Learning To Be Whole

PTSD

  • Belief and the Age of Insistence

    Belief and the Age of Insistence

    My thoughts on truth on justice on empathy? On how things don’t just go one way and how abandoning victims to victimhood is a violence all its own.

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  • Can’t Find a Better Man

    The half growl/half crow of Eddie Vedder has long been a part of my own, personal war cry.  It both fed and poured out my teenage angst—my frustration with the things that were senseless, wrong, and unjust in the world, and my desire to be free from all of the pain and confusion and devastation

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  • Toxic 2.0

    I don’t know how to do relationships. Don’t get me wrong.  I know how to advise about relationships.  I’d make a great family therapist or marriage counselor.  I marry people—to one another, of course—in ceremonies, as the ordained minister with credentials recognized by the state.  Ask me about your relationship and I will give you

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  • And the Storm Rages On

    It isn’t easy for me to be vulnerable. I remember a friend from cohort saying to me once that I was very open by not very vulnerable, and I was upset by that statement, because I didn’t think it fair to separate the two out in that manner.  Being honest was, in my mind at

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  • Avoidance

    I’m supposed to be paying bills. But there isn’t enough money. So, I am doing this thing that I do.  Some like to call it procrastination, but I’ve started to use terms that are more honest wherever possible, so this thing is called “avoidance”. When the thing cannot be done comfortably, efficiently, without stress, or

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  • I Should Be Packing Right Now

    The journey to this moment has been long and hard and chaotic and sometimes frightening.  So, now that I am here, I am paralyzed. This is certainly not the first time that I have fought my way through all sorts of trauma to find myself safe on the other side and stuck.  Just stuck.  It

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  • When Comes the Night

    “There are low points. There are going to be low points. And if you can take me at the high points, then you also need to take me at the low points. That’s what I have to say.” My daughter uttered these words with passion and much arm movement a few moments ago. She was

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  • Done

    In therapy on Monday, I said to my therapist, “I’m done!  I’m done.” And that was immediately followed by the expression, “I don’t even know what that means, because I am not going to kill myself, so I don’t know what I am done with, per se, or what I am quitting, exactly.” I’m relatively

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  • Five Common Arguments Against Watching 13 Reasons Why, and Why, as a Survivor, I Reject Them

      Recently, the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why has created what I wish were helpful conversations on my Facebook feed.  But, more often than not, the people who are posting are educators of middle and high school students in small towns.  The reasons why I have those sorts of educators on my feed are simple—I

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  • Breakthrough

    Sometimes I write a whole lot of stuff and then I just file it away, never to be seen again. Unless I die and someone figures out my laptop password, divulging all of the secrets within the “Current Writing Projects” folder, there are thousands upon thousands of words that will never be read by anyone. 

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