Where Twin Stars Meet the Moon
A poem for pregnancy loss awareness month about my recent miscarriage of our twin stars, our last embryos from IVF we lost due to an unjust mental healthcare system
trauma
5 Self-Care Practices We Need During Coronavirus
When we’re in survival mode, self-care can feel like a foregone luxury. However, our mental health is at risk during coronavirus as much as our physical health, if not more so. We often don’t make the time to take care of ourselves. Perhaps we think it’s frivolous or maybe we’ve been taking care of others …
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What Coronavirus is Saying About Grief
The weight of the world is grief now. The ocean mirrors how I feel. Grey, turbulent, tossed about. The heaviness of another morning of unknowns. Or worse, more bad news. My toddler wakes up with a fever, crying. I press my lips to his forehead and try to still my racing thoughts. What if? We …
Staying Out of Trauma Brain During Coronavirus
“Regulation is the nervous system’s ability to navigate the highs and lows of activation (triggering) and return to calm. ” -Patti Elledge (Trauma Therapist) Right now the world feels like it’s in chaos. With the coronavirus pandemic, and travel bans in place, the stock market plummeting, toilet paper shortages, and our jobs and economic futures uncertain, there …
Why Being Perfect Cannot Save Us
I want so badly to do this perfectly. It’s like somewhere inside I believe if I do all the “right things” I can keep the bad things at bay. I hold tightly to this belief like a child gripping a flashlight to chase away the monsters under the bed. Almost 8 months pregnant, I plan …
What I Learned From a Pregnancy Dream Fulfilled
I got to see my baby today. He’s eight weeks and the size of a wild strawberry, tiny as a jelly bean with little limbs. The heart is already flickering at 172. I’d never seen my baby’s heartbeat. I’d never had a happy ultrasound. On the black and white screen this rainbow baby was hanging out upside …
A Missionary’s Story of PTSD and Healing
For years I have been fascinated by trauma and PTSD. Having experienced much of this myself, I’ve studied to help those in war torn regions and missionaries heal from their pain. What I’ve learned is trauma and PTSD can often be a silent killer among missionaries and aid workers. I teamed up with my strong …
What Missionaries Should Know about Vicarious Trauma
It was 2006 and I was sitting in a dimly lit room in Rwanda listening to a female genocide survivor tell me her story of rape and torture. Most of the time her face remained distant, as though she was recounting something that happened to someone else. A fly buzzed around the office table. I could …
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The Broken Way: What I Learned from an African Mental Hospital-I
“Why are we afraid of broken things? What if the abundance of communion is only found there in the brokenness of suffering–because suffering is where God lives? Suffering is where God gives the most healing intimacy.” -Ann Voskamp, The Broken Way- Sunset in Cape Town is like a world set on fire. The pinks and …
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6 Ways to Heal from Cumulative Grief & Trauma
Trauma and loss happen to us all. Suffering is a part of life. But sometimes things occur and we don’t know or recognize it as trauma, or as something to be grieved. So we go on living, and eventually these traumas pile high inside us like dirty laundry and the burden begins to take its toll. …
The Secret to Healing from Trauma
One of the problems of being an Enneagram Type 2 “Helper” personality, is that I often don’t know how to ask for what I need. I walked into a grocery store the other day to buy another pregnancy test that would turn out to be negative, and the clerk laughed and said she’d sold four of …