Louder Than Silence Podcast

This episode is part of the series From Survivor to Leader, where the LTS staff have discussions about all things LTS and what it means to be leading the work in long-term care for survivors of sexual violence. It’s a mix of our own personal experiences, the work our team does, and how those two things impact each other. Our hope is that survivors feel seen and validated and supporters gain a deeper understanding of what this healing process looks like.

Over the past few months, we’ve been having conversations about burnout, codependency, and overfunctioning. If you missed any of those episodes, I highly recommend going back to check them out. 

As we were having those conversations, it became clear that so much of what we were talking about was rooted in our expectations. We all have assumptions about how life “should” look and what “normal” is, and many of these concepts are challenged as we take steps forward in our healing. 

This goes hand and hand with coming to terms with how sexual violence has impacted our lives. Sometimes it means delaying what we want to achieve. Sometimes, it means that we never achieve what we want to. 

Today, we are untangling our expectations and what our understanding of achievement is at this point in our journeys. 

If you want to find more information or support our work, visit us at louderthansilence.org

September 2026 audio newsletter

Louder Than Silence is a nonprofit organization that provides long-term and trauma-specific care to survivors of sexual violence.

For more information or to donate, visit us at www.louderthansilence.org

August 2026 audio newsletter

Louder Than Silence is a nonprofit organization that provides long-term and trauma-specific care to survivors of sexual violence.

For more information or to donate, visit us at ⁠louderthansilence.org

This episode is part of the series From Survivor to Leader, where the LTS staff have discussions about all things LTS and what it means to be leading the work in long-term care for survivors of sexual violence. It’s a mix of our own personal experiences, the work our team does, and how those two things impact each other. Our hope is that survivors feel seen and validated and supporters gain a deeper understanding of what this healing process looks like.

Two months ago, we had a conversation about overfunctioning and how it’s manifested in our lives. Last month, we followed that up with discussing the connection between overfunctioning, codependency, and burnout.

Today, we wanted to close out this conversation by exploring what it means to recover from burnout but also what it means to recover from the damage of trauma. We decided to weave these two together a little bit in this context, since many survivors have to unlearn a lot of messages around needing rest being bad or negative in some way. So, that’s where our conversation is taking us today, we’re taking a practical look at recovery.

If you want to find more information or support our work, visit us at ⁠https://www.louderthansilence.org/

July 2026 audio newsletter

Louder Than Silence is a nonprofit organization that provides long-term and trauma-specific care to survivors of sexual violence.

For more information or to donate, visit us at louderthansilence.org

This episode is part of the series From Survivor to Leader, where the LTS staff have discussions about all things LTS and what it means to be leading the work in long-term care for survivors of sexual violence. It’s a mix of our own personal experiences, the work our team does, and how those two things impact each other. Our hope is that survivors feel seen and validated and supporters gain a deeper understanding of what this healing process looks like.

Last month, we introduced the concept of over-functioning and how we’ve each seen it show up in our own lives. In having the conversation, we realized that there are so many interwoven pieces connected to over-functioning.

So, today, we are having part two of the conversation about over-functioning, specifically talking about the connection with both codependence and burnout. It’s all one big, vicious cycle. Each of these is deeply connected to the others, and understanding the knot is the first step to beginning to untangle it.

If you want to find more information or support our work, visit us at ⁠louderthansilence.org

June 2026 audio newsletter

Louder Than Silence is a nonprofit organization that provides long-term and trauma-specific care to survivors of sexual violence.

For more information or to donate, visit us at ⁠louderthansilence.org

This episode is part of the series From Survivor to Leader, where the LTS staff have discussions about all things LTS and what it means to be leading the work in long-term care for survivors of sexual violence. It’s a mix of our own personal experiences, the work our team does, and how those two things impact each other. Our hope is that survivors feel seen and validated and supporters gain a deeper understanding of what this healing process looks like. Our episode today is Addressing Over-functioning.For those of you who have never heard the term over-functioning, it means when we take on responsibilities for or on behalf of another person who is able to do it for themselves. Over-functioning often manifests with survivors of sexual violence because it can be a form of coping mechanism based on the idea that managing everything perfectly will help us feel safe and stable. Or, it can be a learned behavior from a controlling and abusive relationship that teaches us that we are responsible for another person’s wellbeing. So, this is the root concept of what we are discussing today–how we have over-functioned in the past and what we are doing to undo that automatic behavior in our lives.If you want to find more information or support our work, visit us at ⁠https://www.louderthansilence.org/

This episode is part of the series From Survivor to Leader, where the LTS staff have discussions about all things LTS and what it means to be leading the work in long-term care for survivors of sexual violence. It’s a mix of our own personal experiences, the work our team does, and how those two things impact each other. Our hope is that survivors feel seen and validated and supporters gain a deeper understanding of what this healing process looks like.

Our episode today is Defining What Matters.

In our work as survivors and as people, it’s important to understand what our values are. Our values indicate how we make decisions and what we prioritize. It takes time and introspection to navigate what it is that we come back to time and time again. This is the process that we recently went through with LTS, working alongside community members, to define what alignment in our work means.

If you want to find more information or support our work, visit us at ⁠https://www.louderthansilence.org/

May 2026 audio newsletter

Louder Than Silence is a nonprofit organization that provides long-term and trauma-specific care to survivors of sexual violence.

For more information or to donate, visit us at louderthansilence.org