This time I read the title of the painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been,...

Trauma does not have to occur by abuse alone…

Resiliency is the essence of a global positive framework…

Resiliency is not gender-, age-, or intellectually specific…

Boundaries are, in simple terms, the recognition of personal space.

Un-winged and naked, sorrow surrenders its crown to a throne called grace.

In this week I see such a picture of life, hard and joyful pressed up together and sleeping in the same bed. They come knit together. The lines of pain run through the joy and...

BEFRIENDING THE BODY Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guard. Angry people...

Deep down inside, each of us knows what our truths are. It is forgivable to lose them…It is unforgivable not to reclaim them.

Many people look at their past and bemoan their mistakes. Those errors in judgment, behavior, hurting others, and the wrong decisions may be what consumes them now. It does not have to be that way,...

You did not invent these family habits. Your family is like mine, for thousands and thousands of years our families have embraced a dysfunctional lifestyle, passing these habits as gospel on to subsequent generations. This...

It’s crazy, how similar we are. Here’s both of us, working through our stuff, trying to make something positive out of something really bad.

One reason we’re not winning the fight against depression is that our available treatments leave so many in partial recovery limbo.

During the worst stages of my eating disorder, I was all-or-none with food—either bingeing or not eating. Much of my experience was, in fact, that if I ate anything, I would eat everything. I began...

The good news, however, is that, also contrary to popular belief, full and lasting recovery from an eating disorder is possible.

The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help, they have no hope.

Stop validating your victim mentality. Shake off your self-defeating drama and embrace your innate ability to recover and achieve.

Searching for a mind long lost I found it shaping colors and history near the cliffs of your heart.

This book is dedicated to those who have died as a result of mind control and/or ritual abuse, and those who have lived when they would rather have died.

I felt empty and sad for years, and for a long, long time, alcohol worked. I’d drink, and all the sadness would go away. Not only did the sadness go away, but I was fantastic....

I, like you, was not depraved or defected before birth but created to be magnificent, a wonderful and freeing realization – simple but explosive.

The strange part about a person’s lack of trust is that it often comes from not trusting themselves.

We’re saying the story doesn’t end here, that the air in your lungs is there for a reason.

I hope that I get to see you love what you are. To know yourself as gift and worth and truth. That you see what a huge thing it is to have the courage to...

No matter how smart we may think we are, no matter how committed we are to our truth, we can lose our way.

At the lip of a cliff, I look out over Lake Superior, through the bare branches of birches and the snow-covered branches of aspens and pines. A hard wind blows snow up out of a...

The spiritual malady that we speak of so often in recovery circles requires a spiritual solution. Nothing else will ever be enough and nothing else will last.

Lumani had never managed a failed delivery because, in the end, no matter how skilled or how hard they fought back, pressure applied in the right places caused even the strongest men to fracture.But this...

We take action when we have the honesty to admit that things are still broken, despite our best efforts otherwise. We take action when we hold ourselves continually open to new techniques, remaining resolutely receptive...

It was painful to contemplate the distance between the future of accomplishment I’d imagined for myself twenty years earlier, and the reality…it was painful to understand that the cushion of exceptionality invoked by the drug...

We’ve been there and come back. When you fall in the pit, people are supposed to help you up. But you have to get up on your own. We’ll take your arms, but you have...

From recovery to rags and rags to recovery symbolizes art – a perfect compilation of human imperfections.

Rigid traditions capture soulsprisons of spiritual thoughtman’s religion has captured a god grown too small and very weak.

Change is threatening to the status quo.

Always allow your childlike wonder, joy, gratitude, love and laughter to serve as your own soul’s tool kit for life’s most difficult challenges.

Her eyes are frosty blue, made all the more seductive by her fair skin. Karly, Annabelle, now Layna. The road to recovery is heavily littered with cross-addiction.

In the past, my brain could only compute perfection or failure—nothing in between. So words like competent, acceptable, satisfactory, and good enough fell into the failure category. Even above average meant failure if I received...

In some counties, there is an actual named crime of ritual abuse and there too, there have been convictions.

I have suffered pains and torture of all natures. I have heard many say, “I am a survivor.” I am not in a boat in a sea of torture awaiting to be rescued. I am...

In truth, Serenus, I have for a long time been silently asking myself to what I should liken such a condition of mind, and I can find nothing that so closely approaches it as the...

Love, Mercy, and Grace, sisters all, attend your wounds of silence and hope.

I felt like I was being carried over the threshold of a sisterhood of loss. I knew I was not walking alone, and that eventually I would bob back up to the surface of the...

I want to feel calm and at ease. Like someone who lives in Half Moon Bay, California, and makes hummus from scratch. Instead, I feel like I’m a contestant on some awful supermarket game show...

Would they be cheered by their recovery, or marked for life by their trauma?

The more judgmental a person is the sadder they are.

Honoring your word is the fiber from which trust is built.

Self-preservation isn’t worth it if you can’t live with the self you’re preserving.

He still heard his mother’s voice–“Davey”–rise like whisper-dust from unseen corners in the house, but it was no longer the only voice he heard. His ears were also filled with the voices of others–his father...

I left myself out of humanity by focusing on differences. This isolation only strengthened Ed” (17)

One of the most dangerous myths surrounding eating disorders is that they are a life sentence.