In today's episode, I'm sitting down with Libby Ward, creator, speaker, and author of Honest Motherhood: On Losing My Mind and Finding Myself, to talk about what it really looks like to wake up mid-motherhood and realize you never actually knew yourself to begin with. Not because motherhood took you away from yourself, but because trauma did that long before your kids ever showed up.

We talk about the overfunctioning, the perfectionism, the hypervigilance disgused up as "being a good mom," and the moment Libby hit a wall in her car on an ordinary morning that changed everything. 

We also get into repair, the grief that comes with cycle breaking, and why loving your kids, while beautiful, is not actually enough on its own.

This one is raw, honest, and so worth your time.

In this episode we cover:

• How Libby recognized her childhood trauma well into motherhood
• The nervous system reality behind why "just calm down" isn't a real option
• Overfunctioning and perfectionism as trauma responses
• The granola bar moment (you will feel this one)
• What cycle breaking actually looks like on a regular Tuesday
• The grief of knowing better and still struggling
• Why repair might be the most powerful thing you can offer your kids
• Libby's book Honest Motherhood and what's inside the pre-order bonus

Links and resources:

Libby's website: https://libbyward.com/ 

Pre-order Honest Motherhood: On Losing My Mind and Finding Myself at https://libbyward.com/honest-motherhood-book

Follow Libby on Instagram

Follow Libby on TikTok

Thanks for listening to The Complex Trauma Podcast!

Be sure to follow, share and give us a review on your favorite podcast platform.

Follow on Instagram: @sarahherstichlcsw 

Follow on TikTok: @sarahherstichlcsw

Learn more about EMDR & trauma therapy in Pennsylvania with Reclaim Therapy

This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended as a substitute for professional medical, psychological, or nutritional advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Remember, I'm a therapist, but I'm not your therapist. Nothing in this podcast is meant to replace actual therapy or treatment. If you're in crisis or things feel really unsafe right now, please reach out to someone. You can call 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, text them, or head to your nearest ER.

The views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent the opinions of any organizations or institutions. Reliance on any information provided by this podcast is solely at your own risk.

You might not call it shame. But if you were emotionally neglected, there's a chance it's been running the show.

Most people who grew up emotionally neglected don't have a name for what they carry. They just know that asking for help feels wrong, that they can't stop replaying conversations, that being seen makes them want to disappear.

This episode is about why that story forms, where it lives in the body, and why it's so hard to recognize as shame at all.

I break down the difference between shame from overt trauma and the kind that grows from absence, why a child's nervous system is wired to turn unmet needs into self-blame, and what it actually looks like to start healing something you can't even point to.

In this episode:

• Why emotional neglect is described as an invisible injury
• How shame forms as a survival strategy to preserve attachment
• The version of freeze that looks like high-functioning
• Why self-awareness can sometimes be shame in disguise
• What it means that your nervous system never built a map for settled
• The grief of growing up in an environment that couldn't hold all of you
• What healing actually looks like when insight alone isn't enough

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Thanks for listening to The Complex Trauma Podcast!

Be sure to follow, share and give us a review on your favorite podcast platform.

Follow on Instagram: @sarahherstichlcsw 

Follow on TikTok: @sarahherstichlcsw

Learn more about EMDR & trauma therapy in Pennsylvania with Reclaim Therapy

This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended as a substitute for professional medical, psychological, or nutritional advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Remember, I'm a therapist, but I'm not your therapist. Nothing in this podcast is meant to replace actual therapy or treatment. If you're in crisis or things feel really unsafe right now, please reach out to someone. You can call 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, text them, or head to your nearest ER.

The views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent the opinions of any organizations or institutions. Reliance on any information provided by this podcast is solely at your own risk.

Sex and complex trauma. It's one of those topics that doesn't get nearly enough airtime, and yet it comes up so frequently in the therapy room.

In this episode I'm talking with Rachael Garner, a certified sex therapist and EMDR clinician who works with complex trauma survivors, about what actually happens to our relationship with sex, desire, and our bodies when we've experienced complex trauma. And there is a lot more nuance here than most people realize.

We talk about why dissociation during sex happens and what your body is doing when it checks out. We get into the difference between physiological arousal and actual desire, why zero libido sometimes has nothing to do with your partner, and how sexual neglect, not just abuse, can shape the way you relate to your own sexuality.

We also talk about what healing looks like in this area, why it has to be slow, what partners often get wrong even with the best intentions, and how nervous system flexibility connects trauma work and sexual healing in a way that's genuinely hopeful.

Rachael Garner is a Certified Sex Therapist, an EMDR Certified Therapist, and an EMDRIA-Approved Consultant-in-Training specializing in complex trauma and sexual issues through a somatic- and attachment-based lens. She is in private practice in Jackson MS, where she resides with her husband and two boys. 

Learn more about Rachael and her work at https://www.garnercounseling.com.

Thanks for listening to The Complex Trauma Podcast!

Be sure to follow, share and give us a review on your favorite podcast platform.

Follow on Instagram: @sarahherstichlcsw 

Follow on TikTok: @sarahherstichlcsw

Learn more about EMDR & trauma therapy in Pennsylvania with Reclaim Therapy

This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended as a substitute for professional medical, psychological, or nutritional advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Remember, I'm a therapist, but I'm not your therapist. Nothing in this podcast is meant to replace actual therapy or treatment. If you're in crisis or things feel really unsafe right now, please reach out to someone. You can call 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, text them, or head to your nearest ER.

The views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent the opinions of any organizations or institutions. Reliance on any information provided by this podcast is solely at your own risk.

If you've ever gone completely blank in the middle of a hard conversation, or found yourself frozen, heart hammering, unable to say a single thing, this episode is for you.

A listener wrote in asking why she shuts down instead of getting upset. Why everyone else seems to cry or fight while she just goes numb and feels nothing. And whether something is wrong with her.

The answer is no. And this whole episode is the explanation.

We cover the difference between freeze and shutdown, because they get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing. Freeze is high activation trapped under stillness. Shutdown is the system going offline entirely. Two different nervous system responses, two different origins, two different things that actually help.

We also talk about why the tools that usually work, breathing, grounding, thinking your way through it, don't reach you when you're in shutdown, and what actually does.

If you recognize yourself in either of these patterns, this episode will give you language for something that's probably been really hard to explain.

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Thanks for listening to The Complex Trauma Podcast!

Be sure to follow, share and give us a review on your favorite podcast platform.

Follow on Instagram: @sarahherstichlcsw 

Follow on TikTok: @sarahherstichlcsw

Learn more about EMDR & trauma therapy in Pennsylvania with Reclaim Therapy

This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended as a substitute for professional medical, psychological, or nutritional advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Remember, I'm a therapist, but I'm not your therapist. Nothing in this podcast is meant to replace actual therapy or treatment. If you're in crisis or things feel really unsafe right now, please reach out to someone. You can call 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, text them, or head to your nearest ER.

The views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent the opinions of any organizations or institutions. Reliance on any information provided by this podcast is solely at your own risk.

If you've done the work, learned the tools, and still feel like you're white knuckling through every single day, this episode is for you.

For many people with complex PTSD and developmental trauma, calm isn't somewhere familiar to return to. It's something that has to be built, maybe for the first time. And that changes everything about how healing needs to look.

This episode breaks down three concepts from developmental trauma research that explain why nervous system regulation can feel so darn hard, and why that has nothing to do with how hard you're trying.

Foundational dysregulation. Blended autonomic states. Defensive accommodations.

These are the missing pieces that explain why you can feel wired and exhausted at the same time, why your coping strategies became your personality, and why the standard regulation tools keep hitting a wall.

This episode draws on the work of Peter Levine and clinical literature on the side effects of developmental trauma.

You are absolutely not broken. There is a real reason you feel the way you do.

Thanks for listening to The Complex Trauma Podcast!

Be sure to follow, share and give us a review on your favorite podcast platform.

Follow on Instagram: @sarahherstichlcsw 

Follow on TikTok: @sarahherstichlcsw

Learn more about EMDR & trauma therapy in Pennsylvania with Reclaim Therapy

This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended as a substitute for professional medical, psychological, or nutritional advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Remember, I'm a therapist, but I'm not your therapist. Nothing in this podcast is meant to replace actual therapy or treatment. If you're in crisis or things feel really unsafe right now, please reach out to someone. You can call 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, text them, or head to your nearest ER.

The views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent the opinions of any organizations or institutions. Reliance on any information provided by this podcast is solely at your own risk.

Childhood emotional neglect doesn't always look like what you'd expect. Sometimes it looks like a parent who showed up to every game, made dinner every night, and still wasn't really there. That gap between what was present and what was missing is exactly what we're unpacking today.

Dr. Danica Harris is a somatic experiencing practitioner and complex trauma expert, and she breaks down why emotional neglect is so hard to identify, what it costs the body to grow up as the easy kid, and what healing actually looks like when you go low and slow. If you've ever said "I had a good childhood" and still felt like something was off, this one is for you.

Find Dr. Danica Harris

@theempoweredtherapist on Instagram and Facebook @empoweredhealingdallas for her group practice

Check out her group practice here and learn more about working with Danica here

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Thanks for listening to The Complex Trauma Podcast!

Be sure to follow, share and give us a review on your favorite podcast platform.

Follow on Instagram: @sarahherstichlcsw 

Follow on TikTok: @sarahherstichlcsw

Learn more about EMDR & trauma therapy in Pennsylvania with Reclaim Therapy

This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended as a substitute for professional medical, psychological, or nutritional advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Remember, I'm a therapist, but I'm not your therapist. Nothing in this podcast is meant to replace actual therapy or treatment. If you're in crisis or things feel really unsafe right now, please reach out to someone. You can call 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, text them, or head to your nearest ER.

The views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent the opinions of any organizations or institutions. Reliance on any information provided by this podcast is solely at your own risk.

After my conversation with Janina Fisher about dissociative parts, my inbox exploded with questions about dissociation. So today, I'm answering three that showed up a few times

In this episode, we're covering:

• Why you might dissociate MORE in therapy than anywhere else (and why that doesn't mean therapy isn't working)
• How to tell the difference between zoning out and actual dissociation
• Why you can tell your trauma story without feeling anything, and what that really means

If you've ever driven home from therapy wondering why your brain keeps checking out, or if you've told your story a hundred times but can't seem to access the feelings, this episode is for you.

What You'll Learn:

• Early warning signs of dissociation in your body (before it fully takes over)
• How to use orienting to stay present when things get heavy
• The difference between depersonalization and derealization
• Why emotional numbness is protection, not proof that nothing happened
• Three concrete ways to start rebuilding the bridge between your story and your body

Mentioned in This Episode:

• Episode with Janina Fisher on dissociative parts (listen if you haven't yet!)
• Window of tolerance
• State-dependent memory
• Dorsal vagal shutdown response

Thanks for listening to The Complex Trauma Podcast!

Be sure to follow, share and give us a review on your favorite podcast platform.

Follow on Instagram: @sarahherstichlcsw 

Follow on TikTok: @sarahherstichlcsw

Learn more about EMDR & trauma therapy in Pennsylvania with Reclaim Therapy

This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended as a substitute for professional medical, psychological, or nutritional advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Remember, I'm a therapist, but I'm not your therapist. Nothing in this podcast is meant to replace actual therapy or treatment. If you're in crisis or things feel really unsafe right now, please reach out to someone. You can call 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, text them, or head to your nearest ER.

The views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent the opinions of any organizations or institutions. Reliance on any information provided by this podcast is solely at your own risk.

Betrayal doesn't just hurt. 

It rewires your nervous system, shakes your ability to trust yourself, and makes you question everything you thought you knew about your relationship. 

In this episode, Joe Sanok shares what happened when his marriage ended suddenly on an RV trip, how he navigated the shock of becoming an unexpected single dad, and what it actually took to rebuild his life without replaying the same patterns.

Joe talks openly about waking up in a camper next to someone who was already gone, the nervous system chaos that followed, and why he built a "support committee" instead of white-knuckling his way through alone. 

We also get into dating after betrayal, how to show up for yourself when everything feels uncertain, and what it looks like to trust again without abandoning the parts of you that are still healing.

This conversation is for anyone who's been blindsided by betrayal, anyone who's had to rebuild their sense of safety from the ground up, or anyone who's wondered if they'll ever feel solid in a relationship again.

Topics covered:

• What betrayal trauma does to your nervous system
• How Joe's marriage ended and what the early days looked like
• Why building a support committee matters more than going it alone
• Dating after betrayal without repeating the same patterns
• Learning to trust yourself again after your judgment feels broken
• How to parent through your own crisis
• Rebuilding safety in your body and relationships

Download Joe's new book: Dating After Betrayal: A Guided Healing and Re-Entry Experience here.

Listen to Joe's podcast, Practice of the Practice on Apple or Spotify

Learn more about Joe's Consulting Services

Thanks for listening to The Complex Trauma Podcast!

Be sure to follow, share and give us a review on your favorite podcast platform.

Follow on Instagram: @sarahherstichlcsw 

Follow on TikTok: @sarahherstichlcsw

Learn more about EMDR & trauma therapy in Pennsylvania with Reclaim Therapy

This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended as a substitute for professional medical, psychological, or nutritional advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Remember, I'm a therapist, but I'm not your therapist. Nothing in this podcast is meant to replace actual therapy or treatment. If you're in crisis or things feel really unsafe right now, please reach out to someone. You can call 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, text them, or head to your nearest ER.

The views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent the opinions of any organizations or institutions. Reliance on any information provided by this podcast is solely at your own risk.

What if forgetting your childhood, feeling disconnected from your emotions, or experiencing different "versions" of yourself weren't signs that something's wrong with you, but evidence of how brilliantly your brain protected you?

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Janina Fisher, one of the leading experts on trauma and dissociation, to unpack what dissociation actually is and why it's a survival response, not a pathology. We talk about why so many people say "I had a good childhood" even when they can barely remember it, what's really happening when you lose time or feel like different parts take over, and how understanding your parts can change everything about how you heal.

Dr. Fischer breaks down her Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST) model and explains why chasing "safety" might be the wrong goal if you've never known what safety feels like. This conversation gets real about fight parts, attached parts, and why noticing what's happening inside you matters more than remembering every detail of what happened to you.

If you've ever felt fragmented, disconnected, or like parts of you don't quite fit together, this episode will help you see yourself through a completely different lens.

Thanks for listening to The Complex Trauma Podcast!

Be sure to follow, share and give us a review on your favorite podcast platform.

Follow on Instagram: @sarahherstichlcsw 

Follow on TikTok: @sarahherstichlcsw

Learn more about EMDR & trauma therapy in Pennsylvania with Reclaim Therapy

This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended as a substitute for professional medical, psychological, or nutritional advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Remember, I'm a therapist, but I'm not your therapist. Nothing in this podcast is meant to replace actual therapy or treatment. If you're in crisis or things feel really unsafe right now, please reach out to someone. You can call 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, text them, or head to your nearest ER.

The views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent the opinions of any organizations or institutions. Reliance on any information provided by this podcast is solely at your own risk.

This episode is a bit different. If it's not for you, that's okay.

Right now, a lot of us are struggling. The anxiety that won't quit, the rage that scares you, the numbness that makes you wonder what's wrong with you, the exhaustion that feels bone-deep. You're not overreacting. Your nervous system is responding to real threat.

In this episode, we talk about what happens in your body when threat is ongoing and there's no clear way to resolve it. We look at vicarious trauma, suppressed anger, grief that doesn't feel like sadness, and the shame of struggling when you think you should be stronger.

If you're trying to figure out how to care without being destroyed by it, how to stay engaged without depleting yourself completely, this one's for you.

Thanks for listening to The Complex Trauma Podcast!

Be sure to follow, share and give us a review on your favorite podcast platform.

Follow on Instagram: @sarahherstichlcsw 

Follow on TikTok: @sarahherstichlcsw

Learn more about EMDR & trauma therapy in Pennsylvania with Reclaim Therapy

This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended as a substitute for professional medical, psychological, or nutritional advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Remember, I'm a therapist, but I'm not your therapist. Nothing in this podcast is meant to replace actual therapy or treatment. If you're in crisis or things feel really unsafe right now, please reach out to someone. You can call 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, text them, or head to your nearest ER.

The views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent the opinions of any organizations or institutions. Reliance on any information provided by this podcast is solely at your own risk.