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chele_yntema

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

Repost from @warpaintjournal • People spend years

Repost from @warpaintjournal
•
People spend years confusing control with care, usefulness with love, attention with devotion, and familiarity with safety because the surface often looks convincing.

Time eventually exposes the difference. Real care leaves choice intact, real love survives inconvenience, real support creates strength instead of dependence, and real trust grows through consistent behaviour rather than convincing words. Stability keeps life open to change while stagnation only teaches endurance. Discipline protects tomorrow, punishment destroys it.

Forgiveness can exist without restored access because healing and trust answer different questions. Success is measured less by what attracts admiration and more by what still holds together on an ordinary day. Almost every lasting mistake begins by mistaking something comfortable, impressive, or familiar for something genuinely good.

#relationship #control #care #loyal #support

Repost from @the.trauma.educator • Anger can bring

Repost from @the.trauma.educator
•
Anger can bring us closer to what is true for us, but this does not mean that every angry impulse should be acted on immediately, or that anger always gives us the full picture.

Like every emotion, anger can be shaped by both the present and the past.

Sometimes, it is responding accurately to a crossed boundary, a betrayal, an injustice, or a pattern we’ve been minimising for too long.

Other times, a present situation may be touching an older wound, making the intensity of the response larger than the moment alone would explain.

The work is not to distrust anger, but to build enough somatic capacity to stay with it without either suppressing it or being totally overtaken by it.

When we can do that, anger becomes easier to listen to.

We can ask:

What is happening now?
What belongs to the past?
What value, need, or boundary is asking for my attention?
And what response would protect my dignity without abandoning my humanity?

Embodied anger does not force us to choose between attachment and authenticity.

It helps us discover whether the relationship has enough room for both.

Effie 🦋

#anger #boundaries #relationship #connections #protection

Repost from @myintegrativetherapist • They may wan

Repost from @myintegrativetherapist
•
They may want you back in their life, but only if coming back means that you are returning to the same role where their version of the past is the only one allowed in the room.

Repair asks for honesty, accountability, changed behavior and enough humility to slowly rebuild trust.

You are allowed to take your time and need evidence. You are also allowed to say no.

The question isn’t just about if they want a relationship with you, but that whether that relationship finally has room for all of you.

#trauma #cptsd #relationship #responsibility #connections

Slow is how we most grow… There are ebbs and flow

Slow is how we most grow…

There are ebbs and flows in therapy where very little appears to be moving or changing.

You arrive each week. You speak, you pause, you wonder whether anything is moving at all.

From the outside looking inside, we seem to be in the same scattered place we have stood for so long. Underneath however, something else is unfolding, the emergence already underway.

Like the slow emerging of the oak, where it first begins its evolution by directing almost all energy and nutrients downward, into an anchoring system that will one day steady it through storms it has yet to meet. The growth is real. It is simply below the surface, where the substance is being structured and stabilised.

Where trauma has been complex and developmental, our systems learned to move quickly. To read the room, to anticipate, to adapt before a need could even be sensed. Slowness can feel unfamiliar in a system organised this way, and there are days where it feels like standing still.

And still, this is precisely where our anchoring occurs. Each time distress is met with compassion, connection, and steadiness, our system accrues a little more evidence that experience can be met. This is the grounding rooting work. It moves through repetition, through relationship, through time.

Progress needs no proof. Your place here is never measured nor hurried. Slowly, steadily, as you are and as you become, in your own time, you are perfectly enough here.

#therapy #cptsd #trauma #grow #slow

Repost from @christabelmintahnwankwo • Western the

Repost from @christabelmintahnwankwo
•
Western therapy tells you to breathe through your rage to get back to “baseline.”

It treats your distress as a pathology, because the system wants you calm so you remain compliant.

The myth we were taught is that anger is a sickness. It isn’t. Rage is your body’s refusal to normalize the abnormal. It is the visceral proof that a boundary has been violated and extraction is happening.

Society prefers a quiet, dissociated Black woman over an angry one. The state wants to turn our systemic rage into private trauma so we stop demanding justice. Refuse to be “healed” into silence.

Anger is energy. When you just vent, the energy leaks. When you contain it and use it to set a non-negotiable consequence, you are practicing relational combat. But turning that heat into a tool requires operational capacity.

Stop trying to be calm in a burning house.

#rage #anger #pain #protection #connection

Repost from @boundariedbootcamp • The way to survi

Repost from @boundariedbootcamp
•
The way to survive was to keep-the-people-pleased. This was not romantic or healthy.

But in a world where power was terribly unbalanced, keeping-the-people-pleased (fawning) became romanticized, glorified, spiritualized, and turned into cultural and legal expectations.

Example: a woman’s place is to be submissive?

My friends, that was propoganda.

But not obeying it was deadly. 💔

Understanding where people pleasing comes from changes…everything.

Because your chronic urge to people-please (fawn) isn’t a random personal flaw.

It’s an inherited means of survival, passed down by ancestors who survived (in a world where those who consolidated power decided the fate of everybody else).

This is what inherited trauma looks like.

So there is no need to shame or pathologize yourself for having inherited trauma responses.

Honor your ancestors for doing what they had to do to survive.

Grieve for what they could not have.

And then open your eyes.

The world is different now.

It’s safe enough. And we need you.

It’s time to heal this.

❤️
Molly
Therapist-turned-boundaries-guide

Becoming boundaried is how compassionate people come into their power. Beautifully, lovingly, and unapologetically. 🌱🌿🌳

#boundaries #trauma #development #therapy cptsd

Repost from @thefeelingexpert • Shame is one of th

Repost from @thefeelingexpert
•
Shame is one of the most studied emotions in psychology, and researchers draw a clear line between it and guilt. Guilt says “I did something bad.” Shame says “I am something bad.” One points at an action. The other points at your whole identity. And once shame lands, it moves your body through the same four stages, every time.

First, the trigger. A mistake, a rejection, being caught off guard and underneath it, you create a verdict: I am the problem.

Then the freeze. Your body responds before your mind catches up. Chest tight. Eyes down. Face hot. You want to become smaller than the room you’re standing in.

Then the retreat. You go quiet, agree just to end the moment, say “I’m fine,” exit the group chat, the conversation, the relationship because staying visible feels riskier than just disappearing.

And then disconnection. Alone with it now, the story gets confirmed. The isolation shame demanded becomes the evidence shame uses against you next time.

That whole sequence is what your nervous system learned in a specific environment, where when a weakness was exposed, it meant ridicule, punishment, or someone pulling their love back. Freezing and retreating was the most protective option a much younger nervous system had access to at the time.

Here’s the part that matters most: that sequence updates.

Every time you catch yourself at the retreat stage and stay one more minute instead of disappearing, and things hold, your nervous system logs new information evidence that visibility doesn’t cost you what it used to.

The healing happens through repetition. The same small moment, staying instead of retreating, repeated enough times that the old pattern finally gets rewritten.

#shame #pain #trauma #cptsd #isolation

Repost from @psychologycortex • The most confusing

Repost from @psychologycortex
•
The most confusing thing about complex trauma is that its effects are often never visible as trauma from the inside. They appear as reactions that feel instinctive, patterns that repeat across different relationships with different people, and an inner life that seems to operate by rules nobody consciously chose. What the research on structural dissociation clarifies is that this is a predictable neurobiological outcome of a specific kind of early experience, and that the parts driving those patterns were formed for reasons that made complete sense in the original environment.

Knowing that a pattern exists, understanding where it came from, and even wanting to stop it are all insufficient if the part driving the pattern is held in somatic and emotional memory rather than narrative memory. The nervous system requires something different from the mind to update its threat assessment, and that something involves direct, repeated experience of safety in the present moment rather than intellectual understanding of the past.

The research on trauma and neuroplasticity consistently shows that these systems are modifiable across the lifespan, and that the brain retains the capacity to build new relational maps at any age given the right conditions. That finding is among the most clinically hopeful in the entire literature on complex trauma, and it points toward what recovery actually looks like as a biological process rather than a purely psychological one.

#trauma #cptsd #dissociation #self #parts

Repost from @the.yellow.jacket.girl • Some of us w

Repost from @the.yellow.jacket.girl
•
Some of us were never taught what to do with our feelings.

We learned to swallow them, smile through them or we tell ourselves, “we’re fine.”

But bottled emotions don’t disappear just because we ignore them. They wait. They gather inside us until one day we snap over something small, cry in the grocery store, can’t sleep at night, or wonder why our chest feels so heavy.

Your emotions are not trying to ruin your life. They’re trying to be heard. They’re asking for a little space, a little kindness, and a moment where they no longer have to fight so hard for your attention.

You don’t have to uncork the whole bottle today. Just loosen the lid.

Healing begins when you’re finally brave enough to say, “I’m not okay,” instead of pretending that you are.

#hope #expression #trauma #okay #emotion

This is the trauma of betrayal- the ambiguity it w

This is the trauma of betrayal- the ambiguity it what was never acknowledged. Of the connection and protection that never came. The pain of the scream left within a deepening isolation, left echoing through the cold hollow spaces of nothingness…

Repost from @frank_andersonmd
•
Not being believed can become a profound second injury.

When a survivor’s reality is rejected by family members, professionals, or authorities, they may be left carrying self-doubt, isolation, and difficulty trusting other people.

The original harm is compounded by the realization that telling the truth did not bring the protection, recognition, or support they needed.

Part of what can help is eventually being met differently.

A corrective experience may happen with a therapist, a trusted friend, a partner, a support group, or someone else who can listen without interrogating, minimizing, or immediately defending the person who caused harm.

It’s rarely one perfect conversation that changes everything. But over time - through safety, attunement and connection - the nervous system can begin to rewire.

A survivor can begin to experience that speaking honestly does not always lead to blame, rejection, or greater danger - allowing them to let go of what they’re carrying.

#betrayal #trauma #cptsd #pain #therapy

Repost from @motivationsthink • Sometimes the most

Repost from @motivationsthink
•
Sometimes the most powerful reminders come from the simplest voices. Love isn’t measured in material things or fleeting moments, it’s the one constant that doesn’t fade, shift, or disappear with time.

It’s the invisible thread that holds us together in joy and in struggle, the quiet strength that softens even the hardest days, and the light that continues to shine no matter how dark it gets.

When everything else changes, love is the one thing that remains steady, unconditional, and true.

#wisdom #love #trust #listen #truth

Ohhh look, now when I’m mad I know specifically wh

Ohhh look, now when I’m mad I know specifically what to do… I shall use the defence of DEFENESTRATION…

The English language is wild. Use one of these in a sentence below... go. 👇
@vocabulary.daily.words

#quote #english #language #funny

Repost from @myintegrativetherapist • Instead of r

Repost from @myintegrativetherapist
•
Instead of repairing what happened, they wait for enough time to pass that bringing it up feels awkward.

Eventually, the original hurt isn’t what gets questioned, but your decision to keep talking about it is.

The focus silently shifts from:

“Did this actually happen?”

to:

“Why are you still bringing this up?”

Over time, this can teach you that your pain has an expiration date. And it isn’t because it’s been acknowledged or repaired. But that everyone else has decided they’re ready to stop feeling uncomfortable.

There’s an important difference between moving on & being pressured to stop expecting accountability.

Those are not the same thing.

#secret #family #trauma #silence #therapy

Repost from @mindfulmft • Family secrets. Sometime

Repost from @mindfulmft
•
Family secrets. Sometimes we’re told never to repeat something. Sometimes we’re told not to talk about something. Sometimes we’re asked to keep something hidden from someone we love. Sometimes we just watch the adults avoid and pretend that the thing never happened or doesn’t exist. When secrets are kept hidden, the message that’s communicated to us is that presentation (how others see us) is more important than addressing and honoring our pain, or the pain that the truth might cause another. And unfortunately, this message can be passed down from generation to generation, creating a cycle of shame, guilt, and hiding.
There is a profound healing that comes from acknowledging and addressing what’s been hidden. When we give ourselves permission to confront the pain that’s been tossed aside, we create space for healing, growth, and transformation. And by prioritizing our own healing, we also set a powerful example for those around us.

#secrets #family #trauma #chaos #lies

All of the above 👆🏻 much needed. Repost from @the

All of the above 👆🏻 much needed.

Repost from @the.trauma.educator

#trauma #cptsd #shame #mistake #pain
•

Effie 🦋

Repost from @primaltrust_official • It’s okay to n

Repost from @primaltrust_official
•
It’s okay to need. It’s healthy! Needing is how humans are built, and you’re allowed to do it out loud.

And you get to have wants too. Preferences. Opinions. You get to make choices, advocate for yourself, take up space.

You get to have boundaries. You get to say no.

And you get to say yes. Yes to the help. Yes to the support. Yes to “actually, I do need this today, thank you.”

This is vital for nervous system healing.

To meet a need, you first have to feel it. That’s interoception — your ability to sense what’s happening inside you. The hunger, the tiredness, the tension, the quiet signal that says something in me needs something. Many of us learned to override that voice so young that we stopped hearing it at all. We’re rebuilding it.

Every time you notice a need and meet it, you’re teaching yourself that you can be trusted to take care of you. That’s self-trust, and it compounds.

When self-trust is low, your nervous system stays on guard, bracing for the moment no one comes. That bracing is neuroception, the way your body scans for safety or danger beneath all thought. When it’s wired toward threat, it reads safe things, like needing and receiving, as dangerous.

As you keep meeting your own needs, your system starts to feel safe. The high alert eases, less stress, fewer symptoms. Less of that automatic fear firing when nothing is actually wrong…

So have your needs and your wants. Come home to your own signals — and answer them. That’s where the safety gets built.

#trauma #safety #cptsd #need #shame

Repost from @hannahfrasermoore • Choosing ourselve

Repost from @hannahfrasermoore
•
Choosing ourselves should be easy, but for many of us it’s the hardest act of all.

When appetite, longing and desire have been silenced in childhood, the very capacity to want is arrested. The muscle never grows.

We become remarkably good at building lives around what is expected of us, but never learn how to build lives around what we truly want.

As Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes, every fairy tale begins with a girl under a spell, unable to act on her own behalf.

This is why we enter The Forest.🌳

To find the parts of ourselves that never stopped wanting.

To reclaim the desires that had to be abandoned in order to belong.

The inability to choose ourselves is the consequence of having our desire cut off before it could take root.

The work isn’t about learning what to want, it’s about recovering the parts of us that never stopped wanting.

#trauma #development #need #want #therapy

Any untagged artwork, please let me know so I can tag the artist. 🙏✨

I know this one well… “Taking responsibility for t

I know this one well… “Taking responsibility for the things you can control is noble; taking responsibility for the things you can’t is a form of self-harm.
Taking on all the blame might feel easier because it means you hold all the power, but over time, the weight of what might have never been yours to begin with will crush you, deteriorating your self-trust and making it more likely that you’ll continue seeking out complete control as the only form of safety within yourself.”

#betrayal #trauma #theray #selfblame

Repost from @nicole_arzt • Harm in therapy and har

Repost from @nicole_arzt
•
Harm in therapy and harm in greater mental health systems is a structural issue without simple issues. I say this as a therapist who deeply values the profession and is also fairly critical of the profession.

The phenomenon of harm warrants ongoing dialogue and critical reflection through all stages of training and in all facets of this profession. Like many things, this topic is far too nuanced to capture within a single post or even a single essay, but this is my attempt.

#therapy #ethics #values

Wisdom @reviveyourroar I didn’t meet many people

Wisdom @reviveyourroar

I didn’t meet many people in my life that I would call lighthouse humans.
I met successful people. Inspiring people. Strong people. Intelligent people.

But when you’ve grown up in survival mode, your nervous system isn’t looking for inspiration—it is looking for safety.

For years I couldn’t have explained what was missing. Something inside me just kept searching.

Looking back now, I realize I wasn’t looking for people with all the answers. I was looking for people who could stay steady when I wasn’t. People who didn’t shame me for struggling, rush to fix me, or demand that I become someone else before I belonged.

Lighthouse humans don’t rescue ships.

They simply keep shining.

Their calm reminds you that storms pass. Their consistency teaches your nervous system that not every relationship ends in chaos. Their presence quietly challenges the belief that the world is only dangerous.

Eventually, you begin to borrow their hope until you can generate your own.

Then something incredible happens.

One day you realize you aren’t searching for a lighthouse anymore.

You’re becoming one.
🫶 Matt
Revive Your Roar

#trauma #storm #lighthouse #therapy #human

Wisdom by Nadia Addesi @nadiaaddesi Feeling unim

Wisdom by Nadia Addesi @nadiaaddesi

Feeling unimportant can arrive much faster than the evidence.

When attention felt inconsistent in childhood, you may have learned to study other people closely. A change in tone, a delayed reply, or someone needing space could begin to feel like proof that your place in the relationship had changed.

As an adult, this can show up as needing reassurance but struggling to ask for it. You may overexplain, become quiet, search for signs that someone still cares, or pull away before they have the chance to disappoint you.

These reactions often make sense in the context of what you learned. If being easy, helpful, successful, or visibly struggling was what finally brought attention, you may have learned that care had to be earned.

Healing begins with creating a little space between what happened and what the moment seems to mean. You can acknowledge the feeling without immediately treating it as confirmation that you no longer matter.

Sometimes that means saying, “I noticed I started feeling unimportant when that happened,” and allowing a safe person to understand you. It also means letting their reassurance reach you instead of dismissing it, questioning it, or deciding you should not need it.

Over time, new experiences can teach your nervous system that someone being distracted, unavailable, or imperfectly responsive does not erase your importance.

A painful feeling can be familiar without being a complete reflection of what is happening now.

Just in case no one told you today… You are seen.

Just in case no one told you today…

You are seen. You are heard. You are valued. You matter.

Your worth has been here all along, well before you were taught to prove it, and it remains even without any effort to be more.

May you find steady rest here tonight knowing that you are inherently valued and appreciated.

#youmatter #valued #neglect #trauma #therapy

Repost from @theempoweredtherapist • To those of y

Repost from @theempoweredtherapist
•
To those of you who are healing from the pain of what you didn’t get, I see you.

#neglect #trauma #therapy #cptsd

When someone we care about speaks to us with sharp

When someone we care about speaks to us with sharpness or pushes us far beyond our capacity, especially when it is our own child, something in us can move very quickly towards rage. Often a rage that takes over without us even knowing it. Beyond the rage, however, a more vulnerable place emerges.

Our chest tightens, our breath shortens, and parts of us, perhaps the part that was harmed in the past, or the part left in chaos to do it alone, begin to awaken an old embodied fear: that once again our innate need for space, time, and respect will be overwhelmed by the other.

Children seem to know, even without trying, how to awaken the parts of us that want to give beyond what we can. They push us the hardest, asking, without words: will you help me contain this chaos inside of me, will you show me where the limits are and keep them while I learn?

This is not to say that we must permit disrespect or harm. It is to ask ourselves honestly: how can I remain connected to my Self amidst my child's chaos, knowing that being pushed and pulled awakens the part of me that still feels the pain of once being hurt, the part that whispers "maybe this means I'm a failure"...

Here the boundary becomes something we feel, as well as something we do. We can pause, attend to what is arising inside us, soften our breath, and let our voice stay low and even. We can name what we see rising in them, "I can see how angry you are right now". And we can say the limit plainly, naming what we ourselves will do, "I am not willing to be spoken to this way, so I am going to step out for a while, and we can talk again once things have settled".

The limit lives in our own action, and not in whether they choose to change. Their storm remains theirs, and our steadiness remains ours, evidence that their intensity has not undone us.

And once the storm has moved through, there is a turning we can make towards ourselves. The part that whispered "maybe this means I'm a failure" can be met now too, met by us. We can let that part know that the limit we just held was held for them as much as for our child, that we are someone who protects now, in a way they were not protected then...

#parenting

Repost from @eggshelltherapy_imilo You are enough

Repost from @eggshelltherapy_imilo

You are enough 🫶🏻

#therapy #intense #trauma #cptsd

Repost from @theempoweredtherapist • For a long ti

Repost from @theempoweredtherapist
•
For a long time, you may have believed that if you could just find the right words, explain it clearly enough, be calm enough, mature enough, good enough, or small enough, they would finally understand.

You may have believed that the continued rupture between you and your caregiver(s) existed because you were communicating poorly.

But dear one, the issue may have nothing to do with your ability to explain.

Sometimes the issue is their inability or unwillingness to attune, take responsibility, engage in the repair process, or see you as separate from their own needs, projections, and pain.

And listen, this realization can be devastating. Realizing that they can’t meet you in your truth may mean grieving the version of them you kept hoping would show up.

It may mean accepting that your younger self tried to reason with people who were never emotionally available enough to show up for you.

And it may mean slowly releasing yourself from the exhausting assignment of trying to be understood by people who benefit from misunderstanding you.

To those of you grieving what your caregivers could not give you, I see you.

#complextrauma #neglect #trauma #therapy #alone

This… sigh 😮‍💨 Repost from @livedexperienceeduca

This… sigh 😮‍💨

Repost from @livedexperienceeducator
•
Neuronormativity doesn’t exist in isolation.

It is produced, reinforced, shaped and legitimised by broader systems of power.

Neuronormativity is the assumption that there is a singular way to function or more specifically, a singular way to feel, think, process information, pay attention, communicate, learn, perceive time, regulate emotions, behave, move through the world and exist.

This assumption has been shaped by systems including:

- Colonialism
- Whiteness
- Capitalism
- Patriarchy
- Cisheteronormativity
- Compulsory ablebodiedness

These systems create an “ideal” person and reward those who come closest to that ideal while pathologising, disciplining or excluding those who don’t.

This diagram represents a conceptual model I’m working on as a starting point for thinking about neuronormativity not as an isolated system but as a system of normativity that intersects with and is sustained by other systems of power.

#Neurodiversity #Neurodivergent #Neurodiverse #Neurodivergence #trauma

Repost from @awakenwithally • Until we become coll

Repost from @awakenwithally
•
Until we become collectively more capable of meeting one another with greater emotional presence and reciprocity, there is another essential relational capacity worth developing:

How to remain connected to yourself and experience a basic level of connection with another person, no matter where they are, even when they are emotionally disconnected, unaware or dysregulated.

This doesn’t mean carrying the relationship alone, tolerating harmful behavior, or creating intimacy where mutual capacity doesn’t exist.

It means another person’s disconnection doesn’t have to pull you into disconnection from yourself. Their dysregulation doesn’t have to become yours. You can remain present, recognize what is happening, and discern how much connection is genuinely available without forcing more.

Sometimes the relationship can deepen. Sometimes it can only meet you at a basic level. Sometimes self-connection helps you recognize that stepping back is the most attuned response.

Love,
Ally.

#relationship #emotion #connection #trauma #together

Repost from @acceptandact • Healing yourself is a

Repost from @acceptandact
•
Healing yourself is a long journey that requires a firm commitment to working on honoring your needs in safe and healthy ways. It’s about learning to choose YOU, learning to take care of your inner child

You CAN learn how to do this through consistently practicing self-reparenting even if you didn’t have a good childhood or loving parents.

Once you accept that you’re a wounded, abandoned little child underneath it all who desperately needs YOUR own love, care and acceptance above all, you will stop approaching yourself with harshness and criticism. You will soften up towards yourself. Tears of love will come rushing out for all of your scared and scarred little parts that desperately want to be held by you.

When you stop betraying, neglecting and abandoning yourself, you end the cycle of abandonment that you were conditioned into during your childhood. When you accept that the abandonment was NOT your fault, that you didn’t cause it, you realize that you were perfectly worthy and lovable your whole life!

#abandonment #trauma #neglect #lost #cptsd

Repost from @igototherapy • 🍓 Your relationship is

Repost from @igototherapy
•
🍓 Your relationship is intense, with high highs and low lows, you feel extremely attached, and feel like you can’t breathe without them - but you’re also constantly confused, scared, hypervigilant, and feel like you’re shrinking. If this is the case for you, it might be that it’s not ’chemistry’ - it’s emotional abuse.
⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
🍓 Abuse isn’t just bruises and physical altercations; it’s also subtle control, undermining you, constant stress and drama, and can feel like a rollercoaster, without any physical abuse at all.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
#abuse #trauma #relationship #manipulation #therapy

Repost from @myintegrativetherapist • Checking som

Repost from @myintegrativetherapist
•
Checking someone else’s reaction before deciding how you feel.

Changing your answer when you sense disappointment.

Saying “I don’t mind” so often that eventually, you’re not entirely sure what you mind.

Automatically becoming a slightly different version of yourself depending on who’s in the room.

When your nervous system learns that connection depends on being agreeable, helpful, easy, or whatever else the moment requires, authenticity can feel surprisingly uncomfortable because being authentic doesn’t guarantee approval.

For trauma survivors, someone else’s disapproval can feel like a threat to your very survival. Because at one point, staying connected, protected, or safe may have depended on your ability to appease the people around you.

So, healing sometimes means letting someone be disappointed, letting someone misunderstand you, and letting someone have an opinion about you that you don’t rush to correct.

When you discover that you can stay connected to someone else without disconnecting from yourself, something begins to change and you stop checking the room for permission to be who you already are.

Save this for the next time you catch yourself reading the room before reading yourself. 🤍

#trauma #misunderstood #relationship #self #authentic

Repost from @awakenwithally • We often hear, “Rela

Repost from @awakenwithally
•
We often hear, “Relational wounds happened in relationship, so they must be healed in relationship.”

There is truth in this. But when it becomes a general rule, healing can turn into another reenactment of the wound.

You may remain in relationships that are too effortful, painful, or misaligned because you believe you have to. Leaving feels like avoidance. Staying feels like doing the “work”.

Healing isn’t determined only by where it happens, inside or outside of relationship. It’s determined by attunement, clarity and choice. In relationship to others and yourself.

For one system, relationship may offer the attunement and support needed to heal. For another, time outside of relationship may be necessary before connection can be experienced with greater receptivity and choice.

Neither path is more evolved.

Healing doesn’t come from following a general rule or making your system fit a particular belief.

Healing depends on attunement.

Can you listen beneath what you believe you should do?

Can you recognize what your unique system is receptive to now and build from there?

Can you meet that truth without turning healing into another demand?

Love,
Ally.

#relationship #trauma #choice #discernment

What happens to us when we are forepassed, downcas

What happens to us when we are forepassed, downcast, made to feel too much of the World too fast?

A distance opens, one that can feel impermeably vast. It is made by circumstance, by privilege unevenly given, by poverty and exclusion and the long weather of being misunderstood, misnamed, or turned from.

And so often the harshest injury comes after. It arrives in the betrayal of those who stand by and do nothing, who look past the very ones they named to serve.

Across all levels, from the macro systems of government to the micro systems of our families, this is a rupture that comes without recognition and without repair, from the very places that promised care.
None of us can undo the whole of this alone.

And still, something remains available to us. We can refuse the comfort of turning away. We can let another's pain matter to us. We can meet vulnerability with presence, and in the meeting, begin to close the distance that has been made.
This is where hope resides.

A hope that lives in connection, in the willingness of one person to stay with another across the space that separates them.

However brief the meeting, where presence meets vulnerability, betrayal is no longer bypassed.

The distance was made. And what is made can be met.

#betrayal #injustice #trauma #cptsd #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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