I’m not asking for a subscription. What I would love more than adding another $5 charge to your automatic payments that you’ll want off in a year but never get around to deleting, is connection. Click the heart if this resonates. Share it with someone who needs it. Restack if you’re moved to. Just let me know this is landing somewhere with someone.

Ten months in. I’ve journaled, I’ve stretched, I’ve om’d, I’ve stared at sunsets to feel awe. I’ve declined the wine. I have done Some Work, people. And honestly, I’m pretty pleased. Except for one thing…. I don’t like how my emotional regulation is worse with my own family than anyone else. Now, I don’t want to get anyone nervous here and imagine me as some green cruel monster once inside my home. I’m talking like once a month, I’ll do something (or usually say something) and think: “That was an overreaction.”

So, this is what I want to focus on for May. How to better manage the flare-ups with my family. But how?

Here’s what I’ve come to understand: every other focus this year (which has been 10 months now!) has been something I do alone. Journaling, meditation, somatic work… All internal, all on my own terms. This one is different. This one happens in real time, with real people, who are not following my healing schedule and do not care that I’ve been working on myself for ten months.

And for those of us with Complex PTSD, what looks like “overreacting” is frequently a trauma response in the form of hyperreactivity, emotional flashbacks, and nervous system dysregulation. It is not, and I repeat, not “just a bad habit”.

Which is both helpful and annoying, because I can’t unknow it, and I can’t always stop it either. With C-PTSD, especially when family of origin is where the trauma happened, close relationships can activate things that strangers and colleagues simply don’t. The people closest to us get under our skin in ways no one else can. That’s not a character flaw. That’s a nervous system doing its job—but just with outdated information.

The upside? All those solo practices over the last ten months have been building something. Body awareness from the somatic work. The ability to pause from meditation. A slightly less chaotic nervous system from skipping the wine. May is where I try a transfer into real life. Into the hardest room. The kitchen of my life, so to speak, with all the hopes of magazine gleam and all the reality of daily grime.

My specific goal this month is simple and measurable: I overreact at my family roughly once a month. I’d like that to be less. I’m not aiming for sainthood but a little more space between the feeling and the reaction.

Here’s the plan, week by week:

Week 1: Notice (This past week)

This week I have just been paying attention. When do I get activated? What does it feel like in my body before I react? No fixing yet—just watching myself like a slightly judgmental nature documentary.

Week 2: Understand (Upcoming week)

Asking the harder question: is this a present-day annoyance, or a trauma response in a costume? Those require very different responses, and I’ve been treating them the same way for decades.

Week 3: Practice (May 17-23)

Actually trying the tools. Pausing before I respond. Taking a slow breath out. Leaving the room before I hit my limit rather than after. (I think this might work well for me.) Seeing what works and what feels like nonsense.

Week 4: Reflect (May 24-31)

What shifted? What didn’t? Where did I surprise myself, in either direction? What do I want to carry into the final month of this project? This will be an especially interesting week as both my mom and mother-in-law are coming to visit for my daughter’s eighth grade graduation. Talk about final test at the end of the semester….

A Tool to Help

The tool I’m bringing in is The DBT Skills Workbook for PTSD by Kirby Reutter, which is a self-directed workbook that bridges DBT skills with trauma. Practical, skill-based, and specifically designed for the kind of emotional reactivity that comes with complex trauma.

I’ll be tracking what triggers me, what works, what absolutely does not work, and what I’m learning about the difference between a present-day annoyance and a trauma response wearing an annoyance costume.

It won’t all be pretty. But it’ll be honest.

The goal isn’t perfect emotional control. It’s understanding my nervous system better and being a little gentler with myself when it fires up.

The CPTSD Project is a year-long project in which I undertake a recommended method each month to lessen the effects of CPTSD (Complex PTSD). I check in weekly (sort of) to let you know how the project is going. And you can see if anything here might benefit you as well. Long-term personal goals like this one are difficult, but it’s easier knowing I have some community—and accountability.

I’m not asking for a subscription. What I would love more than adding another $5 charge to your automatic payments that you’ll want off in a year but never get around to deleting, is connection. Click the heart if this resonates. Share it with someone who needs it. Restack if you’re moved to. Just let me know this is landing somewhere with someone.

For the month of April, I focused on yoga. Not in a “I’ve found my purpose and my Lululemon” way. More as in everyone keeps saying “somatic work helps”. And I agree that I need to do something with my body other than just bracing for impact.

Here’s the thing about CPTSD that I wish were otherwise: it’s not a cognitive problem that I can rationalize my way out of. It lives in the body. The nervous system has been running a very long, very exhausting background program called “something is wrong, something is wrong, something is wrong.”

So, how can yoga help with Complex-PTSD?

Talk therapy is great, but you can’t always talk your way out of a nervous system that’s been in survival mode for years. Which is, apparently, where yoga comes in.

Researchers have been building a solid case for it for a while now: a 2024 meta-analysis found yoga significantly reduced PTSD symptoms and improved emotional regulation. A 2023 JAMA study compared trauma-sensitive yoga to Cognitive Processing Therapy and found similar results—but yoga had a 42% higher completion rate. Sometimes the body just needs a different door in.

I often wonder, though, with these studies, whether what’s found for PTSD translates to Complex-PTSD. They’re related but not identical. PTSD typically stems from a single traumatic event; C-PTSD develops from prolonged, repeated trauma—the kind that reshapes how you relate to yourself, other people, and the concept of safety. The nervous system dysregulation tends to be very entrenched and resistant to the usual tools. So “yoga helps PTSD” is promising, but it’s not a clean translation.

That said, the mechanism yoga is thought to work through is particularly relevant to C-PTSD. The theory, largely shaped by researcher Bessel van der Kolk, is that trauma gets stored somatically—in the body, not just the mind. Yoga works not by processing memories but by interrupting the body’s chronic stress response: slow it down, breathe deliberately, notice sensation without fleeing it.

For people with C-PTSD, who have often spent years dissociating from their bodies as a survival strategy, that practice of gentle re-inhabitation is the point. When doing yoga, you’re not stretching. You’re practicing the radical act of being present in your own skin without bracing for what comes next. What’s so interesting is when I write that, I believe it. I know it. Yet to be honest, I still have trouble when I do yoga. I feel myself thinking: “Oh you really should get on with….” Whatever “it” is. Doing feels safe to me. Being in the body…. Not so much.

What I Tried

To be clear, yoga is familiar to me. Each day when I wake, I do a few sun salutations while listening to the morning meditation on Calm. And I’ve done a lot of yoga before, learning when I was a foreign exchange student in Argentina, which gave me a wide, and non-useful Spanish vocabulary. (There aren’t many reasons to use “solar plexus” in casual conversation.) For April, I wanted to do more yoga, at least three one-hour sessions a week.

So, what all did I try?

Hot yoga with infrared heat: Being new to Austin, I thought I should take advantage of the various yoga offerings and wanted to try the infrared heat that is supposedly more of a calorie burner and helpful for aching joints, neither of which is an area of concern for me. Still: everyone’s talking about it, so I signed up for the free one-time class and volunteered myself to moving in 125-degree heat.

Result? No thanks.

It wasn’t an issue with the heat as much as the set-up. The “class” was a video of a yoga teacher, who was more like a peppy used car salesman with a penchant for calling body parts “team members.” “Get your team balanced!” “Come on, Team!” “All team members above the waist moving?” I don’t do team sports for a reason, and I found the coach-like talk a distraction. (What’s more, she only mentioned breath once.) Plus, the “room” was a small box where my fingertips grazed the ceiling.

The main result is that it made me want a real class, which is what I did next.

Going to an actual studio: This was the one. Something about being in a room with other people quietly trying to exist in their bodies made my nervous system go, oh, okay, we’re doing this. No profound insight descended upon me. No spiritual awakening. Just: this is better. The research supports my experience. Co-regulation is real, and being around calm, regulated bodies genuinely helps a dysregulated nervous system settle. Your body is basically borrowing the vibe of the room. And I’ll take any help I can get.

At-home yoga: As much as I loved the in-studio vibe, my wallet didn’t. So, I ended up going to the studio once a week and turning on Adrienne with Yoga. Lovely. Easy. And somehow her vibe radiated out of the computer screen. I did it in my pajamas, which felt right. The problem with doing healing work in your pajamas is that it’s very easy to not fully engage and just rest in my pajamas. Which, to be fair, is also healing.

Overall Result

I still get restless. My brain wants to file yoga under “wasted time” and “not real exercise”, which I know is incorrect. But as I mentioned in the beginning, C-PTSD is more of the body than of the mind. It’s hard for me to turn off the gnawing feeling that the yoga hour could have been better spent being productive—or at least productively anxious. : )

But here’s what I kept coming back to: the hypervigilance that makes me want to fill every hour isn’t a personality trait. It’s a symptom. The constant scanning for threats, the inability to fully rest, the compulsion to stay useful so nothing bad sneaks up on me—that’s the nervous system doing what it learned to do. Yoga, at its most basic, is a practice in proving it wrong.

I decided I needed to stop framing yoga as exercise I was failing to maximize, and start framing it as what it actually is for me: practiced safety. A small, repeated experiment in letting my body exist without being managed or braced or optimized. That reframe helped. It won’t fix anything on its own. But then, nothing does this on its own. That’s the whole project.

No poses were mastered. Several were attempted. The nervous system survived.

Good enough.

May’s Focus?

I have something planned for May that I’m equal parts excited and terrified about. I’ll share on Saturday. In the meantime, the semester is ending and we’ve finally moved into our permanent Austin home, which means I have more time to devote to Substack. It’s hard to believe I only have two more months of this project! Thank you for reading and supporting me.

The CPTSD Project is a year-long project in which I undertake a recommended method each month to lessen the effects of CPTSD (Complex PTSD). I check in weekly (sort of) to let you know how the project is going. And you can see if anything here might benefit you as well. Long-term personal goals like this one are difficult, but it’s easier knowing I have some community—and accountability.

I’m not asking for any subscription. What I would love more than adding another $5 charge to your automatic payments that you’ll want off in a year but never get around to deleting, is connection. Click the heart if this resonates. Share it with someone who needs it. Restack if you’re moved to. Just let me know this is landing somewhere with someone.

Something interesting is happening…. Dare I say it? Perhaps I am just feeling positive because the roses outside my window are in full we’re-going-out-and-wearing-our-fancy-skirts mode? Perhaps because our house finally sold? Perhaps because the grief from my stepfather’s passing has shifted from that urgent squirrel-in-the-attic-of-my-mind feeling, distracting and unsettling, to more like a friend who needs me to sit with her every now and then.

Whatever is the case, I’m honestly starting to experience some positive changes from this project. The last two months have been so helpful, particularly March’s focus on somatic practices.

For those of you new to this approach, somatic therapy is body-based work centered on the idea that trauma isn’t just stored in our thoughts and memories, but in our nervous systems and physical selves. Instead of talking your way through it, you work with the body directly: movement, breath, sensation. Frankly, as a writer who loves talking, writing, and reflecting, it’s the opposite of what my brain wanted to do.

The Workbook and My Extremely Resistant Type-A Brain

In my last post, I was struggling with understanding somatic theory—and with moving through the workbook I bought in a systematic way that promised one exercise per day. Here’s the thing about that workbook: it is not well constructed. One exercise might take five minutes. Another, inexplicably, two hours. The explanations were written for someone who fully believes in gold at the end of rainbows—abstract, glittery, heavy on promises of healing, light on actual information.

I am a person who likes to complete tasks. And do them well. I still, I kid you not, have my sticker book from grade school where I meticulously peeled off the stickers my spelling tests earned so I could admire them later. So, this workbook was not something I could do as a I had hoped.

Eventually I gave myself permission to be the bad pupil. Cherry pick. Skip the two-hour exercises. Do the easy ones. Let go of doing it correctly and just...try things.

This, as it turns out, was the right move.

What Actually Worked

I ended up loving a number of the techniques! Some of my favorites:

Progressive muscle relaxation—tensing and slowly releasing muscle groups one at a time—works best for me at the end of the workday when I’ve been hunched over a keyboard for eight hours. Five minutes of that and my shoulders remember they’re not supposed to be earrings.

I’ve also made some up. About once a day, to shake out some tension, I’ll dance like a golden retriever who just heard the word “walk”. Just for a few seconds. And where no one can see me. It turns out this is not just unhinged behavior. Rhythmic movement actually helps regulate the nervous system by activating the parasympathetic response. The body calms down. Science said so. I’m vindicated.

Other things I’ve been doing: box breathing (inhale four counts, hold four, exhale four, hold four—resets the nervous system like a little ctrl+alt+delete for your anxiety), and a body scan at the end of the day has been helping. Not the elaborate 45-minute kind, just a quick where am I carrying this? It’s almost always my stomach. Or those shoulders.

The Thing That’s Actually Sinking In

Here’s the shift I didn’t expect: I’ve started to internalize the core idea.

Words—and you know I love words: recalibrate, reframe, redirect, reassure, reroute—are not always the tool. This has been hard for me as a writer to understand. Sometimes my brain does not need more information. It needs my body to stand down first.

I cannot logic myself out of a nervous system response. I cannot explain anxiety into submission. I have tried this approximately ten thousand times and I want to report that it does not work.

What’s more: I’ve been looking up from my desk, noticing tension, and moving into a few slow breaths before my brain has even started its whole presentation. It’s still not a reflex. But I am choosing this option more over my old habits, which usually involved to continue working and trying to talk the feeling away.

That’s new. That’s genuinely new.

I’m also catching my negative thoughts and worries and saying: “Ah hah! That’s an old pattern of thinking that no longer serves me.” And then I do a quick grounding exercise like name 5 things I see, 4 things I hear, etc.

Y’all…. I feel like I am honestly changing some very old, very rutted, habits that, in all fairness, I had to do at one point in my life to protect myself. I’m starting to have access to a different gear: something slower, something that isn’t my first response but is increasingly becoming it.

The squirrel is still in the attic. But she’s sitting down more and enjoying her stash of acorns.

April’s Focus

Given how well the somatic work is going, I wanted to continue with something that is of the body. At the same time, April is a grueling month for college professors. And I’m moving into a new house that has a beautiful back yard (complete with a little koi pond). So, realistically, I don’t have time for anything super time consuming.

For April, I’ve decided on yoga! At least twice in a studio, and another time or two with a good class online. It will encourage me to venture out and explore Austin more. So, if anyone has a favorite online yoga teacher, feel free to put that in the comments below. (I definitely love me some Yoga with Adrienne.)

As always, thanks for reading!

I’m not asking for any subscription. What I would love more than adding another annoying $5 charge to your automatic payments that you’ll want off in a year but never get around to deleting, is connection. Click the heart if this resonates. Share it with someone who needs it. Restack if you’re moved to. Just let me know this is landing somewhere with someone.

New state, new therapist. I cannot tell you how much I resisted the new therapist, largely because I had such a deeply positive relationship with my last therapist. But also because starting over? Telling the same stories to a stranger who doesn’t know my shorthand yet? Ugh. No. Thank. You.

I almost canceled on our first visit. Then I went on a run, purposely/not purposely close to the appointment, choosing to drive to a beloved park instead of running in my neighborhood so I could make it on time. Then I almost didn’t stop the run because it was going well. Then I bargained with myself: fine, end the run early and just sit in the car. I showed up to that first session like a grumpy 16-year-old in the back row of health class: arms crossed, completely prepared to be unimpressed.

I answered her questions for about five minutes, privately deciding they were dull, when she paused and said: “So, you’ve done a lot of the intellectual work. But not the grounding work.”

Record scratch. Full stop. I sat up.

She was right.

Before I get into this month’s focus, which is somatic therapy, I want to say something about trauma because I think we still get it wrong.

Trauma is not an abstract notion living somewhere in my past. It is not a story I retell until it loses its teeth. Trauma is present in my body, and it speaks in my body’s language.

Trauma is the backache that feels like a ladder cracked clean across my spine. Trauma is my stomach churning like the eye of a hurricane: restless, relentless, with a terrifying calm at the center. Trauma is my body feeling the need to move as if a panther is in pursuit. Trauma is a bird beating its wings against the golden cage of my chest, frantic and insistent and trying so hard to be heard.

It is my body. Telling me. Something.

Here’s the thing nobody told me about being a self-aware, therapy-going, personal-growth-obsessed person: I could have exceptional insight into my trauma and the work still not be integrated into my nervous system.

I know. Rude.

I have spent years getting fluent in my own psychology. I can trace my anxious attachment back three generations. I have the vocabulary, the frameworks, the emotional intelligence. And yet, same churn in my stomach every day, especially around 4:00. (Haven’t done enough, never enough.) Same freeze response in certain conversations. Same 3 a.m. heart palpitations like my body is running a drill nobody scheduled.

Turns out, insight is not the same as healing. And my body had been screaming that at me for years. I just thought that was normal.

It’s not normal. It’s also not my fault. But it is my responsibility.

BUT WHAT IS IT?

Enter somatic therapy, my focus for this month. No, it’s not a yoga class with a co-pay. It’s not crystals (unless that’s your thing, no judgment). It is, however, what my therapist thinks I should do next, which is the focus for this month.

So, I’m a couple of weeks in and bought this workbook and listened to equally dreamy-voiced podcasters recording from Costa Rica (why always Costa Rica?). And I’m honestly still confused on what it is.

I know the definitions…. Somatic therapy is any therapeutic approach that brings the body into the healing process, working with sensation, breath, movement, posture, and the nervous system rather than just thoughts and memories.

I think I need a new workbook because this one is way too wordy, even for me. To do the exercises, I have to stop and read and remember to stop and read again. And what I have done feels a lot like what I do when I do a sun salutation.

Hive mind: Does anyone have a suggestion for guided exercises online?

Here’s the thing about being a lifelong student: I don’t actually resist learning. I resist not knowing where the classroom is.

And right now? I genuinely don’t know where the classroom is. I have a workbook that’s too wordy, a therapist who’s pointed me in a direction, and a body that has been loudly requesting I pay attention for years. What I don’t have is a guided, structured way in, something that feels less like reading about swimming and more like getting in the water.

So I’m asking. If you’ve done somatic work—a course, a program, a practitioner, a resource that actually clicked—I want to know. Drop it in the comments. I’m that kid in the front row who actually wants to read your syllabus.

I’m not asking for any subscription. What I would love more than adding another annoying $5 charge to your automatic payments that you’ll want off in a year but never get around to deleting, is connection. Click the heart if this resonates. Share it with someone who needs it. Restack if you’re moved to. Just let me know this is landing somewhere with someone.

Okay, so. Remember my grand very structured plan to tackle my worry problem this month? Weekly themes. Daily logs. Scheduled worry windows. Body scans. The whole thing.

Here’s how it actually went.

Week One: The Worry Log (Or: A Study in Meta-Worry)

The plan was simple: every time I caught myself worrying, I’d log it. Time, trigger, duration, intensity on a scale of 1-10. Very scientific. Very organized. Very me.

What actually happened: I immediately started worrying about the worry log.

Would it take too long? Would I have to stop mid-conversation at my husband’s and my weekend getaway to take notes on my phone? Would tracking my worries make me worry more? (Spoiler: briefly, yes.) For those of you who are fellow worriers, you already knew this was coming.

But here’s where it got interesting.

Once I got past the initial chaos of watching my little worry ants line up in my log, I noticed something that stopped me cold: I wasn’t actually worrying. I was delivering verdicts.

These weren’t fears with questions attached like what if this goes wrong, what if I can’t handle it. They were flat, confident pronouncements about my future. Negative ones. Stated as fact. My brain wasn’t wringing its hands; it was banging a gavel.

If the mind is running that kind of commentary 24/7, no wonder it’s hard to feel okay.

Once I saw it for what it was—negativity, not worry— I could actually do something about it. I landed on a phrase that’s embarrassingly simple and genuinely effective: You’ve always managed. You’ll figure it out.

And the thing is, it’s true. My childhood was, to put it charitably, wack-a-doodle. But my adulthood has been full of adventure, love, and things I’m genuinely proud of. The C-PTSD just is resisting that memo. It’s still waiting for the other shoe to drop. It is convinced, at all times, that I am only as good as what I accomplished today. (This is also why, when I’m sick, I do not rest. I do not even acknowledge being sick. I must do.)

Classic C-PTSD, as it turns out.

Here’s the thing about a brain shaped by trauma: it’s not broken. It’s actually just doing its job extremely well, except now it’s for a situation that no longer exists. When I was a kid and things were genuinely threatening, hypervigilance was genius-level survival strategy. Expect the worst. Stay alert. Never let your guard down. Maybe you won’t be blindsided.

My brain got really, really good at that job. It just never clocked out.

So now, even though I love my new city and my new job, my brain is still hovering anxiously going BUT WHAT IF EVERYTHING FALLS APART?! It’s exhausting. But when I reframe it, when I realize my brain has been running a 24/7 threat assessment program because it was genuinely trying to keep you safe, it’s also kind of touching? Like a helicopter parent who still packs your lunch with all five food groups even though you’re forty.

Sweet. But also: please stop.

Week Two: Scheduled Worry Time (And a Surprise from the Calm App)

The plan for week two was to contain the worry: give it a 15-minute window each day, write it all out, and then tell it to sit down until its scheduled time. I’ve tried this before and it didn’t work because my brain got stuck in the loop. So I was, naturally, worried that would happen again.

What I found instead was that I still wasn’t saving up worries. I was saving up negative thoughts. Same discovery, new context. My brain wasn’t bringing me unresolved fears during worry time — it was bringing receipts for all the ways things might be bad.

Then, on February 19th, the universe decided to be a little on-the-nose about it: my Calm meditation that morning was about exactly negativity bias, and how deeply ingrained it is in all of us. (Love me some Calm. Truly.)

It made me wonder: are people with C-PTSD even more vulnerable to negative thought patterns than the average person? So, I asked my therapist.

She said: Yup.

And then, being a therapist, she elaborated. People with C-PTSD often develop pervasive negative thinking as a direct result of their trauma history. But it’s not as a character flaw; it’s a logical outcome of what the brain learned. I feel like I need to underline and bold this. Prolonged trauma, especially in childhood, trains the brain to scan constantly for danger, which naturally skews perception toward the negative because that’s what kept you safe. Repeated harm from caregivers or trusted people tends to produce core beliefs like I am bad, people can’t be trusted, the world is unsafe — and those beliefs color how everything gets interpreted. For me, the core belief is that only I will be able to keep me safe. I’m doing all this, whatever the “all” is, alone.

The good news, she said, is that these patterns are deeply ingrained, but not permanent.

Which brings me to my favorite part.

The Final Days and the Thing That Actually Worked: Notice, Challenge, Redirect

Here’s what’s ironic: I present as a positive, even joyful person. People who know me would probably be surprised by this post. But the internal weather? Negative charge. Negative space. Negative feedback. Negative returns. Negative Nancy. False negative. Photo negative. Negative, negative, negative. It’s a whole atmosphere in there.

My therapist (and the Calm app, and honestly most of cognitive behavioral therapy) landed on the same three-step approach, and I have to tell you that it’s been one of the most effective things I’ve tried all year.

Step one: Notice. Catch the thought as it’s happening and name it. That’s a negative thought. My brain is doing that thing again. This sounds almost insultingly simple, but it creates a small and genuinely important distance between you and the thought. You’re observing it instead of being consumed by it.

Step two: Challenge. Is this actually true? Would I say this to a friend? Is there evidence that contradicts it? This isn’t toxic positivity. It’s not think happy thoughts! It’s honest interrogation. Does this thought hold up under scrutiny? (Spoiler: mine usually don’t.)

Step three: Redirect. Consciously shift your attention. A more balanced thought. A physical sensation. A task. Something you’re grateful for. Anything that isn’t the spiral.

With repetition, this actually starts to rewire the brain’s default patterns, which is essentially what CBT is built around. And paired with my mantra (you’ve always managed, you’ll figure it out) and the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique when things start to spin, I have a little toolkit now that I actually use.

So How Did the Month Go?

This has genuinely been one of the best months I’ve had since the move.

Not because nothing was hard. Work stress is real, and my brain did not magically stop generating material. But because I finally have language for what’s happening. I’m not a worrier. I’m someone whose brain defaults to negative verdicts because for a long time, that’s what kept her safe. That reframe matters more than I can explain.

What I’m Keeping Long After February

• The mantra. You’ve always managed. You’ll figure it out. Simple, true, mine.

• Notice, challenge, redirect. Every time. It gets faster.

• Self-compassion when I catch myself mid-spiral—responding to it the way I would to a friend, not a defendant.

• 5-4-3-2-1 when things start escalating physically. Name five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can hear, two you can smell, one you can taste. It works.

If you’ve ever thought of yourself as “a worrier,” it might be worth asking whether you’re actually worrying, or whether you’re just living inside a very convincing negative narrative your brain wrote a long time ago to keep you safe.

Because those are different problems. And one of them, it turns out, you can talk back to.

As always, thank you for reading along. And next month’s focus will be on somatic theory. I’m using a 15-minute a day workbook, which pleases my want-everything-organized-on-the-book-shelf heart so much.

The CPTSD Project is a year-long project in which I undertake a recommended method each month to help those with CPTSD (Complex PTSD) rewire the brain. I check in weekly to let you know how the project is going. And you can see if anything here might benefit you as well. Long-term personal goals like this one are difficult, but it’s easier knowing I have some community—and accountability.

I’m not asking for any paid subscription from anyone. So, what I would love more than adding another annoying $5 charge to your automatic payments that you’ll want off in a year but never get around to deleting, is connection. Click the heart if this resonates. Share it with someone who needs it. Restack if you’re moved to. Just let me know this is landing somewhere with someone.

Valentine’s Day. Oh boy. That thorny “holiday” has morphed into another consumerist cesspool when it could be a lovely way to share with one another. So, for this Valentine’s Day, I want to propose something different: exchanging vulnerability. Sharing what we need from our partners, even when—especially when—saying what we need makes us squirm a little.

I think one reason I’m here in this space—this very public, out-in-public-in-my-pjs kind of space—is because I want to connect with others who get it. My husband is very dear to me and supportive, but in my worst moments, I fear that CPTSD are just letters to him. Maybe even an excuse I use. I love Dana Hartman’s article “When You Love Someone with CPTSD” that offers sage advice on how to support a partner who suffers from CPTSD. I say ditto to all of her suggestions for how to be there for your partner, but I wanted to add a few of my own—things that might help you if you’re loving someone with CPTSD.

💏 Celebrate Small Wins

Notice the little things. When we open up about something difficult. When we try something new. Even just when we seem a bit lighter than usual. A simple “Hey, I noticed you seemed more like yourself today” or “I’m really glad you told me about that” can mean a lot. It shows you see our effort without making a big deal out of it or putting pressure on us to keep improving at some predetermined pace.

💕 Be Consistent and Patient

Just keep showing up. Healing from this stuff isn’t a straight line. Some weeks will be better than others, and that’s normal. If we’re pulling away or seem closed off, try not to take it personally. What really helps is knowing you’ll still be there tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.

💗 Respect Boundaries (Even the Confusing Ones)

We might want you close one day and need space the next. It can feel like whiplash, but it’s not about you. (Sorry about that!) Our nervous system is just trying to figure out what feels safe. Instead of guessing, ask us what we need. And don’t be surprised if the answer changes day to day, or even hour to hour.

💘 Avoid Being the Fixer

The truth is, you can’t fix our trauma, and honestly, trying to will wear you out. Sometimes the best thing you can do is just be there. A simple “That sounds really hard” often lands better than a whole list of suggestions about what we should do next.

💝 But Do Be a Partner in the Healing Process

While I appreciate that my husband has never played the savior role, I don’t want to feel alone in this healing process. That’s why I put “celebrate small wins” first. But there’s more that can be done. I would appreciate it if partners would sometimes initiate a conversation and ask what we’re working on. And then, if you see us going off track, asking kindly how we think we’re doing. We’re usually quite aware of our own failings. Too aware, actually. And this can be a good conversation to have.

But more importantly, I would love being asked: How can I help make this easier for you? I don’t know if this is a therapist-approved tactic, but I can tell you, it means a lot to me.

💞 Learn Our Triggers (Without Walking on Eggshells)

Pay attention to what’s difficult for us, but don’t twist yourself into knots trying to prevent every reaction. It’s about being aware and considerate, not about controlling everything you say and do. You can’t—and shouldn’t—bubble-wrap the world for us.

💖 Encourage Professional Help Gently

Therapy—especially trauma-focused approaches like EMDR or somatic work—can make a huge difference. But pushing too hard usually backfires. I appreciate something like this: “I’ve noticed things have been tough lately. Would it help to talk to someone?” And then let it rest. Plant the seed, but don’t water it obsessively.

💓 Take Care of Yourself

This is crucial. You can’t support someone else if you’re running on empty. Keep your own boundaries, lean on your own friends, and don’t make our healing the center of your entire world. Burning out doesn’t help anyone, least of all the person you’re trying to support.

So this Valentine’s Day, instead of (or in addition to) the chocolate and roses, maybe we exchange some of this: honesty about what we need, patience with what’s hard, and the vulnerability it takes to show up for each other—messy bits and all.

For my final October “awe date,” I decided to try something way outside my comfort zone: moving in unison with a group. Moving in synchrony with others can trigger what scientists call “collective effervescence”—a phenomenon that releases feel-good hormones in the brain and creates feelings of awe, belonging, and euphoric unity that bind people together. Some examples are doing the wave at a football game, line dancing, or marching in a band.

So, when I saw the free Zumba class at my daughter’s school I thought, “Perfect.” There’s just one hitch. I’m horrible at this type of thing. Any class where we are supposed to follow the teacher’s lead leaves me frozen like squirrel in the middle of the road, terrorized about which way to go before the tire wheels have their way.

Nonetheless, in the spirit of my CPTSD project, I decided I needed to do it. So, I arrived at the gym (early in fact) and met the teacher. She told me that she was the school librarian and had recently had surgery. She mentioned how her doctor told her to go easy and this was her first class since she’d be back, so she couldn’t push it.

Perfect, I thought. A fellow book-worm. Surely we’re kindred spirits in the coordination department.

“Let’s start with something slow,” she said, conjuring images of deep breaths and long arm reaches. But what came out of the speaker was a hip hop meringue mix—and then this woman transformed. Her body became all rhythm and grace. Hips swiveling, feet scissoring, shoulders shimmying with a casualness that suggested this was as natural for her as breathing. Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out which foot to start with. (And how exactly were her knees bending while mine felt like they’d been installed backwards?)

After about thirty minutes of flailing, the truth became undeniable: I would never move in unison with the group. My body had its own ideas, none of which involved rhythm. So, I made a decision. I gave up trying to follow along and just...danced. I let myself become that terrorized squirrel meets Elaine from Seinfeld hybrid. And you know what? It was joyful.

I didn’t get the awe I came for—that transcendent feeling of synchronized movement. But I got something else: awe for the teacher, whose body moved like water, and for everyone around me who made it look effortless. Sometimes awe isn’t about what you can do. It’s about witnessing what others can do. I’m so glad I gave it a try—and I think I’ll actually return to experience the sense of community that I felt from my short, off-beat hour.

How Did October’s Focus on Awe Help Me Overall?

So far, the therapeutic journaling is still my favorite activity to help with my CPTSD, with EMDR a close second. But the focus on awe has been so joyful that it is something I’ll continue. I’m not sure if it is the best for CPTSD but more so just wise for overall well-being.

We spend so much of our lives cataloging deficits—tallying what we lack, measuring the distance between where we are and where we think we should be. This scarcity mentality keeps us trapped in a relentless audit of inadequacy. But awe does something remarkable: it shrinks the self, not through diminishment but through perspective. In the presence of something vast—whether nature, art, or synchronized movement—our small anxieties lose their grip. We become smaller, yes, but in becoming smaller, we also become lighter, freed from the limitations of our own narrow concerns.

In the end, awe doesn’t diminish us; it simply reminds us we were never meant to carry the weight of everything.

Next Month’s Focus?

I’m a sucker for fall: gourds, bittersweet vine, dried flowers…. My husband calls it “decorating with compost.” I call it ambiance. So, this month’s focus felt obvious to me: gratitude.

Gratitude feels both fitting for the season and slightly daunting given what research tells us about gratitude and complex trauma. Gratitude can be challenging for trauma survivors because our hyperactive nervous systems keep us in constant reactivity, while gratitude requires engagement from the more conceptual, proactive parts of the brain. The very wiring that kept us safe now makes simple thankfulness feel suspect.

Still, the research offers hope. In studies of disaster survivors—from Israeli teens enduring missile attacks to Indonesians recovering from devastating earthquakes—gratitude emerged as a significant factor in reducing post-traumatic stress and increasing life satisfaction. Researchers have found that gratitude can be conceptualized as a protective mechanism that promotes positive outcomes following trauma, not just preventing bad outcomes but actively creating good ones. The catch? The positive effects of gratitude increase over time and with practice. Simply put, it needs time to help us heal. So this month becomes an experiment: Can I practice gratitude without forcing it? Can I be grateful for small things while still honoring the difficulty of the larger journey?

How I’m Going to Approach Gratitude Given the Difficulties with It

☕ Start incredibly small. This is what I keep reading. Focus on tiny, present-moment things (a warm cup of coffee, sunlight through a window) rather than big-picture gratitude (God, Family, etc.). Simply listing out small things from the day can change my mood and make me see what has gone well instead what else I need to do or should have done.

🌱 Don’t force it. If you can’t feel grateful, practice self-compassion instead. It’s okay to just notice good things without requiring yourself to feel a certain way about them.

🤝 Use “and” instead of “but.” Hold both gratitude and difficulty together (e.g., “This is hard AND I’m grateful for my therapist for helping me through it.”)

🧘 Try gentle body-based practices. Mindful breathing or body scans with gratitude thoughts. (I’ve never done this before, so I want to give this a try this month.)

✍️ Write it down. Gratitude journaling or letters are popular—if the focus is on simple things.

⏳ Be patient. The research shows gratitude’s benefits increase over time with practice, not immediately. (Given my tendency to want too much too fast, I’ll have trouble with this one.)

🌤️ Focus on today, not the past. Notice what’s good in current relationships and situations, not trying to manufacture gratitude for past trauma.

⏰ Find a certain time to make it part of your routine. I’m going to try to simply think about 5 things I’m grateful for at lunchtime. That’s usually when I take my first long break in the day, so reflecting on what has gone well is best.

We’ll see how it goes! Thank you for following along with me.

To end, I’ll share this quote from Alice Walker: “Thank you is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.”

DISCLAIMER

I am not a licensed healthcare professional. The information I provide is based on personal experience, research, or general knowledge and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, be it pharmacological, behavioral, or a combination of the two. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or health concern.

WORKS CITED:

https://ggie.berkeley.edu/practice/the-beauty-of-collective-effervescence/#tab__3

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/expressive-trauma-integration/202001/the-neuroscience-gratitude-and-trauma

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/can_giving_thanks_help_heal_from_trauma

Last week, I was driving to a reading, thinking of everything I hadn’t completed that day, and listening to Awe: The New Science on Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life on Audible, which was having the opposite intended effect. Instead of calm, I was feeling like I wasn’t doing enough to bring awe in. And then I felt conflicted about that—as if I were trying to commodify or force awe into being, like walking up to a bartender and ordering a martini of transcendence.

At that moment, Dacher Keltner, the author of Awe, started sharing about vocal bursts—those spontaneous sounds we make that aren’t words: “whoa,” “ooh,” “ahh.” Bursts that are millions of years old, that existed before language. As a writer who has attended a lot of readings, including way too many with that awful poet voice that ends each line with a question mark, I thought about how often the crowd responds with vocal bursts. Those sounds, Keltner pointed out, are an expression of awe. A communal one.

Those simple sounds we make after hearing a good poem or story are not so simple, it turns out. Vocal bursts, Keltner explains, were our first language. Before humans had words—some 200,000 years ago perhaps—we communicated through these brief, emotionally charged sounds. They’re not uniquely human either. Many social mammals—great apes, elephants, horses, even bats—have their own repertoires of vocal bursts to signal threat, comfort, play, or connection. But what makes the human version remarkable is that these sounds transcend culture. Research shows people across different cultures can reliably recognize the emotions behind vocal bursts, even when they don’t share a language.

That sharp intake of breath, that collective “ohhh” at a reading when a line lands just right? That’s not learned behavior. That’s ancient circuitry. We’ve been expressing awe this way for longer than we’ve had the word for it. I love the idea that vocal bursts were our first language—which means the need for awe and wonder is hardwired into us.

As I pulled into the parking lot of the Katherine Anne Porter House to hear Deb Olin Unferth read (who is wickedly smart and darkly funny), I had to smile at my own error, once again. I wasn’t seeing the reading for what it was: another opportunity to experience awe. I was excited to go and wanted to spend more time with this author, but still, I didn’t fully understand that I was driving to a communal opportunity for awe. At the reading that night, we laughed as a group and experienced a brilliant mind at work. And indeed, there were many moments of vocal bursts—and awe.

I think the truth is that sometimes I expect too much. I can apply that statement to many activities in my life such as a dinner I’m hosting that evolves (or is it de-volves?) into a six-course tactical operation that the Pentagon would be proud of. But it also applies to how I was starting to think about awe. I was starting to feel as if the moments of awe had to be big as the view from the toe-rim of the Grand Canyon.

But it can be much smaller. Like marveling online at the face of this orchid, which had me wonderstruck just before writing this. Or laughing at Deb Olin Unferth’s description of futuristic sand once we have used up all the sand.

With all this in mind, I wanted to share a list of quick and easy actions that break the cycle of incessant doing and pause to enjoy the beauty around us, even on a work-day.

On a Five-Minute Break (Because You’re Not a Robot), Try One of These:

· Step outside and look up at the sky. Clouds are always doing their thing whether you notice or not.

· Find a window and watch how shadows move. (Yes, really. Just watch them.)

· Pull up a 60-second timelapse video of literally anything in nature—blooming flowers, moving glaciers, the northern lights.

· Close your eyes and listen to the most epic piece of music you can think of with your full attention.

· Look at a photo of Earth from space and remember that all of human drama is happening on that tiny blue dot.

· Google “electron microscope images” and prepare to have your mind blown by what dust mites actually look like. (Okay, maybe skip this one if you’re squeamish.)

· Watch birds doing bird stuff outside your window.

· Pull up images of the deep sea or outer space and let yourself feel appropriately tiny.

· Do a quick search for “amazing facts about [insert literally anything]” and fall down a brief rabbit hole of wonder.

None of these will fix your inbox. None of them will make the meetings less exhausting or the deadlines less real. But they might remind you why you’re doing any of this in the first place. And they will definitely give you sixty seconds where you’re not performing, not producing, not managing—just witnessing.

As many smarter people than I have said, we need energy to give energy. And awe, even the smallest dose of it, is how we refill the well.

So today, just once, look up. Look out. Let yourself be interrupted by something that has nothing to do with your obligations.

Awe isn’t a luxury. It’s a reset button. It’s the thing that reminds us we’re not just the sum of our task lists—but that we’re part of something larger, stranger, more beautiful.

As promised, I went on an “awe date” with myself, meaning I made an intentional plan to do something to elicit a sense of awe in myself. Being new to Texas—and being my daughter’s fall break—I thought a hike in hill country would be fitting.

We talked about it throughout the week, including me doing extensive research into best hikes within a two-hour radius and asking multiple grad students and friends. All was set—or so I thought. When my daughter (finally) woke up, she didn’t want to go. Wails, flails, all the things. Eventually we did go—and it was worth it. But it also showed me how difficult it is to break from routine—or is the word ‘ease’? She wanted to stay home, hang by the neighborhood pool—and have more time for tv. Admittedly, that sounded pretty nice to me, too, and I briefly imagined everything I could get done if we didn’t do this five-hour excursion. But none of that would have filled either of us with awe. Distraction is not rejuvenation.

With the promise of a road-side taco, I was eventually able to push her (and myself) out the door. I also scaled down the plans and drove to a state park only 40 minutes away. And I’m so happy we did. She loved hopping on the rocks and looking into the turquoise waters at the fish and their shadows. And I just let myself sit and stare, watching the sun sequin through the trees. It was beautiful. And awe filled.

And yet, it felt like I wasn’t doing enough—even though I was. As I mentioned in last week’s post, I think we can become overly attached to the idea that growth only comes from discomfort or pain. But the more I read about awe and its health benefits, the more I realize joy is also a part of healing and growth.

At the same time, I also suspect this is not a mindset of our own making….

I’m currently reading The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life by Dascher Keltner (heartily recommend), and he sets up the book by talking about how positive emotions have been discounted in psychology for much of its history. I was curious about that and wanted to look into it more.

For most of the 20th century, psychology focused over what was broken—depression, anxiety, trauma, all the ways humans could malfunction. This made sense given psychology’s origins in clinical practice, but it created a weird blind spot: psychologists treated positive emotions like they were just the absence of negative ones. Happiness? Awe? Joy? Those weren’t real topics of study. They were what you had left over when you weren’t miserable.

Why the resistance?

· Scientific legitimacy: Early psychologists desperately wanted to be taken seriously as scientists. Studying suffering and disorder seemed more “serious” and measurable than studying happiness or awe.

· Medical model dominance: Psychology aligned itself with medicine, which focuses on disease and treatment.

· Funding and relevance: Post-WWII money flowed toward understanding and treating mental illness, PTSD, etc. All of which is good, but positive emotions were left out.

· Philosophical skepticism: Positive emotions were seen as subjective, fleeting, and less “real” than negative ones, which had clear evolutionary and survival functions.

Then came 1998, when Martin Seligman gave his APA presidential address and basically said, “Hey, we’ve turned psychology into a victimology.” He argued the field needed to study human flourishing, strengths, and positive emotions with the same rigor it brought to pathology. This launched the Positive Psychology movement, and suddenly researchers had permission to study the good stuff.

Many key figures followed, including, Barbara Fredrickson (broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions); Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (flow states), and Dacher Keltner (whose book on awe I’m reading.)

Awe, in particular, had been almost completely ignored. Keltner and Jonathan Haidt’s 2003 paper was groundbreaking precisely because awe had barely been studied at all before then. It was considered too ephemeral, too spiritual, too hard to measure in a lab. How do you quantify standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon with your mouth hanging open?

Even now, positive psychology sometimes must fight for legitimacy. Critics accuse it of being “pop psychology” or toxic positivity that ignores life’s real struggles. But the field has grown enormously, especially around emotions like awe, gratitude, and compassion. Turns out, studying what makes us flourish is just as important as studying what makes us fall apart.

And maybe that’s the lesson from my awe date, too. It took effort to get us out the door—effort my daughter resisted, and I almost talked myself out of. But the ease we found sitting by those turquoise waters, watching sunlight through the trees? That wasn’t laziness. That was flourishing. Sometimes the hardest work is letting ourselves feel good.

So, what better focus could I have for this month if not awe? I simply want to do one thing every day where I’m actively seeking awe, be it as simple as going outside to look at the stars for two minutes before bed. In addition, I want to take myself on a weekly “awe date.” The Artist’s Way imprinted on me when I first started out as a writer, so I can’t help but think of this practice a revised version of the “artist’s date” where I seek out something to refill my well. My plan this week: to drive to a state park and hike to a view.

Health Benefits of Awe

On our paths to growth, I think we can become overly attached to the idea that growth only comes from discomfort or pain. But the more I read about awe and its health benefits, the more I realize joy is also a part of healing and growth.

There’s a growing body of research on awe’s positive mental and physical benefits, recently amplified by Dacher Keltner’s bestseller Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. Here are some other findings that convinced me of awe’s importance:

Research shows that experiences of awe—whether from standing at Yosemite, listening to Beethoven, or watching a kid discover their toes—can literally shrink your sense of self in the best possible way. When people feel awe, they draw themselves smaller, perceive themselves as part of something bigger, and this “vanishing of self-focus” actually mediates the relationship between awe and reduced daily stress. (That’s why after a trip to the beach, I feel as if my “problems” are not so dire, but just a part of life.) Even better, experiencing awe doesn’t just make you feel good: it can lower inflammation markers in your body, sharpen your critical thinking, and make you more generous, according to “Eight Reasons Why Awe Makes Your Life Better”. And if all of that isn’t convincing enough, a 2021 UC Berkeley study found that awe is more potent at reducing daily stress than other positive emotions like amusement or joy, with effects showing up both in self-reports and physiological measures. So basically, those moments when you stop scrolling and actually look at the sunset? That’s not indulgent. That’s medicine. And unlike most medicine, this one’s free and has zero weird side effects (unless you count suddenly wanting to be nicer to people).

So, what are some practices that you can do, easily and quickly, to help bring more awe into your life?

Common Awe Practices That Anyone Can Do

🌳 Get Outside and Really Look. Take a 10-minute “awe walk,” slowing down to notice textures, colors, and patterns in nature. This could be observing how morning light hits leaves on your backyard tree or discovering the intricate details of a spider web. Yesterday, I saw from my back patio a slice of pink sky. Instead of just saying to myself, “Ain’t that pretty?”, I marched out the front door in my jammies to get a better view. And it was worth it.

👁️ Shift Your Perspective. Stop to gaze at something that catches your attention, like a leaf growing through the cracks of a sidewalk or ornate script signage on a store window you’ve walked past a million times before. The key is paying attention with fresh eyes to familiar surroundings.

☕️ Mindful Daily Rituals. Even daily, mundane activities are moments to feel awe. It can be as simple as focusing on the smell and warmth of a fresh cup of coffee before taking your first sip.

🌍 Think and Dream Bigger. Watch documentaries about deep space, ocean depths, or scientific breakthroughs to expand your sense of what’s possible.

🍒 Witness Moral Beauty. Look for acts of kindness, courage, or compassion—whether it’s a stranger helping someone in need or a parent comforting a child. (This is small, but the dude at Tacodeli, my new obsession, gave me a free taco the other day—and it made me one happy tamale.) Human goodness can be just as awe-inspiring as natural wonders.

🛝 Spend Time with Natural Awe-Finders. Hang out with kids, who are naturally gifted at finding wonder in everything from bubbles to butterfly wings.

📚 Read poetry! I don’t see this in a lot of articles about awe, but for me, poetry is one of the most reliable sources of wonder. There’s something about the way a poem can compress the vast into a few perfect lines that creates its own kind of awe. And that’s one of the reasons I have this “Pause and Awe” section here on Substack. I’ll definitely be sharing poems that have given me that catch-in-my-throat feeling, in hopes you can feel it too.

I’ve just been dabbling so far this week—and I already love it. And it’s been easy to integrate into my life. I changed a meeting date with a dear colleague to a local park instead of a coffee shop. And I went chasing after this roadrunner for a better look. (He didn’t love it, but I can’t tell you what a kick I get out of watching this bird.) This is just the beginning of my October awe experiment, and I’m already hooked. Here’s to more wonder-chasing ahead.

Sources

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10018061/

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/eight_reasons_why_awe_makes_your_life_better

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unlocking-your-potential/202112/new-insights-from-the-science-of-awe?msockid=0267bdced0d0674a2a48ab93d1a766c2

Without a doubt, therapeutic journaling has been my favorite action I’ve taken since I began this project in July. In the mornings, I sit outside with my cup of tea, read a little poetry, watch the birds who have finally discovered my feeder, tell the dog she is cute, tell her again, and then answer the prompt designed for me. It has not been a blubbery, tar-pit of self-pity, but rather a finely honed sense of pride of what I’ve overcome—and realization of what I need for comfort. Honestly, I’ve been surprised how positive I’ve left each writing session. I think, though, that has a lot to do with the prompts that were designed for me. The prompts often the focus on either reflecting on my past resilient acts or noting what brings me a sense of safety now.

So, why does it work?

Therapeutic journaling isn’t just trendy self-help fluff; there’s actually a lot of research to support its beneficial effects. Research has consistently linked expressing our feelings to better psychological health and positive therapeutic outcomes, including improved moods and reduced anxiety. Turns out that dumping all those swirling thoughts onto paper helps your brain make sense of them instead of letting them bounce around like ping pong balls in your skull. Simply put, regular journaling enhances mood, increases emotional awareness, and reduces stress levels. As explained in The Power of Journaling, “According to Emotional Disclosure Theory by James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, writing about emotional experiences helps process traumatic events by organizing chaotic thoughts and releasing pent-up emotions.” This all makes intuitive sense to me. When was the last time you felt worse after writing about your emotions?

But here’s where it gets really interesting: journaling doesn’t just help you vent (though venting is great). Studies have found that therapeutic journaling techniques can improve decision-making and increase perseverance through difficult times, especially when you’re figuring out what actually matters to you. We’re talking real results here. “Neuroimaging research from UCLA reveals that expressive writing activates the prefrontal cortex—the brain’s executive control center—while simultaneously dampening activity in the amygdala, our threat detection system (Lieberman et al., 2007). There is that word I’m focusing on: amygdala. Anything to calm that little T-Rex in my brain is wanted.

That said, before I crown journaling the cure for everything, researchers do point out that high degrees of heterogeneity and methodological flaws in existing studies. Translation: the research is promising but messy, so we need better studies to figure out exactly how to make journaling work best for different people. Still, for a free therapy session that fits in your pocket (and on your porch), it’s pretty hard to beat.

Friday Take-Away

Try a five-minute session with one of these questions that I found incredibly helpful to contemplate.

October’s Focus

What will be the focus for October? It’s been a tough few months for me with the move, new job, and passing of my stepfather. Without a doubt, the move was worth the stress. Still, I need to do something to actively shift my mentality from survival mode where each day has one hundred tasks on the to-do list---to being present. So, I want a focus around joy, specifically something that will help me focus on gratitude. What shall it be? Stay tuned and see next Friday!

Disclaimer

I am not a licensed healthcare professional. The information I provide is based on personal experience, research, or general knowledge and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, be it pharmacological, behavioral, or a combination of the two. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or health concern.

Sources

https://positivepsychology.com/benefits-of-journaling/

https://childmind.org/blog/the-power-of-journaling/

https://journalinginsights.com/therapeutic-journaling-guide/

https://www.reflection.app/blog/benefits-of-journaling

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8935176/

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In last week’s post, I shared how I am going to focus on expressive writing (also called therapeutic journaling among many other terms) to help me with CPTSD. I shared my schedule of daily writing prompts, which includes questions inspired by the Pennebaker Method, which is often referenced when writing about trauma.

How did it go? GREAT! In fact, this might be my favorite monthly focus so far.

I thought it might feel onerous to find the ten minutes every day—or worse, leave me feeling drained after the session. That has not been the case. The questions aren’t taking me that long to answer (more like five minutes) and the writing is only making me feel more energized. A lot of the questions this first week have been about what brings me comfort and sense of safety.

Reflecting on little spots in the house that calm me and little acts like lighting candles and playing cello music made me more aaware of what I need to do each night to help soften the day. When I realized how “lighting” kept coming up as something that soothed me, I bought some more durn candles. A pretty lamp. Simple. But effective.

Last week I shared the prompts I’m using, but today I want to share another set that was designed for me without any prompts that delve into any particular trauma.

But you might be asking: Can expressive writing still be helpful even if I don’t write about the trauma?

Short Answer: Yes. You don’t have to dive directly into trauma memories for your journaling to be healing. Here’s why:

1. Safety Before Story

With CPTSD, the nervous system has learned to expect danger. If you jump straight into trauma memories, it can feel like reliving them instead of processing them—which risks retraumatization. Trauma recovery is less about the details of the story and more about learning:

• “I am safe now.”

• “I can notice my triggers without being consumed by them.”

• “I have resources and strengths I didn’t have back then.”

2. Indirect Healing is Still Healing

Journaling about safety, strengths, and regulation may feel “too light,” but it’s actually foundational. You’re practicing:

• Regulation (calming your body after distress)

• Self-compassion (healing shame)

• Boundaries (rewriting old patterns)
  These directly repair trauma wounds without needing to recount every painful memory.

3. Trauma Processing Can Be Gradual

When (and if) you feel ready, trauma-focused journaling doesn’t have to mean writing every detail of what happened. It can be done safely with prompts like:

• “What would I like my younger self to know now?”

• “What message would I give to the part of me that went through that?”

• “What do I want to reclaim from that time (e.g., joy, creativity, voice)?”

That way, you’re engaging with the meaning and healing, not just the raw events.

✅ So: no, you don’t need to write about trauma memories directly for journaling to be therapeutic.

If you do, it’s best to do it slowly, with grounding, and ideally with the support of a therapist or safe container.

Here is a schedule that was designed for me, but maybe some prompts here will work for you. Healing is deeply personal—and everyone has to find what works for their needs. So, don’t consider this a recommendation, but more like a draft that you might want to revise for your own needs.

🌱 20-Day Trauma-Informed Journaling Plan

🌀 Daily Framework

1. Opening (1–2 min)

   • Ground: notice 3 things you see, 3 hear, 3 feel.

   • Set intention: “I am safe as I write.”

   • (On trauma days: Imagine your container. Know you can place heavy feelings inside if needed.)

2. Journaling (5–10 min)

   • Write to the daily prompt.

   • Pause anytime and use the container if something feels overwhelming.

3. Closing (2–3 min)

   • (On trauma days: Place the writing into the container, lock/close it, and set it aside safely.)

   • Write one sentence of gratitude, hope, or a comforting thought.

   • Re-ground (3 things you see/hear/feel, stretch, or drink water).

📖 Prompts by Week

Week 1: Building Safety & Self-Compassion
Day 1 → What helps me feel safe in my environment?
Day 2 → A moment I felt calm or grounded, even briefly.
Day 3 → Kind words I wish I could hear today.
Day 4 → Three small comforts that soothe me.
Day 5 → A gentle letter to myself as if I were a close friend.

Week 2: Strength & Resilience
Day 6 → A difficult time I survived — what helped me endure?
Day 7 → Qualities I admire in myself.
Day 8 → A protective part of me that helped me when I was younger.
Day 9 → A boundary I set (big or small) and how it supported me.
Day 10 → A personal value that matters to me (e.g., honesty, creativity, kindness).

Week 3: Awareness & Gentle Trauma Processing
Day 11 → What sensations tell me I’m getting triggered?
Day 12 → What helps me return to calm after being triggered?
Day 13 → ✨ Trauma prompt (use container): If I could speak to my younger self, what would I want them to know?
Day 14 → ✨ Trauma prompt: What did I need back then that I didn’t receive—and how can I offer that to myself now?
Day 15 → ✨ Trauma prompt: Write a message from my present-day self to the part of me that still feels stuck in the past.

Week 4: Integration & Future Self
Day 16 → If my future self could write me a letter, what would it say?
Day 17 → What inner resources (strengths, skills, supports) do I have now that I didn’t before?
Day 18 → ✨ Trauma prompt (use container): What is one piece of my story I’m ready to gently reclaim (a strength, a lesson, or a voice I had to silence)?
Day 19 → What kind of life do I want to build for myself?
Day 20 → Three things I am proud of in myself today.

💡 Key:

• ✨ = trauma-processing day → use the container ritual before and after writing.

• Non-trauma days → focus on grounding, self-compassion, and resilience.

• The container method referenced here is basically a mental technique that trauma therapists teach to help people manage overwhelming feelings or traumatic memories. You imagine a really strong, secure container—like a safe or locked box—and mentally put all those difficult thoughts, emotions, or flashbacks inside it, then lock it up tight and store it away until you're in therapy and/or ready to deal with it.

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DISCLAIMER

I am not a licensed healthcare professional. The information I provide is based on personal experience, research, or general knowledge and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, be it pharmacological, behavioral, or a combination of the two. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or health concern.

I’ve been away from Substack a couple of weeks because my stepfather passed away. Now, I’m back “home,” trying to settle into this new city with the awareness my life has changed in other ways aside from the physical move to Austin. With my stepfather’s death, I no longer have him in my life, and more significantly, neither does my mom, which has reverberating effects for me.

When I arrived home last weekend, my family and I went to the Congress Avenue Bridge to watch the nightly emergence of the largest urban bat colony in the world. It was a bust because the day had been colder than usual and rainy—and apparently, Mexican free-tailed bats are like us and like to stay in with Netflix on cold, rainy nights.

The sunset was beautiful, albeit, bat-less—and as I stood watching the sky watercolor itself, I thought about change and its inevitability. I had been feeling a bit sorry for myself, overwhelmed by all the changes in my life, and then I thought: change is an opportunity for growth. If I try to carry on as before, that will not only be impossible, but a missed opportunity to re-evaluate and create new routines that the change has offered.

All of this brings me to this year-long project and the larger goals I have for myself. For this month’s focus, I want to do something that allows me to process all that has happened with the move and my stepfather’s passing—and also see how I might be ineffectually responding to these changes because of past trauma.

So, what will be the focus for September? Journaling! Typically, I journal every morning to get out a worry or organize my thoughts before I write for the day. I started this habit long ago when I followed practices recommended in The Artist’s Way and Writing Down the Bones as if they were religious texts. The type of journaling I want to do in September, often called expressive writing therapy or therapeutic writing, is different from my daily journaling.

So, how exactly does journaling for CPTSD differ from regular journaling?

• Purpose: It’s not just “venting on paper,” but part of a trauma-informed practice focused on healing, trauma integration, and building regulation skills.

• Approach: This type of journaling is more structured and guided by prompts. Plus, the writer needs to do techniques that support a sense a safety before and after the writing (e.g., grounding before and after, focusing on resourcing and strengths).

• Focus:

  • Processing trauma memories gradually and safely

  • Identifying triggers and patterns

  • Building self-compassion and inner safety

  • Reclaiming personal narrative and agency

I want to be clear that there are risks. Writing about trauma without support can trigger flashbacks, overwhelm, or dissociation. That’s why trauma-informed journaling emphasizes pacing, containment, and sometimes working alongside therapy. With the help of my therapist, I created a schedule for the next 20 days. I’ll share this so that you can see what I’m doing, but by no means am I suggesting others to do exactly what I do. Everyone has to find their own pace and practice. This is simply what was created for me to use.

CONTEXT FOR MY JOURNALING SCHEDULE

Before I share my schedule, I wanted to give a bit of context. You've probably heard of Dr. James Pennebaker's writing method. It’s actually the go-to approach that therapists and researchers use most often. And for good reason! Studies have shown that this simple writing technique can genuinely improve both your physical and mental health, whether you're dealing with everyday stress or more serious issues.

So what exactly is it? Pretty straightforward, really. You just write about something stressful, traumatic, or emotionally challenging for 15-20 minutes a session. You do this for three to five sessions over four days in a row. That’s it.

Here’s what's really fascinating: over the last 25 years, researchers have consistently found that writing about tough experiences actually helps your body and mind heal. Dr. Pennebaker was one of the pioneers who discovered this. He found that when people wrote about emotionally difficult stuff for just 20 minutes at a time over four consecutive days, something interesting happened. Sure, they felt a bit stirred up right after writing - that's normal. But in the long run? Their health actually improved. We're talking better immune system function and fewer health problems overall.

It's pretty amazing that something so simple can have such a real impact on your wellbeing.

MY JOURNALING PLAN

Here is what my schedule is going to look like for the next twenty days. I do have Pennebaker’s questions integrated into it, but if you were thinking about trying this yourself, I want to say that you don’t need to do that part if it feels too overwhelming or unsafe. In fact, I’ll post another schedule without that. So, stay tuned! Finally, if you are unfamiliar with the container method, I explain that after the schedule.

🌱 My 24-Day Trauma-Informed Journaling Plan (with Container Ritual & Pennebaker Method)

🌀 Daily Framework

1. Opening (1–2 min)

   • Ground: notice 3 things you see, 3 hear, 3 feel.

   • Set intention: "I am safe as I write."

   • (On trauma days: Imagine your container. Know you can place heavy feelings inside if needed.)

2. Journaling (5–10 min for regular prompts / 15–20 min for Pennebaker days)

   • Write to the daily prompt.

   • Pause anytime and use the container if something feels overwhelming.

3. Closing (2–3 min)

   • (On trauma days: Place the writing into the container, lock/close it, and set it aside safely.)

   • Write one sentence of gratitude, hope, or a comforting thought.

   • Re-ground (3 things you see/hear/feel, stretch, or drink water).

📖 Prompts by Week

Week 1: Building Safety & Self-Compassion

• Day 1 → What helps me feel safe in my environment?

• Day 2 → A moment I felt calm or grounded, even briefly.

• Day 3 → Kind words I wish I could hear today.

• Day 4 → Three small comforts that soothe me.

• Day 5 → A gentle letter to myself as if I were a close friend.

Week 2: Strength & Resilience

• Day 6 → A difficult time I survived — what helped me endure?

• Day 7 → Qualities I admire in myself.

• Day 8 → A protective part of me that helped me when I was younger.

• Day 9 → A boundary I set (big or small) and how it supported me.

• Day 10 → A personal value that matters to me (e.g., honesty, creativity, kindness).

Week 3: Awareness & Gentle Trauma Processing

• Day 11 → What sensations tell me I'm getting triggered?

• Day 12 → What helps me return to calm after being triggered?

• Day 13 → ✨ Trauma prompt (use container): If I could speak to my younger self, what would I want them to know?

• Day 14 → ✨ Trauma prompt: What did I need back then that I didn't receive — and how can I offer that to myself now?

• Day 15 → ✨ Trauma prompt: Write a message from my present-day self to the part of me that still feels stuck in the past.

Week 4: Pennebaker Expressive Writing Method (4 consecutive days)

• Day 16 → 🖋️ Pennebaker Day 1: Write continuously for 15-20 minutes about a stressful, traumatic, or deeply emotional experience. Don't worry about grammar or spelling—just let your thoughts and feelings flow onto the page.

• Day 17 → 🖋️ Pennebaker Day 2: Continue writing about the same experience or explore a different aspect of it. Include your deepest thoughts and emotions about what happened.

• Day 18 → 🖋️ Pennebaker Day 3: Write about how this experience has affected your life, relationships, or sense of self. What have you learned or how have you grown?

• Day 19 → 🖋️ Pennebaker Day 4: Focus on meaning-making. How does this experience fit into your larger life story? What would you want others to know about going through something like this?

Week 4 Continued: Integration & Future Self

• Day 20 → What inner resources (strengths, skills, supports) do I have now that I didn't before?

• Day 21 → ✨ Trauma prompt (use container): What is one piece of my story I'm ready to gently reclaim (a strength, a lesson, or a voice I had to silence)?

• Day 22 → If my future self could write me a letter, what would it say?

• Day 23 → What kind of life do I want to build for myself?

• Day 24 → Three things I am proud of in myself today.

📝 Special Notes for Pennebaker Days (16-19)

• Extended writing time: 15-20 minutes instead of the usual 5-10

• Continuous writing: Keep your pen moving or fingers typing—don't stop to edit

• Expect emotional intensity: It's normal to feel stirred up during and immediately after these sessions

• Use your container ritual: These days especially benefit from the container visualization

• Extra self-care: Plan something nurturing for after each Pennebaker session

⚠️ IMPORTANT SAFETY NOTE

The Pennebaker expressive writing method (Days 16-19) is an intensive trauma processing technique that can bring up strong emotions and memories. Please consider whether you're ready for this level of emotional work before beginning.

You may want to skip or postpone the Pennebaker days if you:

· Are currently in crisis or feeling emotionally unstable

· Have recently experienced a traumatic event (within the last few months)

· Are not currently in therapy or lack adequate support systems

· Have a history of severe dissociation, self-harm, or suicidal thoughts

· Feel overwhelmed by the gentler trauma prompts in Week 3

Consider consulting with a mental health professional before attempting the Pennebaker method if any of the above apply to you. You can always complete the rest of the 24-day plan and return to Days 16-19 when you feel more prepared and supported.

Remember: Healing isn't linear, and there's no shame in recognizing when you need additional support or aren't ready for certain types of processing. Your safety and well-being come first.

THE CONTAINER METHOD

Unfamiliar with the container method referenced in the schedule? The container ritual is basically a mental technique that trauma therapists teach to help people manage overwhelming feelings or traumatic memories. You imagine a really strong, secure container—like a safe or locked box—and mentally put all those difficult thoughts, emotions, or flashbacks inside it, then lock it up tight and store it away until you're in therapy and/or ready to deal with it. It's super helpful because it gives you back some control over when you engage with your trauma instead of having it randomly hit you throughout the day. Plus, it helps prevent those intrusive thoughts from taking over your normal life.

FINAL TIPS

*It is best to do your writing in a meaningful place, time and atmosphere, so think about finding a location where you will be undisturbed by others, your phone, e-mail, etc.

*Write by hand. Writing by hand is often recommended to slow down the process and make thoughts more concrete, though typing or voice recording can also be effective.

*Keep writing in the allotted time. If you run out of things to say, repeat what you've already written.

*Professional Guidance: Therapeutic journaling is a powerful tool, but it’s best used as a supplement to professional treatment, not a replacement for it.

*Be patient with yourself and the process of healing. (I have to include this one especially for myself because I always want to see change so quickly!)

DISCLAIMER

I am not a licensed healthcare professional. The information I provide is based on personal experience, research, or general knowledge and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, be it pharmacological, behavioral, or a combination of the two. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or health concern.

SOURCES

https://www.va.gov/WHOLEHEALTHLIBRARY/tools/therapeutic-journaling.asp#:~:text=The%20Therapeutic%20Writing%20Protocol,an%20adjunct%20to%20traditional%20psychotherapies.

August is coming to a close—and supposedly, so is summer. (Although it sure doesn’t feel like that in Austin.) But there is a sense of new beginnings. Last weekend, my daughter’s eighth grade class gathered at a parent’s pool. It was a new moon, new school year—and new city for us. The host, a lovely woman whose life’s purpose (so it seems after sharing a glass of champagne with her) is about building community and uplifting others. I was smitten with her (partially because she called champagne sparkles), but I digress. She asked us to each go around and say aloud a one-word intention for the upcoming year.

Mine was “creativity” and my daughter’s was “determination.” I was thinking about how to ensure I kept writing amid the demands of a new job—and I’m not sure what my daughter had in mind. (She’s 13, so, it’s likely that part of her determination is to pull away from me!) But I was struck at the overlap between the two. Anything in life requires both creativity and determination—especially personal growth and healing from past trauma.

While this month’s focus on EMDR has been positive for me, it might not work for you. And that’s normal. What works for one person may not work for another—and that is where both the creativity and determination come through.

I do hope my writing about EMDR this month will help to correct some of the myths around it. Despite its growing popularity and evidence base, there are several common misconceptions about EMDR. To conclude this month’s focus, I thought I’d list out some of these misleading ideas and provide what my experience has been like.

🧠 1. “It’s just about eye movements.”

Reality:
While bilateral stimulation (often through eye movements or tapping) is a key component, EMDR uses many different elements; it’s a structured, 8-phase therapy that includes meeting first with a therapy to share your history, preparation, assessment, desensitization, installation of positive beliefs, and more. Eye movements are just one piece of a larger therapeutic process.

💤 2. “It’s a form of hypnosis.”

Reality:
Definitely not. I was always fully awake and in control. The goal is to help the brain process traumatic memories while staying grounded in the present, not to put someone into a trance.

⚡ 3. “It works instantly or in one session.”

Reality:
I’ve had a number of sessions, each with its own purpose—and its own follow-up work. EMDR is not a quick fix. Complex trauma, childhood abuse, or long-standing require many methods (here’s the creativity component) and determination to see you through them.

🔮 4. “It’s pseudoscience or woo-woo.”

Reality:
I know it sounds so bizarre. And I thought this when I first heard of it. EMDR is recognized as an evidence-based treatment for PTSD by organizations like:

• APA (American Psychological Association)

• WHO (World Health Organization)

• VA/DoD (U.S. Departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense)

While its mechanism isn’t fully understood (much like many psychological treatments), multiple controlled studies support its effectiveness.

🚶 5. “You just re-live the trauma over and over.”

Reality:
I find it is just the opposite. Unlike exposure therapy, EMDR doesn’t ask you to repeatedly describe traumatic events in great detail. The focus is on processing the memory in a way that reduces its emotional charge, while staying connected to the present.

👨‍⚕️ 6. “Any therapist can do EMDR.”

Reality:
Uh-uh. EMDR requires specific training and certification. Not all therapists are trained or qualified to use it effectively. It’s important to seek someone certified by recognized bodies like EMDRIA (EMDR International Association).

If you're considering EMDR, it’s helpful to talk to a trained EMDR therapist who can clarify what it entails based on your personal history and goals. I’ve found it incredibly helpful, but you’ll need to be creative and determined to find what works for you as we strive to integrate our past and present.

🍒 TAKE-AWAY

Usually I offer something that you might want to do, but this week, I’d love to hear any suggestions for my September focus. I have something I’m leaning toward, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.

DISCLAIMER

I am not a licensed healthcare professional. The information I provide is based on personal experience, research, or general knowledge and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, be it pharmacological, behavioral, or a combination of the two. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or health concern.

Plain white walls. No paintings or curtains. Mattress on the floor. Perhaps this wasn’t the prettiest room for it, but it was a quiet bedroom in my still-unpacked home. I coerced my obdurate, cat-like dog to join me and then flipped open my laptop to log into my session.

My therapist and I had agreed earlier that today would be the day for EMDR, so I wore comfy clothes and sat cross-legged on the bed for comfort. She began by asking me what memory I wanted to focus on. (And just to be clear, I am not going to go into detail about this traumatic memory in this post.) What’s interesting about how my therapist does it—which I understand is a common practice during EMDR sessions—is that we don’t talk about the memory. I tell her briefly (3 sentences max) what the memory is. Because of my history with her, she can fill in the details.

It’s interesting the effect of not talking about the traumatic memory. The focus is on my present-day feelings and beliefs associated with the memory. EMDR relies on a combination of recalling the memory, focusing on associated negative feelings, and bilateral stimulation to reprocess the experience. I have more to say about talk therapy, which I’ll reserve for another post. What I will say now is that not moving into narrative helps me stay more in the present with EMDR. Calmer. If you don’t mind me getting a little brainy, I’ll explain why.

When recalling a traumatic memory, the amygdala becomes highly active, processing the fear and emotional intensity of the event, while the hippocampus (responsible for memory formation) and the prefrontal cortex (involved in rational thought and regulation) can show altered, fragmented, or underactive function, making it difficult to process the memory as being in the past. In other words, telling the story can make my body start to feel as if I’m right back where I was as a kid. The heart quickening. The breath tightening. The electrical fear zinging up and down my legs. So, I’m relieved to not go there.

What she asked me next is what is an association about myself I harbor because of that traumatic memory. With what I was recalling, I told her that I felt as if everything was always on me. If a problem arose, I’d have to solve it myself. If work was to be done, I’d have to do it myself. And worse, if I needed something, there was no point in asking for help and hearing someone refuse.

What follows might seem odd, but here’s what we did. I took that one initiating thought (‘Everything is on me’) and then silently repeated it while tapping my shoulders with my eyes closed. I prefer to cross my arms over me in a hug and use the right hand to tap the left shoulder and vice versa. I tap and repeat that phrase for a minute or two. What invariably happens in the logical parts of the brain take over and questions that thought. Soon I was thinking, “Well, everything isn’t always on me.” My therapist will say ‘stop’ and ask me to share what came up. There is always something new that we follow for the next tapping session—usually in the form of simple sentence. We do this until there is a deeper understanding of how I am reacting in the present from that traumatic memory.

We ended the session with something practical; Three sentences that I could use to either ask for help or how to say no if what’s being asked is too much for me. My last workplace definitely asked too much of me. Even when I did ask for help, I was usually rebuffed. At one point, I asked my chair if I could request another professor to take over the reading series (which I had been running for seven years) at least while I was serving as the city’s poet laureate and organizing multiple events. She said, “I just don’t know why you can’t do it all.” I share this to say that I think I have sometimes put myself in positions—or stayed too long in positions/relationships—that reinforced negative thought patterns that stemmed from past traumas.

That is the beauty of EMDR. Because of the tapping and limited talking, I was able to stay in the present and reflect on how the trauma was impacting my daily life. I woke up today excited to cull through our boxes, find a fresh stack of post-it notes, and write out the reminders that came from the session. As my therapist said, “It will take active work to change these thought patterns.” EMDR is a way to shine that flashlight beam on the wooded path that you need to walk down to reach a new destination.

TAKE AWAY

If this at all sounds interesting and potentially helpful to you, I highly encourage you to give it a try. But only if you are ready. What is confronted is real, but the potential for growth is also real.

DISCLAIMER

I am not a licensed healthcare professional. The information I provide is based on personal experience, research, or general knowledge and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, be it pharmacological, behavioral, or a combination of the two. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or health concern.

Between my office at home and my office at Texas State, I’m adrift in a sea of cardboard. Towers of boxes, lampshades, beach ball, and various contraptions for making the perfect cup of coffee litter my floor. With everything feeling so unsettled and new, I know this is not the time to make judgements about my move. (Oh, but I want to all the same.) For many of us with CPSTD, uncertainty feels extra scary—which is why I thought this would be the perfect month for an EMDR session.

As I mentioned in my last post, meeting with a therapist before an EMDR session—and a few times if the relationship is a new one—is part of the process. Luckily, I was able to do a preliminary session with my therapist this week where we discussed next week’s EMDR session.

Next Friday, I’ll share in detail what happens in that session. I’ve done about three sessions before, but they were a long time ago, so the memory is a bit fuzzy—which is partly why I want to do it again. Also, it was so helpful!

What I do remember is what I want to talk about in today’s post—and that is the effect those sessions still have on me. Sometimes in therapy, the advice works great for a while. Being a perennial apple-polisher, I’ll do whatever the therapist recommends—for the next week. But inevitably, I’ll fall off the wagon. And then I’ll hoist myself back on it. I’ll go through this same process again and again until, hopefully, a new habit forms. That’s fine. That’s life. But that was not my EMDR experience.

Once I had the EMDR session, my perception of that particular traumatic memory I honed in on fundamentally and permanently altered. Yes, that’s right. There has not been a regression these past two years surrounding that memory. Sounds too good to be true, huh? I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t experience it.

What happened before is my therapist asked me to come in with a specific memory that I wanted to recall. She asked on a scale of 1-10 how it felt about it in terms of my reactivity at the start of the session. I felt that lightning pulse of anger through my legs. Tightening in the throat. A need to move, to do, to get away. Usually, I was an 8 out of 10. But after the EMDR, whenever I have recalled the memory, it’s more like a 2. And it’s stayed that way.

As I mentioned in my last post, researchers are still trying to figure out what the bilaterial stimulation is doing to make EMDR so successful. Personally, it felt like the tapping kept me in the present, which then allowed the memory to be processed into the past. Sometimes when we recall something, it can get us upset all over again. It’s as if the little ol’ brain doesn’t know the situation is not immediate. There is no need for flight or fight. But the tapping, for whatever reason, kept me aware that I am safe now—and that the scary situation was not an immediate threat. Afterwards, it felt similar to cleaning out some old files. I still need the information in the file, but I don’t need to keep the ten-year-old document on top of my desk.

This sense of “cleaning out my files” is backed up by one theory as to why EMDR works, and that is called the working memory theory. This theory proposes that remembering a traumatic event uses up mental resources, and adding a secondary task like rhythmic tapping further taxes working memory, thus reducing the vividness and emotional intensity of the memory and making it easier to process without becoming overwhelming. Maybe so.

Another theory is called dual-attention stimulation, in which tapping keeps part of the person’s attention anchored in the present through the physical sensation while another part revisits the past, creating a “dual awareness” that may allow the brain to safely reprocess the memory rather than re-experiencing it. The tapping—along with the questions my therapist asked of me later—made me feel like an observer of my life. It gave me distance, even though I was sitting cross-legged on the couch.

Another reason I feel like the experience was so successful is my therapist had me imagine what I needed to have been told years and years ago. Those words of kindness gave me some grace—and gave others grace, too.

The key idea is that EMDR doesn’t erase memories — it changes the way they’re stored and linked to emotions. I still remember what happened, but the memories no longer feel as distressing or “raw.” If any of this sounds like it might help you, I highly encourage you to give it a try. And next week, I’ll report back on the session I have scheduled for this upcoming week.

Friday Takeaway: Let’s Try a 10-Minute Sound Bath

I am new to these, so if anyone has suggestions or links, please share. (I’ve been finding ten-minute sound baths on Spotify, which isn’t ideal, but it’s free and easy to do.)

The idea is pretty simple:

✨1. Choose Your Space

· Pick a quiet, comfortable room where you won’t be disturbed.

· Dim the lights or use candles for a relaxing vibe.

🔔 2. Gather Your Instruments or Play a Sound Bath Online

· Singing bowls, chimes, gongs, or whatever works for you.

· If you don’t have instruments, use a high-quality speaker and sound bath recordings.

🌸3. Prepare Yourself

· Wear comfy clothing.

· Have a yoga mat, blanket, or cushion to lie or sit on.

· And in my case, make sure the dog is somewhere so she can’t paw at the door the whole time.

💖 4. Set Your Intention

· Take a few deep breaths and think about why you’re doing the sound bath (e.g., to relax, to release stress, to focus).

🌙 5. Begin the Session

· Start with a soft sound (like a bell or a low hum).

· Gradually layer sounds, letting them flow naturally.

🌊 6. Focus on Listening

· Close your eyes and breathe deeply.

· Let the sound wash over you, noticing vibrations and sensations in your body.

🕊️7. End Gently

· Slowly reduce the volume and let the sound fade.

· Sit quietly for a moment before moving.

🌿 8. Hydrate & Reflect

· Drink water afterward.

· Take note of how you feel—physically and emotionally.

DISCLAIMER

I am not a licensed healthcare professional. The information I provide is based on personal experience, research, or general knowledge and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, be it pharmacological, behavioral, or a combination of the two. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or health concern.

My focus for August is EMDR. And, to be honest, the first time I heard of it, I thought: What a load of hooey. The year was 2016 and my family and I were in England for five months in a faculty exchange. Similar to a study abroad for students, the program allowed for faculty to teach in another country for one semester.

Our “home” was a 101-room manor house in the countryside, complete with a scent garden, marble pillars, and hidden train tracks within the walls to cart the coal once used for heating. This manor house had been transformed by the University of Kentucky into a campus, so we lived in the same building as the students. We taught classes in the former drawing room. We held convocation in the ballroom. We wrote in the mahogany-shelved library, which now served as the retreat for faculty.

It was through the other visiting faculty during this semester that I learned about EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). The psychology professor’s husband was also a therapist, and over a dinner of Yorkshire puddings, he began to tell me about it. There in the newly added cafeteria to accommodate the students and faculty alike, amid the dull roar of sliding trays and silverware clanging into sudsy vats, he told me about the success he’d had with a patient—and his own skepticism.

“So, you have them recall a traumatic memory and follow your finger back and forth?”

He took a bite of the pastry sopping in gravy and nodded. “I don’t even understand it. But the change was remarkable.”

When I returned to my humble quarters on the fourth floor, I kept thinking about it. How could it work?

It couldn’t.

But then I kept reading about it—and now, nine years later, EMDR is backed by multiple major mental health organizations around the world, especially for treating PTSD. Here's a quick breakdown of who supports it and what they say:

🏥 Major Organizations That Recommend EMDR

• World Health Organization (WHO)
  They recommend EMDR for treating PTSD in both adults and kids. The evidence is considered solid, but not the highest level.

• International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS)
  They strongly recommend EMDR as a go-to treatment for PTSD.

• American Psychological Association (APA)
  The APA says EMDR is a good option for adults with PTSD, but their recommendation is more cautious—they "conditionally" recommend it.

• U.S. Veterans Affairs (VA) and Department of Defense (DoD)
  These organizations give EMDR a big thumbs-up, especially for veterans dealing with trauma. They call the evidence "strong."

• NICE (UK health guideline organization)
  In the UK, EMDR is recommended for PTSD that's not related to combat. They’re a bit more conservative, saying the evidence is weaker, but it still works for many people.

• Australian NHMRC (Health Council)
  Australia rates EMDR really highly. They say it works just as well as trauma-focused CBT (which is kind of the gold standard).

So, what exactly is it and why might it work?

EMDR, which is often considered an eight-phase treatment, must be done with a trained therapist. Before the actual session when a traumatic memory is recalled, the patient will meet with a therapist to review the patient’s history. Later, the therapist will make sure the patient has ways of handling distress that may arise. And then the work often associated with EMDR can begin. For the sake of length, I’ll write more about the actual process next week. But what I want to address now is the question most people wonder about, including myself. Why is the tapping helpful when recalling a traumatic memory?

Short answer: We don’t know for sure. The tapping (or other forms of bilateral stimulation like eye movements or sounds) are key—but the exact reason why it's helpful is still being researched.

💡 Some Leading Ideas as to Why Tapping Helps in EMDR 💡

🧠 1. It activates both sides of the brain (bilateral stimulation).

· Tapping alternates between the left and right sides of the body (like left-right tapping on hands, knees, or shoulders).

· It’s thought that the brain processes traumatic memories more effectively—almost like syncing both hemispheres to work together—with some sort of bilateral stimulation.

· It may help the brain "digest" and file the trauma away like a normal memory, so it’s no longer triggering.

🏵️ 2. It reduces emotional intensity.

· Doing something rhythmic and physical (like tapping) while thinking about a distressing memory seems to make that memory feel less overwhelming.

· Studies show that people often feel less fear, sadness, or anxiety about the memory after a few rounds of tapping or eye movements.

🌳 3. It helps keep you grounded.

· Tapping gives your brain something to focus on in the present moment.

· That way, you're not completely overwhelmed by the memory—you stay connected to “now,” which makes the memory easier to face.

🛌 4. It may mimic REM sleep processing.

· Some researchers think the eye movements or tapping simulate what happens during REM sleep, when your eyes move rapidly and your brain naturally processes experiences.

· EMDR might be “hijacking” this natural system to help you heal more consciously.

Wrapping Up

Next week, I’ll begin sharing about my own past experience with EMDR as well as beginning a new session with my therapist. I’ll delve more into what an actual EMDR experience looks like then. I also just want to add that while EMDR was originally developed using eye movements, research shows tapping, sounds, or vibrations can be just as effective. Some people, like myself, prefer tapping because it feels more grounded or easier to do in session (or even between sessions with a therapist’s guidance).

To wrap it up, tapping in EMDR helps your brain reprocess traumatic memories in a way that feels safer and less intense. It’s not about “forgetting” trauma, but helping your brain see it differently—so it no longer controls how you feel in the present.

Friday Takeaway

This technique, called the Safe-Place Exercise, is sometimes suggested by therapists when patients are not in sessions and can be used to help manage difficult emotions or disassociation during EMDR. But you can do it any time, whether in conjunction with EMDR or not. With the stress of moving to a new city (and our house sale falling through the day before the closing!), I could definitely use it. Let’s give it a try this weekend.

DISCLAIMER

I am not a licensed healthcare professional. The information I provide is based on personal experience, research, or general knowledge and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, be it pharmacological, behavioral, or a combination of the two. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or health concern.

Yesterday marked the end of this project’s first month—and today begins August’s new focus. In addition to this first-month anniversary (that I will celebrate with a dip in Barton Springs), there have been other personal milestones as well. My family and I left our beloved friends and neighbors in Mobile, Alabama to move to Austin so that I could direct the stellar MFA program at Texas State University in San Marcos. It has been an emotional month with a potential house buyer who was as off-and-on as a strobe light. In the end, he pulled out 24 hours before the closing this past Monday.

So, it was an emotional month—and I’m honestly thankful that I started this project to help me be aware of my tendencies in times of stress. I tend to have higher emotional dysregulation, hole up, and obsessively work (because I can have control over that task in front of me). One night I woke up at 1:00 a.m. to pack—and only took a 30-minute nap the next day.

The daily meditation practice, which I thought would be easy, proved to be quite difficult. But isn’t that difficulty a good thing? My avoidance of that ten-minute sit and the heightened anxiety while I meditated taught me a lot. I saw how sitting activated my stress because my mind whirled on all I needed to do. That discomfort highlighted how much I need meditation and how worthwhile this project is.

What did I learn about meditation and myself?

One, meditation for those of us with CPTSD can be more challenging than those of us without it. We might have to try different strategies like what I shared in my last post. This past week, I did shorter sits of only five minutes, and that was a breakthrough. My rational mind could tell my other mind (how many minds we have, I don’t know) that surely I could sit for five minutes without ruining my productivity. Two, through the guidance of my friends here on Substack, I found alternative ways to meditate that involved more movement instead of just sitting. One technique I loved that Monica Miller suggested was standing in mountain pose with my elbows bents and my hands out as if I were holding a ball. On the inhale, pull the imaginary ball out. Exhale, pull the imaginary ball in. Just having a little more focus and a little movement calmed my system down.

I will definitely continue the daily meditation throughout this year as I see how it is key to helping me regulate my T-Rex of an amygdala.

The Focus for August (insert drum roll here)

EMDR! I’ll talk more about what EMDR is in my next post, but here is a basic summary. EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, which I understand doesn’t mean a lot to someone who is new to it. It’s a type of psychotherapy developed by Francine Shapiro in the late 1980s primarily used to treat trauma and PTSD. A typical session with a trained therapist involves recalling a traumatic memory while engaging in some type of bilateral stimulation, such as moving your eyes back or tapping a part of your body. The bilateral stimulation is thought to help the brain reprocess the memory in a more adaptive way. I’ll go into depth on why this might work in my next post. While some people might find it a bit kooky, I tried it before to great effect. I would like to do a few more sessions in August and explore what the latest research says about it. Feel free to ask me anything you’d like about it as I focus on EMDR this month!

Friday Take-Away

I’ve been so scheduled lately—or maybe what I mean is that life has been so hectic lately. And I suspect I’m not the only one out there a bit over-scheduled. For this weekend, let’s try something to counter that feeling.

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Yet…. I also have to question myself. First, this is an extremely stressful time with the move from Alabama to Austin, Texas. I’m thrilled to be joining the MFA faculty at Texas State and directing the graduate creative writing program there, but the move itself has been awful, partly because the potential buyer keeps threatening to release the sale. (And I’m still flummoxed with how much stuff I’ve managed to acquire without realizing it.) Second, what does “better” even mean in meditation? And finally, maybe the meditation has ameliorated some of my stress—yet I’m unaware of how much since I can’t compare what this month would have been like without the daily practice?

I think a few reasons are behind my sense that the meditation is not “working.”

*I’m expecting too much too soon. (I do this A LOT.)

*I’m meditating when I’m tired. If I don’t meditate at the start of the day, my focus bounces about like popcorn. The main way my CPTSD manifests is that I’m uncomfortable with relaxing and sitting. Realizing that I could not meditate well when I’m tired made me aware how meditation is an active process, not passive. Meditation requires concentration to focus on the breath and gently bring the mind back once it inevitably pops away. I might be sitting with my eyes closed, but I’m definitely doing something.

*I’m not taking into account that meditating can be more difficult for those with past trauma. While meditation can be a powerful tool for us with CPTSD, I need to remember that I have to approach it with more patience and care than others. And, like it or not, traditional meditation practices can sometimes trigger distressing memories, dissociation, or anxiety. For me, I become anxious as if I need to hurry onto something else….Something quantifiable. Something that can be ticked off the daily to-do list.

So, what to do? I’ve been reading a lot this week on advice for those with CPTSD and meditation, and here are some tips I’ve found to be most useful. Maybe something here will resonate with you, too.

🧠 1. Start with Grounding, Not Silence

• Why: Silence can feel unsafe or overwhelming to some of us.

• Try: Begin with grounding exercises (e.g., feeling your feet on the floor, holding an object, naming things you see/hear—like how I focused just on sound on the day of the move).

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⏱️ 2. Keep Sessions Short at First

• Why: Long sessions can increase dissociation or overwhelm.

• Try: 2–5 minutes to start. And then increase once it feels manageable. (Maybe ten minutes has been too long for me? I’m going to try five for next week and see how that goes.)

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🪑 3. Try Eyes-Open, Moving Meditation

• Why: Stillness can be triggering for trauma survivors.

• Try: Walking meditation, mindful coloring, or gentle yoga. Admittedly, I’ve always felt as if this type of meditation isn’t as good as sitting, but I keep seeing this as a suggestion. When I do yoga and focus on breath, I am able to concentrate better than when I’m sitting, so maybe I should try this more….

• Tools: YouTube has trauma-informed yoga and movement meditations (I’m a fan of Yoga with Adriene’s trauma-sensitive practices such as this one.).

🗣️ 4. Use Guided Meditations with a Soothing Voice

• Why: A calm, steady voice can provide a sense of safety. I’ve grown oddly attached to hearing Tamara Levitt each day on the Calm app.

• Try: Look for meditations specifically labeled “trauma-sensitive” or “for CPTSD.”

• Apps: Insight Timer, Calm, and Headspace have trauma-aware guides.

🫁 5. Focus on the Breath Gently—Or Skip It

• Why: Breathwork can be a trauma trigger for some.

• Try: If breath is triggering for you, anchor your attention to something else (sound, texture, or a mantra).

• Safe anchor examples:

  • “I am safe in this moment.”

  • Feel your hands in your lap.

🧸 6. Create a Safe Space Beforehand

• Why: CPTSD often involves hypervigilance or emotional flooding.

• Try: Light a candle, use a weighted blanket, or sit with a pet or comforting object. (Although I did not intend to meditate with my friend’s newborn, I was trying to give my friend a break so she could sleep. Holding the baby for 30 minutes in the quiet hours of the morning felt very comforting, so I decided to start meditating. And I loved that day’s sit.)

👥 7. Meditate with a Trusted Person or Group

• Why: Meditating alone can sometimes intensify feelings of isolation. Granted, I love my alone time, but this might work well for others.

• Try: Join a trauma-informed meditation group or meditate with a therapist or supportive friend.

🚨 8. Know When to Pause

• Why: Meditation is not always the right tool in a moment of intense flashbacks or panic.

• Try: Switch to active grounding, movement, or self-soothing techniques.

• Reminder: Meditation should never feel like forcing your way through emotional pain. Listen to your body—which can be difficult for those of us with CPTSD, but we have to keep practicing this.

🧭 9. Practice with a Trauma-Informed Therapist (if possible)

• Why: If you have a good relationship with your therapist, see if they would meditate with you and help tailor techniques to your personal history.

🌱 10. Be Compassionate and Patient with Yourself

• Why: Healing isn’t linear. Meditation progress might look different for trauma survivors. (Oh my gosh, do I need reminding about this!)

• Try: Celebrate small steps—just sitting for one minute with intention is a win.

DISCLAIMER

I am not a licensed healthcare professional. The information I provide is based on personal experience, research, or general knowledge and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, be it pharmacological, behavioral, or a combination of the two. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or health concern.

I woke knowing this would be the last time I’d begin my day on that back porch. Be the last time I’d do my morning yoga and meditate while the sky water-colored its way to day-blue. Be the last time I’d take a sip of tea and say, “Time to get to work,” whatever that work might be.

We have all loved this house, the porch in particular, where we have hosted many friends over a bottle of wine. This is the house where during Mardi Gras plastic beads covered the banister and eventually the hall floor as the weeks of parades continued on. This is the house where we culminated the season with a neighborhood Fat Tuesday party, complete with a brass band that lead folks to the parade route. This is the house where I wrote my second book. The house where I settled into my groove with parenting. The house where I came to understand more about my strengths. The house where I began to actively engage with mindfulness and healing from my past. The house with many games of Catan and Spades. The house where more Murder Point oysters were consumed than I will admit.

There is no way to adequately say goodbye to anyone or anything. But I wanted to do something special for my last meditation in this house. To prevent the mosquitoes from siphoning my blood bit by bit, I usually meditate inside the screened-in porch. But for my last sit, I went straight to the middle of the backyard, plopped myself in the grass, and focused on sound. I wanted to hear the soft drone of I-10 (that I hadn’t even noticed until those early weeks of Covid when streets quieted); I wanted to hear the chitter of my five house wrens that eat more bird seed than a full-grown sow; I wanted to hear my neighbor’s annoyance at her spirited pup that rarely comes when called and my other neighbor whistling a hymn. I wanted to hear—and remember it all.

While I wasn’t doing a sound bath or sound therapy, focusing on sound was helpful given the intense emotions I was having at the moment. The meditation felt similar to when I’m overwhelmed, and I’ll do the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique to help anchor me in the present. I admit I cried during the meditation, but when I opened my eyes, I also smiled. Good bye, my sweet home. To new beginnings—and new meditation spots in Texas!

DISCLAIMER

I am not a licensed healthcare professional. The information I provide is based on personal experience, research, or general knowledge and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, be it pharmacological, behavioral, or a combination of the two. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or health concern.