Rachel Willyung LCSW ACSW

08/11/2025

08/11/2025

08/11/2025

ℹ️🌿 DISSOCIATION: HOW PEOPLE COPE WITH TRAUMA THEY WANT TO FORGET |

When you witness or experience something terrible, you may try not to think about it. To help you, your brain may call on one of its most creative and ingenious coping strategies to keep you going: dissociation. In the simplest terms, dissociation is a mental block between your awareness and parts of your world that feels too scary to know.

Dissociation happens to just about everybody at some time. It takes many different forms for different people. But for people with a complex trauma history, dissociation keeps the brain in survival mode. Nobody can endure a constant state of fear and still function well. You can’t get through life unscathed while always feeling frozen, worried, or shut down by your greatest fears. Dissociation can function as protection, by keeping people unaware of the distress of being traumatized.

Read the Full Article: https://cptsdfoundation.org/2020/04/23/dissociation-how-people-cope-with-trauma-they-want-to-forget/

08/11/2025

Not everyone will understand what you went through.
Not because your pain isn't real-but because some people don't have the capacity to meet you there.
People can only understand you from their own level of
awareness.
And if they haven't done the work to feel their own pain, regulate their nervous system, or hold emotional complexity-they'll dismiss, deny, or downplay yours.
That doesn't mean you need to convince them.
And it definitely doesn't mean you need to keep trying to explain something your body knows to be true.
Part of healing is learning to trust yourself.
Your story. Your truth. Your experience.
To know, deep in your body, "This happened. It mattered.
And I don't need to justify it to anyone.'
You are not here to gather permission slips for your pain.
You are here to move through it.
To honour it in the way that you need.
So, if someone can't meet you with compassion, it's not your job to work hard to get them to understand.
You deserve to be surrounded by people who don't need convincing to honour what you've been through and its impact on you. - .trauma.educator

08/04/2025

How does trauma shape our view of the world — and why does it matter? According to renowned psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., trauma isn’t just a painful memory; it actually changes brain function, often leaving us stuck in a sense of danger. His 2014 book The Body Keeps the Score sparked ...

08/04/2025

ℹ️🌿 FINDING AN UNOFFICIAL DIAGNOSIS OF CPTSD |

I’m a forty-two-year-old woman, haunted by mental illness for as long as I can remember, and yet it’s only within the last two years that Complex PTSD has become known to me. No one in the mental health profession has ever uttered the words to me.

The only reason I know the name and recognize the symptoms as my own is that I’ve done my own research in an attempt to heal myself. Why is it so hard to find a diagnosis that actually fully explains the unique symptoms we live with and have to learn to survive with every single day?

I was diagnosed with depression and generalized anxiety in 2000. It’s a diagnosis that has stayed the same for the last nineteen years, but to me, it never seemed enough to explain the severity of the many symptoms I suffer from.

Read the Full Article: https://cptsdfoundation.org/2019/10/24/finding-an-unofficial-diagnosis-of-cptsd/

07/12/2025

ℹ️🌿 WHAT I THOUGHT HEALING WOULD BE (THANKS, MALADAPTIVE PERFECTIONISM) |

Let’s be real: maladaptive perfectionism is like that mother-in-law who shows up uninvited and starts reorganizing your kitchen.

At first, it seems helpful. Motivating, even. You tell yourself, “Well… she means well.”
But next thing you know, everything’s in a “better” place… and you can’t find a damn thing anymore.

That’s what perfectionism does to your healing.
It comes in hot with good intentions, starts rearranging everything, and leaves you completely disconnected from what you actually need.

Suddenly, you're obsessing over how “well” you're doing therapy. Shaming yourself for still struggling. Treating recovery like a full-time job, with zero PTO.

Read the Full Article: https://www.sarahherstichlcsw.com/blog/what-i-thought-healing-would-be-thanks-maladaptive-perfectionism



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06/20/2025