Midnight Sun Counseling

06/06/2025

Beautiful message about what it means to work together. Diversity is a strength.

In this video, I react to the powerful and emotional Harvard graduation speech by Yurong "Luanna" Jiang, the first Chinese woman to deliver a commencement ad...

10/17/2024

One of the defining features of traumatic events is the loss of choice over what happened to you. They can leave you feeling trapped, helpless, or powerless.

When we do not feel as though we have choices, we can begin to feel trapped, our nervous system perceives a threat.

Therefore, recovery from trauma involves realizing that you do have choices available to you now. (And hopefully that is true).

Take some time to reflect on the small choices available to you today that make a positive difference in how you feel. Choices to engage or disengage from the news or choices to rest and/or move your body, choices about how your feed yourself, choices about how you talk to yourself with self-compassion, choices about how you treat others with kindness, choices to pause rather than react with anger…these decisions add up and help you come out of survival and to feel more empowered so that you can be the creator of your life…one choice at a time.

10/17/2024

Sometimes I like to remind myself that the experiences and feelings I'm trying to resolve or heal don't make me an outsider. They don't make me wrong or broken. And they don't necessarily need to be fixed, rather, tended to.

These pieces of us that we carry shame around, that we try to hide, that we want to fix are the very byproduct of a human experience.

Your pain, your desire, you fear, your anger, your grief, your effort, your attachment, your triggers, your exhaustion makes you a human being.

Human is messy. Human is disorganized. Human is fragile and strong and resilient and needy. Human is brilliant and beautiful and intelligent at that. Human is intentional, human is hardwired (for things like connection!). Human is a complexity of nuanced experiences that arise as a result of living in the organism we inhabit. It's not something we can fix or change or "heal" all the time.

This doesn't mean we have to just let all our wounds and triggers and behaviors just "be", but it also doesn't mean we need to hyper focus on fixing and changing everything.

Rather, what might it be like if we met ourselves in it more often?
Instead of " I need to feel X instead of Y" What if we offered "I feel X and I'm going to hold the piece of me that feels this way"

Perhaps the practice isn't "healing" it by changing it. Perhaps it's through meeting it that it naturally heals. – Lexy Florentina

10/17/2024

Developing discernment is part of healing trauma and stepping into our full sovereignty as adult women.

Discernment is an expression of healthy self-respect and maturity.

It raises the standard for who and what we allow into our lives, based upon self-attunement to our own truth, needs and limits.

But displaying discernment can feel fraught with cognitive dissonance, in moments, if we were raised in a dysfunctional family that coded discernment as being inherently mean, ungrateful, arrogant or being snobbish.

Discernment gets closely associated with shame. And shame makes us easier to exploit and easier to enforce compliance.

As a subset of patriarchal culture, dysfunctional families unconsciously attempt to "break" a child's healthy No and sense of individual will, likely because this was done to the parents as well.

Discernment includes things like:

🔥Saying no to things that don't feel safe or comfortable.

🔥Taking time to decide if you want to do something. Not rushing or pushing into a choice.

🔥Observing and assessing the degree of engagement that feels comfortable based upon data from the environment and how well it aligns with your own sense of truth or comfort.

🔥Feeling free to change your mind or shift your choices based on new information.

🔥Trusting yourself more than others.

Healthy families will encourage a child's growing development of discernment even if the child's limits or boundaries do NOT happen to align with the parents' needs or wants.

The healthier the family, the more flexibility and spaciousness it has in accepting and welcoming a child's individuality.

The less healthy the family, the more rigid and inflexible it will be towards a child's developing sense of self.

If it feels like you are confronting the Terror Barrier when you want to say NO, speak your truth or honor your limits, take heart.

Inner Mothering is the practice in which we can become the loving mother we always needed and help the inner child see that *discernment is NOT incompatible with being a loving person.*

Check out my new blog series here: https://www.bethanywebster.com/blog/crossing-the-terror-barrier-of-the-mother-wound-from-subservience-to-sovereignty-part-2-of-2/

In the article, I share 7 ways you can support yourself in crossing the Terror Barrier!

10/08/2024

ℹ️🌿 AM I EMOTIONALLY UNAVAILABLE? |

Emotional availability is what helps us connect, empathize, and be present with others - in a way that builds intimacy. Emotional intimacy is what we all need in relationships, to feel nourished, and fulfilled. When we are in relationships that lack emotional intimacy, we feel achey, empty and sad.

If you’ve been in relationships that lack emotional intimacy or if you’ve been with someone who is emotionally unavailable [or are drawn to that kind of person], it may be helpful to look at your part in the dynamic, first.

We often attract what is most similar to us, or familiar to us. The good news is that when we notice ways we may be avoiding intimacy, we can start doing the work to make a shift- and then bring more depth into our relationships. And/or attract others who have more capacity to develop richer relationships.

Read the Full Article: https://integrativepsych.co/new-blog/am-i-emotionally-unavailable



📷: unknown, quote: Dr. Alexandra Solomon

10/08/2024

I've never been a fan of the "let" in "don't 'let' them bully you." We don't really "let" bullies & abusers do what they do. What may seem like
"letting" them do it is often us stuck in a freeze, fawn, or other trauma response.
Not "letting" them do it isn't quite that simple.

Trauma responses aren't choices. We don't sit down & calmly decide between fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or flop.
When we're triggered, our nervous system makes that decision for us.

Maybe you don't suck at setting boundaries.
Maybe it's unreasonable to expect your boundary setting to be perfect when the "fawn" trauma response is lighting up your nervous system like a forest fire.
Trauma responses aren't "choices." Maybe you can extend yourself some grace. — Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle

07/08/2024

Heidi Priebe - "C-PTSD Survivors: 10 Important Messages You May Have Missed In Childhood"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJumPPoau7k

This is my summary of the video:

- Trauma interrupts our ability to process memories properly.

1. Toxic shame is the sense that there must be something wrong with me. We develop "neurotic" responses, such as anxiety, depression, addictions - all of the things that people go to therapy for most often. None of that was a choice! The toxic shame that you feel is not as personal as you think it is.

2. It is impossible to focus or concentrate when you are chemically triggered or emotionally dis-regulated. The first step is to acknowledge that you are triggered or dis-regulated.

3. People need the most help, care, and support when they are struggling the most. The brain prioritized not getting things wrong above getting things right or just trying. When you are making mistakes, that is when you need to get support, and let people help.

4. It is normal to not know things that you have never been taught. It is also normal not to know things that you couldn't learn because you were in a dissociated or emotionally dis-regulated state when someone tried to teach you. Employers actually expect you to not know things, and to ask questions so that they can teach you what you need to know. They would rather that you ask if you don't know something. It isn't bothering them.

5. In order for your life to feel meaningful, you have to get to know yourself and your feelings, interests, and passions.

6. Your triggers are not your core authentic self. You are not your triggers!

7. A lot of the time when you are procrastinating, you may be spending an appropriate amount of time trying to process overwhelming feelings. If you have chronic triggers or frequent emotional dis-regulation, you do actually have less hours in the day than most people have.

8. Other people are constantly taking cues from you about how to interact with you. If you chronically inhibit your expression of emotions, they might not be able to read you. If they are not offering you support, it might be because they don't know that you need support because you don't show it (as opposed to because they don't care about you as much as someone they seem to be giving more support to).

9. Good people do bad things. The degree to which re recover from these bad things (or our feelings of guilt and shame) may depend on how much love and guidance and support we get. We need to learn to trust in small increments - small changes, one step at a time.

10. Hope often comes about from a change in circumstances. If you were shamed or not given enough support when you made mistakes or in general growing up, you may have developed "learned helplessness" which means that you gave up trying to succeed or to get enough support. Learned helplessness can be unlearned when you start getting the support that you need.

Videos Referenced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsBPvgnCJsQhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxBm9r2tpyY

01/14/2024

01/14/2024

While the invisibility may have started with parents too busy, too checked out, or not capable of really seeing you, it may be maintained by our own habits and a certain turning away from the world.

Often to survive the emotional barrenness of emotionally absent parents or any early environment that did not feel welcoming, we turn into ourselves. Rather than reach out in relationships, we withdraw.

Part of healing is coming out of the cloister and back into the world.

01/13/2024

Learning to face our triggers is how we heal.

Taking the necessary steps to heal isn't just about suppressing triggers - it's a much deeper emotional and psychological journey. Instead, focus on developing healthier habits and outlooks that can combat unhealthy responses in any situation you face.

01/13/2024

Connection is a basic human need. We can't heal from loneliness without others. We need to belong.

Most mental illness is related to lost connection. Depression is lonely. Anxiety is usually about the fear of losing important connection. Trauma causes us to shut down because the worst trauma is about losing connection in some way - from losing someone we love to being hurt by someone we love, and so we shut down in order to protect ourselves from that kind of pain.

Healing from trauma is also about connection. First, restoring the ability to feel safe, to trust ourselves, and to trust others. Second, processing. Third, re-connecting and finding community again.