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.

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.

Spurred by Amy’s death I’ve tried to salvage unwilling victims from the mayhem of the internal storm and am always, always just pulled inside myself.

Always love, always encourage, and never let despair get in the way.

There had been a subtle realignment of the spheres. The world was somehow a place I could endure again. If life was a grey corridor lined with doors, it was now within my power to...

Punishments include such things as flashbacks, flooding of unbearable emotions, painful body memories, flooding of memories in which the survivor perpetrated against others, self-harm, and suicide attempts.

Ritual Abuse usually involves repeated abuse over an extended period of time. The physical abuse is severe, sometimes including torture and killing. The sexual abuse is usually painful,humiliating, intended as a means of gaining dominance...

Our minds have a great capacity for deception. This does not mean we are necessarily dishonest but if we are not careful, when our brains do not have answers, our minds will create them.

Sitting on the hot seat of change requires much courage, patience, and persistence.

Sometimes I struggle. Sometimes I falter. Sometimes I live in gray. But always I remember the yarrow you’ve grown in the spaces of my rib cage. I now love with roses from my heart, with...

No matter how dark the night may get, your light will never burn out.

An intensely gripping narrative…expertly crafted and totally addictive…a must read!

There are a lot of times the heart burrows deeper, goes tunnelling into itself for reasons only the heart itself seems to know.They are times of isolation, of hibernation, sometimes of desolation. There is a...

We are not the only ones affected by our recovery. The spiritual awakening heals the world one person at a time.

The unavoidable has touched the life of every human being on the face of the earth. Some have rebounded, others have given up–but all of us have felt the wings of tragedy brushing against us.

One day at a time, sweet Jesus. Whoever wrote that one hadn’t a clue. A day is a fuckin’ eternity

Never has nostalgia held stronger sway; never has the belief in the redemptive possibilities of the future seemed so laughable.

They got drunk and high on a regular basis, but this is a vestige of youth that you either quit while you’re young or you become an addict if you don’t die. If you are...

The man who sins but wants to purify it is no more a sinner than the man who doesn’t sin but wants to sin.

For example, I can doubt that 2 + 2 = 4; however, my doubting does not change the equation. When I test out that formula and find that it is true, then that becomes my...

A spiritual hell I lived in … hating the God of love and knowing the god I served … hated me!

It’s about needing to feel loved and comforted but feeling unworthy of real love and comfort. It’s about hating having needs and desires. For some of us, needs make us feel greedy and selfish. For...

Even those who drink until blacking out, those who beat women, are not the exception, hopefully not the norm, trapped somewhere in society in a dark place nobody wants to talk about.

Ironically, this physically weak feeling signifies that I’m actually getting stronger. I know from my past that I will ultimately feel strong if I just sit with the feeling and experience it.

Those who support such survivors of abuse often find it difficult to hear the reality of those survivors’ lives and experience and are often unsupported themselves. Rather than being supported, workers are often ridiculed, castigated...

We don’t get to choose the things that happen to us in life. What we can choose is how to react to them, how we deal with them, and how we move on.