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July 6 - July 11, 2025
And I know where I have to begin. Every villain’s redemption arc begins with their origin story.
Hatred, I learned quickly, was the antidote to sadness. It was the only safe feeling. Hatred does not make you cry at school. It isn’t vulnerable. Hatred is efficient. It does not grovel. It is pure power.
“But, you know, it’s okay to have some things you never get over.”
But your brain is not trying to be reasonable. It’s trying to save your life.
Having an emotional response to a trigger is perfectly healthy. Those triggers are only considered PTSD when an event is so traumatic that its triggers cause symptoms like panic attacks, nightmares, blackouts, and flashbacks—when the emotional response becomes debilitating.
In his article, Anda cautioned that using ACE scores as an individual screening tool has several risks, including that ACEs “may stigmatize or lead to discrimination…generate client anxiety about toxic-stress physiology, or misclassify individual risk.”[7]
Brain scans prove that patients who’ve sustained significant childhood trauma have brains that look different from those of people who haven’t.[8] Traumatized brains tend to have an enlarged amygdala—a part of the brain that is generally associated with producing feelings of fear. Which makes sense. But it goes further than that: For survivors of emotional abuse, the part of their brain that is associated with self-awareness and self-evaluation is shrunken and thin.
Child abuse is often associated with reduced thickness in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with moderation, decision-making, complex thought, and logical reasoning.
We need a certain amount of sleep and water and nourishment in order to think, to learn new things, to produce the correct hormones. If we don’t get all of those things, our bodies are “running at a deficit.”
But we don’t often understand what deficits we’re running at. We are not like The Sims, where we can see our hunger and rest and boredom levels represented as little progress bars at the bottom of the screen. Barrett said that when we’re dehydrated, we don’t necessarily feel thirsty—we feel exhausted. When we have something odd happening in our stomach, our body doesn’t quite know if we have a menstrual cramp or a stomachache or if we need to poop. We might not even be aware for a long period of time that our stomach hurts. And this isn’t unique to people with PTSD. It’s normal, everyday
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Our body might be screaming “I NEED FUNYUNS” while we project our hangriness onto, say, this poor sweaty schmuck who’s b...
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learned two critical things that day. First: Just because the wound doesn’t hurt doesn’t mean it’s healed.
And the second thing I learned was: My parents didn’t love me.
The reason I hadn’t been loved had nothing at all to do with me or my behavior. It had everything to do with them.
The literature says this is normal for traumatized people. Experts say it’s all part of the three P’s: We think our sadness is personal, pervasive, and permanent. Personal, in that we have caused all the problems we face. Pervasive, in that our entire life is defined by our failings. And permanent, in that the sadness will last forever. But, as usual, knowing that I am textbook doesn’t help me rise off the page.
“Being grounded refers to a state of mental awareness where you’re fully present with the here and now. You know who and where you are, the current time and year, and what’s happening all around you. It is the opposite of dissociating.
The term “grounded” started making sense. Being utterly and completely present allowed me to focus on the immense, full-body pleasure of simply being alive.
And scientists have found that some people who suffer from depression, anxiety, or C-PTSD have overactive DMNs.
The DMN can be silenced significantly by antidepressants or hallucinogenic substances. But the most efficient cure for an overactive DMN is mindfulness.
And there’s another advantage to shutting the DMN down. When our ego is silenced, there is a dissolution of the relationship between self and other. We more easily enter a state of interconnectedness, a feeling that we belong to something—a society, a world that is bigger than us, that shares our essential humanity.
This openness was based in very real science.
Restorative yoga is just one way to slow down the DMN. Once you start searching, there are plenty of good mindfulness exercises that can “ground” you—get you out of your damn head and into the world.
Shrooms in particular have proved to be a great salve for people with terminal illnesses. The oncoming specter of death can be terrifying, but after these suffering patients emerge from their hallucinogenic experiences, many are at peace with their lives and deaths, content to be absorbed back into the fabric of the universe.
Shrooms have also been shown to suppress your DMN and dissolve your ego, allowing you to look at your life with a childlike, brand-new perspective. They can draw connections between disparate parts of the brain, building creative solutions to our life’s struggles and strengthening areas we don’t use frequently enough.
This whole fucking narrative of all of these Asians settling gently into the American dream is bullshit. The facts just don’t add up. You have a community of immigrants and refugees who survived extreme violence—but they don’t believe in mental illness, don’t talk about trauma, don’t allow for feelings or failure, and everyone is just fucking fine? The worst angst here comes from not being able to make an essay sparkle? Come on.
read up on my classmates’ painful family histories: the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Cambodian genocide. I realized that my community was built in large part from the wreckage of America’s brutal proxy wars against communism. America massacred civilians in No Gun Ri and My Lai, it poisoned fields of crops and buried mines, it left behind machine guns in the wrong hands and let houses turn to rubble. San Jose is America’s consolation prize for those who lost Saigon and Seoul.
It is far too easy…as the naturalized citizen of a country that tries to kick dirt over its bloody history…to see only the castle on the hill and not the thickets of bone we trod through to arrive at it.”
was not loved more or less than anyone else. But the truth was something better than that: I had been seen.
My family tried to erase this history. But my body remembers. My work ethic. My fear of cockroaches. My hatred for the taste of dirt. These are not random attributes, a spin of the wheel. They were gifted to me with purpose, with necessity.
I want to have words for what my bones know. I want to use those gifts when they serve me and understand and forgive them when they do not.
Fully acknowledge all the things you’ve done wrong instead of minimizing them and claiming that I’m obsessed with the past? Acknowledge how much this hurts?
Catherine was right. Estrangement is not freeing. It has not felt joyful. It has not been happy. It has only felt necessary, and even that is something I question all the time: Does this make me selfish? Does it make me cruel? Then I think of the Thao Nguyen lyric, You made a cruel kid. Come look what you did.
There is one major difference: I don’t have to work on earning his love anymore. I can just work on accepting that I will never have it.
Removing my parents from my life protected me, but it did not fix me.
Dr. Ham was acknowledging his own vulnerability within the session. But his vulnerability didn’t make him seem less competent or trustworthy. It did the opposite. I trusted him more. I felt comfortable letting him correct my behavior, but I also felt okay pushing back on him and telling him when he was being too much.
And if you really want to work effectively with people, you have to keep surrendering your power. And that means being humble and making mistakes and fumbling and being comfortable with that.”
And I don’t want you to just be self-regulating in a corner by yourself. Shame makes you want to hide and tuck away. But what if instead you were in this state where you could ask, ‘Who are you? What do you need from me right now? And what do I need from you?’ ”
This was Dr. Ham’s whole theory: that because of its repetitive nature, complex trauma is fundamentally relational trauma. In other words, this is trauma caused by bad relationships with other people—people who were supposed to be caring and trustworthy and instead were hurtful.
The only way you could heal from relational trauma, he figured, was through practicing that relational dance with other people.
The brain’s fear reflex is very real. But it has an opposite force, too, as ancient and as powerful. Our bodies and brains melt into kindness in the presence of one key ingredient. “This school made me feel like I was somewhere where people actually loved me.”
“It’s not the fights that matter. It’s the repairs.” The repairs. You’re still my friend, Jeremy. I’m over it, Willow, because I’m your friend.
As adults, Dr. Ham told me, the process of repair is a bit more complex, more transactional. But no less satisfying. “See, for people who are traumatized, all they know is rupture,” Dr. Ham explained. “They always have to come to the abuser with an apology. But it’s never about them having their own needs. It’s not a mutuality thing. It’s a one-way street.”
What is important is to approach all of these interactions with curiosity for what that truth is, not fear. He said I should approach difficult conversations with an attitude of “What is hurting you?” instead of “Have I hurt you?”
But more and more, I am curious enough to ask the magic question: “What do you need?” These four words open doors and break down walls.
Being healed isn’t about feeling nothing. Being healed is about feeling the appropriate emotions at the appropriate times and still being able to come back to yourself. That’s just life.”
“Pain is about feeling real, appropriate, and valid hurt when something bad happens. Suffering is when you add extra dollops to that pain. You’re feeling bad about feeling bad.”
The PTSD had always told me I am alone. That I am unlovable. That I am toxic. But now, it is clear to me: That was a lie. My PTSD clouded my vision of what was actually happening.
Perhaps the only real thing that was broken was the image I had of myself—punishing and unfair, narrow and hypercritical.
Because objectively, PTSD is an adaptation, a mechanism our genius bodies evolved to help us survive.
When it came time for Siegle to name this phenomenon—the dissociated state that means you don’t always have emotions that are totally appropriate for a situation—he called it Blunted and Discordant Affect Sensitivity Syndrome.
