childhood trauma

Photo by Katja Stückrath on Unsplash

Two Selves: Life With Chronic Post-Traumatic Stress

Loss was a language I’d learned early but had no way to speak it out of me. Read...
Photo by Carolina Heza on Unsplash

Why Childhood Emotional Abuse May Cause Serious Physical Pain In Adults

It isn't an exaggeration to say that people who experience migraines suffer. And sadly, research now shows migraines themselves may, at least in part, be caused by prior suffering in the form of childhood trauma from emotional abuse. Read...
I wanted to reach inside myself and cut it away.

Erasing My Father’s Face From Mine

Little things, everything would annoy me. I couldn’t keep it down. I lost my temper, over and over. I felt the strain of it all, the sheer exhaustion of parenting two young kids. But it was more than that. This anger was reminiscent of something buried deep within me. A piece of my past that I’d buried down so far I didn’t even know it was there anymore.

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I was consistently pondering this emptiness inside me.

Everything I've Learned About Living With Abandonment Issues

I grew up knowing my family always had its very own black cloud. Like a backyard pet that comes and goes when it pleases, a room locked but filled with things we weren’t allowed to look at or set free. And it was all passed down to me like some broken heirloom — my ancestor’s weaknesses and fears, swirled into DNA’s mad ritual. Does the body sometimes take into itself — take from its creators — what it cannot heal from? Sometimes, yes.

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I try to talk about it. I try to ask about it. I try to make a space for these realities.

Why It’s 100% OK To Talk To Me About My Time In Foster Care

When we think of foster care or wards of the state or orphans or homelessness, we hear poor. We hear the forgotten. We hear hopeless. We hear other. Let’s face it: we hear classism, trash, bad parents, drugs. The stigma cuts through the room, through the world, through the news reports we don’t read — and through our bodies.

So let’s get this out of the way now: Imagine not coming from a relatively typical family background, not having enough money to go on school trips, and knowing the structure of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and watching your mother at the podium. Imagine going from homeless shelter to foster care, and imagine your main source of support as a teenager wasn’t your mother or father, but your social worker or your foster parent — a stranger, for all intents and purposes. Imagine keeping all of this quiet, because there’s no way high schoolers could ever understand. This was my life. Now you know.

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My Journey To Overcoming The Trauma Of Childhood Sexual Abuse

I didn't have a fairy-tale childhood, unless it was one of those dark and grim ones that really shouldn't be read to children.

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