The Empowered Therapist

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The Empowered Therapist

Helping humans heal through validation, embodied practices, and empowered healing strategies
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09/05/2024

I asked y’all to share with me some of the things that have helped you out on your healing journey, and you didn’t disappoint.

When it comes to healing, there is no one size fits all. When it comes to healing, we can use any tools, support, or strategies that work for us, and we can always add to our resourcing anytime something helpful pops us. When it comes to healing, you doing what is right for you is always a great way to start becoming more of yourself.

To those of you navigating your healing, one resource or support strategy at a time, I see you.

09/04/2024

Dear ones, we don’t go from the thick of our pain to all the way healed. In order for us to begin to feel differently we often have to allow two conflicting things to exist at the exact same time.

For those of us who have long disregarded or discredited ourselves and our efforts, it is unlikely that we will wake up one day filled with love in our hearts for every little ounce of ourselves. Rather, we have to expand our narrative and knowing of ourselves. We have to try on self-acceptance and self-validation a little at a time.

This is why a gentleness practice is so important. A little at a time, we can begin to shift our view of ourselves. And when we’re ready, we can allow the old story to fade away. We can allow ourselves to accept ourselves exactly as we are.

To those of you learning to trust and honor yourself a little bit more each day, I see you.

09/03/2024

Notice the, “I want to be” rather than clearly stating that I am always these things. Dear ones, no one is perfect and healing isn’t a state of arrival. It’s all about gentleness and intention setting around here.

Let me know what or who you want to be as you’ve been healing, in the comments.

To those of you honoring a little more of yourself and others every day, I see you.

09/02/2024

I know we can be so fearful of asking for help. I know it is scary to have hope that someone will be there when you haven’t received the care, attention, and support you’ve needed before. I know it can feel really painful to put yourself out there and hope that someone wants to show up and listen.

And yet, all of the discomfort that comes up when we have to take relational risks is still not the same as the trauma we’ve endured when we have had to navigate our pain all on our own.

As you are able, allow yourself to contain multitudes. Allow yourself to try something new. Allow yourself to take small relational risks and let someone know how they can show up for you. When you are ready enough, begin to observe that discomfort and trauma are in fact not the same thing- even if your body attempts to code them in the same way.

We can forever feel into the differences in our own experiences.

To those of you beginning to see that discomfort isn’t traumatic, I see you.

08/30/2024

Delivering a difficult truth, but with a lot of love.

Sometimes we must learn how to unhook from unhelpful patterns. So many of us find ourselves turning towards the people who are actively not choosing us. So many of us will try strategy after strategy to shift the outcome, rather than just fully attending to the truth that is right in front of us.

For some of us, this pattern started in childhood, and it is especially common for those of us who had inconsistent caregivers. If you found yourself pleasing and performing and shifting yourself relentlessly as a child, in order to secure safety, you may find yourself engaging in all of those same strategies to get a peer to stay in adulthood.

Turning towards people who actively turn away from you is not an effective or helpful relational or personal strategy.

The pain and grief you carry is so freaking valid. And trying to chase down someone who wants to leave will not help you to feel more whole.

Said with love dear ones, said with so much love.

To those of you learning to pursue yourself and honor your own feelings, I see you.

08/29/2024

It’s really hard to do something that wasn’t modeled for us. It can be challenging to know how to be soft with yourself if your caregivers weren’t soft with you. It may feel impossible to develop healthy and helpful ways of coping in adulthood if you have survived on tough love and self-criticism.

Healing is possible, and you deserve it.

To those of you looking for another way to be with yourselves, I see you.

08/27/2024

Individuals who have experienced trauma may find that the so-called “small stuff” gets to them a lot more than it gets to others. They may have difficulty shaking off interpersonal interactions that don’t go the way they expect, they may find their thoughts linger and persist, they may fixate on a situation while they try to see something from multiple perspectives, their emotions may be pulled and stretched and constantly in overdrive, they may feel like they can never rest.

Sometimes the small things aren’t small at all. Sometimes the small things are the things that are easier to attach to or focus on. Sometimes the small things are plentiful and consistent. Sometimes the small things add up to big pain.

For survivors, the small stuff may layer on the big stuff. Daily interactions and encounters may mimic bigger traumas such that themes related to rejection, neglect, or abandonment may be activated in small interpersonal dynamics. When we have unhealed attachment wounds, when we haven’t yet experienced a corrective emotional experience, we may be prone to worry that people will leave us, or hurt us, or harm us, or miss us, and this makes all of the small stuff feel really big.

At our core, we all want to be seen and accepted. Any threat to this, even a small threat, can really activate all of those survival instincts that were once in overdrive. Any time we fear another attachment wound we will feel reactive, unsettled, and distressed because our very smart brain and body want to keep us safe. In this way, the small stuff may actually feel big, because to you it is big, because to you, your safety may constantly feel threatened.

To those of you feeling impacted by all of the small stuff, I see you.

08/26/2024

The nuance is where it’s at.

To those of you recovering from trauma and looking for safety in your relationships, I see you.

08/23/2024

Please note: This doesn’t apply to feedback we’re needing to receive related to causing another person harm; this post is explicitly about unsolicited advice that doesn’t contribute to our own growth.

Advice can come in many forms and from many places. Sometimes unwanted advice is coming from someone who is well-intentioned and sometimes advice is coming from someone who isn’t intending to see us at all. Unless we’re explicitly asking for advice we’re likely fine without it. Unless we’re explicitly asked to give our opinion it likely isn’t necessary for us to share it.

We’re often taught to be grateful for anything someone gives us and these teachings are really amplified for those with oppressed identities. We’re sometimes taught that it would be rude to be ungrateful when someone shares with us. Even when it’s hurtful, even when it’s unwanted, even when it isn’t what we’re needing at that time.

When someone slides into our DMs with their critical ideas about our content; when a parent shares with their adult child about how they should handle something at work; when a friend offers their two cents about our relationship-without us asking for it, we’re likely to feel an internal sense of rejection. We’re likely to feel powered over. We’re likely to internalize that this person believes they know us better than we know ourselves.

We can think something about someone and say nothing. We can have an opinion that varies from someone else’s. We can handle things vastly different from one another and all still be okay. It’s okay to disregard advice that doesn’t land for you. It’s okay to be ungrateful now and then. It’s okay to keep what serves you and release the rest.

To those of you who have internalized unwanted advice because you thought it was something you had to hold on to, I see you.

08/22/2024

Patterns repeat themselves and we do what we know until we learn to show up differently.

To those of you learning about your worth and value so you can get your needs met in your relationships, I see you.

08/21/2024

I think we can really overlook the impact of emotional neglect on child development. We can sometimes get so focused on abuse and violence (which is the too much, too fast aspect of trauma) that we forget the real and impactful experience of neglect (which is the not enough for too long side of traumatic childhood experiences).

Caregivers can be harmful in a variety of ways, and not all of them are obvious. In fact, children are sometimes more affected by what they didn’t have then by the overt pain they had to endure. To be clear, I’m not actually wanting to make a comparison here- no one wins when trauma is involved. Rather, I want to highlight that not having what we need- not having emotionally present, available, attuned, and aware caregivers can also leave a lasting impact on the developing child.

When our caregivers ‘act as if’ nothing is wrong, when we can clearly see that something is wrong, that can teach the child to not trust themselves and their sense of the world. Likewise, if our caregivers are non-reactive in situations where a reaction is warranted, the child may shut down and feel like if they can’t trust their caregiver’s reaction, then they ought not to trust anyone at all.

Children are always learning from their caregivers. They take the world in through experiences. When there is a void of emotional language or honesty about feelings, the child is likely to feel disconnected from their own emotional experience.

Kids need to see adults respond. They need to see a wide range of emotions. They need developmentally appropriate truths. Kids need to learn to trust their gut so that as they get older, they can do that in the situations that matter most.

To those of you who experienced emotional neglect, I see you.

08/20/2024

Let’s get something straight, we are all needy, because we all have needs. We are naturally social beings and we move through our lives connecting and colliding with others and the collisions, in particular, inform how we connect (or attempt to connect) with others as we move forward and form new connections. Meaning, our past relationships inform how we show up in our current relationships.

Sometimes we have relational needs that go unmet, and when this happens there are a number of different ways we can respond. We might shut down and turn inward and act as if we have no needs or, we may seek out connection in really obvious ways. The person who goes inward likely suffers quietly while the person who engages in attempts to connect may suffer in a public way, one that highlights their suffering to others.

The ones who experience their suffering out loud are often labeled as ‘needy’ or ‘clingy’, especially by people who cope with their suffering on the inside. These labels are harmful and they push people further away; they exasperate the unmet needs. If we have a history of trauma stemming from childhood, especially if there was a family dynamic where our needs were consistently unmet, we may not know how to express our needs to others in helpful ways; we may not know how to connect with people who are able to meet our needs; we may not even know what our needs are.

It is reasonable to seek out connection and desire to have your needs met. As we heal we can begin to engage in new strategies for connecting; ones that allow others to meet us in our needs; ones that allow us to recognize and communicate our needs to others.

To those of you who feel ‘needy’, to those of you who are suffering, and to those of you who desperately want to be seen, I see you.

08/19/2024

Sure, you might just be fighting about the dishes. It’s just that sometimes we aren’t really fighting about what’s in front of us. Sometimes we are using what’s right in front of us to connect with our feelings about the bigger themes taking place in our relationships.

Often, it’s not actually communication issues that take people to couple’s therapy. Rather, beneath the arguments about schedules and chores, lies bigger and often scarier issues that are likely going unaddressed.

Relationships are complex, and in our dynamics with others we are connecting and colliding with them all the time. And sometimes, the collisions feel too big, or too risky to attend to, and when this is the case we will sometimes ignore, stuff, or disregard the ways in which things aren’t working for us so that we can stay put. Over time, what we ignore rises to the surface. And when our unattended to feelings are at the surface, we’re more likely to see arguments about the ‘small stuff’- we’re more likely to focus on the stuff that doesn’t really matter when we’re not attending to the stuff that does.

What goes unaddressed comes up as something else. When we find ourselves focusing on the smaller things or the concrete tasks, we may find that bigger, scarier, thematic issues are lurking just beneath the surface.

Rather than waiting until there is a fight about the dishes, we would all be better served to address the ongoing relational misses that are taking place between us and others. Rather than focusing on situational concerns, we are better off addressing the things we’re holding on to and making meaning about in our relationships.

To those of you who have been fighting about so much more when you’ve fought about the dishes, I see you.

08/16/2024

We often talk about resilience in a way that suggests that people have to endure too much, be too strong, and fight against all of their internal and natural cues in order to get through something awful. This idea of resilience may actually be experienced in the body like additional trauma- this idea of resilience may actually be really flooding and activating.

Resilience within the body occurs when we can become activated and return to a state of less activation later. Resilience within the body occurs when our bodies can differentiate between something that is threatening in the here-and-now and something that is triggering from the past. Resilience within the body occurs when we can trust our body enough to help us through the activation we’re experiencing. Resilience within the body occurs when we can be gentle with ourselves when we’re activated and respond in a way that honors our activation rather than rejects it.

Building a resilient system after trauma takes time, effort, and gentleness. Learning to experience your activation not solely as a threat but also as a messenger increases our capacity for our internal responses. Becoming more comfortable with your body’s way of responding may help you to weather the discomfort that arises when activation occurs. Learning that activation doesn’t necessarily mean external action needs to occur can help the body to become more resilient over time.

Being resilient isn’t simply about tolerating discomfort and activation, it’s about acknowledging that activation will occur and that rejecting yourself and your body when you’re activated won’t help you to feel whole. Rejecting your body’s responses won’t aid in healing; rather, it can keep us stuck in patterns that we really want to change.

To those of you who are learning to see the resilience you already possess rather than having to act resilient in the face of traumatic experiences, I see you.

08/15/2024

Our childhood relationships, both the ones we were in with our caregivers, and also the ones we saw modeled for us, often dictate how we show up in relationship with others. And for those of us who grew up with emotionally unavailable caregivers, we may find ourselves chasing after people who aren’t ready, willing, or able to be in connection with us. And simultaneously, we may find ourselves distancing from people who are ready for connection, and there is a good reason why this is the case.

You see, some of us aren’t used to intimacy. Our systems can’t handle closeness. Our bodies aren’t sure they can handle a dynamic that doesn’t feel like a chase. Sometimes, emotionally available people will even be uninteresting to us, or boring, or unappealing. Is this sounding familiar?

When we grow up with dysregulation, we are used to co-dysregulating with others. That means that healthy nervous systems don’t initially feel like enough to us. When someone is grounded or settled, our excess energy doesn’t have anywhere to go, because there is no chaos in the other person’s system to co-dysregulate with. And while this initially feels unfulfilling, these are the exact sorts of relationships that will help us settle into our own bodies. The best relationships occur between two people who are ready, no chase required.

This is how healthy co-regulation dreams are made.

To those of you looking for safety in new places, I see you.

08/14/2024

Thinking about all of you who have recently returned to school.

People who desire to work in fields where formal education is required to do their job are often forced to decide between not getting to fulfill their desires and goals, and enduring pain and trauma from college and university systems. Institutions of higher education aren’t designed to support students who are systematically oppressed.

Academia is inherently racist, classist, ableist, elitist, and oppressive. Students are expected to achieve and function despite navigating these harmful systems; professors are expected to maintain rigor and standards that value scores and publications over well-being and critical thought.

Black and non-Black students and faculty of color often carry the biggest burden as they’re expected to endure, and not challenge the racism they encounter at every level of the academic system. They’re often expected to lead diversity conversations for their white peers while receiving no additional funding for doing so; they’re expected to blend in while simultaneously receiving the message that they don’t belong.

People should be able to leave college with opportunity, not trauma. They should be allowed to thrive rather than drown in debt. They should feel qualified and capable, not self-doubt after having to prove their worth to an institution that seeks to limit their very existence.

We need to challenge the way things have ‘always been done’; we need to decolonize our classrooms, programs, and syllabi; faculty need to learn from students rather than insist they know best; administrators need to trust their faculty when they share perspectives on training.

To those of you who have endured academic trauma, I see you.

08/13/2024

Sitting here thinking about the caption I could write. Knowing I could say many things about why this is true. Knowing I could acknowledge all of the reasons you don’t owe anyone something they desire at the cost of you. Knowing I could share with you why you are worthy and deserving of connection that is fair, and honest, and loving, even when it’s complicated.

And yet, you don’t need the caption. You just need this reminder. No additional commentary is necessary.

To those of you who sometimes need to be reminded that you don’t have to be in connection with anyone who is causing you harm, even if they really, really want you to be there for them, I see you.

08/12/2024

Sometimes trying harder makes sense, especially if the other person is struggling and therefore unable to engage with us in their usual way. And sometimes, we find ourselves doing all the work for way too long. Sometimes the relationship was never actually equitable. Sometimes the reciprocity was never really there.

Let yourself move away from those who never move towards you. Let yourself be free of the burden of doing all the relational work. Let yourself know when you have outgrown a connection.

To those of you needing permission to stop trying so hard in all the wrong places, I see you.

08/09/2024

Sometimes nothing changes. Sometimes loss is present even when nothing new is gone. Sometimes we aren’t losing anything at all. Sometimes the only thing that changes is us. Sometimes what we miss is what we thought we had and not actually what we had at all. Sometimes awareness brings us loss, and grief, and longing. Sometimes finding our reality means that we come face to face with the fantasy that we were fooled into believing it was real all along.

It can feel devastating to lose what we thought we had and the layers of grief that can emerge may be profound. When we’re healing, new insights creep in all of the time, sometimes fast and sometimes long and well-earned. As our awareness grows, as we begin to see things more clearly, we may begin to re-author aspects of our story; we may begin to label things differently than we did before. We may begin to feel things differently, noticing things differently, and experience things differently, and while the healing journey we’re on is worthwhile, it’s often not without grief.

When we think we have something and we lose it, there are often two losses. First, the actual tangible loss, and second, the loss that exists inside of us, the one that is linked with what we only now know is the actual truth. This second loss can be deep, it may shake us to our core. This loss is the one that is connected to us in our healing, the one we’re anchored to in the here-and-now. When we realize what we actually had isn’t what we thought we had we may question everything and everyone, and even if just for a moment, we may even question ourselves.

To those of you who are grieving, re-authoring, learning, and growing, I see you.

08/08/2024

To those of you who didn’t have the mother-figure you needed, I see you.

08/07/2024

Recently I asked y’all to talk to me about the differences in asking for support and dumping on people in your lives. Here are some of the answers you shared about what asking for support from someone might look like.

If we want safe and healthy connections with others, we have to put in the work to be a safe and healthy person. This often means being able to show up and share while also fine-tuning our ability to listen. If we want reciprocity in our relationships, we need to know how to both give and take.

What would you add to this list?

To those of you seeking out healthy connections while you work on being the safest version of yourself, I see you.

08/06/2024

Children who experience trauma are likely to undergo a shift where they attend more to their external environment than their internal cues. When their family or household is unsafe, they may begin to utilize survival strategies in order to cope with the chaos or harm they are experiencing; they may begin to function for others as a way to survive their upbringing.

Children surviving trauma are often forced into people-pleasing roles. They may come to believe that if they can control their environment (read: keep their caregivers “happy”) then they can maintain safety; they may come to believe that if they are perfect or need-less then they can stay out of harm’s way. Of course the developing brain is not aware of this process, this is innate, this is automatic, this shift is solely for survival’s sake.

The traumatized child may appear to have it all together, all of the time. These are the kids who are told, “I never had to worry about you” or “I have always been able to talk to you like you were an adult” or some other inappropriate statement that a caregiver says to someone who is in fact, not their peer. Children are not their parents’ peers, ever. Children are never meant to meet the needs of their caregivers and yet when trauma is existing within the household, when untreated trauma is present for the adult, the child often becomes the one to carry the burden.

The burden of having to grow up too soon has a lot of consequences as we age. We may settle into perfectionism because we believe people expect us to perform flawlessly all of the time. We may develop an unhealthy relationship with food or our bodies because we may try to grab onto the feeling of control in any place we can. We may have a history of relational disturbances because we may believe our role is to take care of others, rather than find someone who meets our own needs. We may not even have a sense for what our needs are.

To those of you who had to grow up too fast, who had to caretake your caregiver, and who had to act ‘as if’ in order to survive, I see you.

08/02/2024

Recently, I asked y’all to share about how you see seeking support as different from dumping on your friends (or family), and here were some of your answers.

Overall, we all agree that not honoring someone’s capacity, not checking in, and not being measured in how we share likely negatively impacts people in our lives.

We all deserve support. And, we can be thoughtful about how we seek it out. For many of us, we weren’t taught how to share or receive care. For many of us, we got used to sharing nothing or sharing everything all at once in an attempt to be seen.

Dear ones, we can share and listen. We can honor their capacity and still ask for what we need. We can allow duality to exist inside of us and within our relationships.

To those of you learning to connect in profound and meaningful ways, I see you.

08/01/2024

Their best may not have been good enough for you. Their best may have still been harmful. Their best may not have felt safe. Their best may have actually been them repeating what they experienced.

Their best may have still caused you trauma.

To those of you sitting in the complexity of knowing that their best wasn’t what you needed, I see you.

07/31/2024

Multiple times a week people will leave comments or DMs and ask me how to do something I am sharing about. People will connect with the words they read and immediately wonder how to apply what they are reading, to themselves. Sometimes people will even seem agitated with me that I haven’t neatly detailed a how-to guide for them on healing- coming in and demanding I tell them what the first step is.

And listen, I get it. We all want the answers. Each and every one of us wants to feel better, more congruent, more aligned. And yet, the concepts being shared on social media are just that, concepts. They are ideas. They are suggestions. They are part of the puzzle, but they are certainly not the solution.

Why is this? Well, healing is individual. Our path is going to look different from others. If I could give a blanket, “Just do XYZ and you’ll be healed!” I would. Trust me, I am not withholding answers from you. Rather, I know that your specific answers can’t be found here. Our answers exist in the application of our own work, in our specific nervous system reactions, in the tenderness we can show ourselves.

Likewise, people will often want to understand the “why” rather than acknowledging what is, and personally, I think this is the wrong focus. “Why am I like this” isn’t nearly as helpful as saying, “I am like this, now what do I need.” You see, one of these focuses on past you as a problem and the other focuses on current you needing support.

Dear ones, social media is a starting point, the real healing work is happening off the screen. Please use what you learn here to be informed in your process. Please take what you’ve gained here to validate yourself and engage in real life strategies that create more connection with your true self.

I’m here, and I’m rooting for you.

To those of you learning online and taking this info into your everyday life, I see you.

07/26/2024

We may have come to believe that our wisdom resides in our cognitions. We may find ourselves trying to think through our problems in an attempt to find solutions. We may struggle to connect with our bodies and ultimately decide that our brain is capable of helping us heal.

And the truth is, trauma resides in the body. Trauma is truth to our nervous system. Trauma is what lingers inside of us long after our circumstances change, and our brain moves on to another topic.

As you are able, make small strides to connect with your body. Befriend yourself and all of your sensations. Allow your emotions to take up space so that they can move through you. Settle into the wisdom that your body holds.

To those of you looking for your own answers, I see you.

07/25/2024

Please note: this post is not addressing instances of abuse, intentional harm, power and control, or gaslighting. This post is addressing rupture within otherwise healthy and relatively safe relationships.

We all see things differently. Our lens is highly influenced by our lived experiences. Our nervous system is our own and will react to our internal and external environment differently than others. And the truth is, what works for us may be the very thing that is activating for someone else. What we need may be in direct conflict with someone’s else’s needs.

These conversations require immense nuance. We never want survivors to feel as if we are justifying or making light of their pain. And, often in our intimate connections, we experience hurt by someone we care about. And this hurt is often unintentional and sometimes even completely outside of the other person’s awareness.

Best we can, we need to be able to differentiate conflict from abuse. We need to be able to feel into the difference between rupture that can be repaired, and someone knowingly threatening our safety. We need to see that we too can cause harm to someone else unknowingly. We need to create space for all of us to get it wrong when we really want to get it right.

(Almost) No one wants to be someone else’s villain, and yet, many of us take up negative space somewhere in someone else’s story. When we can allow relational rupture to exist alongside our quest for safety, we can begin to see that not all relational misses are in fact traumatic to us and our systems.

To those of you looking for the nuance in your relationships, I see you.

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To those of you who need a gentle reminder or two today. Thanks for letting me see you. #selfacceptancejourney #feelyourfeelings #angerishealthy #gentlereminders #somatichealing #embodiedhealing #healthyrelationship #theempoweredtherapist

One of the reasons our trauma responses stay active is because our nervous system remains in chronic activation. If we don’t notice of the shifts in our environment, we aren’t likely to experience shifts within ourselves. We have to help our bodies to settle. We need to encourage them to feel into the difference between stress and traumatic stress. We are on our way to healing when we can differentiate small changes in our environment. Does stress exist all around us? Yes. And, as we are able, we need to assess for relative safety. In a world that, for many of us, feels profoundly unsafe, we need to be able to notice the moments we are ‘okay enough’ or ‘safe enough’. Being able to notice shifts around us will help us to create shifts within us. Last year is over. The holiday season is over. You are right here, right now. To those of you working on being more present, I see you.

Boundaries help to keep us feeling safe in our relationships. They promote secure attachment. Boundaries are part of a somatic practice. They support our internal knowing. Boundaries teach others what they can expect from us, and show us what we can expect from others. They promote relational predictability and reduce relational risk. To those of you learning to create, maintain, and reinforce your own boundaries, I see you.

To those of you needing some gentle reminders on this Sunday, I see you. These are just some of the points we will be addressing in detail at our Healing Your Way Home Retreat, October 12-16th in Dallas, TX. Check out the link in my bio to learn more.

Let’s chat about Intimate Partner Violence. . . . . #dv #dvawareness #domesticviolence #dvawarenessmonth #intimatepartnerviolence #intimatepartner #powerandcontrol #abuse #harm #neglect #control #gaslighting #gaslit #iseeyou #attachment #connection #intimacy #partnership #dating #marriage #ipv #safety #safe #support #psychoeducation #love #trauma #traumainformed #dallastx #theempoweredtherapist

Those who have survived childhood trauma often long for a family to return to; they desire a family who will love them unconditionally; they wish that their family felt like home. For those of you who have experienced family pain, attachment wounds, and abuse, neglect, or violence, you may experience a longing for a family you've never had. And for those of you who have come to learn that particular family members are unsafe, or who have lost loving family members who buffered family dynamics for you, it can be particularly painful to lose something you once (believed you) had. We can want it to be different. We can wish for people to change. We can mourn and grieve and be profoundly saddened by the disconnection we feel with our families. And here is the hard truth, wishing it was different will not make it so. Despite this truth, your feelings are still valid, and they are worthy of being acknowledged and felt. Two things can be true: We can want a family to connect with, and unfortunately we may not have that, maybe not now, and maybe not ever. Given that we can't change others, we must focus on us, and our boundaries, and our expectations for relationships. We must fill our lives with chosen families, and loved ones, and people who see us, and accept us, exactly as we are. Two more things can be true: We can be hopeful and prioritize safety. We can be open to people doing their own work (read: we can't and won't do the work others are meant to do) and we can decide if we want to offer them a place in our lives when they return. We can also decide that some people just don't get to have a place, because our healing matters more. To those of you missing what you desire in a family, wishing for others to change, and healing from the pain of family wounds, I see you.