard versions of this so many times from people who aren’t asking for perfection.

They’re asking what it might feel like to stop working so hard just to feel okay inside their relationship.

To not always be the one noticing everything, anticipating everything, explaining everything, repairing everything.

To experience care that doesn’t have to be requested in a perfectly organized presentation before it becomes real.

And underneath all of that, a quieter longing:

“I want to feel like I can rest here, too.”

Not because relationships should never be difficult.

But because there’s a difference between doing the work together and becoming exceptionally skilled at carrying the relationship alone.

You shouldn’t have to become less sensitive, less honest, less expressive, or less alive to make love sustainable.

And your ability to endure something isn’t necessarily evidence that it’s good for you.

Sometimes, the most important shift isn’t learning how to tolerate more.

It’s learning to recognize what allows you to feel more like yourself over time.

What makes room for your needs.
What supports your honesty.
What creates steadiness instead of requiring constant recovery.
What becomes nourishing, not merely familiar.

That’s the work I teach here.

Not simply how to recognize what you’re building.

But how to respond differently, move differently, and participate differently in the relationships and life you say you want.

Because seeing the pattern matters.

But so does becoming someone who can act from that awareness + hold the kind of love, connection, and life you’re no longer willing to abandon yourself to create.

You don’t just need to see what you’re building. You need the capacity to build differently.

Follow along if you want to learn how to do both.

💛 #relationship #trauma #live #love #awareness

Repost from @lexyflorentina • We’ve been taught to

Repost from @lexyflorentina
•
We’ve been taught to approach so much of healing from the question, “How do I get myself to stop doing/feeling/experiencing this?”

How do I stop feeling anxious? How do I stop shutting down? How do I become less reactive? How do I get rid of this pattern? How do I finally become the version of myself I know I’m capable of being?

And of course we want to feel better. We want things to change. We want more freedom in our bodies and our lives.

But I think there is an important difference between wanting something to change and making your relationship with yourself conditional on it changing.
Because you’re still going to have hard days. You’re going to have reactions you don’t understand, feelings you wish you weren’t having, old patterns that show up again, moments where you feel clear and grounded and moments where you absolutely do not.

The question becomes: what happens to your relationship with yourself in those moments?

Do you immediately start analyzing, correcting, criticizing, fixing? Does your body become a problem the moment it stops behaving the way you want it to?
Or can you learn to become curious about what’s here, listen to what it might be asking for, and stay in relationship with yourself even when you don’t particularly like what you’re experiencing?

To me, that is attunement.

It isn’t a perfected state you finally arrive at. It’s a relationship you practice.

#trauma #body #cptsd #relationship #pressure

Repost from @hannahfrasermoore • One of the diffic

Repost from @hannahfrasermoore
•
One of the difficulties when leaving relationships is the war it starts within ourselves.

What looks like a question about another person becomes a reckoning with one’s own internal structure.

Who am I if I choose myself?

What does it say about me, if I can hurt another?

When we equate attachment with safety and endurance with love, even the idea of leaving disrupts our identity.

As thoughts of leaving take hold, different parts of the psyche take position. The part that absorbed disappointment. The part that survived by remaining loyal. The part that craved the love story. Each part carries a history and its own set of needs. Each claims moral authority. Alongside them, another part enters the fray, a part that senses constriction and demands a bigger life.

This is more than simple indecision, it is internal conflict at the level of identity.

Leaving asks for things we might not be very good at, like an ability to think about our own experience or a capacity to assert ourselves even when we feel mean. Assertion draws on aggression, and for a psyche organised around goodness, aggression feels very dangerous. Agency here, can feel like betrayal.

The fantasy of a perfect decision is ever present. We want a choice that harms no one. A way out that leaves everyone intact. Certainty promises emotional cleanliness and suggests a way to depart without blood.

But easy decisions are full of childhood hope and logic.

Adult decisions, however, are forged in tension. When it comes to breakups, love and resentment often live in the same body. Loyalty and aliveness pull in opposite directions.

If we can sit in the unknown and listen to its wailing, something new develops within us. Capacity forms in the willingness to endure guilt without collapsing or to tolerate being cast as the bad one.

We find a way to hold the knowledge that leaving will wound and find ourselves able to choose, or discover that staying doesn’t mean remaining wedded to earlier ways of relating.

What emerges from that tension is a new inner strength.

And a life reshaped around a centre that can survive imperfection and prioritise living over compliance.

Repost from @embodiedwithmichelle • There’s a diff

Repost from @embodiedwithmichelle
•
There’s a difference between being loved by someone and being included in the way they move through life.

You can be deeply loved and still find yourself constantly reminding someone that you’re here.

Reminding them to consider you.
Reminding them to include you.
Reminding them that this affects you too.
Reminding them that you’re supposed to be on the same side.

And at some point, I think it’s worth asking:

Why am I teaching someone that we’re supposed to be in this together?

Because you can communicate a need beautifully. You can explain it ten different ways. You can become more understanding, more direct, more patient, more “reasonable.”

But there’s something exhausting about having to keep introducing yourself into your own partnership.

Because if you always have to be invited into their reality, you’re not actually living inside the same reality as them.

You’re visiting it.

And that’s a very different feeling from being someone’s partner.

You’re not asking to be prioritized every second.

You’re asking to belong.
#belong #family #connection #relationship

Repost from @famimind_ • Waking up in a dysfunctio

Repost from @famimind_
•
Waking up in a dysfunctional family doesn’t immediately feel like freedom.

Sometimes it feels like losing your entire understanding of home.

Because once you start healing, you don’t just recognize what happened to you.

You recognize the system that made it possible.

The “difficult” child was often reacting to what nobody wanted to acknowledge.

The “disrespectful” adult child may simply be the first person who stopped confusing obedience with respect.

The “dramatic” one may be the only person willing to name what everyone else learned to normalize.

And suddenly, words from your childhood need new definitions:

“Keep the peace” meant don’t confront the person disturbing it.

“Be mature” meant carry emotions that were never yours.

“Forgive” meant stop expecting accountability.

“Family is family” meant your boundaries shouldn’t apply to us.

That realization comes with grief.

You grieve what happened but also the family you thought you had, the apologies you may never receive, and the relationships that only worked when you were shrinking, rescuing, forgiving, or staying silent.

And perhaps the hardest truth…

Sometimes the family system will fight your healing harder than it ever fought what hurt you.

Because systems protect what is familiar.

When you stop playing your old role, other people are forced to confront what your role helped them avoid.

So you may become “selfish.”
“Too sensitive.”
“Different.”
Even the villain in someone else’s story.

But eventually, being misunderstood becomes less frightening than betraying yourself again.

Sometimes the one accused of “breaking the family apart” is simply the one who finally stopped breaking themselves to hold it together.

Save this for the days guilt makes you question what you know.

Love,
Anaishe Rose 🌹

#trauma #guilt #cptsd #family #therapy

Repost from @soulfulnomadmomma • Some of us learne

Repost from @soulfulnomadmomma
•
Some of us learned very early that love meant carrying what other people would not.

Their moods.
Their disappointment.
Their consequences.
The emotional weight of the entire room.

We became exceptionally compassionate, but much of that compassion was formed before we had boundaries.

We learned to understand the person hurting us more deeply than we understood the part of us being hurt.

To look for the wound beneath their behaviour.

To make allowances.

To remain patient.

To give them one more chance to become who we could already see they might be.

But compassion becomes self-abandonment when it is endlessly extended toward the person refusing responsibility and withheld from the woman carrying the consequences.

Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is stop interrupting another person’s encounter with themselves.

To return what belongs to them.

To allow their choices to have weight.

And to meet the younger part of us who still believes:

If I stop carrying everyone,
I may no longer be needed.

If I am no longer needed,
I may no longer be loved.

#compassion #boundaries #responsibility #youmattertoo #trauma

Repost from @kayatoastforthesoul.sg • I hear this

Repost from @kayatoastforthesoul.sg
•
I hear this surprisingly often in therapy:

“I was told I need to forgive them so I can move on.”

Sometimes that advice comes from friends, family, even therapists and counsellors.

Forgive them for yourself.

Forgive them so you can let go.

Forgive them so you can finally move on.

But sometimes I wonder...

Why do you have to forgive?

—

I don’t think forgiveness is the blanket answer.

Especially when someone has never taken accountability, never taken responsibility, or perhaps never even acknowledged the hurt they caused.

Asking someone to forgive anyway, just to “be the bigger person”, can sometimes feel like another invalidation of what happened.

Because perhaps what happened really was unfair.

Perhaps you were wronged.

And perhaps you don’t need to turn that into forgiveness for your healing to count.

You can say:

“What happened to me was not okay.”

“I don’t forgive what they did.”

And still decide that you don’t want what happened to keep taking up so much space in your life.

I think that’s an important distinction.

—

Moving on doesn’t always mean making peace with what someone did.

Sometimes it means making peace with the fact that it happened, that it was unfair, and that you still get to decide what happens next.

You don’t have to forgive someone to take your life back.

What they did belongs to them.

What you do next belongs to you.

You’ve got this, always.

Take care,
Hernping

💙

#trauma #therapy #cptsd
#forgiveness #notneeded

Repost from @matthewlicata • There are children wh

Repost from @matthewlicata
•
There are children who learn very early that love comes with a task.

No one asks them directly. No contract is signed. Yet somehow they understand. A parent’s sadness fills the room like weather. A caregiver’s anxiety lingers at the edges of daily life.

The emotional atmosphere becomes something that must be carefully monitored, anticipated, and managed.

And so a vow begins to form:

I will carry what is too heavy for those I love to carry.

What begins as an act of devotion gradually becomes a way of belonging.

Years later, the circumstances may have changed, but the vow often remains. We may find ourselves carrying responsibilities that do not belong to us, managing emotional burdens we did not create, and confusing care with self-abandonment, compassion with overfunctioning, and love with sacrifice.

Beneath these patterns lives a question that is rarely spoken aloud:

If I stop carrying this, will I still belong?

For many of us, what makes these burdens so difficult to put down is not the burden itself. What we fear losing is the connection the burden once seemed to protect.

The longer I sit with the mysteries of trauma and healing, the more I have come to see that this pattern is not a failure. It is an expression of love. It is the intelligent adaptation of a young soul doing its best to preserve connection in the only way it knew how.

Healing begins when we discover, slowly and with great tenderness, that belonging does not have to be earned through sacrifice.

Perhaps one of the deepest forms of healing is discovering that we are still loved when our hands are finally empty.

#trauma #therapy #cptsd #connection #childhood

This… the override for me came from my deep fear o

This… the override for me came from my deep fear of being made to be the one at fault, the failure, the perpetually flawed… the one left alone…

Repost from @the.trauma.educator
•
#trauma #cptsd #relationship #empath #protect

Repost from @stacia.aashna • It can be painful to

Repost from @stacia.aashna
•
It can be painful to want to be seen while also feeling afraid of what might happen if you are.
.
.
#cptsd #trauma #hidden #self #therapy

Repost from @hannahfrasermoore • When our parents

Repost from @hannahfrasermoore
•
When our parents tie love to conditions we learn a law that never lets go.

We will be lovable if.

We will be lovable when.

We will be lovable, but not yet as we are.

In psychoanalysis this is misrecognition. The fusion of love with shame. Every scrap of approval carries the message that we are defective at the core.

The child grows into an adult who is not organised around joy, but around defence. The mask matters way more than desire. The appearance of happiness matters more than happiness itself.

Better miserable than visible. Better curated than exposed.

Rejection wounds. Humiliation annihilates.

Humiliation revives the old judgements and turns them into public proof. This is why people stay in dead marriages, polish images of their lives, and silence their hunger. This may on the surface appear vain and shallow, but it is the desperate scrabble for survival. A do or die concealment of shame.

An idea that if you are truly seen you will be obliterated.

As Hollis reminds us, the strategies that preserved life become the prisons that steal it. The task is to see the original judgement for what it was: a lie.

Love was never meant to be conditional. The work is to refuse the parental verdict, to risk being seen as you are, and thrive in your wolf-skin.

Please let me know any untagged art so I can tag. 🙏✨🩷

#self #trauma #cptsd #mask #relationships

Repost from @famimind_ • Some of us didn’t enter a

Repost from @famimind_
•
Some of us didn’t enter adulthood unprepared.

We entered it overprepared for the wrong things.

We knew how to tell what kind of mood someone was in before they said a word.
We knew when to make ourselves small.
When to help.
When to apologize.
When to stay quiet.
When to pretend something didn’t hurt.

And because we became so good at functioning, nobody really questioned what it was costing us.

They called us mature.
Independent.
Responsible.
Easygoing.
Strong.

But a child becoming really good at managing other people is not always maturity.

Sometimes it is what happens when being aware of everyone else feels safer than being connected to yourself.

And then adulthood comes, and suddenly the things that once protected you start following you into places where you no longer need them.

You over explain your no.

You feel guilty when someone is disappointed in you.

You confuse being needed with being loved.

You tolerate things long after they begin hurting you.

You apologize just to make the tension disappear.

You can tell everybody else what they’re feeling while struggling to name what is happening inside of you.

That is why healing can feel so disorienting sometimes.

You are learning things at 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 that other people seem to do without thinking.

But there was never something wrong with your ability to learn.

You simply became fluent in survival before anyone taught you how to feel safe.

And now you get to learn a different language.

Boundaries.

Self trust.

Rest.

Healthy anger.

Reciprocity.

Leaving.

Receiving.

Being loved without performing for it.

There is no age at which it becomes “too late” to learn what childhood should have taught you.

Some of us are not behind.

We are simply learning adulthood without survival holding the pen this time.

What is one thing you’re teaching yourself in adulthood that you wish someone had taught you as a child?

Save this for the days you start judging yourself for how long healing is taking and send it to someone who is learning too.

Love,
Anaishe Rose 🌹

#family #relationship #trauma #childhood #adult

Repost from @jillianturecki • We need each other.

Repost from @jillianturecki
•
We need each other. Sometimes we just get so overwhelmed and need co-regulation. Someone helping you as you ground yourself when your mind spirals, is truly one of the highest forms of love and care there is.

#care #relationship #trauma #cptsd #therapy

Repost from @thefeelingexpert • What Silence Actua

Repost from @thefeelingexpert
•
What Silence Actually Teaches. A child’s body doesn’t experience silence as neutral. It experiences it as danger, because a withdrawn parent is, in that moment, an unavailable parent, and unavailability means unsafe. There is no clarity to what is happening. It can have severe consequences.

So, without any words to explain what’s happening, the child’s mind creates its own explanation, and it almost always points inward. Not out at the people doing it like “they’re struggling to communicate.” Its just back to themselves such as “I am the reason this is happening. I did something wrong.”

Some children get loud to end the silence. Most get quiet, careful, watchful, trying not to cause the next episode. That vigilance doesn’t stay in their childhood. It becomes the way they read every important relationship, scanning for the version of silence that once meant they’d done something unforgivable.

This is what people mean when a partner’s bad mood sends them spiraling, or when they can’t handle being ignored, or when they’d rather have a screaming fight than a cold one. It was never really about tolerance for silence. It’s about what silence used to mean to them as a child who felt unsafe and alone.

The repair as an adult, isn’t learning to tolerate silence better from others. It’s learning that silence is just an absence of words, and it is not a verdict on your worth. The people who are healthy and safe for you will tell you what’s wrong instead of making you guess. Chronic or intentional silence is a punishment or manipulation. Its learning about your own actions and boundaries.

#trauma #neglect #silence #cptsd #therapy

Saying no can be the hardest thing. Often under ou

Saying no can be the hardest thing. Often under our not saying no there is fear - parts of us scared of conflict, and perhaps more so, scared of what our no might cost of the relationship. Sometimes, even without us knowing it, we sacrifice our needs in order to protect the relationship.

From @no.more.pleasing :

I’ve said no and meant it. Then someone asked, “Why not?” and ten minutes later I was asking what time I should get there.

It happened in small steps: one reason, then another. An apology. An offer to do half. Sometimes all it took was “Fine” and two days of silence. By 11 PM, I was writing the message that would make everything feel normal again.

The request hadn’t changed. I had just run out of words before they ran out of pressure.

They didn’t need a better argument. They needed me to keep talking.

#no #communication #relationship #youmatter #fear

From @drscottlyons You can understand exactly wh

From @drscottlyons

You can understand exactly why you feel the way you do and still feel it sitting in your chest, your throat, or your stomach.
That is because emotions are biological events.
They need to be metabolized, not only understood.
Think of a feeling like a sugar cube in water.
You can name it, describe it, and point directly to it.
But it begins to dissolve when you give your body enough space and safety to experience it.
The next time a feeling stays with you, notice the urge to explain it or make it go away.
Pause and find where you feel it in your body.
Stay with the sensation for a few breaths without forcing it to change.

#emotions #trauma #feelings #change #why

Repost from rebelthriver • Tonight, I am thinking

Repost from rebelthriver
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Tonight, I am thinking about the women who came before us. How many went to bed with words caught in their throats because silence was the safest choice available to them?

We carry their courage, but we do not have to carry their suffering or pass it on to our children.

Every time a woman trusts her own voice, leaves what is harming her, or chooses a life large enough to hold her whole self, something in the lineage shifts for the better.

May the lives we build give their courage somewhere gentler to land.

Rest now, beautiful ones. You are so very loved.

꩜ Ella

#trauma #woman #trust #youmatter #youareenough

Repost from rebelthriver • Being the bigger person

Repost from rebelthriver
•
Being the bigger person should never mean being told to shut up and take it.

There is nothing noble about quietly absorbing someone else’s cruelty.

Being the bigger person does not mean becoming the easier person to hurt.

You can speak up, walk away, draw the line, and still know exactly who you are.

🌺 Annie

#abuse #bullying #speakup #youmatter #therapy

Repost from @sarahbcoaching • Your nervous system

Repost from @sarahbcoaching
•
Your nervous system moves toward what it believes is safe, not toward what you want badly enough. 💛⁠
⁠
I spent years believing that if I just wanted something enough, I’d eventually be able to move toward it. I’d find more motivation, get clearer on my why, and commit harder. ⁠
⁠
And none of it worked, my friend. Not because I wasn’t trying, but because I was trying in the wrong language.⁠
⁠
Your nervous system doesn’t speak the language of desire; it speaks the language of safety. ⁠
⁠
And when what you want most resembles something that was once dangerous or unavailable, no amount of wanting will override what your system has decided about whether it’s safe to have.⁠
⁠
This is the piece that’s missing from almost everything in the self-help world. Vision boards, affirmations, goal-setting — all of it assumes that the gap between where you are and what you want is a motivation problem. But if your body doesn’t feel safe receiving what you’re reaching for, you’re not going to reach it through effort alone.⁠
⁠
What actually moves the needle is building your nervous system’s capacity to hold what you’re desiring by showing it through lived experience, in tolerable doses, that expansion doesn’t have to end the way it did before.⁠
⁠
That’s not a mindset shift. It’s somatic work. And it’s the only thing I’ve found that actually changes the pattern rather than just managing it. 🌿⁠
⁠
⁠
With kindness and belief in your healing,⁠
Sarah

#trauma #safe #relationship #enough #therapy

Repost from @frankiestherapy • 💣 I’m going to say

Repost from @frankiestherapy
•
💣 I’m going to say something controversial…I don’t believe you need to forgive people who hurt you in order to heal. 👇

💕 There’s something about ‘you need to forgive them for yourself’ that has never quite sat right with me.

Someone hurts you, they break the trust, they cause the damage, and somehow…your told

Forgive them.
Release the anger.
Find compassion.
Let it go.

But why does healing require me to forgive you for something you chose to do to me?

💕 I believe in forgiveness for yourself.

Forgive yourself for staying.
For trusting.
For not seeing it sooner.
For going back.
For accepting things you now know you deserved better than.

But forgiving them?

I don’t believe you owe anybody that.

💕 You can accept that something happened without deciding it was okay, you can stop carrying the anger without absolving the person who caused it, you can understand someone’s wounds without excusing the wounds they created in you, and you can move forward without rewriting what happened into something more forgivable.

Healing doesn’t have to mean ‘I forgive you.’ Sometimes it means…’I release myself from what you did to me.’ And to me, those are two very different things.

#trauma #pain #cptsd #hurt #trust

Repost from @theempoweredtherapist • This is why w

Repost from @theempoweredtherapist
•
This is why we don’t compare traumas. Emotional neglect tends to get overlooked, because to outsiders it can seem like someone has available caregivers if they are physically present. But for those who experience emotional neglect, the lack of emotional availability from their caregivers can feel devastating and have long-lasting impacts.

It’s hard to get not enough of something that seems like it could be in reach, and this is often the experience of the emotionally neglected child.

And so often, when adult children begin to feel into this dynamic for themselves and begin naming what they felt when they were younger, they are invalidated. And this invalidation is likely to feel like even more complexity and pain.

To those of you carrying wounds no one even knows about, I see you.

#trauma #neglect #invisible #pain #cptsd

Repost from @scott.austin.martin • Many men believ

Repost from @scott.austin.martin
•
Many men believe that keeping the peace means avoiding conflict. But when a moment of tension is brushed aside without repair, the body retains the charge of that moment. Over time, those unresolved moments accumulate.

Conflict is not the enemy of a good relationship; unrepaired conflict is.

.

#relationships #conflict #communication #anger #mentalhealth

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Chele Yntema is a Registered Clinical Counsellor and Trauma Specialist.

In the spirit of reconciliation I acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. I pay my respect to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today. I am committed to inclusion across race, culture, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexuality, religion, and ability. I recognise that people from diverse communities face systemic barriers and seek to challenge the current system and strive for change that makes mental health and wellbeing accessible to and inclusive for all.

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