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Aristotle

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chele_yntema

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

wisdom by @famimind_ Becoming the cycle breaker

wisdom by @famimind_

Becoming the cycle breaker changes more than your relationship with your family.

It changes your relationship with guilt, belonging, responsibility, love, and even yourself.

Because dysfunctional family systems usually have roles.

The peacemaker.
The fixer.
The responsible one.
The one who keeps quiet.
The one who forgives first.
The one everyone calls when something goes wrong.
The one expected to understand everybody while nobody is required to understand them.

When you stop performing your role, the system has to adjust.

And sometimes, instead of questioning the dysfunction, people question you.

Why are you different now?
Why are you making everything a problem?
Why can’t you just let it go?
Why are you distancing yourself?
Why are you tearing the family apart?

This is why healing can initially feel like loss.

You may lose closeness that depended on access to you.
You may lose approval that depended on obedience.
You may lose relationships that only worked when you abandoned yourself to maintain them.

That doesn’t mean every relationship has to end.

But healthy relationships must be able to survive your boundaries.

And this is the part of cycle breaking that deserves more attention:

You’re not only learning what to stop.

You’re learning what to build instead.

How to communicate without fear.
How to disagree without punishment.
How to love without control.
How to rest without guilt.
How to apologize without manipulation.
How to set boundaries without explaining them for an hour.
How to create traditions that don’t revolve around dysfunction.
How to make home feel safe instead of emotionally unpredictable.

Cycle breaking is not becoming the perfect person your family failed to be.

It is becoming conscious enough to stop passing forward what should have ended with you.

With love,
Anaishe Rose 🌹

#trauma #family #cptsd

Repost from @hannahfrasermoore • We can spend a li

Repost from @hannahfrasermoore
•
We can spend a lifetime surviving relationships rather than being fully alive inside them.

The tragedy of adaptation is that we can become so good at enduring our lives, we forget they are also ours to live.

✨#trauma #relationships #understandingothers #cptsd #redflag

This… when the wall of our world come tumbling dow

This… when the wall of our world come tumbling down, when all we ever knew isn’t really all we ever knew…

Repost from @haileypaigemagee
•
Disillusionment is one of the most overlooked forms of grief.

It’s so painful because you don’t just lose the thing — you lose the *belief* you had about the thing.

And usually, that belief was a central piece of your identity. So really, you lose part of you, too 💔

Disillusionment is one of the biggest catalysts of life transitions⁠. It’s the moment that leads to a person deciding to leave a relationship, career path, community, or lifestyle that they spent years believing in.

Making sense of the beliefs that have shattered ⁠— allowing yourself to grief and process ⁠— and creating a new narrative that holds space for what you’ve learned and who you’re becoming now ⁠— is how we slowly heal from disillusionment.

#pain #trauma #betrayal #mentalhealth #cptsd

Repost from @thefeelingexpert • You finally start

Repost from @thefeelingexpert
•
You finally start doing the work. You’re in therapy, you’re reading, you’re understanding yourself in ways you never have before. And instead of feeling better you start feeling worse. Heavier. Sadder. Like something is being lost rather than found. And you wonder if you’re doing it wrong.

What you’re feeling is grief. And it is one of the most normal and sometimes least talked about parts of healing from trauma.

You are mourning something you never had. And that is its own kind of grief with its own weight. And grieving what could have been is real even when it has no specific shape.

The grief just means you are finally close enough to it to actually heal it.

#trauma #grief #cptsd #innerchild #loss

Repost from @matthewlicata There is a great deal

Repost from @matthewlicata

There is a great deal of wisdom in the now-familiar phrase that “the body keeps the score.” Our bodies carry our histories. They remember what overwhelmed us, what frightened us, what brought pleasure, what required protection.

Long before the conceptual mind has figured out what is happening, the body may already be responding—with contraction or expansion, trembling or warmth, an impulse to move toward or pull away.

Learning to listen to these communications, to cultivate a kind of somatic sensitivity, has been an important part of my own life and work for many years. But the body is not an oracle. Because some of the score was written a very long time ago.

A nervous system shaped in an environment where intimacy carried danger may register closeness as threat. Someone who learned that belonging required self-abandonment may feel intense activation while setting a healthy boundary. What feels expansive and alive may be a movement toward something deeply true—or toward something exquisitely familiar.

None of this means the body is wrong. The contraction is real, the fear is real, the trembling is real. But what the body is responding to may not belong entirely to the present moment. And perhaps this is where somatic sensitivity begins to deepen into somatic discernment.

Listening to the body is not the same as obeying it. Rather than immediately asking, What is my body telling me to do?, we might become curious about another question: What is happening in my body as I am here? We may not know immediately whether the fear is signaling danger or vulnerability, whether the contraction is asking us to leave or marking a threshold that was once unsafe to cross. And perhaps that not-knowing is part of the practice.

The body is not standing outside our history, offering pure instructions about the life we should live. The body is inside the history. This is precisely why its communications deserve our attention—not as commandments, but as part of an ongoing conversation between past and present, protection and possibility.

The body knows. But the body knows many things.

#body #knowing #intuition #trauma #communication

Repost from @no.more.pleasing • Toxic positivity d

Repost from @no.more.pleasing
•
Toxic positivity doesn’t always tell you your feelings are wrong. Sometimes it hands you more acceptable ones to replace them with.

Gratitude instead of grief.
Strength instead of support.
A lesson instead of anger.
A bright side instead of the truth.

Often, the person isn’t trying to hurt you. They just don’t know how to sit with pain.

But after enough of these responses, you learn to bring people the edited version. The one that doesn’t ask them to sit with anything.

#toxicpositivity #grief #trauma #cptsd #pain

Repost from @dr.shaunarae • It can be difficult to

Repost from @dr.shaunarae
•
It can be difficult to name what you’re still trying to understand when your partner is waiting for an answer. You may see effort and want to acknowledge it, while also knowing you’re not ready to say what it means for the future of the relationship. That’s a hard place to speak from, especially if your honesty is met with repeated requests for reassurance.

That’s part of why it matters to ask what you’re waiting for. If there’s something you genuinely need to learn, you can name it and pay attention to it. If you’re waiting for a painful truth to feel painless, more searching may keep you circling the same question.

There’s also a meaningful difference between needing more time to sort through your feelings and needing something more to happen between you. After a betrayal, for example, a person may remain unsure because trust has not yet been supported by the repair they need. Their partner may feel that enough time has passed, while they are still trying to talk about what has been missing during that time.

Being able to name that difference can make the conversation more honest. It gives both people something more specific to respond to than “I’m still not sure,” even if neither person knows yet where the conversation will lead. 🤍

#trauma #cptsd #clarity #Discernment #Relationships

Repost from @frank_andersonmd • One of the hardest

Repost from @frank_andersonmd
•
One of the hardest things about being hurt by someone you loved is that the relationship may not fit neatly into “good” or “bad.”

There may have been real care, real connection, and memories you still value.

And there may also have been behavior that hurt you deeply.

The trouble comes when the good memories start becoming an argument against your pain:

They loved me.
They had their own wounds.
There were so many good moments.
Maybe I’m making too much of what happened.

Sometimes the pain needs room to be understood without immediately being balanced against everything good about the person.

That doesn’t mean you have to erase the good.
It means you can remember what was good without using it to make the harm smaller.

And your boundaries do not depend on whether someone was “all bad.” They can be based on what happened, what it cost you, and what you need now.

#harm #trauma #cptsd #confusion #therapy

Sometimes we lie awake in the evening, parts of us

Sometimes we lie awake in the evening, parts of us exhausted from the day that has been, whilst other parts swirl into the yet-to-come tomorrows, anticipating the what-ifs and preparing the how-tos.

Often the swirls linger into the morning light, the worry of worse still residing deep within. It is in these times we are pulled to share our swirls, to seek a sense of certainty in an Other.

Yet even amidst their certain assuredness, something goes amiss. Our worry of worse still swirls, still remains loud.

Perhaps this is when a promise of assuredness is offered quickly, the parts of us moving with disquieting distress are left lost in the shadows.

Oftentimes, though assurance is wanted, the assurance needed is that of an Other who stays close in truth, who stays alongside us even amidst the shadows of disquieting distress, an Other who stays honest even within and between the unknowingness of our tomorrows.

Into the unknowingness of our tomorrows, here now, alongside you, honest and true.

#anxietysupport #worry #coregulation #psychotherapy #brisbanetherapist

Repost from @famimind_ • Somewhere along the way,

Repost from @famimind_
•
Somewhere along the way, you learned to look back at the child you were and ask:

Why didn’t I say something?
Why did I still love them?
Why did I lie?
Why didn’t I fight back?
Why did I keep trying to make them happy?
Why couldn’t I protect my siblings?
Why was I so difficult?

But those are adult questions being asked of a child who was trying to survive with a child’s brain, a child’s power, and a child’s choices.

You didn’t have the language you have now.

You didn’t have the distance you have now.

You didn’t have the freedom you have now.

And you certainly didn’t have the responsibility the adults around you had.

You adapted.

Maybe you became quiet because speaking made things worse.

Maybe you became useful because being needed felt safer than being vulnerable.

Maybe you became an achiever because praise was the closest thing you had to consistent love.

Maybe you learned to read everyone’s mood before you learned to understand your own.

Maybe you protected your siblings as much as you could while secretly needing someone to protect you, too.

And now, years later, you’re looking at those survival responses through adult eyes and calling them character flaws.

They weren’t.

There is a difference between taking responsibility for who you are today and taking responsibility for what happened to you when you were a child.

Healing asks us to do the first.

It does not require the second.

So maybe the child you were doesn’t need another apology.

Maybe they need someone to finally say:

You should never have had to figure out how to survive the people who were supposed to make you feel safe.

And maybe that someone gets to be you now.

If this reached a part of you that still carries childhood shame, leave a ❤️ no explanation needed.

And send this to someone who is still blaming the child they were for what the adults around them failed to do.

Save this for the days your younger self ends up back on trial.

Love,
Anaishe Rose 🌹

#trauma #child #hurt #cptsd #shame

Repost from @the.trauma.educator • When your body

Repost from @the.trauma.educator
•
When your body experiences or perceives a threat, it needs access to some form of defence response, whether that is fight, flight, freeze or another one.

The fight response has a very specific role in the nervous system; to support self-protection and self-advocacy.

Fight allows you to remain engaged with the “threat” from a more empowered position:

“I can do something about this here and now.”

Now, remember, by “threat” I don’t only mean physical threat.

A perceived “threat” can be a boundary being crossed, someone treating you unfairly, a conflict that asks you to stand your ground, somebody being disappointed with your choice, having to ask for what you need, saying no when someone wants a yes, or recognising that something isn’t right for you and acting accordingly.

The challenge comes when your body doesn’t experience fight as an available option.

At that moment, the need for defence doesn’t disappear.

In the absence of a solid fight response, it can start to rely too heavily on the flight response:

“Where I am right now doesn’t feel safe enough, so I need to be ahead of the threat.”

That’s why you might catastrophize, you worry about how someone will respond, avoid situations that require confrontation, you fear disappointing people, you rehearse conversations before they happen, you become hyperaware of changes in other people’s behaviour and try to prevent difficult situations before you have to face them.

Over time, your life can become too constricted because your body doesn’t trust its capacity to protect you when something difficult happens.

This is where healthy aggression is so valuable.

It allows you to resist, push back, act, choose, say no, confront, negotiate and protect what matters.

Effie 🦋

#anger #healthyagression #cptsd #anxious #threat

100% this 🙏🏻 let’s build a better community of tog

Repost from @myintegrativetherapist • We can get r

Repost from @myintegrativetherapist
•
We can get really good at staying functional. We keep busy, intellectualize, minimize, take care of everyone else, or tell ourselves we’re over something because it happened a long time ago. But not feeling something and not having feelings about it are two very different things.

When you finally have enough safety or space to let some of it in, you might be surprised by how much is still there.

You don’t have to open the floodgates all at once. You can feel a little, come back to yourself & let that be enough for today. ❤️

#feelings #emotions #trauma #safety #therapy

When our systems are shaped early by prolonged vol

When our systems are shaped early by prolonged volatility, and when turbulence remains ever possible, our experience organises into patterns of protection, or parts of us, that implicitly learned how to adapt and respond to Others and the World whilst keeping the Self safe.

Parts of us move toward daily functioning and toward getting through, they feel the push to persist. These parts learned long ago how to push on and push through alone, sensing and perceiving shifts in the atmospheres within and between Self and Others well before anything is spoken.

Other parts of us want to scream, to shrink, to sink into the floor with a cry for help. They sense the body collapsing under the pressure to persist.

Yet even within the very real core need beneath the collapse, the panic, the dread, and the shame of being found wanting begins to press in. Parts terrified in the aloneness of the collapse itself.

Perhaps because parts of us still remember that it was the cry for help, and the collapse itself, that once awakened frustration, expectation, anger, intrusion, and retaliation; or worse still the stark absence of the Other even within our cry.

And so, our core needs prevail while an inner battle between persisting and collapsing abides. We become frozen yet functional. We are always ready, never resting… For resting is the remembered risk, the moment the true harm came.

Certainly the World around us offers no relief, where accountability is scarce, where collective care is thin, and where we are expected to survive on our own. And often, even the help does not help.

So we rise. We push on. We push through. We persist. And the collapse awaits. Perhaps this is why complex trauma persists.

For when we needed it most, when we need it most now, there was and still is no Other to gently be alongside us. Maybe even that is why what is needed now is gentle accompaniment.

To know that someone is there alongside us within the needed collapse, as the losses of our earliest years become shareable and knowable in togetherness.

#complextrauma #cptsd #burnout #traumatherapy #relationaltherapy

I have to share this one from @ptsdthewarwithinoff

I have to share this one from @ptsdthewarwithinofficial as I couldn’t resonate more….

Healing is apparently just me trying to gently parent the tiny feral creature living inside my soul.

Me:
“Hey buddy, what do you need?”

My inner child:
“Violence. Revenge. A cigarette. Maybe a juice box.”

Me:
“Okay, well… one of those is age appropriate.”

Nobody talks enough about this part of healing. The part where your inner child is not a soft glowing angel wrapped in light. Sometimes he is a sleep-deprived little raccoon with abandonment issues and a suspicious attitude.

So now I get to be the adult in the room like:

No, we are not blowing up our life.
No, we are not texting that person.
No, revenge is not self-care.
Yes, you may have a snack.
Yes, I will sit with you.
Yes, we can be dramatic, but only a little.

Healing is wild. One minute you are doing deep emotional work. The next minute you are negotiating with your inner child like he just crawled out of a dumpster behind a gas station.

Still counts.

#LittleMe #trauma #cptsd #therapy
#PTSD The War Within
Matt 🦝

Repost from @frankiestherapy • 💣 This is how you c

Repost from @frankiestherapy
•
💣 This is how you can slowly become convinced that YOU are the problem… 👇

💕 You start the conversation wanting to talk about something that hurt you, but somewhere along the way, the original hurt disappears.

Now you’re talking about your tone, your reaction, the paragraph you sent, how emotional you became, and eventually, you can become so focused on reacting ‘correctly’ that you stop asking whether what keeps happening to you is okay.

💕 And yes, we are still responsible for our behaviour when we’re hurt, but accountability shouldn’t erase context. You can regret the way you reacted AND recognise that something repeatedly pushed you to a place you didn’t like being in.

Both can be true.

💕 This is also why some relationship patterns can become so confusing and difficult to leave. You spend so much time analysing yourself… Was I too sensitive?
Did I overreact? Could I have communicated it better?

…that you stop looking at the relationship itself.

💕 And sometimes healing begins when you stop asking…’How do I become easier to love?’ And start asking…’What is this relationship teaching me to believe about myself?’

From @nvcglobalrising Tired of the fights. Tired

From @nvcglobalrising

Tired of the fights.
Tired of the uncomfortable silence.
Tired of pretending we don’t have a position.

There are people we care about who see some things so differently from us that we barely know how to begin a conversation.

Politics, immigration, Israel-Palestine, climate, AI, vaccination, gender, democracy.

Sometimes we avoid the subject altogether. Sometimes we enter already tense, expecting a fight. Sometimes we speak carefully and leave half of what we really think unsaid.

And sometimes we listen mainly so we can prepare our answer.

After a while, it can seem like our choices are to get louder or stay quiet.

But there is another thing many of us are longing for: to say what matters to us and still remain in relationship.

To be curious without pretending we don’t have strong convictions.

To listen without giving ourselves up.

To hear something that deeply disturbs us and still try to understand what is happening in the person sitting across from us.

Because avoiding these conversations has a cost too. Parts of us stay hidden. Certain subjects become forbidden territory. We start relating to people through what we imagine they believe rather than through what they are actually saying.

We don’t expect the difficult differences between us to disappear.

We want to become better at being with them.

To speak honestly, listen closely, disagree, be affected by each other, and still remain in conversation.

#relationships #conflict #conversation #connection #nonviolence

Repost from rebelthriver • One of the things I’ve

Repost from rebelthriver
•
One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that sorrow and joy are perfectly capable of keeping each other company.

You can be going through one of the hardest periods of your life and still find yourself laughing at something ridiculous. You can carry an enormous amount of grief and still be stopped in your tracks by a beautiful sunset.

I hope you notice something lovely today, whatever you may be carrying.

꩜ Ella

#Grief #cptsd #quote #trauma #FindingBeauty

When a storm is upon us, the alarm we feel is ofte

When a storm is upon us, the alarm we feel is often larger than the storm itself. Sometimes our storms take the shape of a loss, sometimes a rupture, the waves forming in surges of intense affect and demands too great for our systems to meet alone.

Implicitly, before any words have an opportunity to arise, the storm and its waves awaken an embodiment of alarmed aloneness: the dissociative unknowingness, the ambiguity that still exists within and between the many terrifying times we needed an Other most of all, and no Other came.

The then-and-there implicitly moves within the here-and-now waves in the storm. Our systems respond autonomically as though we are, so to speak, drowning. Indeed, though the waves may be new, the aloneness is strangely familiar.
With this in mind, we cannot negate that the distress of the then-and-there as well as the distress of the here-and-now is asking for compassionate connection. The spacious, soft steadiness of accompaniment.

Even now, we need an Other who willingly journeys alongside us, in the distress itself, so that whatever swirls arise, whether shadows of the then-and-there or darkness in the here-and-now, can be met within relational reciprocity, and be digested and metabolised rather than endured.

Though the storms may come, may you always remember you matter. Here alongside you. Moment to moment. Breath by breath. No longer alone.

#cptsd #traumatherapy #alone #drowning #burnout

Repost from @goodgriefhq • The reality of grief. A

Repost from @goodgriefhq
•
The reality of grief. A poem by @ulliekayepoetry

Repost from @thefeelingexpert • When you are const

Repost from @thefeelingexpert
•
When you are constantly apologizing and dimming yourself to keep the peace, the peace isn’t real. You’re not actually keeping the peace, what you doing is just managing everyone else’s comfort at the cost of your own.

You end up carrying the weight of a room so that nobody else has to feel anything uncomfortable. And you have been doing that for so long its normal for you. It doesn’t feel like something that was asked of you. It just feels like you and you are being helpful, you want to be liked, and you don’t want any tension.

What’s happening is your nervous system has been trained to scan for frustration, tension, conflict, or someone getting uncomfortable. Your reaction is to step in first before the person can criticize, show disapproval, scold, get angry. Its a form of protection. So you think I must be doing something wrong, so you apologize ... to smooth things over. Stay small and under the radar. You shrink yourself in order to stay safe. For the nervous system, this is aligned with the fawn response.

You spent years apologizing for taking up space, for having feelings, or for needing things. Even though none of that was yours to apologize for.

And the work now isn’t about stopping your apologizing.

The goal is about slowly unlearning the belief underneath them and which apologies really matter. You want to change the belief that your presence is a problem and that your needs are a burden and that you need to apologize for those thoughts.

This is about taking some time to learn the difference from an apology to stay safe or one that takes responsibility for an action you did do.

Checking in with yourself and tuning into your intentions behind the sorry can help you reframe your communications and feel more confident.

#sorry #toomuch #cptsd #trauma #therapy

Repost from @hannahfrasermoore • Feeling like you’

Repost from @hannahfrasermoore
•
Feeling like you’re not a “real adult” has nothing to do with your level of maturity. It is the residue of a developmental rupture that was never repaired.

In psychoanalytic terms, the self-states that were never given safety to unfold remain frozen at the age they were abandoned.

Instead of growing into adulthood, you were prematurely recruited into it, tasked with regulating a parent’s moods or containing their anxiety, even holding the family together.

The ordinary, everyday work of being a child; playing, trusting, creating, imagining and resting, were replaced by the construction of a false self to meet the demands of others.

Now, no matter how competent you are, part of you is still waiting for the moment you finally feel grown.

This is where shadow work begins: by reclaiming the exiled parts of you that never had the chance to grow, (your unlived life) so you can inhabit adulthood as your whole self, not a performance.

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

🙏🩷✨

#trauma #cptsd #parentification #lost #therapy

Repost from @healingemotionalneglect • Sometimes t

Repost from @healingemotionalneglect
•
Sometimes the child who learned that feelings were a burden becomes the adult who struggles to be vulnerable.

You may keep people at a distance, hide your emotions, or feel uncomfortable when someone gets too close-not because you don't want connection, but because vulnerability once felt unsafe.

Healing is learning that you're allowed to feel, need, and be known.

If this resonated with you, let this be more than just something you relate to. Let it be an invitation to understand yourself a little deeper. 🤍
#trauma #cptsd #vulnerability #therapy #hurt

Repost from @drdenizpsyd • Scapegoating does not o

Repost from @drdenizpsyd
•
Scapegoating does not only silence a person. It teaches them to abandon their own perception in order to preserve safety & belonging.

That is why healing the scapegoat is more than individual healing. Each time you return to your body, trust what you sense, or refuse to participate in denial, you repair something much older.

The return of the feminine is not a rejection of the masculine. It is their reunion.

Intuition with discernment.
Receptivity with action.
Relationship with structure.
Inner knowing with external knowledge.

Without relationship, power becomes domination. Without grounding and form, intuition can lose its way. We need both.

Those who were forced to see what their families refused to face are rising now because that same capacity is needed collectively as we move towards a new paradigm.

We are not here to reverse the hierarchy.

We are here to remember a different relationship to power altogether. One rooted in truth, relationship and wholeness. ❤️‍🔥

#scapegoat #betrayal #trauma #cptsd #power

Repost from @drdoylesays Consumed by confusion a

Repost from @drdoylesays

Consumed by confusion and fear, guilt and shame, whilst burdened by the pressure to keep going, there was no choice and no chance to stay connected and survive in any other way than whatvid learned.

That way was to internalise and to take everything personally, to understand life through a window of self-blame, self-doubt, and through worthlessness.

And whilst I’m learning new ways, the parts of me that still remember back then, at times still hurt.

I’ve also learned along the way, that sometimes these parts of me take things personally because so much of the time what is spoken is personal and it does hurt in the present… Telling me not to take it personally truly just dismisses the pain of both the present and the past. And this matters.

#cptsd #guilt #shame #trauma #therapy

Repost from @healyourinnerchild.app • You can know

Repost from @healyourinnerchild.app
•
You can know something is unfair and still feel unable to say anything about it.

For some of us, speaking up was never just about expressing an opinion. It could mean dealing with anger, being dismissed, being told we were too sensitive, or watching a situation become even more uncomfortable after we said something.

When those experiences happen repeatedly, staying quiet can start to feel easier than challenging what feels wrong. You may become very good at noticing the double standard, reading the room, and knowing exactly what you want to say, while still hesitating when it is time to actually say it.

That hesitation can follow you into adulthood. You might rehearse what you want to say, question whether you are making too much of it, or decide it is easier to let something go, even when you know it is not right.

This is one way childhood experiences around fairness, being heard, and having your perspective taken seriously can shape your relationship with your own voice.

#trauma #traumatherapy #cptsd #unfair #fearofconflict

So often, as we begin to turn toward our own needs

So often, as we begin to turn toward our own needs, guilt arises before any thought has time to form. A tightening, a constriction, a hesitation, and a pull back toward the Other; a sense that we have somehow done something wrong simply by reaching for something of our own.

Perhaps this guilt belongs to a younger part of us. A part that learned long ago that tending to the Other first preserved connection and kept us protected.

For a youngling depending upon others for survival and belonging, this makes a great deal of sense. Indeed, it is often the only avenue available for an embodied sense of Self as secure.

And so, even now, as we reach toward a boundary, a pause, or a need of our own, this part moves swiftly to protect us, calling forward guilt in service of keeping connection and belonging intact.

With this in mind, perhaps the guilt that arises now can be met with curiosity and compassion alongside the discomfort. What is this part afraid might happen? What does it long for?

Perhaps in time, with being met, again and again, by a secure, soothing Other alongside our Self, the younger parts of us may begin to learn that there is room now for our needs to be met too.

You make sense. You matter.

#guilt #partswork #cptsd #relationaltrauma #traumatherapy

Repost from @cptsdfoundation • Some seasons don’t

Repost from @cptsdfoundation
•
Some seasons don’t feel like growth. They feel like survival. You keep hearing “get back up”....but nobody tells you what it costs to stand every single time. There’s always something. A truth you didn’t ask to see. A habit you have to unlearn just to keep functioning. A wound that reopens right when you thought it had closed.

And somewhere in the middle of all that “growth,” you forget what it feels like to just breathe without bracing for the next thing.

People love to say resilience is beautiful. They don’t talk about how tired it makes you. How lonely it is to keep choosing strength when all you want is for someone ...or something.... to carry the weight for a while. You’re not asking for a miracle. You’re not asking for life to be perfect.
You just want a pause. A moment where you’re not fixing, healing, or holding it together.

Being strong was never the dream.

It was the only option you had. And somewhere underneath all that strength is a person who just wants to rest....not recover. Not push through. Just rest.

If this is you right now, you’re not weak. You’re just tired of being brave.

Quote and Image: @subtle.somebody

#trauma #mentalhealth #cptsd #therapy #tired

Repost from @theempoweredtherapist • Your nervous

Repost from @theempoweredtherapist
•
Your nervous system learned through repetition.

Repeated moments of overwhelm.
Repeated moments of not feeling safe.
Repeated moments where your body had to protect you.

So it makes sense that healing often happens through repetition too.

Through ordinary moments where nothing terrible happens.

Through being disappointed and realizing you’re still okay.

Through resting without everything falling apart.

Through setting a boundary and surviving someone else’s reaction.
Through feeling activated and finding your way back.

Healing isn’t about having one breakthrough that changes everything.

It’s giving your body enough new experiences of safety that, over time, it starts to believe something different is possible.

To those of you healing your relationship with my mind, body, and yourself, one small gesture at a time, I see you.

#trauma #cptsd #body #emotion #therapy

Repost from @thefeelingexpert • Emotional abandonm

Repost from @thefeelingexpert
•
Emotional abandonment doesn’t require anyone to leave the relationship. It happens when your partner is physically there but emotionally nowhere to be found. Your feelings, your needs, your inner world don’t get met. Don’t get held. The person is present. But the connection isn’t.

What it feels like. Lonely in a way that’s hard to explain to people outside the relationship. Because you’re not alone. You share a home, a life, maybe even a family. And you still feel like you’re carrying everything by yourself.

There’s even a specific grief that comes from being unseen by the person who is supposed to know you best.

Over time it turns into numbness. A quiet ache. A sense that something essential is missing that you can never quite put your finger on. Because what’s missing isn’t a thing. It’s a person being present for you.

#emotional #abandonment #rejection #harm #trauma

Repost from @thefeelingexpert • What makes attachm

Repost from @thefeelingexpert
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What makes attachment trauma different from other trauma? Most trauma is about something that happened. Attachment trauma is more about something that was missing or something that should have been safe but wasn’t. It doesn’t leave a clear, specific memory. It leaves a ‘felt’ sense. Like a body that braces in intimacy. A nervous system that alerts that closeness is a threat. A self that was built around the question of whether it was ever lovable and never received a clear enough answer.

Which is why it often goes unrecognized for so long. There is no big event to point to. The family may have appeared functional. The love may have been real. And yet something was off in the quality of the connection and in how seen the child felt, how safe they felt needing things, how reliably the caregiver returned.

That something, repeated across thousands of interactions across the earliest years of life, is what shapes the attachment system. And the attachment system is what shapes every close relationship that comes after.

#attachment #traumatherapy #cptsd #relationships

Repost from @frank_andersonmd • I think this disti

Repost from @frank_andersonmd
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I think this distinction matters because people can assume that if a pattern is still showing up, the trauma work must not have worked. However, that’s not always the case.

You may have worked through the pain connected to a specific event and still have deeper beliefs or expectations that were shaped over years.

Those can keep showing up in relationships, work, friendships, and the way you see yourself.

Knowing the difference helps us understand what we are actually working with, instead of assuming every recurring pattern means we are back at the beginning.

#cptsd #traumatherapy #patterns #relationships #trust

Perhaps you know the sort of exhaustion that sleep

Perhaps you know the sort of exhaustion that sleep does not touch.

Perhaps you have taken the week off and found that the rest restored nothing, or that stopping felt worse than continuing, and something within you began to hum with a pressure you could not name.

Certainly this is confusing. We are told to rest, to slow down, to be gentle with ourselves, as though the stopping were freely available and we were simply refusing it.

Yet for many of us there is good reason the stopping is so difficult. Somewhere within, younger parts of us remember what happens when we cannot keep going. Perhaps there is frustration.

Perhaps there is expectation, or anger, or intrusion. Perhaps, more painfully still, there is nobody there at all.

And so we continue. We push on and push through, whilst the exhaustion accumulates beneath the pushing, and the panic and the dread and the shame of being found wanting press in from underneath.

This does not soften through more discipline, or more determination, or one more attempt at doing it properly on our own.

What makes the difference is company.
Someone alongside us, softly, slowly, steadily, whilst we find out what it is to be this tired in the presence of another person.

#complextrauma #cptsd #burnout #traumatherapy #relationaltherapy

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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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