Dragonfly Therapeutics of Calgary

02/14/2026

Abusers not remembering the abuse or claiming it never happened is part of the abuse. It's not selective memory it's not genuine confusion it's a calculated tactic to make you doubt your reality to make you question what you lived through to gaslight you into believing you imagined or exaggerated everything.

When they say I don't remember that or that never happened they're not confused they're protecting themselves by making you look crazy and it's abuse on top of abuse.

You remember every detail because you lived through the trauma you carry the scars you've replayed it in your mind a thousand times trying to make sense of how someone who claimed to love you could hurt you that way.

But they conveniently don't remember because remembering would require accountability and accountability threatens their carefully constructed victim narrative.

So they erase it they deny it they rewrite history and suddenly you're the one defending your own experience to the person who caused it.

This denial serves multiple purposes it avoids consequences it maintains their image it makes you look unstable it keeps you stuck explaining proving defending when you should be healing.

And the cruelest part is it makes you doubt yourself even when you know what happened even when you have evidence even when your body remembers the trauma your mind starts questioning because they're so convincing in their denial. That's intentional that's the goal and that's abuse.

Don't let their denial erase your reality. You know what happened you lived it you survived it and their refusal to acknowledge it doesn't make it any less real.

Their claiming it never happened is just another form of abuse another way to control the narrative another tactic to avoid facing what they did.

Believe yourself trust your memory honor your experience because their denial is about protecting themselves not about the truth and you don't need their acknowledgment to validate what you know is real.

02/13/2026

“Sit with animals quietly…
and they will show you their hearts.
Sit with them kindly…
and they will help you locate yours.”

We live in a world that is constantly asking us to talk.
Explain.
Defend.
Perform.
Prove.

Horses ask for none of that.

They don’t need your backstory.
They don’t need your achievements.
They don’t need you to be impressive.

They need you to be present.

When you sit with a horse quietly — really quietly — something shifts.

Your breathing slows.
Your shoulders drop.
Your thoughts soften.

There’s no judgement.
No fixing.
No agenda.

Just co-regulation.
Just energy meeting energy.

And if you sit with them kindly not trying to take, not trying to prove, not trying to “get something” they mirror that kindness back.

They show you their softness.
Their vulnerability.
Their trust.

And in that space, you often find your own.

So many of us didn’t learn how to sit with ourselves gently.

But horses teach it without words.

They help us locate the parts of us that are calm.
The parts that are honest.
The parts that are still good.

Sometimes the most healing thing you can do
is stand in a field
and say nothing at all.

🐴🖤

02/12/2026

Love this and so true 🥰

02/07/2026

Silence has a way of pretending it’s neutral. It sits in a room like a closed window, neither kind nor cruel, until you realise the air has gone stale. Edith Eger understood that kind of silence intimately, as a lived condition, something enforced and something later chosen, sometimes mistakenly, as a form of survival.

Eger’s observation about depression and expression comes from The Gift, published in 2020, decades after she survived Auschwitz as a teenager and rebuilt her life in the United States. She trained as a clinical psychologist, worked with trauma survivors and veterans, and became a late life public voice for psychological freedom. Her earlier memoir, The Choice, traced her survival and recovery; The Gift is more distilled, less historical, and more focused on the everyday habits of the inner life. The line sits where those two books meet: the lived knowledge of unspeakable horror and the professional understanding of how the mind copes when it’s overwhelmed.

What makes the idea unsettling is how ordinary it is. Many of us learn early that keeping things in is safer. Don’t complain or burden people. Keep moving. The body often co-operates for a while. You go to work. You answer messages. You smile at the neighbour. But inside, feelings that haven’t been named don’t dissolve. They harden or leak sideways. Sadness turns into numbness. Anger becomes irritability or fatigue. Fear settles into the bones and calls itself realism.

Eger isn’t romantic about expression. She isn’t suggesting that speaking is easy or that disclosure guarantees relief. Expression can be awkward, poorly timed, even misunderstood. Sometimes it comes out wrong. A sentence spills too fast. A truth hits heavier than intended. But she’s pointing to a psychological reality that has been quietly affirmed by decades of trauma research: what is suppressed doesn’t disappear. It seeks another route. Depression, in this light, isn’t a personal failure or a chemical accident alone. It’s often the cost of carrying too much, for too long, without language.

Her thinking sits in conversation with Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, whom Eger later knew personally. Frankl emphasised meaning as a path through suffering. Eger adds something more bodily and relational. Meaning helps, but so does release. So does saying the thing out loud, or writing it badly in a notebook, or letting grief move through the chest instead of locking it behind competence.

There’s also a cultural edge to her claim. Western societies, particularly in the post war period in which Eger came of age, rewarded stoicism. Emotional restraint was framed as maturity. For women especially, anger and despair were inconvenient feelings, often redirected into self-blame or silence. It’s not incidental that Eger, now in her nineties, has found a wide readership among women who were taught to cope quietly and are tired of paying the psychological price.

Expression doesn’t always look like confession. Sometimes it’s indirect. A line of poetry. A long walk taken without distraction. A conversation where the voice shakes slightly and keeps going. What matters is movement. What stays trapped tends to turn inward, breeding shame and isolation. What moves outward has a chance to change shape.

Eger’s life doesn’t deny the reality of suffering or imply that healing is quick. She knows that some experiences never fully leave us. But she insists on the possibility of not being ruled by what remains unspoken. In a world that still mistakes emotional containment for strength, her insight feels quietly radical.

© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved

Image: U.S. Navy graphic by Petty Officer 2nd Class Andrea Rumple

01/30/2026

IF YOU EVER NEED TO FIGURE OUT WHO THE REAL BULLY IS AND WHO THE ACTUAL VICTIM IS, LOOK AT WHO STANDS ALONE.

The victim is almost always the one forced to carry the weight in silence. They’re misunderstood, judged, and often disliked—not because they did something wrong, but because they refused to play along, conform, or stay quiet about the harm done to them. Standing alone makes people uncomfortable, so instead of questioning the cruelty, many choose to question the person who survived it.

Meanwhile, the bully is rarely alone. They’re surrounded by groups, enablers, and people who laugh along—not because it’s funny, but because it’s safer to fit in than to speak up. Those people call it “jokes,” “drama,” or “both sides,” just to avoid accountability. Silence and laughter become shields that protect the harm and keep it going.

Power loves an audience. Abuse thrives in crowds. And isolation is often the price paid by the one who tells the truth, sets boundaries, or refuses to accept mistreatment. So when you’re trying to understand the story, don’t just listen to the loudest voices—look for the one standing alone. More often than not, that’s where the truth is.

01/26/2026

Repair is not a conversation in dysfunctional families.
It’s a threat.

Because repair doesn’t just ask what happened.
It asks who benefited from pretending it didn’t.

Repair forces a family to look at the roles they depended on to function -
the parent who was never questioned.
the child who absorbed the damage.
the silence that kept things “normal”.
the story that made everyone feel decent enough to survive.

And that story is not small.

It’s generational.

It says:
“We did our best.”
“That’s just how our family is.”
“Nothing was that bad.”
“Every family has problems.”

Those phrases aren’t harmless.
They’re load-bearing beams.

Because once you name the harm, the entire structure wobbles.

Repair would mean admitting:
that control was mistaken for care
that cruelty was normalized
that protection was conditional
that comfort mattered more than safety

And if that’s true, then the family wasn’t just imperfect.

It was complicit.

That’s why repair is resisted so aggressively.

Not because they don’t love you.
But because repair threatens identity.

It threatens the idea of
being a “good parent”.
being a “close family”.
being “nothing like THOSE families”.

Repair doesn’t just ask for an apology.
It asks for a reckoning.

It asks people to sit with the fact that what they passed down wasn’t resilience or tradition or strength —
it was survival through silence.

So instead of repair, the system protects itself.

They minimize.
They deflect.
They accuse you of “living in the past.”
They reframe your pain as obsession.
They call your clarity cruelty.

Because if YOU’RE the problem,
the family story stays intact.

This is why the most aware person becomes the most dangerous.

Not because you’re disruptive.
But because you’re incompatible with denial.

Repair would mean the previous generation has to say:
“This ends with me.”

And many families would rather lose a truth-telling child
than lose the identity they built by never looking too closely.

So if you were punished for asking for repair,
for naming patterns,
for refusing to carry what wasn’t yours

it wasn’t because you asked for too much.

It’s because repair threatened something older than you:
a generational agreement to survive without accountability.

Walking away isn’t failure.

It’s what happens when truth reaches a system
that was never designed to hold it.

01/26/2026

❤️

Horses don’t push healing.

They don’t ask you to “get over it.”

They wait.
They listen.
They respond to what’s actually happening — not what should be happening.

And that’s why their presence feels so safe.

Healing doesn’t come from force.
It comes from being met. 🖤

01/20/2026

In narcissistic family systems, the scapegoat exists for a very specific purpose: to carry what no one else is willing to face. They absorb the blame, the rage, the dysfunction, and the unspoken truths that threaten the family’s image. Every conflict gets routed to them. Every discomfort is projected onto them. As long as the scapegoat stays in place, the system appears “stable,” because someone is silently holding all the pain.

The scapegoat becomes the emotional landfill. They are blamed for tension they didn’t create, punished for dynamics they didn’t control, and labeled as the problem for simply reacting to chronic mistreatment. Their role is not accidental—it is structural. The family doesn’t heal by addressing harm; it survives by assigning it. And the scapegoat is chosen to carry what others refuse to own.

When the scapegoat leaves, the illusion collapses. There is no longer a single person absorbing the dysfunction. The anger has nowhere to land. The guilt has no container. The chaos that was once redirected suddenly turns inward. Relationships fracture. Conflicts escalate. Masks slip. And that’s when the system panics.

Suddenly, people reach out. Not with accountability. Not with remorse. But with pressure, guilt, and rewritten narratives. They want the scapegoat back—not because they miss you, but because they miss what you provided: emotional labor, silence, tolerance, and a place to dump responsibility. Your presence made their denial possible. Your absence exposes the truth.

A system that requires a victim to function will always chase the one who escaped. It will frame your departure as betrayal, selfishness, or cruelty, because acknowledging your role would require confronting theirs. But leaving isn’t abandonment. It’s clarity. It’s the refusal to continue sacrificing yourself so others can avoid growth.

Breaking free doesn’t destroy the family system—it reveals it. And once you see that your suffering was the glue holding everything together, you understand why staying was never loyalty. It was self-erasure.

Walking away isn’t cruel.
It’s ending a cycle that survives only through sacrifice.

© Shattered Emotions

01/10/2026

There are moments in life when the path narrows.

When the light feels far away and the ground beneath you changes.
We don’t choose those moments.

They choose us.
The horses have taught me that the dark isn’t a mistake.
It’s a passage.

A place where the old ways fall away and something truer begins to form. A horse will walk into the dark without panic.

Not because it knows what’s ahead —
but because it trusts what’s guiding it.

So if you find yourself in a season that feels heavy, uncertain, or unfamiliar,
this isn’t a sign you’re lost.

It’s a sign you’re crossing something.
And on the other side of that crossing,
you don’t return the same.

You return clearer.
More honest.
More yourself.

The Way of the Horse isn’t about avoiding the dark.
It’s about learning how to walk through it —
guided, held, and deeply connected to what matters.