If trauma memories or emotions are affecting your daily life, reaching out is a strong and important step.
Healing from PTSD or CPTSD is possible—and you don’t have to do it alone.

👉 Ready to finally start healing and feeling like yourself again?
Reach out to Psychiatric Wellness today!
📞 Call: (405) 437-0205
🌐 psychiatricwellness.org

Take the first step toward healing — your future self will thank you.

#TraumaRecovery #PTSDHelp #CPTSDSupport #YouAreNotAlone #PsychiatricWellness

In the midst of a global uprising against police brutality and systemic racism, No Visible Trauma examines a deeply troubled police department and reveals the devastating consequences of unchecked police brutality. Despite its relatively low crime rates, recent years have seen the Calgary Police Service shoot and kill more people than officers in any other Canadian city, and more than either the New York or Chicago police departments in 2018. Five years in the making, the film unravels the intertwined stories of three individuals who were the victims of extreme violence at the hands of police officers. From the kidnapping and beating of a young immigrant from Ghana, to the fatal shooting of an unarmed man during a “wellness check”, the film exposes a criminal justice system that fails to hold police officers accountable for their actions.

Directors: Marc Serpa Francoeur, Robinder Uppal
Writers: Marc Serpa Francoeur, Robinder Uppal

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5ktKrNvJnuQ

This doc focuses on CalgaryPD but the issues raised are happening across AB, in BC, Manitoba, Ontario & many more places across Canada. Canadian cops keep getting away with crimes & human rights abuses, daily, in Canada. Systemic racism is still a major problem across the country - no matter how much our governments try to whitewash their PR.

#documentary #documentaries #police #PoliceBrutality #politics #Calgary #Canada #crime #AwardWinning #PoliceViolence #AwardWinningDocumentary #HotDocs #trauma #VictimStories #TraumaHealing #TraumaRecovery #PublicAccountability #PublicScrutiny #PublicTransparency #CopCrimes #RemoveQualifiedImmunity #NoJustice #DefundThePolice #ACAB #CDNpoli #BCpoli #ABpoli #PunishPolice #CriminalCops #KKKanada #SystematicAbuse #SystemicRacism #Canadian #RacistCanada #WarSurvivorsForPeace

Day 2 of learning makeup at 29💄
Because my abusers can't control me anymore.
Part 2 + results✨️

#makeupjourney #healing #selfexpression #ptsdrecovery #traumarecovery #arttherapy #makeupforbeginners #beautyjourney #empowerment #makeuplife

Trauma Isn’t Permanent: Therapist Dr. Cecelia Baldwin Explains How the Body Can Heal https://shinemycrown.com/trauma-isnt-permanent-therapist-dr-cecelia-baldwin-explains-how-the-body-can-heal/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #TraumaRecovery #HealingJourney #MentalHealthMatters #TherapyTalk #SelfCare

I just posted the most honest bio I have ever posted in my life, and I wanted to share it. I feel like it will be very effective in communicating my personhood to people it might feel aversive to. Because if someone feels bad by interacting with me, I would very much rather that they didn't.

Highly emotionally unstable, self-castigating, exceptionally well-managed, diversely modular, polymathic genius punk system.

For DECADES I diminished myself to seem non-threatening to people with small and icy hearts. I diminished myself, and they demanded more, until I allowed myself to become unmade.

But I'm lucky. I was able to remake myself. And now I choose to define myself.

I will no longer be taking feedback on my personhood. I did that for 40 years, and it was a bad idea from the start. Constructive criticism, always welcomed. But I will no longer permit a single person other than myself to tell me who or what I am. This is my promise to myself.

Also, like, there's empirical evidence for my definition of myself. I have SHIT self-esteem, so there's A LOT of evidence.

The last part of the bio is just for Discord, but it's a general statement of fact. 😈

I'm safe if you are. If you don't think I'm safe, you're not.

#Plurality #OSDD #DID #Neurodivergent #ActuallyAutistic #MentalHealth #SelfLove #Boundaries #SystemPride #TraumaRecovery #Punk

Emotional Healing: Relearning Safety and Experiencing Life Differently (Donations will be matched/doubled)

Animals who arrive from trauma often live in a perpetual state of “survival mode.” Their bodies and minds remain on high alert because danger was once a constant reality.

TCWR’s approach helps animals shift from fear to confidence, from distress to curiosity, and from guardedness to genuine engagement with their environment.

#TurpentineCreek #Rescue #traumarecovery #GivingTuesday

Healing isn’t cute or tidy —
but damn, you’re doing it anyway 💜✨

Proud of you for holding the heavy stuff without losing yourself.

#HealingIsHardWork #MessyGrowth #TraumaRecovery #InnerChildSoftness #RestIsProductive #RadicalSelfCompassion #YoureDoingSoWell #MentalHealthMatters 💫

Lookit these boys playing. 💙

I look back at my past self some days, and I see someone so well-intentioned and so broken by brainwashing and manipulation. I have so much love and compassion for past me. He did his best in some fucking impossible circumstances and with some pretty awful people breathing down his neck. He kept trying his hardest every day, no matter how small others made him think he was.

You can see it in his smile. His hope is great. His love is great. His pain is immeasurable.

I'm grateful for his sacrifice. I wouldn't be here without him.

#TransReflection #PreTransition #TransLives #SelfCompassion #GenderJourney #TraumaRecovery #Healing #Survivor #MentalHealth #CPTSD #DogsOfMastodon #DogLove #Throwback

I write 'trauma-informed scifi. Here's what that means.

https://inkican.com/about/

#traumainformed #trauma #traumahealing #traumarecovery #mentalhealth #healing #ptsd

If you’ve been trying to heal your self-talk, rebuild trust with yourself, or learn how to hear your own needs beneath the noise… this episode will feel like a deep breath. #HealingJourney #CPTSDRecovery #TraumaRecovery #innerwork

Taking Away the Monster’s Power

There was a Threads post I read last night that stayed with me long after I closed the app. It was about sexual-abuse survivors and how, for many, the deepest wound isn’t only what happened. It’s how their families respond after. One comment read something like, “Parents feel shame because they failed to do the one thing they were supposed to do: protect their child. Out of that shame, they deny it ever happened. And after denying it for so long, the silence itself becomes real.”

That line hit me hard because I know that silence. I’ve lived with it.

When something horrific happens in a family, the natural instinct should be to protect and comfort. But for many survivors, the opposite happens. The adults retreat behind fear and shame, rewriting the story so they can live with themselves. According to trauma psychologists, denial is a common defense mechanism when the truth threatens a person’s sense of identity. A 2018 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that families dealing with abuse often enter what researchers call “protective denial”—a state where acknowledging the trauma would mean admitting they failed at love’s most basic duty: safety.

That’s what builds the silence.

In families like mine, silence doesn’t just linger. It mutates. It becomes a living thing, a presence that sits at the dinner table and watches TV with you. Everyone senses it, but no one names it. It’s easier to pretend it isn’t there than to face what it means. Over time, the silence becomes the monster in the house: invisible, but powerful enough to shape every conversation, every relationship, every unspoken rule about what can and cannot be said.

That’s the monster I write about.

In The Ordinary Bruja, Marisol lives inside that same haunted quiet—the generational kind that passes from mother to daughter like an heirloom nobody wants. Her mother Josefina tried to protect her the only way she knew how: by wrapping truth in stories, lullabies, and warnings disguised as folklore. It’s something I’ve seen in so many immigrant and Latine families—pain gets encoded in parables because direct confrontation feels dangerous or disrespectful. Storytelling becomes the only safe language for survival.

When I write, I’m not just crafting fiction. I’m translating silence. Every ghost, every haunting, every ancestral whisper in my books represents something once buried. Writing becomes a kind of exorcism; a way to let those spirits finally speak.

People sometimes ask why my stories lean into darkness. I tell them it’s because I grew up in a world that pretended darkness didn’t exist. Writing horror and magical realism lets me drag it into the light. Horror, at its best, doesn’t glamorize pain, instead it forces us to look at what we’d rather avoid. Like the psychologist Carl Jung said, “What you resist, persists.” By writing the very things I was told to keep quiet about, I stop them from persisting in me.

Silence is powerful because it isolates. It convinces survivors that they’re alone in their truth, when the reality is heartbreakingly common. According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), about 1 in 9 girls and 1 in 20 boys experience sexual abuse before age 18. Yet fewer than 38% of these crimes are reported. And of those reported, many families respond with disbelief or hostility, which re-traumatizes survivors and pushes them deeper into isolation. That’s how silence becomes its own ecosystem of harm.

For years, I didn’t understand that silence is a form of participation. When we choose not to speak, we hand the microphone to the monster. The more everyone avoids naming it, the more it grows. It slithers between generations, showing up as anxiety, addiction, or perfectionism—disguises that look different but share the same root: unspoken pain.

In writing The Ordinary Bruja, I decided I was done letting the silence win. Through Marisol, I took away the monster’s mask. Her journey isn’t about becoming fearless. It’s about facing what her family refused to confront. When she begins to see her ancestors’ ghosts, she’s really seeing what they hid from her: the pain, the guilt, and the truths that were too heavy to hold.

I’ve learned that every survivor’s story of healing starts with naming. That first whisper of “This happened to me” is an act of rebellion against shame. Shame thrives in secrecy, and truth starves it. When survivors speak, even through fiction, they reclaim their narrative. Research from trauma expert Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, explains that storytelling helps survivors integrate fragmented memories and rebuild a coherent sense of self. In other words, telling the story—whether aloud, on paper, or through art—is literally how we rewire our brains toward healing.

That’s why I write.

I don’t write because I enjoy the dark; I write because I refuse to let it win. I write to remind myself that even if no one else names the monster, I can. And once I do, it loses its grip.

There’s a particular kind of freedom that comes when you finally drag the unspoken into the light. It’s painful, yes—but it’s also purifying. Every time I describe the ghost, or give a voice to a silenced woman, I feel a piece of that generational weight lift. It doesn’t disappear overnight. Healing never does. But the act of storytelling, of choosing to remember and speak, is a daily declaration: I survived, and the monster doesn’t get to live rent-free anymore.

Denial doesn’t protect anyone. It only delays the inevitable reckoning. Silence is not safety. It’s surrender.

So, yes, my monsters talk. They whisper, cry, and sometimes sing. But they’re mine now. They don’t walk freely through my house anymore.

And that, to me, is what real magic looks like.

#breakingSilence #familyDenial #generationalTrauma #healingThroughWriting #magicalRealism #ownVoicesFiction #survivorStories #theOrdinaryBruja #traumaRecovery

Healing from trauma is crazy. It is unstable and it destabilises self and others.

Why? Because it requires me to grow beyond the "stable" pseudo-personality that the traumatising family-, cult- or societal systems pushed on me.

Society is sick and sickening, it causes trauma and dissociation. Then it tells us that WE are crazy, unstable, perhaps ridiculous and perhaps dangerous for doing what we need to do to heal. In order to truly heal, one HAS TO become even more crazy than before, as in more "unstable" in society's eyes. Less adjusted to its "stable" structures and demands.

I know, I know, the first step of trauma therapy is stabilisation. But what we want to be stable is stuff like having basic needs met, having housing and food and at least one stable, respectful and nurturing relationship. We DON'T need to stabilise the pseudo-personality! That's the crime of therapy that I'm rebelling against. They stabilise the wrong thing and they destabilise the wrong thing. They take away our agency to let our true self emerge and make choices.

It's like telling a caterpillar that emerging from its cocoon is "unstable" and pathological and that it should go back to the nice stable larval version of itself.

In my case, that was the version that is easily lead and that assimilates into existing systems. Not a threat.

But we deserve to destabilise the systems that did this to us. The families, cults, religions, therapies, states, capitalism - all of it. And that includes getting rid of the rules and beliefs and triggers and feelings that they installed inside us. Killing the cops in our heads. Killing the despotic parents, the double-standardised inner critic, the victim blamer in our heads.

🧵

#trauma #TraumaRecovery #crazy #mad #MadLib #AbuseCulture #AbuseSurvivor #AbuseRecovery #VictimBlaming #RapeCulture #MentalHealth #crisis #resilience #anarchy #KillTheCopInYourHead

It was during deep conversations with @DionRa that we came across this, he told me: Dissociation is a mechanism that makes ABUSE easier. Not survival, abuse! It works in favour of abusers. We forget what they did to us, we become more easily (mis)lead, we are easier to gaslight, we stop noticing boundaries and violations, we stop seeing the difference between the abuser and us, we see ourselves through their eyes.

Dissociation, to some degree or another, is something that we are forced to adopt when we are abused and would die if we stoutly resisted the abuse.

3/5 🧵

#dissociation #DID #trauma #abuse #ChildAbuse #TraumaRecovery #AbuseSurvivor #AbuseCulture

I used to be ruled by fear. All the abuse and trauma throughout my life meant that I never had a safety net and never anyone or anything I could trust or fall back on. I trusted myself and my own discernment least of all because I was the one who got blamed for everything.

No longer. Two years ago, I made a commitment to not let fear hold me back from doing what I know is right. And I stuck with it. It changed the way I live my life.

Last year, I made another commitment to myself, one which I didn't know how to put into words, but I stuck with anyway: That I would no longer separate myself from myself. I would no longer abuse my own body by pushing past my limits, for example.

I am now staying with myself, staying connected to my body, staying ME, despite all the trauma and fear I'm suffering. It is hard but it is worth it. Not only am I growing and learning and HEALING old wounds despite the current circumstances - I am also bringing all of my abilities, strengths and knowledge to the fight.

I'm no longer letting myself get cut off from myself. It's the equivalent of having functioning supply and communication lines while under attack. It can't give me everything or protect me from all dangers, but it's giving me the best chance I'm gonna get.

1/5 🧵

#AbuseRecovery #TraumaRecovery #CultRecovery #about #fear #EmotionalHealing #dissociation #DID #AbuseSurvivor #RapeSurvivor

Day 2 of learning makeup at 29💄
Because my abusers can't control me anymore.
Part 1✨️

#makeupjourney #healing #selfexpression #ptsdrecovery #traumarecovery #arttherapy #makeupforbeginners #beautyjourney #empowerment #makeuplife

The Weight of the World and the Dread That Never Ends

https://theinterfaithintrepidart.com/2025/11/01/the-weight-of-the-world-and-the-dread-that-never-ends/

Day 1 of learning makeup at 29💄
Because my abusers can't control me anymore.
Part 5 + results✨️

#healingjourney #makeupbeginner #selfhealing #ptsdrecovery #traumarecovery #makeuplife