Struggling With Food, Weight, Substances, or Relationships?

If you’re struggling with food, weight, substances, or relationships I can help.  I struggled in each of these areas for many decades until I learned that they were classic symptoms of unhealed complex PTSD and I got the support I needed to heal.  

As a result of healing my trauma, I am in long-term recovery from my struggle with alcohol and drugs and have been in long-term recovery from binge eating, and severe obesity, and have been maintaining a 160lb weight loss for over two decades.

Also, after struggling for years in forging and maintaining close relationships, healing from CPTSD has gifted me with the ability to maintain a healthy long-term romantic relationship and several close friendships. 

What If You Were Never Physically or Sexually Abused?

If you can’t identify a link between what happened to you as a child and your current struggles, we can explore the more subtle forms of childhood trauma, known as emotional neglect (when a parent, due to their own unhealed trauma, anxiety, depression, addiction, or being too busy, doesn’t acknowledge their child’s emotions as valid, important, or shames them for having emotions.)  

Another form of trauma that is frequently missed is childhood witness abuse. This is where a child is exposed to chronic tension, emotional abuse, or physical violence between parents, or between a parent and a sibling.  Bullying, racism, homophobia, poverty, and living in an unsafe neighborhood are also forms of childhood trauma.

My primary types of trauma were witnessing my drunk, alcoholic mother raging at my dad on a regular basis for over a decade, as well as her emotional neglect due to her alcoholism and unhealed trauma. I also experienced emotional abuse due to being bullied for many years as an overweight kid at school as well as living in a fat phobic culture as a child and as a severely obese women throughout my adulthood.  Additionally, experiencing the realization that I was a lesbian while attending Catholic High School in the 1970s and throughout the following decades in an extremely homophobic culture was another form of trauma I endured.  

Believing I had to have been sexually or physically abused to be considered a trauma survivor is what prevented me for over three decades from seeking the necessary trauma based therapies to experience optimal healing.  

There are also many forms of invisible emotional, physical, or sexual trauma that can happen at such a young age that a child’s brain is not developed enough to explicitly remember them. This explains why so many of us struggle with food, weight, substances, and/or relationships but have no clear memory of why.  The good news is you don’t have to have an explicit memory to be able to heal the ways trauma has impacted your brain, body, mind, behavior, and relationships.