Tag: life

  • What Burns and What Remains – On trauma bonds, genuine connection, and learning to tell the difference

    I stood next to my husband in the backyard by the burn barrel, watching notebooks go up in flames. They were bound with ribbons — pages and pages of my own handwriting, years of writing I had done to survive. To cope. To find myself in the middle of a life that often felt like…

  • Understanding Spiritual Trauma and Its Impact

    When the ground you thought would always hold becomes unstable—that’s spiritual trauma. After a decade of trying to heal in places that retraumatized me, I learned what survivors actually need. It’s not what most churches think.

  • Connection vs. Consumption: Recognizing When Relationships Extract Rather Than Nourish Part 2: Love vs. Consumption Series

    A Note on Process: This piece emerged from a long conversation—with myself, really, though AI served as a reflective partner in the process. I started with raw, stream-of-consciousness writing trying to understand my own patterns around connection and consumption. The AI helped me see the structure in what I was already saying, asked questions that…

  • Care or Carrying?

    **Tags:** – trauma recovery – boundaries – codependency – religious trauma – emotional responsibility – self-leadership – caring vs carrying – parenting adult children – healing patterns – compassion fatigue – inner work – family dynamics – faith deconstruction – emotional boundaries – recovery coaching **Excerpt:** I was 17 when I called my ex-boyfriend to…

  • From Echo Chambers to Common Ground: A Journey Through Fear and Finding Connection

    Yesterday, we watched a flock of turkeys walking up and down the road, jumping, flapping, and following each other up and down the same section of road back and forth, heading nowhere. But clearly one of the turkeys thought that was a good idea, and the others followed suit. Later I observed them huddled together…

  • Navigating the Cracks

    I’ve been trying to understand what I’m feeling when I look at social media these days. Confusion, fear, anger, and so much grief over where we are as a country right now. It feels like walking across a frozen pond with cracks, wondering when we might fall through. But I’m learning that beneath the surface…

  • Walking in Shadows: A Journey from Darkness to Light

    The toxic faith I grew up with convinced me that looking inward was dangerous—that if I dug beneath the surface, I’d discover nothing but the rot of an irredeemably sinful heart. But what happens when someone already drowning in that internal darkness looks outward and sees nothing but more of the same? When it finally…

  • When Stars Fall: Finding the Light Within

    “Sometimes life feels almost too heavy to bear. I find myself turning off the news or closing social media after yet another story of a bright star crashing into darkness—someone whose light had guided so many of us through our own difficult days. But why do their lights go out? Why do they sometimes choose…