Nourish Flourish Thrive Integrative Health

22/10/2025

19/10/2025

🧠 What Happens in the Brain During Trauma?
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When someone experiences trauma, their brain shifts into survival mode. Three key areas are affected:
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🔥 Amygdala (The Alarm System): Becomes overactive, keeping the body on high alert, leading to anxiety and hypervigilance.
🛑 Prefrontal Cortex (The Thinker): Partially shuts down, making it harder to think clearly, regulate emotions, or feel in control.
🔄 Hippocampus (The Archivist): Struggles to process memories properly, which can cause flashbacks or memory gaps.
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These brain changes can make trauma feel “stuck” in the body, but healing is possible. With the right approaches—like somatic therapy and nervous system regulation—clients can regain a sense of safety and stability.
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That’s part of what we explore in The Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST) certification training for therapists.
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💡 Want to learn more? Comment "training" below, and we’ll send you a link to Dr. Janina Fisher’s free webinar!
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19/10/2025

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐲𝐜𝐥𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐒𝐚𝐟𝐞𝐭𝐲 & 𝐑𝐞𝐠𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 🧠💛

In therapy—and in life—our nervous system constantly moves through cycles of activation and calm. Understanding these stages helps both therapists and clients navigate emotional waves with more awareness and compassion.

Here’s how the cycle unfolds 👇

1️⃣ Activation:
A trigger (internal or external) sparks a nervous system reaction. The body prepares for fight, flight, freeze, or fawn—often before we even notice.

2️⃣ Awareness:
This is the mindful pause. We begin to notice what’s happening—tension, shallow breath, racing thoughts. Awareness is the bridge between reaction and regulation.

3️⃣ Regulation:
Here we engage tools for safety—breathwork, grounding, co-regulation, or sensory anchoring. Regulation doesn’t mean “calm instantly,” it means “create conditions for safety.”

4️⃣ Integration:
Once the body feels safe again, we can reflect, make meaning, and reconnect. Integration is where resilience builds—turning distress into embodied wisdom.

✨ Therapy isn’t about avoiding activation—it’s about learning how to return safely. ✨

If this resonates, Comment “Safe” below ⬇️ and we’ll send you a link to Jules Taylor Shore’s free webinar on Experiential Therapy Techniques — a beautiful deep dive into nervous system-based integration.

🔖 Save this post if you teach regulation tools or support trauma-informed healing.
🔁 Share it with a colleague who blends somatic and experiential work.

19/10/2025

Trauma makes you tolerate people who treat you poorly because you're afraid of losing them.
When you’ve lived through enough hurt, you start to normalize pain that should never have felt familiar. You convince yourself that if you just love harder, stay quieter, or become “easier” to be around, people won’t leave. You mistake emotional survival for connection. You start absorbing blame that was never yours to carry, walking on eggshells to keep the peace, and accepting crumbs because they’re better than nothing. You learn to hide your pain behind a smile, to settle for half-love, and to silence your own needs just to avoid conflict. You begin to think that your worth depends on your ability to hold everyone together, even when you’re falling apart inside.

But healing—real, soul-level healing—changes the story. Healing teaches you that love built on fear isn’t love at all. It reminds you that peace doesn’t come from pleasing everyone else; it comes from choosing yourself even when it feels uncomfortable. Healing helps you unlearn the idea that loyalty means self-abandonment. It teaches you that you don’t have to beg for respect, prove your worth, or earn the right to be treated with kindness. You stop chasing validation from people who were never capable of giving it.

Healing makes you realize that the greatest loss isn’t when someone walks away—it’s when you walk away from yourself trying to keep them.
You learn that protecting your peace isn’t selfish—it’s sacred. You begin to understand that you are not too much, too sensitive, or too demanding for wanting the love you deserve. And slowly, you start to rebuild the kind of life where being true to yourself feels safer than trying to be accepted by those who never truly saw you.

18/10/2025

Narcissistic abuse recovery isn't just healing from a broken heart.

It’s the painstaking, sometimes excruciating process of reclaiming who you truly are after years of having yourself erased. It’s healing from a broken sense of self, a self that was constantly belittled, invalidated, and made to feel invisible. It’s finding your voice again after it was silenced, gaslit, or twisted into doubt by someone who wanted control. It’s repairing a broken brain, one that has been conditioned to question every thought, every feeling, every memory, leaving you confused and exhausted.

It’s reconnecting with yourself after a broken connection left you feeling hollow, isolated, and unsure of your own worth. It’s trusting your intuition again after it was systematically dismantled, leaving you second-guessing your instincts and judgments at every turn. It’s untangling a broken reality where lies were dressed up as truths and love was used as a weapon. It’s calming a broken nervous system, constantly on edge, hyperaware, and conditioned to expect danger at every turn.

It’s reigniting a broken inner light, that quiet spark of hope, joy, and authenticity that felt smothered but never fully extinguished. It’s rebuilding a broken trust in humanity, learning that not everyone is manipulative, cruel, or deceitful, and that there are people who see, honor, and respect you as you are. It’s nurturing a broken spirit, the essence of you that felt crushed under the weight of constant manipulation, yet quietly survived, waiting for the day it could rise again.

Recovery is more than moving past the abuse—it’s reclaiming your life, your boundaries, your mind, your heart, and your soul. It’s learning to stand in your truth without fear, to love yourself without apology, to trust yourself without hesitation, and to shine your light unapologetically. Every tear, every struggle, every setback is part of rebuilding a self that is stronger, wiser, and more unshakably resilient than you ever imagined.

This journey may feel endless, but every small step toward healing is a radical act of courage, self-love, and defiance against the abuse that tried to convince you that you were broken beyond repair. And the truth is—you are not just surviving. You are becoming whole again, piece by piece, light by light, until the world finally sees the full, unbreakable brilliance of who you really are.

17/10/2025

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