My proud mama heart poured through photos all week. The last year has been a challenging one for us. Everything I’ve learned about trauma & ACEs & attachment & healing has made me a better mom & human & has endured during crisis - Gratefully.

2)Parenting was hard. When I was dissociative or anxious my daughter would say, “I feel like we were together but not together.” She could feel when I was not present. I’d not known how often I wasn’t present before parenting, how out of my body I was. Even after 12 years of ...

3)therapy, I didn’t realize how uninhabited in my skin & body I was til the intensity of parenting & my daughter needing me to soothe, center, stabilize & set tone. I was not good at fun, relaxing & play.

4)it was terrifying to do things differently than had been done with me. I worried that attachment style parenting would spoil her, make her fragile & she wouldn’t be tough or Street smart. That was the most frightening.

5)for me (not everyone), the ACE study was a way to understand how those with less adversity & trauma weren’t weaker or less tough, but statistically more likely to be healthier, happier, & to live longer. I want that for my daughter. It motivated me.

6)it’s hard to convey how profound that shift was for me from blaming & trying to fix myself, which had been my goal for my whole adult life to instead create conditions for health, love, safety, & joy. I still suck at joy but I’m not dead yet. I have become a hot stalker.

7)I have forgiven myself for being hurt, pained, harmed. I stopped apologizing or even speaking to what others did to me. That’s not my story - it is theirs. My story is who I am & what I do & who & what I’m responsible for. But it took so f’n long,

8)to not take the trauma done to me personally, to not feel like something in me brought out violence or neglect in others, to believe I am entitled to do more than manage or cope or survive. That was needed before I could go public & share as a survivor.

9)to does last a survivor, a mother. A partner & not hide beyond academic or professional credentials but just share as a woman, a mom, a daughter, a trauma survivor & a person living with traumatic stress. I needed to hear from people who’d been there & got it & who shared.

10)shared the hard, as well as the rewards, because most healing of all is honesty. It opens doors & hearts & makes truth sharing possible. For me, PTSD was 10 times harder than cancer & I hope I get more years, love & joy, more time & growth & healing. I wish it for others, too.