I Lost My Little Apricot by Melody Finch, the lovely Caramel (Learner at Love), shares the heart-wrenching experience of miscarrying. The foreword includes the figure that one in four pregnancies will end in miscarriage, and points out that it’s a subject that doesn’t get talked about enough. Parts of the book were written before and […]
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I recently saw a really interesting documentary called SKIDS, which focuses on kids attending Vanguard Secondary, an alternative school in Langley, B.C., Canada, that uses a trauma-informed approach Vanguard‘s model recognizes that trauma is at the root of the significant challenges that have kept their students from succeeding in regular schools. Their model is informed
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is containment. British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion first proposed containment to describe a pattern of communicating mental experiences. Another researcher later suggested that Bion’s traumatic experience fighting in World War I influenced the development of his theory. Early life containment
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The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk is perhaps one of the best-known books about trauma, particularly early life trauma. It’s been on my to-be-read list for quite a while, and I’ve finally managed to get around to it. This is a hefty book. The digital version that I was reading weighed
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Our minds play all kinds of tricks on us. We’ve got all kinds of cognitive biases that influence what we do with our thoughts, and our brains do interesting things with what they pick up through our senses. There’s a philosophical argument as to whether or not there is a truly objective reality, but for
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is deindividuation. Every human is a unique individual with self-awareness. Deindividuation is a process by which people start to lose that self-awareness when part of a group. Oxford Reference defines deindividuation as: “A psychological state characterized by loss
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Raising the Alarm is an autobiography by Arron Whittaker. He lives with schizoaffective disorder and borderline personality. He also has a trauma history, and is sure that he’s on the autism spectrum, although he hasn’t been diagnosed. The author uses a pen name for this book, and explains the steps that he’s taken to conceal
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The internet is full of talk about toxic people. Searching for “toxic person” yields 295 million hits on Google. That’s a whole lotta toxicity. If someone is abusive, you deserve to a) be free from them, and b) call them toxic or whatever else you might choose. But those 295 million online hits aren’t all
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In this emerging blogger post, Meagon of Prose for the Masses writes about living with PTSD, and the many different ways it can look. I am not a veteran. I have not survived a major genocide nor am I a survivor of horrific abuse. I do not outwardly bear the signs of someone struggling, but
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I suspect we’ve all got them—those nagging little blogging insecurities that chatter at you from the back of your mind every once in a while (or more regularly). While we probably all have them, none of us talk about them. After all, they’re not the kind of thing that’s very pretty. But maybe we should
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