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chele_yntema

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

Repost from @eliseheerde • You were in the middle

Repost from @eliseheerde
•
You were in the middle of the hardest thing you had ever done and then you had to manage everyone else’s response to it.

Deconstruction already costs everything. The framework, the community, the certainty, the identity.

💔 What makes it significantly harder is when the people around you treat your theological shift as a personal threat that requires an immediate response from you.

Their distress about your deconstruction is almost never actually about you. It is about what your leaving represents to them.

👉🏻 Your doubt threatens their certainty.

👉🏻 Your questions expose the ones they have not allowed themselves to ask.

👉🏻 Your freedom is a mirror they did not ask to look into.

That is their work to do, not yours to prevent.

❤️‍🩹 You were allowed to fall apart without holding everyone else together.

Your deconstruction belongs to you. The pace, the direction, and the destination are entirely yours.

#trauma #cptsd #distress #loss #space

Repost from @psychotherapy.central • Most of us im

Repost from @psychotherapy.central
•
Most of us imagine healing as this big, dramatic moment.n A breakthrough or a sudden release. Waking up one day and everything is different.

But real healing is usually much quieter than that.

You bounce back a little quicker after getting triggered.
You set a boundary without agonising over it.
You walk away from people who can’t show up for you.
You notice old patterns pulling at you, and you don’t follow them.

The shifts can be so gradual that you almost miss them happening.

But slowly, those small changes add up to an entirely new way of being in the world and in your relationships.

This is what I witness over and over in therapy. Healing tends to unfold through repetition, awareness, safety, grief, repair, and the choice to do things differently again and again.

Then one day, something that used to consume you just... doesn’t. And there’s this deep sense of freedom you didn’t know was possible.

That matters so much.

Love, Jen 🪷

________

#therapy #trauma #pattern #parts #change

Repost from @healing.the.mosaic • After going thro

Repost from @healing.the.mosaic
•
After going through emotional abuse, what’s a thought about yourself that you really struggled with? Maybe it was “I’m too sensitive,” “everything is my fault,” or “maybe I really am the problem.” Let’s challenge some of those thoughts together and remind ourselves where they came from. 🤍🤍🤍

Also if emotional abuse is mixed with something like religious abuse, it can become even harder to recognise what’s happening, especially when you’ve been taught to believe that questioning someone means you’re doing something wrong.

#trauma #cptsd #emotionalabuse #abuse #therapy

Repost from @the.trauma.educator • There are some

Repost from @the.trauma.educator
•
There are some deeply ingrained beliefs about healing that can distort how we understand ourselves inside relationships.

That if we are “healed enough,” certain behaviours should stop affecting us.

That if we feel something intensely, our perception must be distorted by our trauma history.

That if we are triggered, the problem must automatically be inside us.

That if we have made mistakes too, we somehow lose the right to recognise when something is harmful.

That we need certainty, proof, or an courtroom-level evidence before we are allowed to trust that something does not feel right.

That if we can just communicate more clearly, regulate ourselves better, become less reactive, or find the perfect words, we can eventually make another person understand us.

But healing is not supposed to make you better at tolerating what repeatedly hurts you.

Trauma history can shape how we see things, can amplify certain fears, and reactions. But that does not mean our perception is automatically unreliable.

You can be activated and still be accurately noticing something.

You can have your own wounds, your own work to do, and still recognise that a behaviour, dynamic or relationship is not good for you.

You do not need to prove that you were perfect before you are allowed to say that something hurt you.

You do not need everyone to see your reality before you take your own discomfort seriously.

This is where self-trust becomes much more nuanced.

Self-trust is not assuming that every feeling is a fact, or that every interpretation is correct.

Self-trust is built in our capacity to hold complexity without abandoning ourselves inside it.

You can question yourself without cross-examining yourself.

You can take responsibility without taking responsibility for everything.

You can tolerate discomfort that helps you grow without increasing your tolerance for harm you will need to heal from.

Finally, you do not need to be fully healed before you are allowed to say:

“This keeps hurting me. I’m not choosing it anymore.”

Effie 🦋

#trust #harm #relationship #trauma #choice

Repost from @theempoweredtherapist • Here’s what I

Repost from @theempoweredtherapist
•
Here’s what I’m not saying: I’m not saying we can’t have expectations of others. I’m not saying that people can’t change and grow. I’m not saying that your needs are too much and that you should keep your relational hopes and dreams in check.

Rather, I’m saying that too often we will have expectations of others that we never communicate to them. We will sometimes have needs we expect people to meet without ever letting them in on what we desire in our connections. We will leave things up to chance and then feel chronically disappointed.

We may expect people to ‘just know’ what we need and want, which is a recipe for relational disaster. We may wrongly assume that others will see the relationship in the same way as us and therefore act in a way that mirrors how we show up. We may unintentionally project our stuff on to people and then hold them to a standard they never consented to.

Relationships require nuance. Ebb and flow. Understanding. And lots of direct communication. When we withhold our needs, dreams, and expectations, then we are sure to have lackluster connections.

Safe relationships require both people to show up, speak their truth, and be responsive.

To those of you who are learning how to show up fully and safely in your connections, I see you.

#reciprocity #relationships #expectations #connect #desire

Repost from @thefeelingexpert • What Family Guilt-

Repost from @thefeelingexpert
•
What Family Guilt-Tripping Actually Is:
Guilt-tripping in a family system is when your needs, boundaries, or independent choices are consistently met with reminders of sacrifice, suffering, or obligation and until the guilt of having a need outweighs the need itself. It is not happening just occasionally. It is a pattern in the family. And over time it teaches you that having something for yourself is something you will always have to pay for.

What Growing Up in a Guilt-Tripping Family Creates in You:

• You say yes before checking in with yourself whether you mean it, because the guilt of saying no arrives way faster than the thought

• You feel responsible for other people’s emotions in every relationship and not just your family’s

• You apologize constantly: including for things that were not your fault and feelings that are completely legitimate

• You cannot set a limit without spending days justifying it to yourself and managing the fallout in your head before it’s even happened

• Your happiness feels conditional, like it needs to be earned, justified, or apologized for when someone else isn’t sharing it

• You mistake guilt for your conscience and spend years acting on feelings and beliefs that were put there by someone else’s need to control you

#family #trauma #guilt #shame #relationships

Repost from @hannahfrasermoore • We chastise ourse

Repost from @hannahfrasermoore
•
We chastise ourselves for not being able to have hard conversations, as if we are weak in some way or defective. But the reason we avoid conflict is more complicated.

When love couldn’t tolerate difference growing up, we learned to reshape ourselves to keep the relationship together at all costs. We learned that being good/nice/useful/ pretty bought safety, that silence or performance kept the peace, that self-erasure was the ticket price of belonging.

But overtime these soul-compromises became character and our survival story hardened into identity.

We became stuck.

What we need to understand is that these adaptations (far from being personal fault lines) are the evidence of what the soul was forced to do to stay in relationship when relationship was perilous.

The work is to see the wound without shaming it, to honour its intelligence and then allow ourselves to outgrow its control.

#trauma #truth #betrayal #cptsd #defence

Any untagged artwork please let me know so Incan credit 🙏✨🩷

Repost from @psychotherapy.central • This quote re

Repost from @psychotherapy.central
•
This quote really resonates with me, because so many of you who come from complex trauma backgrounds carry a deep sense of being broken. 📕

This makes complete sense. As a child, you naturally believe that what happens to you is because of you. That you must somehow be bad or deserve it. If you were good and loveable, then surely this wouldn’t be happening.

That feeling of brokenness is often rooted in deep shame.
There are different ways we learn to hide shame. We might become the class clown, shrink ourselves into invisibility, overwork to prove our worth, or numb through drinking.

When you’ve experienced neglect, violence, a parent’s mental health struggles, or similar adversity as a child, there is real pain in those places. Those parts of you are wounded and in need of care.

You can help those hurt parts in many different ways. One of my favourite approaches for this kind of developmental trauma is Internal Family Systems (IFS). It is one of the most powerful methods I’ve encountered for addressing and resolving deep hurt and shame.

If you’d like to experience it for yourself, reach out and book a session with one of our wonderful therapists. The link is in the bio.

Love, Jen

@arielleschwartzboulder
_______

#complextrauma #trauma #broken #hurt #betrayal

Repost from @michellcclark • Is “I’m fine” somethi

Repost from @michellcclark
•
Is “I’m fine” something you say because it’s true? Or is the lie you fall back on so that people can’t actually see you?  Let me know if this resonates: somewhere along the way, you learned that honesty about your exhaustion was an inconvenience.

That naming the weight you’re carrying would make you a burden.

That admitting you’re drowning would somehow make other people uncomfortable—so you translated your truth into something smaller.

Something more palatable. Something that doesn’t require anyone to show up for you in ways they’ve already proven they won’t.

But when you compress your reality into a two-word answer, you start believing the lie yourself. You start thinking maybe you are just tired. Maybe if you just slept more, meditated harder, practiced more gratitude, the ache would go away.

You gaslight yourself into thinking the problem is your inability to cope, not the conditions that are genuinely impossible to thrive in.

The truth is, you’re tired—but you’re not just tired. You’re depleted. Depletion is what happens when you’ve been pouring out more than you’ve been replenished for so long that you don’t even remember what “enough” feels like.

Admitting that you’re depleted feels like complaining. Like ingratitude. It feels like you’re not allowed to name what’s wrong because other people have it worse, or because you should be grateful for what you have, or because you’ve been conditioned to believe your needs are negotiable.  But you’re allowed to make space for the nuance. You’re allowed to be struggling and grateful. You’re allowed to want more and appreciate what you have. You’re allowed to need support without it meaning you’ve failed.

Stop translating your truth into something smaller just because the full version makes people uncomfortable. Your comfort matters, too.

Repost from @myintegrativetherapist • The hardest

Repost from @myintegrativetherapist
•
The hardest part of learning to advocate for yourself isn’t always saying the thing.

Often it’s the part afterward, when your nervous system starts collecting evidence that you’ve ruined everything. 😂

If being easy, agreeable, or low-maintenance once helped you stay connected or avoid conflict, speaking up can feel surprisingly dangerous.

Someone being disappointed, uncomfortable, or even annoyed with you doesn’t automatically mean you did something wrong.

It could be that you just stopped abandoning yourself to keep everyone else comfortable.

This …. I only realised the way I was being treate

This …. I only realised the way I was being treated in certain relationships wasn’t ok when I saw my daughter treated the same way by them….

Repost from @conscious_soulll
•
Sometimes the cruelest comments are disguised as jokes, advice, or “just being honest.” But when someone’s humor leaves another person covering their body, questioning their worth, or shrinking themselves to avoid criticism, it was never harmless.

Women are taught from such a young age that their bodies are somehow public property. Too big. Too small. Too old for that dress. Too revealing. Not feminine enough. Not attractive enough. And somehow, there is always someone willing to explain what they should change to become more desirable.

What makes it worse is how often women are expected to smile through it. Laugh so nobody feels awkward. Stay quiet so dinner is not ruined. Be “easygoing” so a man does not have to experience the discomfort created by his own words.

But protecting someone’s comfort should never require sacrificing your dignity.

And there was something powerful about two women from different generations finally recognizing the same thing. One was learning that she did not have to accept unsolicited judgments about her body. The other was realizing how many years she had spent pretending those judgments did not hurt.

Sometimes speaking up does more than stop one inappropriate comment. It gives someone else permission to finally speak about everything they have been silently carrying.

A joke is supposed to make everyone laugh. If the person being joked about feels smaller afterward, maybe the problem was never that they were “too sensitive.”

Maybe someone simply became too comfortable being disrespectful without consequences.

Teach daughters that their bodies are not auditions for love. Teach women that setting boundaries does not make them difficult. And teach people that being embarrassed after someone calls out your behavior is very different from being humiliated for simply existing in your own body.

Some conversations become uncomfortable because someone was finally brave enough to stop pretending everything was fine. ❤️

#body #shame #abuse #relationships

Repost from @frank_andersonmd • It can be hard to

Repost from @frank_andersonmd
•
It can be hard to respond to yourself with compassion when the thing you’re doing is actually hurting your relationships, your health, or your own well-being.

Getting defensive the second you feel criticized. Trying to control what other people do. Becoming jealous or suspicious. Shutting down during conflict. Avoiding something important because you’re terrified of getting it wrong.

Asking, “When did I learn I needed to do this?” helps you look beneath the behavior instead of stopping at “I hate that I do this.”

You may start to see what the pattern has been trying to protect you from, prevent, or help you manage. Once you understand what it is organized around, you have a better chance of responding to that underlying need differently.

Compassion doesn’t mean approving of the behavior or ignoring its impact. You can take responsibility for a pattern and still meet yourself with kindness.

That matters because shame tends to keep us locked in judgment. Compassion makes it easier to look honestly at what is happening, understand it, and begin to change it.

#trauma #impulse #denial #cptsd #conflict

Repost from @ourembodiedhealing • I couldn’t do th

Repost from @ourembodiedhealing
•
I couldn’t do this on my own. The people I work with come to me because they can’t do this on their own.

If you’re having trouble feeling safe in your body even when you know you’re safe, that’s not your fault. That’s what trauma does—it keeps part of our physiology stuck in the past, and *unable to take in* the full reality of the present.

If you can’t do this on your own, there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s the case for everyone else I’ve ever known who’s ever suffered from early trauma.

But once you have the help of someone who’s able to guide and accompany you in straddling the line between the pain of the past and the ok-ness of right now, you DO learn how to start bridging the gap when you’re on your own.

Your capacity to be present and in your body grows.

The grip of the past over your life loosens.

Your body just needs to learn it from another body who’s holding a bigger container for all of this to happen than you can hold yourself ❤️

#trauma #safety #cptsd #therapy #fear

Repost from @healing.the.mosaic • #trauma #Dissoc

Repost from @healing.the.mosaic
•

#trauma #Dissociation #cptsd #disconnection #therapy

Repost from @amythelifecoach • Someone asked me re

Repost from @amythelifecoach
•
Someone asked me recently how to tell the difference between a behavior that’s actually harmful versus something that’s just triggering you.

And while yes…we can all collectively agree on certain behaviors being giant red unsafe flags - we can also all recognize we have unique triggers rooted in our past and linked to our current level of healing and capacity level.

Spending time trying to label their behavior or convince them they’re unsafe is a waste of energy.👏

What you actually want to know is what you value, how it impacts you personally and what you should say or do in those moments.

The two frameworks I have most of my private clients work through are identifying their unique triggers and their values. Combined these help them rebuild self trust, safety and agency — and feel confident in what they need to say or do in any relationship or environment they enter into.

#values #harmful #abuse #relationship #disrespect

Repost from @lexyflorentina • The Seeker Who Can’

Repost from @lexyflorentina
•

The Seeker Who Can’t Stop Seeking is what I call the pattern we can find ourselves in when every inner question is reflexively answered by looking outside of ourselves.

It’s a pattern that can keep us from further growing, evolving and ultimately healing because our system learns that what it truly needs (self attunement, inner trust) is not safe. Therefore, the chase perpetuates.

#trauma #seeking #pattern #trust #self

Repost from @myintegrativetherapist • The goal isn

Repost from @myintegrativetherapist
•
The goal isn’t to convince yourself you imagined the shift.

Maybe their tone did change or they got quieter or something really is bothering them.  Healing is learning that noticing someone else’s mood doesn’t automatically make that mood your responsibility. You’re allowed to notice without investigating.

#unpredictable #fear #relationship #passiveagressive #anger

This is a heavy one. Remember always that you were

This is a heavy one. Remember always that you were always worth staying for.

Repost from @hannahfrasermoore
•
This is one way rejection can live in us and it’s brutal.

If this is you, you may recognise the enormity of it.

A relationship ends, a job doesn’t come through, a friend ghosts you and the loss seems to open up like a trapdoor taking your self worth, confidence, future and your entire sense of being lovable with it.

When loss or rejection feels this existential it’s often because it is carrying two losses at once.

The person who left today.

And the person who should have come long ago.

Our work is separating them out.

We need to grieve the person for who they were to us and tend to the older wound for what it actually needed. To stop asking today’s rejection to confirm an ancient verdict.

This person left, but you remain.

And from this place, loss can become grief rather than proof.

Any untagged pics please let me know so I can tag. 🙏🩷✨

#worth #trauma #rejection #loss #therapy

Repost from @healyourinnerchild.app • Why does a c

Repost from @healyourinnerchild.app
•
Why does a compliment sometimes feel harder to accept than criticism ever did?

Growing up, feedback may have leaned more toward what needed fixing than what was already good enough, and a younger part of you may have learned that being noticed usually meant something to correct, not something to appreciate.

So compliments can start to feel unfamiliar. You might deflect them, downplay them, or quickly explain why they’re not quite true. Not because you don’t want to be appreciated, but because a part of you may still be waiting for the follow up critique, the “but,” the catch.

This isn’t a flaw or something to fix. It may just be a nervous system that learned to stay alert for what’s wrong, even in moments that are actually going right. Still doing, quietly, what once felt necessary.

#feedback #critisism #compliment #trauma

Repost from @thefeelingexpert • Healing past someo

Repost from @thefeelingexpert
•
Healing past someone doesn’t mean what they did was okay.
It doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten.
It doesn’t mean they won.

It means you decided that your life matters more than keeping the wound open in case they ever come back to acknowledge it.

This is the part of healing nobody wants to hear, because it feels unfair. And it is unfair. What happened to you was unfair. The fact that the person who caused it gets to move through their life without the weight of what they did while you carry the consequences every day, that is one of the most genuinely unjust dynamics that exists. You didn’t create it. You didn’t deserve it. The fact is that healing is still yours to do, even though the harm wasn’t yours to cause.

But here is the thing about tying your healing to their action: it actually keeps them at the center of your life. As long as you are waiting on them whether its for the apology, the acknowledgment, the change, the consequences, the understanding, they are still in charge of something that belongs entirely to you. Your healing. And your healing remains on their timeline. Your life is still waiting for their participation. And they have already proven, definitively, that they cannot be trusted with things that belong to you.

Healing past someone is not the same as saying what they did was fine. It’s not forgetting. It’s not excusing. It’s not pretending the wound wasn’t real or that the cost wasn’t significant. It’s not even necessarily forgiving, because forgiveness is not a prerequisite for healing and nobody gets to set that timeline for you but yourself.

#therapy
#trauma #choice #cptsd #youmatter

Repost from @frank_andersonmd • People can come in

Repost from @frank_andersonmd
•
People can come into trauma work expecting that progress will look like finally crying, finally accessing the anger, or finally remembering something they couldn’t before.

But sometimes what shows up is much quieter: blankness, distance, fog, or simply “I don’t know.”

That can be frustrating, especially when you’re trying hard to understand yourself.

One of the things I want people to know is that trauma work doesn’t have to begin with a breakthrough. It can begin with becoming more familiar with what actually happens in you when certain memories, relationships, or experiences come close.

Over time, that kind of attention can give you a much clearer picture of your own patterns, without demanding that your experience look a certain way.

#numb #trauma #feeling #cptsd #therapy

This, 100% this… Repost from @drgenevievevonlob •

This, 100% this…

Repost from @drgenevievevonlob
•

…the adults we become are shaped by the children we once were.

When we help a child trust themselves, we’re also healing the generations that came before them.

Over the past 20 years as a Clinical Psychologist, I’ve sat with hundreds of highly sensitive adults who have spent a lifetime wondering,

“What’s wrong with me?”

Many grew up noticing things that others couldn’t put into words. They sensed when words and actions didn’t match. They picked up on emotions, subtle power dynamics and contradictions long before they had the language to explain them.

And so often instead of those experiences being understood, they were often dismissed.

“You’re too sensitive.”

“You’re imagining it.”

“Don’t be so dramatic.”

Over time, they learned to question themselves. That’s why being bullied, gaslighted or having your reality denied in adulthood can feel so devastating..It often reopens a much older wound of being misunderstood, doubting ourselves and feeling alone.

Our healing begins when we stop asking what is wrong with us and no longer feel the need to prove our reality to others.

It’s about stopping abandoning ourselves and learning to trust ourselves again.

And I believe that this is one of the greatest gifts we can offer our children.

When we raise children whose feelings are welcomed, whose perceptions are taken seriously, and whose inner world is honoured, we help them grow into adults who don’t spend decades questioning themselves.

My hope is that we create a world where the deeply perceptive, sensitive children don’t have to grow up learning to doubt themselves.

#trauma #bully #sensitive #neurodivergent #therapy

The hardest thing… Repost from @hannahfrasermoore

The hardest thing…

Repost from @hannahfrasermoore
•
If this has happened to you, you may know how quickly desire can morph into high voltage intensity.

You meet someone you like and before you have really discovered who they are, being chosen by them begins to feel like a matter of psychic survival.

Their desire starts to carry the weight of proving something enormous: that you are lovable. That you matter. That you are wanted and worth staying for.

Taking our time can feel dangerous. We worry that any hesitation might give them the chance to leave. So we reverse the order: we choose first, secure the relationship, and save the assessment of what we really think about them for later.

When this feels like our one chance at love, who they are becomes secondary to being chosen by them.

Nine times out of ten, this has a history. If our early relationships were shrouded in hyper vigilance, if they taught us to anticipate rupture, monitor closeness, earn connection or work to remain precious, that way of loving embeds deep within our bones.

The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wrote about the capacity to be alone: the internal security that allows another person to remain separate whilst we remain intact.

This is the capacity that allows us to choose.

To want someone deeply and still choose.

To let them be messy, human and themselves.

To let them be other.

To trust ourselves with the possibility of loss. Yes they might leave. Yes we might discover we do not want them.

Both possibilities have to become bearable if we are going to find out what is actually here.

Because love requires more than being chosen. It requires us to choose, too.

Any untagged images please let me know so I can credit. ✨🩷🙏

#attachment #trauma #relationship #loss #fear

This feels so true and real not only for myself bu

This feels so true and real not only for myself but for so many in the world right now

Repost from @kayatoastforthesoul.sg
•

SO LITTLE ONE, IF YOUR HEART FEELS HEAVY TODAY,
PLEASE DO NOT TURN IT INTO YET ANOTHER REASON
TO BLAME YOURSELF.
MAYBE TOO MUCH CAME
ALL AT ONCE, BEFORE YOU HAD TIME TO COME BACK TO YOURSELF.

—
I also want to be honest.

Some days are hard.

Somedays we find ourselves floundering to say the least.

Trying to get our head above water, only to feel ourselves sinking again.

And sometimes the kindest thing we can say is simply:

“I am struggling right now.”

Not with disbelief. Not with shame. Not while forcing ourselves to pretend everything is okay.

Just honestly to ourselves instead.

Because sometimes life really does not give us time to breathe.

And if you are struggling too, it does not mean there is something wrong with you.

It does not mean you are not trying hard enough to swim.

Sometimes the currents are just too strong okay?

So hold on.

Catch yourself where you can.

Rest when you can, so you do not tire yourself out trying to survive everything at once.

And I hope life is kind to you.

If not today,

then tomorrow too.

Wishing you my best.

Take care,
Hernping

💙

P. S. Someone msged me last week saying they needed a sabbatical from life. Sign me up for a bit pls?

Joking, resting tonight :)

Get some rest too everyone 🙏

#mentalhealthwarrior #trauma #cptsd #care #therapy

Repost from @hannahfrasermoore • When we grow up i

Repost from @hannahfrasermoore
•
When we grow up in homes that minimise or invalidate our wants and needs, a deep & lasting wound forms.

We learn that our desire creates trouble.

That asking exposes us.

That not receiving is a kind of personal fault.

Evidence or our lacking.

This message beds in until keeping quiet feels safer than wanting out loud.

No wants, no exposure.

We grow into women who measure ourselves by how little we need.

We become super skilled at hiding our longing. Our need. Our desire. Shaping our lives around what keeps us acceptable rather than what makes us feel alive.

But the cost builds. Unlived wants gather in the corners of the shadow and wait. They press against the surface of the life we built to stay safe.

The turning point arrives when we begin to pay attention to what we actually want and slowly & carefully, we form a relationship with our own desire.

This is the bedrock of self intimacy.

Each want becomes information.
Each need becomes a doorway.

This is how we find our way back to ourselves.

Any untagged artwork please let me know so I can credit 🙏✨🩷

#woman #hidden #shame #need

Meeting our most authentic sense of Self exactly a

Meeting our most authentic sense of Self exactly as well are…

Repost from @mytms_journey
•

One of the biggest shifts in my own healing, and something I teach constantly now, was realising that emotional safety doesn’t mean feeling calm, happy or regulated all the time.

In fact, if every time anger, sadness, anxiety, jealousy, resentment or disappointment shows up, you immediately try to regulate it away, analyse where it came from, reframe it into something more positive or shame yourself for feeling it in the first place, your body may actually be learning the opposite: this feeling isn’t safe for me to have.

For many of us, that lesson started a long time ago. Maybe anger threatened connection. Maybe sadness made someone uncomfortable. Maybe having needs got you labelled difficult, dramatic or too much. So your system got very clever at suppressing, fixing, intellectualising or performing “fine”.

Which is why learning emotional safety can look surprisingly messy...

It can look like being fucking furious and letting yourself be furious without making yourself wrong for it. Crying without rushing to stop. Admitting something hurt even when another part of you thinks it shouldn’t have. Feeling resentment without immediately turning it into guilt. Letting yourself have a completely unreasonable human reaction without turning it into a problem that needs fixing.

We talk so much about teaching the nervous system that it’s safe to calm down, I think we need to talk a hell of a lot more about teaching it that it’s safe not to be calm aswell. Because emotional safety isn’t feeling good all the time really, it’s knowing you’re still safe, worthy and lovable when you don’t.

Dani ❤️👏
mytmsjourney.com

#safety #system #connection #trauma #worth

Repost from @jessicabaumlmhc • Sometimes the harde

Repost from @jessicabaumlmhc
•
Sometimes the hardest part of slowing down is the shock that comes with how alive everything you’ve pushed down for years still feels. You thought you processed it already, or maybe time had dulled it for you. Maybe you felt like it was already healed, because you were just that good at keeping it pushed down.

But your body doesn’t forget what happened to you. It doesn’t forget the moments you felt scared with no one to turn to. It holds on to the times when you felt unseen or unloved. And it keeps all of the unprocessed trauma inside your body, waiting for the day you’re ready to unpack it.

When you finally create safety, your nervous system doesn’t need the numbness anymore. So, it starts unpacking it for you.

It can feel like you’re suddenly getting worse, but you’re finally feeling what’s always been there. You’re left holding the grief you postponed, fear you outran, and the weight you’ve had carrying everything alone.

It’s overwhelming and tender, and some days it all can feel too much.

But the rawness you’re feeling is a sign that something is changing within you. Your body is finally trusting enough to let you feel, and your nervous system feels safe enough to start to process.

It can feel like you’re falling apart, but you’re finally coming back together again.

#safe #trauma #slow #survivor #therapy

Repost from @neurodivergent_insights • Wednesday’s

Repost from @neurodivergent_insights
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Wednesday’s glossary entry covered dissociation. I wanted to go a bit deeper into this concept, because for Autistic, ADHD, and AuDHD people there are some extra pathways into dissociative experiences, ones that often confuse us and perhaps confuse our therapists.

For most of my life I didn’t know what to make of my foggy, dreamlike state that I seemed to perpetually be in. Learning what they actually were (in my case often how my body responds to sensory overload), has opened up so much understanding (and support).

This carousel is the condensed version. The full article goes deeper into the research, the nuances, and what the emerging science is saying. Linked in bio.

#Dissociation #AutisticShutdown #Autism #ADHD #AuDHD

Repost from @ourembodiedhealing • Even if you don’

Repost from @ourembodiedhealing
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Even if you don’t know where that support and attunement could come from, let yourself want it for yourself. Let it be the thing you know you need more of. Let your desire for it lead you there.

#relationships #connection #trauma #support

Repost from @matthewlicata • Sometimes life comes

Repost from @matthewlicata
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Sometimes life comes not to soothe us, but to overturn the world we have made.

Something arrives—death, a new lover, shattering grief, the end of a dream, an encounter we cannot explain—and the spiritual house of cards begins to fall.

The beloved has appeared, in one of her fierce or more wrathful forms, carrying the power to undo the familiar arrangement of who we have taken ourselves to be.

This is part of what makes healing and awakening so disagreeable at times. We imagine they will make us feel better, safer, more certain, perhaps even more whole. And sometimes they do.

But initiation has another movement. It contradicts the persona. It disturbs the world it has so carefully arranged. It brings us into contact with a life that may bear little resemblance to the one we were certain we were going to live.

Something unexpected enters the room and pulls the rug out from underneath us.

There is a mercurial intelligence in the psyche that does not seem particularly interested in preserving who we think we are.

It disturbs what has become fixed, opens what has become closed, and returns movement to places that have crystallized around certainty.

Perhaps this is one of the deeper purposes of regulation: not to become increasingly undisturbable, but to develop enough ground that we can allow ourselves to be genuinely moved.

To be touched by beauty. Undone by love. Rearranged by grief. Astonished by what we cannot explain.

Not every disturbance is a sign that we have lost our way. Sometimes the path itself comes to disturb us.

#pain #trauma #deep #toomuch #grief

Repost from @the.trauma.educator • When we notice

Repost from @the.trauma.educator
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When we notice rumination, repetitive thoughts that don’t lead anywhere, and an over-analysis of a situation without any new information, it might be a sign of unfelt grief.

This grief can be far more complex than we might initially believe, because it often extends beyond the loss of the obvious.

It might be grief over old identities, possibilities, illusions we held onto and spells we lived under, lost time, missed opportunities, the limits of another person, and our own limitations, ideas about how life was supposed to unfold, choices we’ve made out of survival, behaviours we’ve tolerated out of fear, the person we turned into that we lost respect for, or the belief that we didn’t deserve better treatment.

Grief can be brutal but it can also lead to the softening of the pain.

Because it’s the process through which our nervous system can begin to metabolize loss, reorganize around what is true, and make meaningful change possible.

Effie 🦋

#trauma #overthinking #fear #understand #hurt

Repost from @hannahfrasermoore • Some of us are tr

Repost from @hannahfrasermoore
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Some of us are trained to know things, but never name them.

To see clearly, but never act.

To feel everything, but protect everyone else from it.

This can feel like some awful state of endless confusion, but psychologically it’s known as disavowal. A defence that forms when the truth is too dangerous to integrate because integrating it would cost us essential relationships, or your role within the family or even your sense of self.

This is why it feels dangerous.

Women are taught this from day one. To manage harm without making it explicit. To narrate the wound without disrupting the structure or to skilfully rebrand it.

To be good by being quiet.

But truth kicks us savagely from within. It returns as symptoms. It unravels the life built around avoiding our hiding it.

This is about the horrible cognitive dissonance we feel that makes our heads spin (that feeling when your internal negotiation feels like it may explode.) The confusion that maroons you in the swamplands of indecision when you already know what’s going on, but you just don’t want to see it.

When you can’t bear to know what knowing will require.

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

#trauma #confused #truth #betrayal #dissociation

Repost from @healyourinnerchild.app • Have you eve

Repost from @healyourinnerchild.app
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Have you ever caught yourself softening an opinion, holding back a need, or saying yes when you really wanted to say no?

Many of us aren’t doing this because we’re naturally easygoing. Sometimes these responses develop from experiences where expressing ourselves didn’t always feel safe.

When your thoughts, emotions, or needs were met with criticism, conflict, distance, or disapproval, a younger part of you may have learned that adapting was the safest way to stay connected. Over time, it can begin to feel as though belonging depends on becoming who other people need you to be.

Those protective strategies don’t always stay in childhood. They can continue into adulthood as over-explaining, difficulty setting boundaries, avoiding conflict, or feeling pressure to shape yourself around what others might accept.

These patterns often begin as ways of protecting connection, not as reflections of who you truly are.

Healing is a gradual process of recognizing those old strategies with compassion and discovering that you can stay connected without losing yourself in the process.

#trauma #cptsd #innerchild #protectivestyles #therapy

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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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