The Healing Cottage, 119 N. Belair Road, Evans, GA (2026)

01/02/2026

New Year, New You?

A fresh year is the perfect time to practice something that’s both hopeful and science-backed: you can shape the way your brain looks at life. This happens through neuroplasticity. It’s your brain’s built-in ability to rewire itself based on what you repeatedly focus on.

Your attention is training your brain

Your brain is always strengthening the pathways you use most. When you intentionally pay attention to what’s good, safe, meaningful, or hopeful, you reinforce the circuits connected to reward, connection, and emotional regulation. Over time, it becomes easier to access calmer, more positive states…not because life is perfect, but because your mind is getting better at seeing the full picture.

Small habits build strong “positive pathways”

Practices like gratitude, mindfulness, prayer/reflection, or positive self-talk are repetitive mental workouts. Just like exercise strengthens muscles, consistent positive focus strengthens the brain’s ability to notice, feel, and return to what’s good.

The opposite happens too

When stress, fear, or negative thinking becomes the default, the brain adapts to that as well. It gets faster at scanning for threats and problems. It’s a brain doing what it’s trained to do.

Changing your “default setting”

The goal isn’t to deny hard things. It’s to actively train your attention so your brain learns: “Yes, that’s hard… and there’s also hope, support, meaning, and possibilities here too.” With consistency, you can shift your internal “default” toward resilience.

A simple New Year practice to start today

Each day, write down:
• 3 good things (even small ones)
• 1 thing you handled well
• 1 thing you’re looking forward to

New year, new you doesn’t have to mean a total overhaul.

It can be one small daily choice that slowly reshapes your brain…and your life. ❤️‍🩹

Comment “RENEW” below if you’d like to start renewing your mind daily. ✍🏻

#2026

01/01/2026

A New Year isn’t a race. It’s a new starting line of a journey for introspection and honesty, and it’s full of possibility.

If you woke up energized and excited, we’re cheering you on.
If you woke up tired, grieving, anxious, or simply trying to get through the day… remember you’re human and we all have hard days sometimes.

Today can be as simple as:
• taking some deep breaths on purpose
• drinking water and eating something nourishing
• stepping outside for thirty minutes of sunlight
• sending one healthy text you’ve been avoiding
• choosing one small act of kindness toward yourself or others

At The Healing Cottage, we believe healing is built in the ordinary moments, not just big breakthroughs.

May 2026 be a year where you feel supported, steadier, and more at home in your own life.
🕯️✨

Happy New Year’s Day from The Healing Cottage of the CSRA!

#2026

12/31/2025

Tonight, as we get ready to say “goodbye” to 2025 and “Hello” to 2026, remember, we don’t have to “fix” everything. We can honor how far we’ve come.

Then, you can start where you are…tender, tired, hopeful, messy, brave.

At The Healing Cottage, we’re cheering for your quiet wins:
• boundaries you kept
• emotions you finally named
• hard conversations you survived
• steps forward you took… even while scared

As we close this year, we’re holding space for gratitude and grief, joy and weariness. If you’re carrying a lot into the new year, breathe, you’ve come this far.

When it comes to “resolutions,” (we’re not talking about the kind that disappear when January does.) It’s a chance for real resolutions, the steady, soul-level ones like choosing support, practicing honesty, building consistency, returning to yourself (and maybe to God) and taking the next right step even when it’s small.

If 2025 took a lot out of you, let this be your permission slip: rest is productive, healing is real, and you’re allowed to begin again, one healing choice at a time.

Happy New Year’s Eve from The Healing Cottage of the CSRA.
May this next year be one of healing, happinesses, health, growth, and restoration.
🕯️✨

God heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.
Psalm 147:3 🕊️✨❤️‍🩹

12/27/2025

There’s a quiet and exhausted space between Christmas and New Year that doesn’t get talked about much.

The meals are over, the gatherings are done, and what’s left is… you. Your body. Your heart. Your real life.

If you feel a little tender, tired, or emotionally “off,” you’re not alone. This week is a beautiful time for gentle resets, not pressure.

If the holidays stirred up old grief, old patterns, or old pain, take heart. You don’t have to carry it alone, and this in-between season can still hold space for healing. 🕊️

Small steps are enough:
🕯️ rest
🌿 one nourishing choice
📵 a little less noise and screentime
💛 one honest conversation
🙏 a moment with God

We’re here, holding space for the in-between, breath by breath, day by day.

— The Healing Cottage of the CSRA ✨

12/25/2025

Merry Christmas from The Healing Cottage of the CSRA 🎄✨

If this season feels full of joy, we’re celebrating with you.
And if it feels complicated, heavy, tender, lonely, or overwhelming…there’s nothing “wrong” with you.

The holidays can stir up old wounds, fresh grief, family stress, or the ache of what you wish was different.

Wherever you are today, may you experience small moments of peace, a kind word, a warm meal, a quiet prayer, a gentle boundary, a glimmer of hope.

You don’t have to carry it all alone. Healing is possible, one small step at a time. 🤍

With love and gratitude,
The Healing Cottage of the CSRA 🌿

12/19/2025

Our Prayer Tree is up in the office at The Healing Cottage. 🤍🎄

Clients and visitors can write a prayer request and place it on the tree. Some are detailed, some are just a few words, and some (like a child’s handwriting) I can’t fully read… but God can.

Each morning and evening, I pause and pray over every single request on these branches.

If you’d like prayer, you’re welcome to add a card the next time you’re here. If you don’t come in, post below, or message me “PRAYER” and I’ll include your request on our tree and pray for you and yours too!

12/18/2025

PERSPECTIVE
This year has been hard for so many of us. When life looks different than it used to, it’s easy to focus on what’s missing to feel the weight of unmet expectations and what isn’t.

But when I pause… when I hold this year up to the light of Truth… I’m reminded of something sobering:

There are people who have never known Christmas parties or warm kitchens filled with baking.
Never known safe homes, present parents, healthy children, or the luxury of celebrating instead of surviving.
For them, life has always been a daily fight for safety. Fear isn’t seasonal, it’s constant.

This year and the one before it have been deeply hard for me in very real ways. Still, when I step back, I can’t deny it: even here, even now, I have been profoundly blessed. If you really search for it, I bet you can find some things to notice that you have been profoundly blessed in as well.

When we open our gifts this year,
the TVs, the coats, the boots, the purses…may we pause.
May we pray for those who will sleep beneath the cardboard of those boxes
for those who rejoice over discarded coats
for those who pass by a purse because survival leaves no room for brand names.
When our children forget their gifts by the evening and move on to the next want
may we pray for children whose basic needs weren’t met at all…
children without present parents,
children for whom even a small gift would have felt like wonder.
After we pray, may we ask God how to put faith into motion.
How to make next year gentler for someone else, not just on holidays, but on ordinary days too.
How to make ripples that reach farther than we can see.

Please hear my heart, this isn’t about guilt or shame. This is not me saying that your pain this year, or in this life does not matter… it does.
This is not me saying, suck it up with toxic positivity. If you know me, you know that is truly not my heart because sometimes things stink really big and we have to grieve and lament over those things. It is OK to not be OK at times. The goal is not to stay there.

These are simply my ponderings.

Some will feel unsettled.
Others will ponder alongside me.
It really is a matter of perspective.
One perspective that leads to guilt or to gratitude…
to self-pity or to rejoicing even in the have-nots and grief.

I choose to rejoice.

Because despite a hard life, I have worked really hard to have post traumatic growth and thriving.
Despite a hard couple of years, I’ve been intentional to notice that God has been good to this girl in ways I can’t fully express.

As the new year approaches, I’ll keep returning to James 2:14–18 asking how to live a life that shows up, light that can be seen, touched, and felt.

Because love looks like something.
Because beauty rises from ashes.
Because small acts, done with a selfless heart, can change the world. And if it does not change the world, it can at least change the world for one person.

11/27/2025

Wishing you and yours a safe and loving Thanksgiving!

The holidays come aglow in candles, and gatherings, but sometimes with the darkness of memories that we wish we could forget.

We tell ourselves this is the season Where we must gather.
Where we must comply.
Where we must sooth the past into silence because the table is set and the story is supposed to be beautiful.

Healing doesn’t happen where harm is invited. A holiday does not make unsafe people safe. Time does not heal wounds all on its own.

If a child was hurt, your job is not to keep the peace … it is to protect the child.

It may look like an empty chair.
It may look like a closed door.
It may look like choosing courage over comfort.
It may look like new holiday traditions and people.

If the one who was wounded is grown now, hiding a quiet ache behind their smile ask them (or yourself) what would feel like safety.

Listen.

Do not overwrite the story with forced joy nor participation. Do not try to rush the healing to make others comfortable.

The hard work is not pretending it never happened.
The hard work is saying:
You matter more than tradition.
You are worth more than silence.
Your safety is not negotiable.

This is about all the unseen sorrows we wrapped in scripture, excuses, and smiles.

Healing does not come by sitting beside what once shattered you.
Healing comes when someone finally stands between the harm and the harmed.

If protecting the vulnerable rearranges the table, and even leaves empty seats,
then maybe that is exactly what love and safety looks like.

Families are not healed by pretending.
They are healed by truth.
They are healed by safety.

They are healed when someone is brave enough to say:

Not anymore. It stops NOW.

11/20/2025

CPTSD-is a trauma-related condition that develops after long-term, repeated, and inescapable traumatic experiences, especially those that occur through childhood or within close relationships.

So many who carry complex trauma don’t even know they’re carrying it.
I know, it sounds impossible but sometimes wounds weave themselves into the very air we breathe.

CPTSD grows in places we couldn’t leave, inside relationships we were tied to by love, or need, or simple survival.
It doesn’t announce itself with a clear beginning or end. It threads itself through the days and the years until it feels less like harm and more like “just life.”

So we grow up calling the hurtful things “normal.” We learn to make peace with what should never have been ours to bear. And then, later…maybe much later…someone looks at our story and whispers the word “trauma.” And everything inside us wants to say, “No… it wasn’t like that. Well, it didn’t feel like that.”

Because, usually, it just felt like any other Tuesday.

Our minds, our bodies, gracious guardians that they are, gave us dissociation, and distance, and all sorts of adaptive protections so we could keep going. But even the strongest defenses grow tired. Many years after we’ve walked out of the places that hurt us, the symptoms rise like a tide we never saw coming. What was adaptive, is now maladaptive. What worked, now causes more problems.

The truth is:
complex trauma rarely looks obvious.
Not to the world.
Not to the survivor.
Especially not to the survivor.
We think trauma announces itself with dramatic noise. Sometimes it does, but more often, it hides in the shame filled parts of us and gets masked by competence, humor, strength, or the habit of never making a fuss.

So maybe what we need is more compassion, more gentleness toward the stories we don’t see.
More grace for the people who learned to survive by pretending they didn’t hurt.

Maybe part of your own healing is to help the world slow down and see a little deeper. To tell the truth about what trauma can look like. To make space for every survivor…

Even the ones who don’t yet have the words for what they lived through.
❤️‍🩹

11/19/2025

Thanksgiving is a week away, and it’s a beautiful time to slow down and notice the everyday gifts we often overlook. Things like your first warm sip of coffee, a cozy bed at night, the people who show up for you, the small moments that bring a breath of relief between the busy days.

I also know many of you may be in a season where gratitude feels hard to reach. Maybe you’re overwhelmed, stretched thin, or wondering what there is to even be thankful for. I understand. Sometimes it seems like there’s nothing good to hold onto but those are the moments when digging a little deeper matters most.

There were seasons in my own life when I didn’t know where our next meal would come from. Gratitude wasn’t easy then, but it became an anchor. Noticing even the smallest good helped carry me through what felt impossible.

If you’re longing for more peace, well-being, or connection with others, gratitude is a powerful place to begin.
Here’s a simple practice to try this week in anticipation of Thanksgiving:

✨ Say “thank you” to at least three people.
This could be someone close to you or even someone you meet in passing.
✨ Be specific.
Name what they did and why it mattered.
For example: “Thank you for taking the time to explain the issue to me. You really put thought into it, and it shows how caring you are.”

✨ Notice the impact.
Did their expression or body language change?
How did you feel after offering genuine appreciation?

✨ Reflect on the experience.
What shifted in you when you slowed down and named the good?

As we prepare for Thanksgiving, may gratitude open the door to peace, connection, and a deeper sense of “being” in the days ahead. 🕊️

11/15/2025

Need a slow, cozy reset? 🧶🧵🌸

Join us for Contemplative Crafts a peaceful space to create, breathe, and connect with others.

📅 Next Meeting: December 7th
🕑 Time: 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM
📍 Location: 119 N. Belair, Evans
📞 To reserve your spot:
Call or text Emma Haffey, LMSW
(913) 547-0863

All craft supplies are provided, so you can simply show up as you are and let your hands (and heart) unwind.

💲 Cost: $25 per session
👥 Adults 18+

Share or tag a friend who would love a peaceful afternoon of crafting and contemplation, and save this post so you don’t forget! 🌿✨

11/11/2025

🏆🥇Thank you to all who nominated and voted ! The Healing Cottage won
“Best of Shop Local Augusta 2025” in the mental health category.
We are so thankful for each of you!
😱❤️
See other winners in the link in the comments.

The Healing Cottage

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