Eileen Martin, MSW, LCSW

01/26/2026

01/26/2026

"Women who exit harmful marriages are not breaking something sacred. They are refusing to be broken. The shame placed on them is a warning to others. Endure, or pay socially for choosing
yourself."

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1A99N8eGWJ/

Susan Faludi has spent her career examining how power reshapes narratives, and divorce is
one of its quietest battlegrounds. When a woman exits a damaging marriage, the language
around her shifts immediately. She is analyzed. Questioned. Psychologized. Her decision is
treated as a character flaw rather than a survival response.
The scrutiny is relentless. Why did she not try harder. Why did she not stay for the children. Why
did she choose the wrong man. Each question assumes the same thing. That preserving the
institution mattered more than preserving the person inside it. Harm is minimized. Endurance is
romanticized. Escape is reframed as moral collapse.
Faludi’s work exposes how deeply this framing is embedded. Men who leave are described as
dissatisfied. Women who leave are described as unstable. The marriage is treated as neutral
ground, while her departure becomes the disruption that demands explanation. The abuse,
neglect, or erosion that preceded it is often reduced to background noise.
This is not accidental. Social systems rely on women absorbing damage quietly. Marriage has
long functioned as a stabilizing structure for society, and when women step away from it, they
threaten that stability. The response is not empathy. It is interrogation. If survival looks too
justified, the structure itself comes into question.
The reframe Faludi pushes is uncomfortable but necessary. Leaving harm is not failure. Staying
silent inside it is not virtue. A system that demands women sacrifice their safety, dignity, or
sanity to preserve appearances is not moral. It is extractive.
Women who exit harmful marriages are not breaking something sacred. They are refusing to be
broken. The shame placed on them is a warning to others. Endure, or pay socially for choosing
yourself.
The question is not why women leave. It is why survival is still treated as something that needs
defending.
Who benefits when women are taught that leaving harm is worse than living with it.

01/21/2026

What’s on the board this week? Thoughts to ponder with curiosity and compassion.

01/20/2026

Unprocessed grief constricts the world.

Grief that is welcomed widens it.

This doesn’t mean welcoming grief feels gentle or relieving at first.

Often it feels overwhelming, disorganizing, even frightening.

Many of us learned early that grief had to be contained, managed, or carried alone. So we tighten around it. Not because we’re weak, but because we’re trying to survive.

When grief is allowed to move, slowly, with support, at the pace of the nervous system, it doesn’t drown us. It makes room.

Not all at once. Not neatly.

But over time, something widens: perspective, tenderness, capacity for joy.

01/19/2026

Emotional pain can feel overwhelming when we weren't provided with safety and acceptance as children.

Pain that is welcomed becomes passage.
Pain that is resisted becomes prison.

So many of us weren’t taught how to be with pain.
We were taught to override it, explain it away, stay productive, stay pleasant, stay strong.

But pain doesn’t dissolve when it’s ignored.
It tightens. It lodges. It demands vigilance.

When pain is welcomed, felt in the body, named without judgment, it begins to move.
Not because it’s fixed, but because it no longer has to fight to be seen.

This is not about liking pain.
It’s about trusting yourself enough to stay present with what’s true.

And when we do…
Joy doesn’t disappear.
It has room to return.

01/18/2026

Boundaries: Story of the Day

"It's ok to draw a line with the people in your life who don't treat you right. It's not selfish to protect yourself. You are worth protecting."

This story by Gabriel Andreas, with art by Matthew Andreas, is available as a print here: https://conta.cc/3WxFbQq

Want little bits of goodness in your email inbox? Click here for Story of the Day: https://conta.cc/49y5JG8

01/18/2026

Why External Focus Kept You Safe, and What Heals Now

Many individuals who grew up in unsafe or unpredictable environments learned to orient externally as a primary regulation strategy. External focus often provided predictability, control, usefulness, and a sense of identity by monitoring others’ needs, moods, and reactions.

While adaptive at the time, this outward vigilance can persist into adulthood and contribute to chronic anxiety, hyper-responsibility, and difficulty tolerating uncertainty. In contrast, developing internal focus supports healing by strengthening self-trust, emotional containment, and nervous system regulation.

Turning inward allows individuals to recognize, validate, and respond to internal states rather than override them, fostering a sense of safety that is not dependent on external conditions. This shift is not about abandoning attunement to others, but about restoring balance so regulation and safety can be generated internally as well as relationally.

01/16/2026

Healing through self validation:

Other people’s responses are data, not verdicts.

Invalidation tells you about their limits, not your legitimacy.

Self-validation isn’t pretending it doesn’t hurt, it’s saying, this makes sense for me.

01/09/2026

For those reeling after daily trauma in the news, slow down, reach out, notice feelings of overwhelm and name it. Use gentle movement, a walk, stretching, to ground. Take very good care.

01/08/2026

"You deserve your own compassion. You deserve to walk forward, lighter and freer, carrying wisdom instead of chains."

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1GxUZAQa4m/

✍️ The Hardest Person to Forgive - We can forgive others with surprising ease sometimes. A friend hurts us, and eventually we let it go. A stranger wrongs us, and we find a way to move past it. But when it comes to forgiving ourselves? That’s where we become stuck.

Regret holds us like nothing else can. We replay our mistakes endlessly—the words we shouldn’t have said, the choices we wish we could undo, the people we hurt. We carry these memories like heavy chains, dragging them everywhere, unable to walk forward, trapped in a past that cannot be changed while life continues flowing around us.

Forgiving ourselves does not erase what happened. It does not pretend our mistakes don’t matter or that we caused no harm.

What it does is release the weight so we can actually do something meaningful with what we’ve learned. It frees us to become better, to grow from our mistakes rather than being crushed by them, to walk forward with the lightness we need to bring peace to others.

How can we offer peace to the world when we are still at war with ourselves? How can we extend compassion to others when we withhold it from our own hearts?

Peace begins within—not just with calming our minds, but with learning to treat ourselves with the same gentleness, the same understanding, the same mercy we so readily offer to everyone else.

We are human. We may make mistakes. This is not a failure—this is simply what it means to be alive, to be learning, to be walking a path we’ve never walked before.

The question is not whether we will stumble. The question is: Will we allow those stumbles to define us forever, or will we learn from them, forgive ourselves, and keep walking?

Let us be gentle with our own hearts. Let us forgive ourselves—not as an ending, but as a beginning. Not as permission to repeat mistakes, but as freedom to become who we are truly capable of being.

You deserve your own compassion. You deserve to walk forward, lighter and freer, carrying wisdom instead of chains.

May you and all beings be well, happy, and at peace.

12/10/2025

A helpful reminder as the holidays ramp up: focus your energy on the things that you can actually control. You can't fix family drama or make everyone get along, but you can protect your boundaries and your peace.

🩷Did this post resonate? There's a whole library of resources (like affirmation cards, self-care assignments, and worksheets!) waiting for you on my Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/SelfLoveRainbow

12/07/2025

I work with so many clients who were told their sensitivity was “too much.” I was told the same.

This is a small piece of my truth and a reminder that sensitivity isn’t weakness. It’s wisdom. It’s clarity. It’s survival.

It’s also one of the most sacred parts of who we are.

Sharing this for anyone who has ever felt “too emotional” for the world around them:

Dead squirrels undo me. I often tear up when I see a defenseless animal that has been hit by a vehicle. A counselor told me once that “it was too intense” for me to cry about such things. I soaked that in with the same measure as anything else I was told was too much. Too sensitive. Too dramatic. Just too much for others to bear.

All words from the outside world attempting to hide their own unmet feelings and shame.

I feel.
I feel big.
Too big for words sometimes.

Some are uncomfortable with my unspoken truth lived out in emotional expression. I have picked apart endlessly for the last 20 years what is mine and what is others. It’s been sort of like an exorcism. It hasn’t been altogether a pleasant experience, but neither was hiding in the dark shadow of shame.

I wear my sensitivity like a superpower most days now. It is my Wonder Woman cape that protects an unflinching sense of self, protected from a knowing place inside. Deep and abiding. Me.

I am, rather than you are.