I was thinking about the most important questions I have asked myself in this child abuse healing journey, and I thought it might be beneficial to share those with you because when I started asking myself these questions, I felt a massive shift. I believe that one of the hardest things (this was my experience) in healing is to reflect on what is happening in our lives at this moment. Healing trauma is so much about clarity and intention. I think about this - if we can figure out how we got...

Today is an opportunity for you to live on your terms. You are the person in control of your life. No one but you is going to be the HERO of your story. It's OK to be scared. IT'S NOT OK TO QUIT ON YOURSELF. Think about all the times in your life that you have been terrified of something you knew would make your life better. Why is that? Why do we get so scared of the idea that we can live on our terms, be the hero, and do things we want to do because WE WANT TO DO THEM? For many of us, it's...

Have you ever thought about how control is impacting your life? It can feel like safety and security while simultaneously being the very thing that brings chaos into your life. We seek to have power as trauma survivors because it brings a sense of ease, especially when we come from a chaotic background. However, control can also spiral into perfectionism, which leads us to evaluate the minutia of life against how we can do it better, stronger, and faster. In childhood, we could not control...

Welcome to 2021 my friend! I don’t know about you but I am so excited about this year and I’m ready to make this my best year yet. Success and happiness is easier said than done, especially when you find yourself sabotaging your dreams, relationships, health, career, and life. But WHY? Why do we get in our own way when we are so desperate to have the life that we want? The #1 question that I get is " How do I stop sabotaging myself?” In this episode of the Podcast I break down the reasons...

From Dec 31st, 2015. I've never posted this here before. My life is very different today but this was a pivotal moment in my healing journey because for the first time I didn't have to carry all the pain of trauma and abuse alone. I hope that if you are reading this that you can find strength in knowing that you are not alone. -M I am literally terrified right now. This is hands down the scariest thing I have ever done. I have spent my life being prideful and never asking for help. I have...

Part of me wants to scream fuck Christmas. The other part of me wants Christmas to mean something more than presents and stuff. Christmas is so triggering in an already toxic society that says it’s our duty to keep abusive family members in our lives rather than seek peace and health, and it is because, by that understanding, we find ourselves at battle with ourselves over our sovereignty. I think we need to hit the pause button and recognize for a moment that right now, and no, I don’t mean...

No one ever told us that it was ok for us to be our own person. No one ever said that we could have self-love, self-esteem, or self-believe. No one told us that we didn’t deserve to be hurt, abused, and mistreated. No one said to us that we could be somebody. And yet they wonder how we got so fucked up? Honestly, it is a miracle that many of us have made it this far in life. We have been ill-equipped with the wrong tools, the wrong mindset, and the wrong understanding of what it means to be...

As the year ends and the inevitable finish line of what I could call chaos is upon us, I decided to compile my thoughts on the changes and shifts of the state of my mental health. This is a top ten list about my most significant mental health and trauma recovery lessons. In no particular order: 1: No one is out to get me. - I swear this is the part about recovering from trauma and abuse that no one mentions. The world, as it turns out, is, in fact, not against me. I had been all but wrong...

Let me first be clear and state that this is not a comparison to Covid. Now that we have that out of the way let’s continue. I wrote a blog post the other day, and in it, I mentioned that when I was four years old, my mother cut off my right index finger. I have written about this experience in both my book and website a few times over the years. I think about the impact that carrying the scars of our abuse has on us as survivors of childhood trauma, and I can’t help be feel a deep sense of...

It’s ok to be aggressive in healing childhood trauma. There is a vast difference between being hard on yourself and pushing yourself into growth. To be brutally honest, as I always am, I think that we need to have a reclamation on this idea that just because we are trauma survivors that we can’t push ourselves into something. I will forever be the first to say that gentleness and patience are the keys to healing, but I find it incredibly discouraging that people consider pushing yourself...

How does one differentiate the need for formal education in trauma healing as mandatory versus optional? I have been thinking about how Americans and most first world countries have been so inundated with the idea that someone must have gone to university to be taken seriously in mental health, and I can’t help but wonder the authenticity of it all. I think about how an old man in Bali healed my body; he a master of physical manipulation with no education and little understanding of my...

This trauma healing list will be short and sweet, with plenty of room for elaboration in the near future. For now, these are the top 5 things that you can do now to start healing trauma. The best thing that you can do to heal trauma without any doubt is to acknowledge that you have some work to do. There is no reason to spend time nor money on therapy or trauma healing modalities without accepting that you have to take it seriously. The worst thing that I did was spend thousands of dollars...

What is it that moves us towards wanting to be healthy? And what does healthy even mean for trauma survivors? It’s almost a trick question. On the one hand, we have society telling us this idea of health is not to feel the emotional impact of the world around us. On the other hand, we tell ourselves that feeling emotions are destructive, in some shape or the other. We tell ourselves that we shouldn’t be angry, happy, sad, or anything in between due to other people’s responses, which in its...

Life is not easy for most people. And the comparisons that we tend to make to justify the things that happen to us is entirely unfair. Look, no one deserves to experience abuse at all. But, we often invalidate our own experience when we point towards others and say they had it worse. It’s easy to do that. I have been there. It’s much easier to say it wasn’t that bad than to say it was a terrible experience that shaped a huge part of who I am, and that I have to struggle daily to create a...

There is power in standing up for yourself and sticking to your personal boundaries regarding how you participate in life as a trauma survivor. I hate the constant barrage of showing up because of obligation. Fuck that. I mean, when I think about the fact that people will shame you over not doing something that you don’t want to do, I get irate. I think about how many times in our lives that we are put in the position of showing up due to social constructs, and I want to smash my face into...

We are taught to mourn the death of our family, our parents, especially. But, how can you mourn someone who hurts you? For a long time, I sat with the idea that from a societal perspective, we are supposed to feel pain when we lose a parent. I think about the burden of shame from others in our lives when we don’t show up kicking and screaming for one more moment together. They say we are supposed to cry, to scream no Lord, take me, and absolve them of their sins, but I don’t know if that is...

I have been thinking about why some heal childhood trauma and some don’t, and I have concluded that the idea of healing in some regard is a mindset. When you think about the power of words and the impact that they have on us, I can’t help but wonder how much our narrative and the definition of “healing” is tied to those around us. Who is to say what healing means any more than some is to define happiness, success, peace, love, or hope? We hold an immense skill and tool to be leveraged in...

What if your dreams weren’t just dreams? What if, despite childhood trauma, we could have that life that we fantasize about? Would you take the chance to find out, or are you too paralyzed by fear? I remember lying on my bedroom floor and feeling the concrete beneath me on frigid cold winter nights and thinking to myself that there must be something more out there. Growing up in poverty and abuse is a surefire way to either engulf or ignite a child’s dream. I looked at my life as a...

Some days you just don’t got it. And that’s ok. You know, I get tired of these rah-rah cheerleaders who are always telling us that everything is lovely all the time. It’s not. And why the hell can’t we be OK with the fact that it isn’t always going to be fine? Some days life is fucking hard! Some days your husband leaves you, your cat dies, you burn the frozen pizza, your mom calls you, your bike gets stolen, and you drink too much coffee, so during that work meeting, you have to excuse...

Fall gold is now gold falling Winter abound The cheerful humans that pedal around town Now sit and wait It’s easy to find shelter under the bus stop awning Seasonal depression is rapping at my chamber down Quoth the Raven - from now until April-ish There’s not enough day in the time And here I thought we were saving it All these holidays Great uncle mctouchy with his uninvited invites Guess that’s just how he is Politics are not allowed at this dinner table Only Xanax, red wine, and lies...

I watched the waves crash against the side of the ferry as it skirted between the two Thai islands that I had spent most of my summer. This trip must have been my fifth between the two islands. The sky was clear, but there was subtle violence to how the waves smacked the boat pushing it side to side as it jetted on the crystal blue ocean. I was seated on the second tier, alone, which had never happened before. And I stared out the window; I realized that all the pain, suffering, abuse,...

Let’s admit it. We have all had the thought that self-help is stupid. Often we find that understanding to be complimentary to “Why do I have to do all this damn healing?” At least that was my experience. I have felt both incredibly overwhelmed and underwhelmed by this entire self-help thing. I have even questioned myself and my ability to truly step into healing, considering my childhood trauma was so impactful in the way I used to show up for myself. Having an ACE Score of ten really fucked...

356 pounds?! Are you kidding me, Michael? What the fuck are you doing to yourself? Every morning I would wake up and watch the number on the scale tick up as I slowly allowed obesity to run wild and consume my body. Fat . I was always the chubby kid. I shopped in the boy's husky section at Walmart as a preteen. Husky for the unware is the polite nomenclature for fat kids. I spent summers running around with my shirt on. I ate entire boxes of gummy bears for dinner. I never ordered just one...

The hardest battle we fight in healing trauma is against ourselves. I was driving 80mph across I-70 West, heading from Indiana, a place that I had called home for so long that I didn’t know anything else and I was terrified. Through the great plains, I saw incredible showcases of nature’s power in the form of lightning storms and, at one point, just within the boundaries of Idaho, a tornado that was so wide it could probably eat a city. The road West was long and lonely but gave me time to...

It’s not always going to be like this. I hope that’s true. Some morning I wake up and have t o remind myself to be grateful and have gratitude for the fact that maybe one day I won’t have to do the work anymore. There is something so burdensome about having to fix all of the issues that other people caused. I constantly think about the fact that there is nothing that I can do about the past. In one way, this understanding inspires me to continue to move forward no matter what, and the other...

I was caught off guard yesterday as I sat staring out the window, watching the rain pour and trickle down the glass. The smell of fresh laundry and the tobacco candle burning in the kitchen is beyond calming. The sound of Killswitch Engage softly echoed in the background from my desktop speakers; I recognize the irony even typing this. And at that moment, I had an overwhelming sense of emotion run over me. For the first time, I realized that I am in it; I am on my vision quest. Historically...

It’s true. I’m not sure if anyone told you yet, but you’re allowed to disconnect from the healing journey for a little bit. We get so caught up in doing all of the things that sometimes we forget that we are allowed to live. To be alive isn’t a series of habits and routines and practices that overtake your life. To be alive is to find the present moment, indulge in it, and to take a little bit of it with you. This trauma healing game is exhausting; wake, meditate, journal, do yoga, set...

There is a place that we get trapped in the choices that we make. I want to think that conflict happens when there is a collision of values between the person you were and the person you are becoming. In the moments of change in the healing process, we reach plateaus, not as in the end but as in a time to create a shift. When this happens, we are faced with making a choice: do we act according to the person we were or the person we have become and are moving in towards. We hit a wall in...