HeartBalm

When You Speak and No One Is Listening. What happens when truth has no power.

I was on the trail today, gnashing my teeth about another crappy landlord, and then I suddenly saw what was actually happening.

Side note: this happens a lot when I’m on the trail. My body moving, eyes taking in the scenery, hands touching bark and grasses, music playing, and then a quiet stream of consciousness comes winding into the quiet space within me that isn’t occupied and tied up with activity to share big truths and ah–ha moments. The power of walking/hiking meditations!

Back to the landlord… I asked questions about the ongoing noise from downstairs tenants, and I was dismissed, not heard, and my experience was barely acknowledged. The tenant’s downstairs were obviously being prioritized and the landlord was showing their loyalty and preference pretty clearly. Those tenants are permanent. I’m a temporary renter in their furnished place for a few months while they go off to their second home in a warmer climate for the winter. Of course, the permanent tenants matter more. Of course, they’re favored. Of course, the landlords will be loyal to the people who pay their bills and keep things stable. How silly of me to think I mattered - even while paying them a hefty rent.

And that’s when it hit me – this isn’t just about landlords – this is about power.

I could see how often in my life I was not the priority because I didn’t hold it. Because I didn’t have enough money. Or the right position. Or the status. Or the protection. And how even when what I said was true, and clearly painful, and mattered deeply to me, it didn’t mean I would be listened to, believed, or acknowledged.

Truth alone was never enough. I see that clearly now.

I’ve spoken out about being sexually harassed by a college professor, and the school prioritized the professor. I’ve spoken out about being groomed for years by a man who was a neighbor and family friend, who later sexually assaulted me – and my parents did nothing. He was still allowed in our home. Around me. Because they cared more about him and their connection to his family, and about their friendship, and about what the neighbors would think if the truth got out.

So I learned early what happens when you tell the truth without power. You learn that safety is conditional. That belief is selective. That silence is rewarded.

It’s why I can see all the women and girls who have spoken out – and still no one cares. Or some pretend to care, or they say the right words while continuing to protect the system.

This woman landlord calls herself a liberal, progressive, staunchly advocating for truth with picket signs. She talks about protesting and speaking out. And yet she behaves exactly like the system she claims to oppose. Loyal to the hierarchy. Loyal to comfort and preserving societal norms. Loyal to patriarchy. Not loyal to truth. She is the problem and thinks she’s doing good work.

» This is why we have years of faceless, voiceless victims, and the Epstein files.

» This is why a convicted felon and rapist can hold office.

» This is why abuse is normalized and victims are told to calm down, shut up, soften their language, and stop being so angry and emotional.

People are more loyal to the status quo, protecting their comfort zones, and keeping men safe and not held accountable, than they are to truth, love, humanity, and what’s right.

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Expanding With Grief and Gratitude: A Balancing Act of Maturity

NOTE: These past few months have been a lot for me, and I’m honoring the need for rest and recovery. Recording, editing, and publishing a podcast episode takes…

Whitewashed Tombs: What We’ve Been Living Inside and Seeing Through

Twice in one day, I heard a phrase I had never heard before: whitewashed tomb. It didn’t feel mystical or ominous, it felt weird and strangely precise, and an invitation to look further. I stopped everything I was doing to look it up and see what it meant after the first time I heard it. I pondered it and moved on. Then I heard it again later in the day and thought wow - there might be something to this. It was like language was arriving for something I had already been living inside of but had no words for it.

A whitewashed tomb refers to something that appears clean, respectable, and righteous on the outside while inside it is hollow, decaying, or dead. It names the disconnect between presentation and reality, between what is displayed publicly - the fake facade - and what is actually happening beneath the surface. It is a harsh phrase because it points to a harsh truth, one that many would rather not look at too closely.

For trauma survivors, this is not an abstract idea; it is very familiar terrain. Many of us grew up with families that functioned exactly this way. From the outside, everything looked fine, prefectly curated, and often even admirable. The facade of good parents, good values, a solid reputation - but inside, there was neglect, control, emotional manipulation, systemic abuse, silence, or harm that could never be spoken. The appearance of the family mattered more than the reality of the child. Maintaining the surface became the highest priority. A normalized tribal agenda of whitewashing the exterior so that noone would ever question the toxic decay or annihilating dysfunction within.

Living in an environment like that teaches you early that truth is tenuous and dangerous, and that appearances are the currency used to keep the facade in place, and ultimately what matters most. You learn very early to read energy instead of words, a survival skill born of constant cognitive dissonance, where what is said publicly and what happens privately are two entirely different realities. You learn that naming what feels wrong will not bring relief but punishment, and that keeping quiet is often the cost of belonging.

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

_Adrienne Rich, Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying

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Permission to Exist: Disrupting Survival Adaptations

As an adult, it can be difficult to look back at childhood or longstanding traumatic situations and understand all that transpired - not just what happened, but how your nervous system adapted in order to survive. It can be startling to be flung into flashbacks later in life that feel less like memories and more like being dropped into “a confusing mosaic of multi-layered events, scattered along our timeline from the nonverbal stage of life to the adult now.” When that happens, time collapses. The body doesn’t register what happened as history - it registers it as real, now.

For many trauma survivors, one of the strongest adaptations made in those early environments was learning that existence itself required permission. Being seen, heard, or taking up space often came with consequences. So, the nervous system learned to monitor, minimize, scan, and stay quiet. Safety wasn’t found in presence, but in disappearing. That adaptation made sense at the time. It worked, and it often remains in place and on automatic, long after the danger has passed.

That distinction is important to note because when dysregulation shows up, it is not a failure of insight or understanding - it is a signpost showing where the nervous system is still on duty. Survival mode takes over and everything becomes something to be understood, explained, fixed, figured out, anticipated, and controlled. The mind moves forward in time because that strategy once increased safety. But the body is not living in the future as something to survive - the body is living now.

Trauma is not stored as a story, but as an experience in the body.

_Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

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Anatomy of a Breakthrough Disguised as a Breakdown

A terrifyingly real and raw event happened to me recently, one I thought was a full nervous breakdown – a feeling of losing my grip on everything. But what I was actually living through was the anatomy of a breakthrough, the kind that looks like destruction from the inside out because it rearranges everything you thought you understood about yourself. It came disguised as overwhelm, grief, panic, and deep despair. But underneath it was something else entirely. Something clean, sharp, and true, and something I didn’t know I was ready for or could survive until it pulled me into its center and ripped me open.

The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door.

_Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

To my amazement, ground zero of this shattering experience started with a cat. A traumatized cat named Hazel who has been living in a shelter cage for two years. My friend, a dog person – not a cat person – adopted her and asked me to watch her while she was out of town for a couple of days. Then within a week she asked me to watch her again while she left for an extended holiday trip over a period of six days, and I agreed. What I didn’t expect was that Hazel would become a mirror – a living image of the terrified child in me I had never fully seen. Her wide, dilated eyes, her frozen body, her hiding in the darkest corners and spaces of the house. Her inability to trust safety even when it was right in front of her. It makes me cry just thinking about it now. Her fear was so familiar it hurt. It hurt in a way that shot right through the adult me and pierced the deeper part of me – the part I have survived by never letting myself look directly at it because I didn’t know how to hold it or perceive it.

The essence of trauma is disconnection from ourselves. Healing is the reconnection to self.

_Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Then my friend asked me, on the heels of being gone twice in a short amount time, to watch her cat again while she went away for another six days. I was already unraveling but that request broke me. The trigger wasn’t just Hazel. It was my friend’s unconsciousness and obliviousness. Her inability to see Hazel’s terror and pain for what it was – brushing it off as something the cat would simply get over – echoed something too close to my own history. It was like watching the original wound reenacted in front of me: a terrified small being and the adults around her too self-focused, too distracted, too emotionally unskilled and immature to even register her fear and panic. It’s the dismissiveness, the denial, the casual cruelty of not seeing what is right in front of you. I have lived a lifetime inside that.

I was already overtired, and not feeling at my best. Run down by doing too much, noisy neighbors, and overwhelm. So maybe it was inevitable that the final straw of seeing Hazel and watching her new guardian and carer ignore and dismiss her by leaving her alone again to survive in her frozen state – was the thing that finally broke me. My body went into overload. Shaking and crying uncontrollably. A pressure in my chest so intense I could barely breathe. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t even trust my own decisions. I kept thinking I was falling into a black hole with no bottom, but the truth is I wasn’t breaking – I was being shown what had been frozen in me for decades. The Hazel inside me. The part who learned to hide in plain sight. The one who lived her entire childhood vigilant, terrified, eyes wide open in the dark, trying to scan the environment for danger, trying to anticipate the next blow. The part who survived by separating from herself and presenting the functioning version of me to the world while the rest of me lived in the shadows.

It’s not a matter of letting go - you would if you could. Instead, we let it be. And in letting it be, it begins to let go of us.

_Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

Watching Hazel felt like seeing myself from the outside for the first time. Not just feeling the fear, but witnessing it. Witnessing the whole ecosystem of trauma from every fucking horrifying angle: the frozen, traumatized one, the adult who should know better but doesn’t, the silent scream of helplessness, the moral injury of seeing innocence harmed and ignored. I stood inside all of it and outside of all of it at the same time. That is what cracked me open. That is what shook me to my core.

This experience followed the same reorganization I described in my recent Friday Edition, Trauma Physics > Quantum Physics – the collapse into the particle-state, the rupture, and then the quantum moment when the observer comes forward and the system unravels and reforms anew – simply because it’s finally being seen.

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Trauma Physics > Quantum Physics

Why the world felt real, why oneness felt impossible, and how trauma collapses reality

I have been studying topics like quantum theory for decades. So much so that I was given the nickname quantumgirl. It was, as a trauma survivor one of the many avenues I have gone down to try and find healing, understanding, and relief. It has stayed with me as a point of interest, and I’ve just begun to look at it again to understand its implications for a survivor of childhood trauma, and years of adult trauma.

For years, it has felt like there has been a strange split within me, whether I was aware of it or not. On one side, there’s this part of me that has lived through brutality, neglect, sexism and misogyny, unchecked narcissism, and varying degrees and kinds of danger. It is the part that says: this world is real, this pain is real, everything hurts because everything can hurt me. And on the other side, the part that studied quantum physics, non-duality, and Native American wisdom, and even felt deep oneness with the silence of nature, there’s this deep intuitive knowing that the world is fluid, interconnected, illusion-like, made of something softer and more expansive than the nightmare I grew up inside. Those two truths never lined up - until now.

What I understand now more than ever is there is a bridge that can bring these sides together… the understanding that if something can hurt you, your nervous system concludes it must be real.

Pain collapses the world into a single, solid form. Pain becomes the observer that freezes possibility into the only version of reality you are allowed to experience.

Experience is always colored by the state of the body and mind through which it is filtered.

_Rupert Spira, The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience

In quantum physics, everything exists in a field of infinite potential. A wave of maybes. A shimmering expanse of all possible outcomes until something measures it, observes it, or something looks at it. This is the wave to particle, and particle to wave experience of quantum theory. That act of observation collapses the wave into one particular state. The collapse isn’t dramatic; it’s simply the moment a system takes shape. And in human development… as I’m understanding now, the “observer” that collapses reality is the nervous system. I was never the observer it was my nervous system – the first responder and protector for a child in an abusive, dysfunctional, toxic home. A child doesn’t work with probabilities or philosophy – a child works with sensation, and nothing in the universe sharpens sensation like pain.

The act of observation changes the observed.

_Niels Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge

When a child grows up in a hostile home with a narcissistic parent, an explosive parent, or an absent parent, and in a chaotic environment where the emotional weather changes without warning, their nervous system isn’t operating in the quantum field - it’s operating inside threat! Every scream, every silent treatment, every emotional abandonment, every dark look of disgust, anger or hatred, every unpredictable shift becomes a measurement. The pain forces coherence. And the child’s entire reality collapses into one conclusion: The world is dangerous. I must stay small, stay watchful and vigilant, and stay ready. This is what life is.

There is no room for possibility in that kind of world. No internal expansiveness. No field of maybes. Just the single fixed outcome of danger-as-truth. Our identity is then fused with the pain and the danger. This collapse becomes the self, hypervigilance becomes personality, distrust becomes intelligence, bracing becomes instinct, and trauma becomes the architecture of reality.

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Sips of Love and Care: Small Rituals for Big Healing

Self-care is not selfish. You cannot serve from an empty vessel.

_Eleanor Brownn, Mile 9

It happens again. You wake up in the early hours, somewhere between 2:30 and 5:30 AM, staring at the ceiling, wondering why. There’s no loud noise, no nightmare, no obvious cause, just your body alert and restless, as if it’s waiting for something.

You can hear the blood rushing in your ears, pulsing rapidly - a reminder that your heart is racing, even though there’s no real reason for it. You try shifting positions, closing your eyes, willing yourself back to sleep, but it doesn’t come. The more you chase it, the more awake you feel. And so you lie there, caught in the strange, empty space between exhaustion and awareness, wondering if this will be yet another day that starts in the dark.

If you have ever experienced this repeated and unwelcome early morning wake up call - you know how frustrating it can be. And, if you’ve lived with CPTSD, you’ve likely felt the cumulative weight of these nights - when your nervous system comes online letting you know it’s still standing guard. A nervous system locked in chronic high alert isn’t just inconvenient, it’s exhausting on every level.

Sleep is a time when the body repairs itself, when the mind integrates and processes, when everything gets a chance to recover and reset. But for those of us with CPTSD, sleep often feels like an untrustworthy visitor - coming and going as it pleases, leaving us depleted and on edge.

The body, conditioned to expect threat, doesn’t fully power down. Instead, it hovers in a half-state, caught between hyper-vigilance and exhaustion, scanning for dangers that no longer exist but still feel real. Over time, the cost of this adds up in the form of hormonal imbalances, adrenal fatigue and burnout, systemic inflammation, brain fog, and an emotional landscape that feels frayed and fragile.

For a long time, I was frustrated… and getting angry. It pushed me into a new kind of survival mode. The kind where lack of sleep breeds desperation and a strong-arm approach. I thought I had to fix these early morning wakeups because they felt like more proof of my brokenness.

Many with CPTSD deal with a nervous system that does not live by a clock, or adhere to commitments and schedules. It can feel like a endless and futile battle with ourselves. But what if we simplified our approach and softened to it instead?

What if, instead of fighting against it, we offered ourselves small acts of love, tiny sips of care that remind the body: you are safe, you are held, you are worthy of attention and care, you are not alone.

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Why Those on Healing and Spiritual Paths Hurt More Than Others: Surviving All That Tried to Kill Us

People don’t talk enough about how painful the healing path, or the spiritual path really is, especially for trauma survivors. It’s not just uncomfortable, it often feels gutting. And it’s not something most people will ever understand, nor do most (as I have found) want to.

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.

_Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

For those of us with trauma, the illusion of life, or the way most people live inside a dream of “normal,” broke very early on. We saw behind the curtain long before we were ready. We learned that love could vanish in a heartbeat, that safety was not real, that the people who were supposed to protect us were often the ones who hurt us deeply and at a core level.

That kind of early betrayal does something horribly profound. It shatters the ordinary dream of life - the one built on material success, consumer comfort, and the capitalist patriarchal illusion that happiness can be earned, bought, stolen, hussled for, or achieved. The world trains people to believe that if they just make enough money, find the right partner, build the perfect home, or gain a certain status, they’ll finally arrive - they’ll finally be happy. But for those of us who have seen how hollow, transactional, and gross that system is, the search or chase stops working. The fantasy collapses and it’s realized that the illusion is paper thin. Yet, it still doesn’t compute in many ways because the masses are still looking outward for what they believe is “real” and as our trauma is dismissed, negated, or exacerbated it seems more painful to believe that we are on the right path at all.

I’ve been on a spiritual journey for years, and alongside it, a slow, relentless healing journey. Yet for the longest time, I didn’t believe that as a trauma survivor, I could ever truly awaken or be free. Every trigger, every unresolved wound, every toxic family connection felt like a chain keeping me handcuffed to the collective zombiehood of ignorance and denial. I watched the world chase its illusions - the same illusions I’d been forced to see through too early, and wondered if freedom was even possible for someone like me. It felt like walking in two directions at once -pushing inward toward truth while being pulled outward by patterns and pressures that were almost impossible to escape. And still, even in the moments of impenetrable darkness and despair, even when the illusions seemed undefeatable, something within kept nudging me forward, toward a realness that had always been beneath it all, waiting for me to notice.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

_Marcel Proust, The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time

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I’m Not Stronger Than You: I Just Stopped Abandoning Myself

A woman wrote to me recently after reading something I shared about having a jealous, narcissistic mother (link below). She told me she loved it, but that she could never be as strong as me. Her words didn’t hit me as admiration they landed with deep sorrow. The hidden belief that whatever strength or fire she sees in me is something she wasn’t born with broke my heart, because I know that belief - I have lived there, too.

I want to be clear here and stress that I am not stronger than you. I am not made of something different. I didn’t get here because I had more courage or ferocity or willpower. I got here because pain cornered me until there was no other way to move, exist, or breathe. I didn’t start roaring because I was bold. I started roaring because disappearing again, and being held hostage by pain, fear, rage… all of it felt like death.

I still fall into the victim story. I still hate it when I feel myself circling the drain of it. The only difference is my anger eventually rises and refuses to let me stay in victimhood. Not because I’m above it - but because something in me has decided that returning to that cage costs more than the risk of speaking out and living authentically and unapologetically.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

_Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin

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When Your Body Isn’t the Enemy: How Separating “Me” from My Pain Changed Everything

A simple shift in language that lowers stress, calms inflammation, and helps the nervous system heal

There’s a quiet kind of liberation that happens when you stop saying “I am exhausted” and instead say “My body is exhausted,” or “My nervous system is overwhelmed right now.” It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s one of the most loving and intelligent forms of healing we have access to, especially for those of us living with chronic stress, trauma history, illness, or a kind of burnout we can’t quite shake or explain away.

Just this morning, my first morning back from an intense week-long trip, I immediately felt the ache and heaviness in my body. There was that familiar metal taste on my tongue, the taste of cortisol and detox beginning to move through me. And then I heard it, without effort or analysis: “My body is feeling very tired and sore,” and “My nervous system has been through a lot and it needs rest and care.” I know this language, I’ve studied it in my non-duality practice, but to have it come through automatically this morning while feeling so exhausted and drained felt beautiful, and loving. It stopped me in my tracks and instead of beating myself up for how weak my body and nervous system were - I saw them with compassion, and with that capacity saw what I needed to do to support myself. It showed me how much my inner system and awareness of my entire being has shifted, and how I can support this body and nervous system in return, instead of collapsing into them as my identity.

Most of us were never taught to separate who we are from what our bodies are carrying. We fuse our identity to pain, anxiety, symptoms, old coping patterns, and call it “me.” That identity fusion, creates even more pressure on a system that is already in survival mode. When you are fused with the body or the nervous system, you don’t just feel tired, you become the tiredness. You don’t just experience anxiety - you are the anxiety. And when that happens, there’s no space left to care for what’s hurting, because you are stuck inside it.

The body is only a thought. Do not give it the power to define who you are.

_Ramana Maharshi, Who Am I?

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