HeartBalm

Attachment Trauma and One-Sided Relationships: Breaking the Cycle of Giving Without Receiving

I’ve recently begun to see how long I’ve been living the dance of one-side relationships. Growing up with a narcissistic mother who needed and took everything from me and a father who couldn’t or wouldn’t see me, I learned early that my needs didn’t matter. I learned that love was conditional and transactional - that I had to overfunction constantly, be others’ emotional regulator, and give endlessly to earn love, belonging, safety, and to be seen at all.

I was a very lonely child and it’s funny but the first word that comes to my head is ‘starved.’ I felt starved of affection, starved of love and I felt that it wasn’t OK to ask for it.

_Carol Lee, To Die For

The most damaging thing wasn’t always punishment or anger - it was the withholding. Attention, love, validation, connection and so many other things withheld from an infant, a child, a growing girl as a way for a parent to manipulate, abuse, and control their own child. Withholding in a quiet, calculated way that teaches a child that nothing they do will ever be enough, that their presence isn’t safe or worthy of acknowledgment. It is one of the most insidious forms of abuse a parent can inflict. It shapes your nervous system, your expectations of others, and the way you move through every relationship for the rest of your life.

That pattern doesn’t leave when you leave childhood. It sneaks into adult relationships, into friendships, into work, into every space where your heart tries to connect and reach another. You give and give and give, waiting quietly for connection, for engagement, for care and reciprocity that may never come. You hold space for someone else’s feelings while yours pile up, ignored and unacknowledged, because your nervous system still thinks that staying small and giving (and over-giving) is the only way to survive.

This heartbreak is more than an imbalance. It keeps you hooked in to old scripts: Am I too much? Am I not enough? Did I do something wrong? For those of us with CPTSD, it’s terrifying to confront. Even the awareness of it feels heavy, scary - even mortally unsafe. But awareness is exactly where healing begins. Naming it, seeing the patterns playing out and how they have echoed through your life, and feeling the grief, acknowledging how your energy was always stretched to serve others’ needs first - that is the first step toward reclaiming yourself.

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Depatriarchy the Patriarchy: The System That Keeps CPTSD Alive

For a long time I’ve been very aware of the patriarchy and all the spaces and places where it lives and thrives. And the insidious little barbed threads it has woven methodically into our daily lives. It isn’t just in governments or corporations or religions. It’s in our kitchens, bedrooms, w…

When food, life, and the Earth herself call us to evolve

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

_Arundhati Roy, The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy

I don’t think any of us are exempt from the current shifts. People are feeling it in their own ways - the rising tension in the air, the unpredictability of weather, the constant birage of toxic news, the sense that life is both speeding up and breaking down. Some call it politics. Some call it chaos. But underneath it all is the same truth I feel in my own body: that change is here!

It’s a shift that is physical, emotional, and spiritual all at once. It’s a deep recalibration. Our bodies ache or reject what once felt familiar. Our hearts grieve or rage at old patterns that no longer fit, and intuitive guidance feels off and unreliable. For those of us living with CPTSD, this shift can feel even sharper - like the old survival patterns are breaking apart inside of us leaving us raw and uncertain.

Life with CPTSD is like braving white water rapids everyday. We try and find some ease and a comforable place to exist and hang on. Adding more to our plate of intense change, blatant injustices, unchecked power grabs and financial strain can feel like a bridge too far. It can feel unfathomable and another blow to a life already shaped by struggle and pain.

But Mother Earth shows us that even this unraveling and strain is part of evolution. She is saying it’s time for change - it’s time for a deep release and letting go.

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The Stupid Things People Say: When Survival Is the Only Victory They’ll Never See

The other morning, I woke up thinking about it again – something someone close to me had said about what I was eating and how it was “bad” for my metabolism. Except it wasn’t about eating too much or the wrong things. It was about eating enough at all. About navigating cycles of nausea, aversion, and finding creative ways to nourish myself when my body refuses. And for a moment, I felt that flicker of irritation, the dark ghost of old toxic shame – but then I laughed out loud. WTF! That ship of having a normal body and metabolism sailed at f’ing birth!

My body’s trajectory, my digestion, my metabolism, my ability to regulate, to sleep, to handle stress wasn’t something I chose yesterday. It was forged in childhood trauma, in survival instincts, in a system that learned to keep me alive at any cost. And year after year of chronic neglect, abuse, and trauma helped grow it into CPTSD. Eating or not eating for days wouldn’t have shifted my weight. My body – any body – only shifts when it feels safe.

Your body is not a problem to be solved. It’s a living, breathing story of survival.

Digestion isn’t just about food – it’s a conversation with your body. When your system is struggling, overstimulated, or unsafe, it can’t digest properly. So of course there’s aversion, nausea, cycles of refusal. It’s not a choice. It’s communication. And it’s not just about food. It’s about the ability to digest life, ideas, work, relationships – everything. When your body is on high alert, nothing passes through easily; everything becomes heavy, uncomfortable, or rejected.

So yes, my digestion has moods. My sleep is fragile. My nervous system jumps at shadows. And yet here I am. Still alive. Still moving through the world. Still making choices with a system that wasn’t built for ease. And anyone criticizing it can be grateful I survived at all! Because surviving wasn’t easy, and it came at a cost my critics and the ignorant will never understand.

To all of us carrying CPTSD, this is the rule, not the exception. People will say stupid things. They will comment on your body, your habits, your choices, as if any of it was ever simple, or any of their business. And when it comes from someone close, someone who’s supposed to see you, hear you, and empathize, it’s infuriating and unacceptable. And it hurts!

What we see on the surface is never the full story.

_Unknown

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When Family Wants You Small

The betrayal that burns in your own bloodline

This life is hard… I can’t pretend otherwise. And sometimes the hardest part isn’t the world out there, it’s the family you were born into.

I still can’t quite understand it, even after years of living it. The intense dread comes in like a heavy fog and covers me. It drags me down into grief, into tears, into old trauma and pain that is still alive in my body. And at the center of that fog is the ache of knowing that the people who were supposed to love me, protect me, and lift me up were the same ones who wanted me small, silent, and gone.

I know what it is to grow up as a girl, then a woman, in the madness of patriarchal America. I know the way it worms its way into your nervous system telling you from birth that your body is not yours, that your voice is too much, that your rage is unacceptable, that your brilliance must be dimmed. I know the way you learned to survive in homes where safety never came, in families where truth was punished, in a culture that reinforced silence and sacrifice as if those were noble virtues.

Complex PTSD is not just a diagnosis. It’s the lived reality of being forced into a world that trains women to betray themselves in order to stay alive - over and over again. That betrayal anchors itself into the body.

The hypervigilance born of years of being terrorized, harrassed, exploited, and carefully watching every eye watching you, and every hand reaching for you. It all births the fight flight freeze fawn cycles, adrenal exhaustion, digestive shutdown, and autoimmune flare-ups. It’s not weakness. It’s not overreacting. It is your body screaming the truth of every violation it had to endure.

And the hardest part. When women finally stop betraying themselves, when they reclaim their rage, their voice, their wildness, the world calls them broken or mad or wrong. But I see it differently. I don’t see broken - I see wholeness rising without apology. This is a time of burning off the fucking lies.

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.

_Gloria Steinem, The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off!: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Rebellion

That’s exactly it! The anger, the fury, the sacred raw rage that comes when you stop betraying yourself. It is not a flaw - it is freedom beginning to move through you and release you from chains.

The system we live in is built to suffocate and imprison those who want to live free. Patriarchy and capitalism thrive on keeping women overworked, underpaid, depleted, and too tired to resist. They pit communities against each other so no one remembers their collective strength. They strip nature for profit and strip women of safety, autonomy, and dignity. That dread I am feeling today, and what you may feel at times is not just personal - it is collective. You and I are carrying the grief of a whole culture. That’s why it feels like an abyss.

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Grief IS the Way Through: Why Grief Isn’t the End... It’s the Beginning

The word grief feels elusive, even frightening, so we push it away and tell ourselves we’ll deal with it later. In moments of loss, betrayal, or endings - whether it’s patterns, relationships, or habits - it can feel easier to resist and distract than to grieve.

But once you grieve and understand its healing process, you begin to understand that it is a necessary process of life. Grief, at its core, is allowing the tears. It’s feeling the pain, acknowledging what has been lost or changed. It’s letting the waves come and break you open - not shatter you, but open you for expansion, for release of what no longer needs to be held, fed, or fought so hard against. It takes alot of energy to not grieve and try to ignore this necessary process of humanity.

What I’ve seen, again and again, is that when people don’t grieve, they build barricades instead. Flesh armor. Food. Compulsions. Hoarded closets and calendars so packed there’s no silence left anywhere. They pad themselves against the void, terrified that if they fall into it, they’ll never come back.

But for those of us with CPTSD, grief is already there. We grew up swimming in it. We carried it silently, forbidden to show it, punished if we cried, told we were too much, too dramatic, too needy. Our bodies became the storage unit for unwept tears. Our nervous systems became graveyards, holding the grief that had nowhere else to go.

When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and re-arises in us as symptoms.

_Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow

So when we finally let ourselves grieve… when we sob, when we shake, when we let the grief split us open… we are breaking the original curse. We are saying, I will no longer carry your silence. I will no longer armor myself just to survive.

Grief is not the end of us. Grief is the thing that keeps us alive.

I have friends who refuse to grieve - their parents, their dog, their losses. They stay frozen in the past, circling it as if it happened yesterday. The pain doesn’t integrate. It calcifies. And it shows up in all the ways they try to control their world: in weight that keeps them armored, in horrible men they cling to, in noise they drown in, in closets and rooms filled with unnecessary stuff, in endless chatter that fills the space where grief should live.

And it’s not just personal. Our collective refusal to grieve is showing up everywhere in society. Unmetabolized grief becomes rage, addiction, numbness, division. We see it in the way people hoard, consume, and distract themselves endlessly. We see it in wars, in systemic injustice, in the destruction of the earth itself. Cultures that cannot grieve repeat their traumas generation after generation, because the grief that could bring wisdom and integration is missing. If you want to understand why society feels like it’s collapsing, look to the grief that no one is letting themselves feel. Grief is not weakness. Grief is the medicine that could make us whole again.

Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. There is no love that does not contain loss.

_Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow

It’s heartbreaking to watch, because I know what it costs. To refuse grief is to refuse life. To keep holding it in is to keep reliving trauma… the very thing that CPTSD survivors already know too well.

I wrote more about the healing power of grief in a past piece, which you can read here:

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The Tyranny of Narcissism: Surviving Personal and National Trauma - (REPOST The Friday Edition | No. 47)

Dying to Everything That Comes: A Personal Practice of Surrender and Freedom

I have a practice of turning toward the scary things in life and surrendering to them. It has been a harsh practice at times, but with the world becoming more chaotic, it feels like the only option left.

I know it’s not just me. The world feels like it’s all too much. It’s overwhelming, chaotic, and gut-wrenching. Like a freight train headed for oblivion. Everywhere we turn, people are consumed by hatred and division, and it’s hard to know who to trust or where to turn. So many of us end up alone with our fears, worries, and unrelenting pain, feeling like we have no one to talk to. But it’s in this darkness that we find true liberation.

The answers we’re looking for won’t come from out there. They never will. They’re already inside of us. But before we can even begin to find them, we have to meet ourselves with awareness and self-love. We have to understand the wholeness of who we truly are and stop looking outside for validation. Don’t waste another moment thinking someone else can fix this for you. The only one who can show you the way is YOU.

Come home to yourself, and start the journey.

I know how hard this can be. Life, in its full rawness, can feel unbearable. The weight of the world presses in, our minds spiral with anxiety, fear, and overwhelming emotions. In those times, it can feel as though we are at the mercy of everything, and there is no way forward. I’ve been there. I’ve lived through deep family trauma, CPTSD, and emotional overload, and there were moments when the pain seemed endless. But it was in those moments of suffering that I found a practice to break free - not just from the pain but from the relentless fear and resistance to it.

This practice, which I call "dying to everything that comes," is something I created from my own experience living with CPTSD. It is my way of surrendering to what is, no matter how painful, no matter how unbearable. It is a practice of radical acceptance. I don’t mean a passive acceptance where you simply give in to the pain and let it defeat you. No. This is the radical act of active surrender - dying to the pain, to the anxiety, to the fear, to overwhelming emotions. It’s not about trying to control or change the situation, but about letting go of the resistance that keeps us stuck.

In my practice, when the chaos, pain, fear, anger or overwhelm rises within me, threatening to sink me, I say: "Fine, have me, take me, consume me. I die to all of it." It’s a bold, brazen declaration to stop resisting. It’s like facing a bully who’s been terrorizing you for too long. At first, you resist, but eventually, you get so fed up that you look at the bully, and say “Fine - let’s dance mother f***er!” But the bully never follows through - it shrinks and dissolves into nothingness because it was never about the pain - it was about control and fear, and keeping you stuck.

When you turn towards the sensation of fear and feel it fully, you realize that it is not something outside you but a part of your experience. It is not an enemy to be defeated, but simply a sensation that passes when we stop resisting it.

_Rupert Spira, The Transparency of Things

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A Tale of Two Selves: The Silent Struggle of CPTSD

You may often feel like there’s a quiet war inside you, and you may be the only one who knows it. You live with two selves - one that is breaking, hollowed out by the weight of trauma and pain, and the other that’s fighting to keep going, to keep showing up when all you want to do is fall apart.

I know that feeling well. There's a part of me, too, that feels like it’s on the edge most days. It’s the part that is worn out by years of surviving, by always holding it together when the inside feels like it’s cracking open. That part whispers, I can't do this anymore.

It aches and weeps with exhaustion, with memories that don’t leave, with triggers that never relent, with a life and a world that doesn’t seem to care.

And then, there’s the other part - the professional part, the part that says, I have to keep going. I have to get through this. I can’t let anyone see the truth. This side of you keeps the mask up, keeps showing up for work, for your responsibilities, pretending that everything is fine, even though you’re anything but.

I know what it feels like to wear that mask. It’s brutal to have to hold these two versions of yourself in the same space, pretending to be one thing while something else is unraveling quietly beneath the surface.

You are not a broken thing. You are a woman in need of healing.

_Samantha King, Born to Love, Cursed to Feel

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From Lifeline to Lightline: Heartbalm and what healing looks like now

When I started writing HeartBalm, it was another way to find healing - and how I kept breathing. It was my lifeline. Like a rope I threw to myself in the dark. A steady anchor in the chaos of my life that held me constant, when I felt like my life was falling apart.

But it wasn’t just for me. I was writing to reach others, too - those still in the dark,
those still holding their breath, those trying to survive what no one believed was real.

I wanted to offer a knowledgebase for the under-served - to offer my years of research, study, spiritual work, and energy training. I wanted to reach out to those that felt dismissed, unheard, gaslit. The ones waking up in the aftermath of trauma, and wondering what the hell was going on, and if healing was even possible.

HeartBalm became a hand reaching back into the darkness. Not to save everyone,
but to say: You are not alone.

And I’m so proud of that. Of how I showed up again and again when everything in me wanted to disappear. Even when I didn’t trust that something - or someone - would not come along, as it always had, to blow it all up.

I wasn’t writing for metrics or praise - I was writing to stay alive and to light a path for those still walking through fire.

But something has shifted. Something in me has awakened, and has been liberated from what I once thought I would never be free of.

What was once a survival tether… is now becoming something lighter.

Not a lifeline anymore - but a lightline. A thread of clarity. A breath of truth.
A way of sharing that doesn’t drain me, but honors where I am now - free and unstuck from the old tethers to pain, dysfunction, and the people and places where it all began.

For so long, I thought I needed to be rescued. But what I really needed… was to be seen. To those of you who have truly seen me through these words, thank you. You gave me more than you know.

She never needed to be saved. She only needed to be seen.

_r.h. Sin, Rest in the Mourning

If you’ve been here with me through the darkest chapters, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your hands to hold and your heart balm. And if you’ve just arrived, welcome. HeartBalm may speak less often now, but when it does, it will come from a place of soul sovereignty - not survival.

And for the first time… that feels exactly right - like a long-awaited exhale in my mind, body, and soul.

To read or explore more please reference this publications resource list:

• r.h. Sin, Rest in the Mourning

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