trauma
At its core, trauma can be thought of as the psychological wounds that persist, even when the physical ones are long gone.
Once A Child . Content Warning.
From the moment we open our eyes—crying in a cold, sterile hospital— the conditions of love begin to blossom. Living and growing in our mother’s bellies only holds a safe place for nearly a year before we were quite literally ejected into chaos we didn’t ask for. From that point on there are conditions to the amount of love and respect we receive. From birth when we are “good babies” in the nursery, the nurses praise us for our cooperation, whereas fussy babies, while still looked at as precious cute creations, are deemed more difficult. Though this example is rather vague and lacks depth into the true meaning of conditional love, it is a pivotal reminder of how we enter and leave this world. Alone.
By The Darkest Sunriseabout a year ago in Psyche
Asylum Warehousing: Again?
The recent discourse surrounding "mental health disabilities" and their societal ramifications carries a chilling echo of a past many hoped had been left behind: the era of asylum warehousing. While framed as a solution to complex social issues, policies that empower the state to institutionalize individuals deemed in need, even those already housed, threaten to unravel decades of progress in mental healthcare and civil liberties. This approach risks re-establishing a system where individual autonomy is sacrificed for perceived public order, potentially leading to widespread human rights abuses and the erosion of fundamental freedoms.
By Sai Marie Johnsonabout a year ago in Psyche
Surrounded Yet Invisible: The Loneliest I’ve Ever Been Wasn't When I Was Alone
I used to think loneliness only looked like empty rooms and unanswered texts. I thought it meant quiet Friday nights, vacant seats across the dinner table, or crying into your pillow at 2 a.m. because no one thought to check on you. But I was wrong. The loneliest I’ve ever felt was in a room full of people who love me. The kind of love they offered was loud and warm—hugs at the door, food piled high on my plate, inside jokes tossed around like confetti. My family is the type that shows up in numbers. Holidays are crowded, birthdays are loud, and silence is rare. There’s always a cousin laughing too hard, a sibling with something to prove, and a parent trying to hold it all together. From the outside, it’s beautiful. To anyone else, it looks like I’m lucky—and in some ways, I am. But what happens when you're surrounded by people who love you, but none of them really see you? No one noticed that I had stopped laughing with them and started laughing at the right times. No one noticed how quickly I slipped out of rooms, how I dodged questions with practiced smiles. No one asked why I seemed tired all the time. Maybe they thought I was just busy. Maybe they thought I was fine. Maybe I was too good at pretending. The truth is, I’ve always been the “strong” one. The one who gave advice, who kept the peace, who didn’t cause problems. I was the one people leaned on—not the one they leaned into. So when I started to crumble quietly, no one noticed. Or maybe they did, but they didn’t know how to ask. Or worse—they didn’t want to know. It’s strange, isn’t it? How you can sit shoulder to shoulder with people who say they love you and still feel like you're on another planet. How you can smile across a dinner table while your insides ache for someone to just ask, “Hey… are you really okay?” But no one asked. So I stopped hoping they would. I became a master of small talk. I learned how to dodge concern with humor, how to hide anxiety with productivity. I showed up to family events with baked goods and tired eyes, and no one questioned either. I wore my loneliness like an invisible coat—heavy, but unnoticed. I remember one night in particular—my birthday. Everyone was there. Balloons, cake, laughter, a slideshow of old baby pictures I would have rather burned than watched. People toasted to me. They said things like, “We’re so proud of you” and “You’re always so strong.” And I smiled. I thanked them. I played the part. But inside, I was screaming. Because not one person asked what I was struggling with. Not one person mentioned how quiet I’d become over the past few months. Not one person noticed how uncomfortable I was hearing myself described in ways I no longer identified with. I wasn’t strong—I was exhausted. I wasn’t holding it together—I was barely hanging on. That night, I cried myself to sleep. Not because I wasn’t loved. But because I realized that love doesn’t always come with understanding. Sometimes, love just isn’t enough. It took me a long time to accept that you can’t feel seen by people who don’t know where to look. And it’s not always their fault. We train the people around us on how to treat us—what we share, what we hide, how we react. I had built a wall so high around my pain that even those closest to me couldn’t climb it. But part of healing, I’ve learned, is letting people in—even when it feels easier to shut them out. I’ve started doing that. Slowly. I’ve stopped saying “I’m fine” when I’m not. I’ve started sending “Can we talk?” texts instead of waiting for someone to notice I’m not okay. I’m learning that vulnerability isn’t weakness—it’s a bridge. A chance for connection. A way out of the silence. And you know what? Some people are crossing that bridge with me. Not everyone. But the ones who do—those are the people I’m holding onto. Loneliness doesn’t always come from isolation. Sometimes, it comes from invisibility. From being in a room full of people who think they know you but never ask who you’ve become. If you’ve ever felt that—if you’ve ever faked a smile in a crowd that swears they love you—just know you’re not alone in that feeling. You deserve to be seen. And maybe, just maybe, it starts with letting someone look. Thank you for reading this 🥰 ❤️.
By Azmat Roman ✨about a year ago in Psyche
Is Anxiety a Disability? How to Secure Disability Benefits
Anxiety disorders are more than emotional distress; they can severely impact on a person to work in his/her normal life, including being able to hold a job. There are a lot of questions by many people with anxiety disorder that wonder whether or not they are disabled enough to receive disability aid. In this post, we will answer the question “Is Anxiety a Disability? whether anxiety disorders would enable you to obtain disability benefits, and how to apply to receive help.
By PURE HEALTH BLOGSabout a year ago in Psyche
Therapy Didn’t Heal Me — It Helped Me Start Over
I used to believe that healing meant going back to who I was before everything broke. That somehow, through therapy, I would find a way to become her again—the girl who laughed easily, trusted quickly, and didn’t wake up every morning with a knot in her stomach. But therapy didn’t give me that. What it gave me was something much harder, much messier, and—eventually—so much more honest. It gave me a blank slate. --- I started therapy because I hit a wall. The kind of wall you don’t just crash into—you become it. I was twenty-seven, recently out of a toxic situationship, and working a job that drained me so deeply I forgot what weekends were supposed to feel like. On paper, everything looked “okay.” That word—okay—was a lie I told myself at least ten times a day. When I walked into my first session, I wasn’t looking to start over. I was looking to fix myself. “Make me functional,” I told my therapist. “I just want to stop crying in the bathroom stall at work.” She nodded. No judgment. Just curiosity. “Okay. Let’s figure out where that’s coming from.” What I didn’t realize at the time was that I hadn’t just lost control of my emotions—I’d never really had it. I was a master of survival, of faking calm, of molding myself into whatever version of “fine” someone else needed. And that’s what therapy unwrapped. Not just the heartbreaks or the burnout, but the core lies I had built my life around: – That love should hurt before it feels good. – That boundaries make you selfish. – That if you’re not useful, you’re disposable. No worksheet or breakthrough moment changed me overnight. What did change me were the long silences. The pauses where I had no words to answer a simple question like, “What do you want?” I didn’t know. I hadn’t known for years. --- One of the most powerful moments in therapy wasn’t a dramatic revelation. It was a quiet Tuesday, maybe session eleven, when I found myself saying something I’d never said before. “I don’t think I like the person I’ve been pretending to be.” My therapist didn’t try to fix it. She just asked, “What would it look like to stop pretending?” It shattered me. Because I realized: I didn’t just need to heal—I needed to rebuild. Not go back to some idyllic “before.” That version of me wasn’t real either. I needed to start from scratch. --- That was the beginning of what I call my "emotional excavation." I stopped trying to silence my sadness and started listening to it. I traced my people-pleasing tendencies back to a childhood where I earned affection through performance. I realized my anxiety wasn’t random—it was my body screaming for rest in a world that told me rest = laziness. And slowly, I gave myself permission: – To say no without guilt. – To rest without proving I earned it. – To be messy, loud, needy, and whole. This wasn’t healing in the neat, inspirational-quote sense. It was grieving. Letting go of versions of myself I had performed for survival. Mourning the lost years. Accepting that I might never be fully “healed,” but I could be honest. I could be real. --- Therapy didn’t save me. It handed me the tools and stood back while I did the demolition. There were weeks I walked out feeling worse than when I walked in. There were times I hated my therapist—not because she was unkind, but because she asked me to look at the parts of myself I’d spent decades avoiding. But those parts? They needed to be seen. And once I saw them, I could finally start over—not as a fixed version of myself, but as a truer one. --- Starting over didn’t mean quitting my job or moving across the country (though I did both, eventually). It meant choosing different in the tiny, day-to-day ways: – I unfollowed people who made me feel small. – I started journaling what I felt instead of what I thought I should feel. – I let friendships fade that were built on old versions of me. – I looked in the mirror and saw someone I didn’t fully know—but wanted to meet. --- If you’re reading this and therapy hasn’t “healed” you—good. That’s not what it’s for. It’s not a magic spell. It’s a mirror. And sometimes, the most loving thing you can do for yourself is admit that you don’t want to go back—you want to build something better. And that begins when you stop asking therapy to erase your pain and start letting it teach you how to carry it, speak to it, learn from it. I’m not healed. But I’m building something real. And that’s more than I ever thought I deserved. Thank you for reading ❤️.
By Azmat Roman ✨about a year ago in Psyche
I Didn’t Know It Was Trauma Until I Couldn’t Breathe
I used to think trauma looked like something dramatic. A car crash. A violent assault. War. The kind of stuff you see in movies, raw and loud. I didn’t know trauma could sit quietly inside you, like a sleeping dog. Until one day, it wakes up, snarling. That day started like any other. I was getting ready for work—half-dressed, rushing, coffee in hand. But something was different. My heart was pounding like it was trying to escape my chest. My throat tightened, my hands trembled, and suddenly, it felt like the walls were closing in. I couldn’t breathe. I sat down on the floor of my apartment in nothing but a towel, chest heaving, eyes wide, certain that I was dying. A heart attack, maybe. Something serious. Only it wasn’t. At least, not in the way I thought. A few hours later, after a rushed Uber ride and a long wait in urgent care, a doctor looked at me with calm eyes and said, “You had a panic attack.” I blinked at her. “But I’m not anxious,” I said. “I’m just… tired.” She smiled gently, but I hated that look. The one that says: you don’t know your own body as well as you think you do. Over the next few weeks, I tried to forget it happened. But my body wouldn’t let me. My appetite disappeared. I couldn’t sleep for more than a few hours at a time. I’d wake up sweating, heart racing, with no memory of a dream—just a deep sense of dread. The silence became deafening. And worst of all, I began to dread everything. Work, people, even texting friends back. I was retreating into myself. Still, I told myself: You’re just burned out. Overworked. Everyone gets like this sometimes. It wasn’t until I found myself crying on the kitchen floor at 2:00 a.m. over a dirty dish that I realized: This wasn’t normal. This wasn’t just stress. I started therapy a week later. And in the first session, after I explained everything, my therapist asked: “Has anything traumatic happened to you in the past few years?” I paused. “No. Not really. Nothing major.” She tilted her head. “Can you walk me through the past five years of your life?” So I did. I talked about the relationship I stayed in far too long. The one where I was constantly gaslit, made to feel small, invisible, never enough. The emotional manipulation, the quiet isolation from friends and family, the way he would punish me with silence or explode without warning. I talked about my job—the toxic environment, the boss who would scream behind closed doors but smile in meetings, the expectation to always say yes, to be available even on weekends, even when I was sick. I talked about how my dad died suddenly two years ago. How I never really cried. How I just… moved on, like I was supposed to. Like grief was something to tuck away neatly in a drawer. And when I was done, my therapist looked at me and said, “What you just described is trauma.” I stared at her like she had spoken another language. Trauma? No. That word didn’t belong to me. That word was reserved for people who had it worse. But as we unpacked everything, week after week, I began to see it. The pattern. The slow erosion of safety. The cumulative weight of everything I had convinced myself was “normal.” The way I had swallowed every pain, minimized every wound. Trauma doesn’t always scream. Sometimes, it whispers for years, until your body can’t hold it anymore. Sometimes, you don’t even know you’ve been holding your breath until your lungs are empty and you’re gasping for air. It’s been a year since that first panic attack. I wish I could say everything is fixed now. But healing is not a straight line. Some days I still wake up feeling like I’m bracing for impact. But I’m learning to recognize the signs—when my shoulders are too tight, when I stop answering messages, when my thoughts start spinning. I’ve learned to pause. To listen. To cry when I need to. To breathe. And maybe most importantly, I’ve learned to stop dismissing my pain just because it doesn’t look like someone else’s. If you’re reading this and you feel like you’re barely holding it together—if your heart races for no reason, if you’re exhausted but can’t sleep, if you find yourself snapping at people or going numb—you’re not just “being dramatic.” You’re not weak. You’re not broken. You might be carrying something heavy. Something you were never meant to carry alone. And maybe it’s time to finally set it down. Thank you for reading ❤️.
By Azmat Roman ✨about a year ago in Psyche
Crawling Back To You
More times than I can count, I've sat wondering who I truly was beneath all of the shame. I wondered if I was brilliant or if I was truly destined to remain in this child-like state of confusion. Walking the world wondering my purpose as I hide in the shadows of who I knew I wasn't, yet who I'd always been. I'd been dripping in a victimhood so carefully built by those around me who claimed that their love for me meant more than what society views love and friendship as today. I spent so much time in the comfort of being the victim that I hadn't paid any attention to the fact that while these people were building this victimhood, I was handing them the nails and hammer.
By The Darkest Sunriseabout a year ago in Psyche
