Frank Anderson, MD, 30 Domino Drive, Concord, MA (2026)

01/27/2026

For many people, choosing someone with familiar qualities doesn’t feel intentional.

“I swore I’d never be with someone like my dad.”
“And yet here I am again.”

What’s usually happening isn’t preference. It’s the nervous system recognizing something it knows how to survive.

Some examples you might recognize:

👉You grew up with an emotionally unavailable parent.
You’re drawn to partners who are independent, self-contained, and “low drama.” At first it feels calm. Later it feels lonely.

👉You had a parent whose mood you had to manage.
You’re drawn to partners who need a lot of reassurance or emotional care. At first you feel needed. Later you feel exhausted or resentful.

👉You grew up with criticism or unpredictability.
You’re drawn to partners who challenge you, keep you on edge, or feel intense. At first it feels exciting. Later it feels unsafe.

👉You had a parent who relied on you emotionally.
You’re drawn to partners who need saving or fixing.
At first you feel purposeful. Later you feel trapped.

Unconsciously, it can feel like: this time, maybe it will turn out differently. Not because you’re naive, but because the nervous system is wired to seek resolution, not novelty.

So what do we do? It starts with awareness.
Not to judge the attraction, but to understand it.

To notice why someone feels familiar, what part of you is being activated, and what old role is getting pulled forward.

That awareness is what helps those patterns loosen instead of being replayed inside the relationship.

This doesn’t mean you have to be “fully healed” to be in a relationship. And it doesn’t mean partners can’t support each other.

It means a partner can walk with you in healing, but they can’t be responsible for it.

Relationships work best when they’re mutual, not when they’re asked to repair the past.

01/23/2026

When someone goes quiet, your body can go into alarm fast.
 It can feel urgent and overwhelming, like something bad is about to happen and you need to respond right away.

You might check your phone, replay the last interaction, or feel your chest tighten as your thoughts start looping. In that moment, it doesn’t feel like overthinking. It feels necessary.

What gets missed sometimes is that your body isn’t reacting to silence on its own. It’s responding to this moment through memory.

For many people, silence once meant emotional withdrawal, loss of connection, or the risk of being left. Over time, the nervous system learned to stay alert to that cue.

That’s why insight alone doesn’t always calm the spiral. Knowing someone isn’t abandoning you doesn’t automatically settle your body. Nervous systems don’t change through explanation alone. They change through experience. Through moments where silence is met with repair, reassurance, and consistent reconnection.

This is also why healing doesn’t happen in your head alone. It happens in relationships that can offer safety and repair, and in therapeutic work that brings understanding together with what the body has learned to expect.

Your reaction makes sense. And with the right kind of support, it can soften and change.

01/21/2026

I share this video not to say how parenting should be done, or to present myself as an example, but to invite a more honest conversation.

Parenting has a way of bringing old patterns to the surface. In the full conversation, we talk about how I would sometimes lose it when something my son did activated parts of my own past. In those moments, I believed that explaining my reactions meant I was taking responsibility. I could name what happened and why.

Over time, I had to see what was underneath that. Growing up, I was criticized often, and explaining became a way to protect myself. It helped me stay regulated and make sense of my behavior.

But explanation is not the same as repair.

This conversation with my son reflects that learning. Like many parents, I was not always aware of what I was unintentionally carrying forward. Survival strategies that once helped me cope were still running in the background, shaping how I reacted long before I noticed them.

The deeper lesson for me was that I needed to keep doing my own healing work. For me, forgiveness was part of what helped shift things. Not because forgiveness is required for healing, but because healing comes from doing the deeper work of addressing trauma directly.

When trauma goes unaddressed, it does not stay in the past. It shows up in reactions that feel bigger than the moment, in defensiveness, over-explaining, and apologies that do not quite land.

When we work with our own history, we do not change what happened. We change how it lives in us. And that shift is often what interrupts patterns from being passed down.

This is what repair can look like. Not dramatic. Not perfect. Just honest, and practiced over time.

📌P.S. If you’re interested in listening to this Healing Generational Trauma conversation, click the link in my bio.

01/21/2026

There’s a real tension here. Wanting rest, and not wanting what surfaces when things slow down.

A lot of people crave slowing down, but when things get quiet, they feel more on edge, more emotional, or more uncomfortable than they expected.

For many high functioning people, staying busy once helped things feel manageable. Work, constant doing, always having the next thing lined up gave the nervous system something to lean on. It reduced how much had to be felt at once.

So when the busyness stops, the nervous system does not immediately relax. It notices. It reacts. It brings up feelings that were easier to avoid while staying busy.

That doesn’t mean rest is wrong. And avoiding rest is not something to shame or force yourself out of. It often helped you keep going when slowing down did not feel safe.
 Over time, it can also keep you from accessing what your body actually needs.

Healing is not about forcing yourself to relax or pushing past what comes up. It’s about noticing this tension, getting curious about it, and moving at a pace your nervous system can tolerate.

The goal isn’t rest on command. It’s learning how to listen differently.

01/16/2026

Some wounds are obvious. Others form quietly, in what never happened.

Patterns like over explaining, difficulty asking for help, or feeling uncomfortable taking up space didn’t come out of nowhere. They often formed in response to what was missing earlier on.

Moments where feelings weren’t met. Where protection didn’t show up. Where support wasn’t available.

This didn’t come from one dramatic event. It came from what was missing over time.

For many people, healing doesn’t start with changing these patterns. It starts with understanding them. When your story finally makes sense, self blame tends to soften and compassion becomes possible.

This isn’t about fault or rewriting the past. It’s about helping the nervous system learn that strategies formed for survival don’t have to run the present.

That’s what integration looks like.

01/14/2026

How psychedelics are used matters.

In trauma work, psychedelics are sometimes used to reduce fear, soften defenses, and help people access emotions that trauma has made hard to reach. For some, that can open an important door.

What matters most is what happens after the experience.

For trauma, change is not just about insight or intensity. It’s about whether the nervous system can integrate what emerged and translate it into lasting shifts in safety, regulation, and relationship. Without integration, improvement can happen, but it’s less likely to be stable or enduring.

Yes, some people report feeling significantly better without formal integration. That does happen. But feeling better is not the same as trauma being fully processed.

Often it reflects a shift in state rather than deeper structural change.

This is not about being for or against psychedelics. It’s about being accurate about how trauma heals. When trauma is involved, preparation, support, and integration are not extras. They are what turn an experience into actual healing.

01/14/2026

A question I hear all the time is, “Why do I react like this when I know better?”

Not necessarily in extreme situations, but in everyday ones. A conversation. A tone. A moment of pressure.

What this post is really about is not labeling reactions. It’s showing how quickly the body moves to protect and how little choice we have in that moment.

These patterns didn’t come from nowhere. They formed in real relationships, under real conditions, when your system was doing its best to adapt.

The work is not to get rid of them. It’s to help the nervous system learn that it doesn’t have to work that hard anymore.

And that’s when you can respond instead of just react.

01/14/2026

You may have seen the term functional freeze lately. It’s resonating because a lot of people quietly recognize themselves in it.

Functional freeze isn’t a diagnosis. It describes a nervous system state where you keep functioning, but mostly on autopilot.

You go to work, answer emails, keep routines, show up socially. From the outside, life looks fine. Inside, things often feel flat, stuck, or disconnected.

That’s usually where the guilt shows up. “I’m doing everything I’m supposed to. So why do I feel this way?”

From a trauma perspective, this isn’t laziness or a character flaw. It’s a nervous system that learned how to stay operational under ongoing stress by dampening feeling and conserving energy. And as long as we see this as a flaw, we won’t give it the care it actually needs.

Insight alone rarely shifts this state. You can understand what’s happening and still feel stuck. From a nervous system perspective, this isn’t shutdown. It’s survival mode.

In my work, I don’t try to push people out of functional freeze. I get curious about what the nervous system is still protecting against.

Instead of asking “What’s wrong with me?” I often invite questions like:

– What has my system needed to stay functional?
– What might it be protecting me from?
– What helps me feel even slightly more settled in my body?

That shift, from pressure to understanding, is often where things begin to ease.

If this term resonates, let it be information, not an identity. A starting point for curiosity, not another reason to judge yourself.

01/09/2026

In my previous clip, so many of you left thoughtful comments and important insights. A lot of you named something people rarely have language for: the pain isn’t only what the abusive parent did, it’s also what the other parent didn’t do.

So I want to stay with this question: Why did I stay loyal to the parent who didn’t protect me?

For a child, attachment isn’t a preference. It’s a survival system. Your nervous system is wired to keep caregivers close, because closeness is how kids get food, shelter, comfort, and regulation. When the relationship is unsafe or unreliable, the system often chooses connection anyway, because disconnection can be even more threatening.

That’s why loyalty can show up in confusing ways. Sometimes loyalty looks like:
* minimizing what happened
* staying emotionally responsible for them
* feeling guilty for being angry
* blaming yourself because it feels more controllable than admitting the adult failed you

One of the most common strategies kids use is turning the problem inward. “If I’m easier, quieter, more helpful, they’ll finally protect me.” 
And it can become the adult pattern of over-functioning, people-pleasing, staying in one-sided relationships, or feeling pulled to take care of people who don’t take care of you.

It’s also important to name this: the parent who didn’t protect you may have loved you. They may have been scared, dependent, dissociated, or trapped in their own trauma.

And the impact can still be real. As a child, your system learned that you could be loved and still not be protected.

When people start seeing this dynamic clearly, they often stop asking, “What’s wrong with me?” and start asking:

* What did my loyalty help me survive?
* What did I have to believe about myself to stay connected?
* Where do I still feel responsible for other people’s emotions?

That’s where deeper work begins, because trauma isn’t only what happened. It’s what your nervous system had to organize around in order to keep attachment.

If this question hits home, you’re not alone. And you don’t have to rush to forgive or understand it quickly. Start by telling the truth about what the child in you was navigating.

01/08/2026

When people talk about childhood trauma, they usually focus on the loudest parent.
 The one who yelled. Hit. Drank. Exploded.

But for many people, another wound sits underneath it. The relationship with the parent who felt loving and still didn’t protect them.

Trauma rarely comes from one relationship alone.
It forms in the dynamics a child grows up inside.

You can be terrorized by one parent and betrayed by the other at the same time.

That puts a child in a bind. Wanting closeness. Learning that safety isn’t reliable. Trying to stay close without setting anything off.

Often, people work on the obvious abuse first. And later, they may notice how much the quieter dynamic shaped their sense of trust, loyalty, and self-protection.

Seeing the full pattern often changes how people understand their reactions and the choices they learned to make to survive.

01/07/2026

We often hear that we shouldn’t rush meaning after trauma. That’s true…and it’s also incomplete.

Meaning making can be protective. In ongoing or extreme trauma, it can preserve hope, identity, and the will to endure. That’s not bypass. It’s survival.

Where things get complicated is after the danger has passed.

If meaning arrives before the nervous system feels safer, it can quietly turn into pressure. Pressure to have learned something. Pressure to be “on the other side.” Pressure to move on before grief, anger, or fear have had space in the body.

Healing isn’t anti meaning. It’s about timing.

When integration leads, meaning doesn’t erase what happened. It becomes something the body can actually hold.

01/05/2026

We talk about trauma bonding a lot right now. Sometimes it gets romanticized. Other times it gets flattened into something “bad.”

I wanted to slow that down…

Shared pain and empathy can create real connection. But when trauma hasn’t been worked through, the nervous system can start leading attraction and intensity in ways we don’t fully choose.

You might notice relationships that feel immediate, consuming, or hard to leave, even when they’re painful.

That’s not a failure of insight. It’s often a body doing what it learned to do to feel okay.

Understanding this isn’t about judging past relationships. It’s about creating more room for choice moving forward.

Frank Anderson, MD

01/27/2026

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