These days, it feels like the word “trauma” is everywhere—on social media, in everyday conversations, and especially in therapy rooms. But even as awareness grows, healing from trauma can still feel just as hard—sometimes even harder. Knowing what happened doesn’t always make it easier to move forward.

Week after week, I support clients suffering in silence. They hold their trauma inside and feel like they have no one to tell. This is often how survivors of traumatic and abusive families end up repeating cycles of abuse, dysfunction, and unhealed wounds, despite promising themselves they would “never” become like their parents (or other bad examples they were exposed to).

On any healing journey, the process can feel isolating and overwhelming. But this is especially true for survivors of traumatic families; survivors whose “safe place” was traumatic. For many people, it takes time to understand how their dysfunctional upbringing shaped their adult struggles, and that their experience was not normal. I know this from my clients, but also because I went through it, too.

As a teenager, I remember going to the school nurse, who had me fill out one of those papers where I circled responses........

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