Kelley O'Hanlon

Schumer would sell his soul to the devil for a box of Cheezits and a promise that Satan will totally think about torturing him less.

Trauma informed professionals-- in any field, not just medicine or therapy-- intentionally support survivors in feeling & accepting that they have wisdom & skill inside them that their trauma responses have temporarily made them doubt or forget about.

We often think of childhood familial abuse as the archetype of complex trauma-- but peer group bullying over years can absolutely check all the CPTSD boxes: it occurs over time, is functionally inescapable, is relationally focused, & injures our self-concept & attachment style.

Self-care is not as easy for trauma survivors as it may sound. We've been conditioned to deny our need for care ("needing" anything feels awfully vulnerable) & to prioritize others at our own expense.

Learning self-care can be like learning a new language as an adult-- awkward.

If we avoid basic self-care-- checking in w/ ourselves, speaking to ourselves respectfully & supportively, feeding ourselves & letting ourselves rest-- we're also avoiding communicating to our "parts" & inner child that they're valuable & safe. Which is the backbone of recovery.

Before we can talk about & process our feelings & experiences in trauma recovery, we often have to wrestle w/ this overwhelming fear of being seen. Survivors learned to be seen is to be vulnerable.

We can't just "let go" of that fear-- we have to meet it w/ respect & patience.

Yes, it sucks we didn't have the tools or support or safety to protect ourselves back then-- but we can care for the kid we once were right here & now, by working our trauma recovery w/ realism & self compassion today.

That kid inside our head & heart & memory still needs us.

You are not a pessimist or "downer" for struggling w/ hope. Of course trauma survivors struggle w/ hope. We're suspicious of it. We know it can make us vulnerable. We know it can be used against us.

But hope, properly understood & leveraged, can also be a powerful recovery tool.

A wild part of trauma recovery can be realizing how we unconsciously use our body, from our facial expressions to our posture to our muscle tension, to manage threats we perceive in the environment.

And to think some people imagine trauma is just "in our head" or "in the past."

CPTSD is going to try to convince you that your involuntary thoughts, feelings, & reactions "define" you-- but they don't. They are evidence of your conditioning-- no more, no less.

We are defined by our thoughtful, values-congruent choices, not our unchosen reflexes.

The fact that our brain likes order & wants to tell us coherent stories often works against us when we've endured sh*t for which there IS no coherent explanation.

Don't let your brain make up a story in which you're the villain just for the sake of having a story. (It will try.)

Validating our own anger isn't easy for survivors of verbal & emotional abuse. We're often worried that acknowledging our anger or aggressive feelings as legit & important might make us like "them."

Trust me: even angry, you are nothing like "them." Not in any way that matters.

I'm not a fan of trauma survivors trying to replace their "negative" thoughts w/ "positive" ones.

But I'm a big fan of survivors learning to swap out unfair, self-brutalizing thoughts for realistic, self-compassionate ones, one tiny, awkward, unfamiliar bit at a time.

The world is full of people & institutions who will unapologetically exploit our "fawn" trauma response.

It's up to us to not shame ourselves for being vulnerable to that kind of pressure-- & to manage our underappreciated "fawn" reflex w/ respect, realism, & compassion.

The shame that you were made to experience about thinking or feeling certain things has nothing to do w/ those things being good or bad, right or wrong. It had everything to do w/ someone wanting to control your behavior by manipulating your thoughts & feelings.

F*ck that.

Our nervous system cares more about safety than it cares about learning. If we wanna level up our life, we're gonna have to get realistic about what it needs to hear & what it needs us to do to feel safe first-- &, spoiler, we're not gonna force or shame it into feeling safe.

The b*tch of people pleasing is that anyone in your life who makes you feel like you need to scramble for their approval probably isn't going to eventually say "that's good enough, you've earned it, you can relax now."

The only way to "win" a rigged game is not to play.

Safe people know how to handle hearing "no" without losing their sh*t & pivoting to emotional abuse.

No exceptions.

People who can & will realistically support our trauma recovery really listen to us-- & people who can't or don't actually listen to us can't or won't be realistic, reliable recovery supports.

Doubting our ability to recover is PART of recovery. Literally no survivor has been all in, all the time, on our ability to do this. Trauma conditioning is DESIGNED to stoke self doubt.

Don't demand you be all in or doubt free today. Just do the next recovery supporting thing.

Nobody else gets a vote on whether something "should" be a trigger for us. Hell, even WE don't get a vote on that.

If something triggers us, it triggers us-- & the decision we DO get is whether we're going to meet that trigger w/ realism & compassion, or let it kick our ass.

Society says “young men are turning to the far right because of feminists” and not “young women are turning to feminism because of far right men” is because the first rule of patriarchy is to blame women for everything a man does. PowllerData

YouTube video by Zohran Mamdani for NYC Zohran Mamdani's Full Victory Speech, November 4th, 2025

If you have any interest in politics at all

And maybe especially if you don’t

Spend 23 minutes listening to this speech.

It will not be wasted.

This is what a Leader sounds like.

This is a reminder of what is possible.

youtu.be/5cG4WD8uEwE?...

Nobody's Baby Becky Chambers meets Miss Marple in the second entry of this cozy sci-fi mystery series, helmed by a formidable no-nonsense auntie of a detective.Welcome to ...

The second Dorothy Gentleman novella is out in March, but you can pre-order now! NOBODY’S BABY is a sapphic sci-fi mystery kicked off with one bone-chilling sentence: A wild baby appears!

us.macmillan.com/books/978125...

Books are the escapism that helps some lonely neurospicy kids build fascinating worlds in our heads while learning a whole bunch of useful stuff along the way, sometimes from the most unlikely places

(And sowing a field full of hyperfocus seeds, but I digress 🤣)

To paraphrase something Wynton Marsalis said about Beethoven, maybe:

Great books, challenging ones, won't make themselves easier for you, but you can lift yourself up to them. They're waiting. And you can see amazing things from up there.

Even a quite imperfect book can be the book that someone, somewhere deeply needed at a particular time in their life. And you, the author, will likely never know who it was or how and why it helped them.

Just read. Read, whatever you want. When words/images pass through your eyes and into your heart, you are more. Who doesn't want to be more?!

Re-read your favourites every few years. The new things you notice, or the things you enjoy more/less than last time show growth from most recent life experiences.

Books not only teach us about ways to be happy, they *are* ways to be happy.