Frank Anderson, MD, 30 Domino Drive, Concord, MA (2026)

12/19/2025

One thing that came up in my recent conversation with Tom Vozzo on the was how trauma can quietly block our ability to receive love.

I believe deeply in the importance of receiving love that comes from beyond ourselves. Opening to spirituality was a game changer for me. It helped me experience support that did not rely only on me carrying everything or having all the answers.

However, healing and spirituality are not linear.
For many people, especially those with relational trauma, receiving love can feel complicated.

When connection has been unsafe, inconsistent, or overwhelming in the past, the nervous system learns to protect. Even love that is meant to be unconditional can feel activating before it feels comforting.

This is not just about authority trauma. Relational trauma of any kind can shape how open we feel to receiving love, whether it comes from people or from something beyond us.

Sometimes spirituality supports healing. Sometimes healing has to come first so that spiritual connection can feel safe. There is no single order. What matters is meeting the nervous system where it actually is, not where we think it should be.

12/18/2025

Most of us come to healing with a quiet expectation that one day, we’ll stop getting activated.

We imagine that progress looks like staying calm, unbothered, unaffected. That if the work is really working, we won’t snap at our partner, shut down in hard conversations, or feel our body tense in familiar moments.

So when activation shows up, it can feel like something went wrong.

For example, you might snap at your partner over something small and immediately feel confused about why it came out so strong.

Or you shut down during a conversation and can’t find your words, even though you care deeply about what’s being said.

Or a tone, a look, or a silence suddenly makes your chest tighten and your mind race.

Or you over explain, people please, withdraw, or go numb without fully choosing to.

When that happens, it’s easy to assume healing should have prevented it.

The goal of healing isn’t to eliminate activation. It’s to change what happens when activation appears. That kind of change doesn’t come from insight alone. It comes from helping the whole system learn something new, not just understand it.

Over time, that looks like noticing yourself getting flooded without immediately lashing out.

Staying in the conversation instead of disappearing from it.

Feeling intensity without your nervous system taking over.

Instead of asking, Why am I still getting activated? A more useful question becomes, What’s different about how I meet this activation now?

12/18/2025

A quick clarification, because this topic brings up a lot.
I’m not anti-AI, and I’m not saying people shouldn’t use it. For many, it’s more accessible than therapy and genuinely useful for reflection.

What matters is how it’s used.

Mental health work isn’t just about feeling understood. It’s about knowing when to stay with discomfort and when to ease off. That requires attunement to a nervous system, not just language.

AI can’t track that. If it always feels soothing or affirming, that’s a design limitation, not a signal that growth is happening.

Here’s my take: use AI as a tool, not a stand-in for relationship. Insight helps, but most healing happens when safety is learned with another person.

That line between support and substitution is worth paying attention to.

12/11/2025

That instinct to jump in with reassurance usually carries more than one truth. There’s the sincere desire to care for someone. There’s the discomfort of silence when you don’t know what to say. And there’s the deeper layer, when their pain brushes against your own and it feels hard to stay with the moment.

And if you’re the one being rushed, it makes sense that it can feel like your pain is being minimized even when the other person means well.

When you understand that both people bring their own histories into the moment, the conversation shifts. It stops being about who got it right or wrong and becomes a clearer look at how pain, care, and fear get tangled together in real time.

12/10/2025

The holidays can stir a very specific kind of grief. Not only the grief of what happened, but the grief of what never took shape in the first place.

Even when you know distance from family is what keeps you steady, there can still be a quiet sadness underneath it. A sadness for the version of family you hoped was possible.

That grief is real. It’s the recognition that certain kinds of closeness or safety never fully formed. And when the season revolves around home and togetherness, that gap can feel sharper.

It’s common to feel more than one thing at once. The sense that you’re doing what is healthiest for you, and the pain of wishing it didn’t have to be this way. Confusion about why something you chose still hurts. Even frustration that the past still has an emotional hold on you.

Nothing is wrong with feeling that mix of clarity and grief. It doesn’t undo the progress you’ve made. It simply shows how deeply you’ve always needed connection that felt safe.

If this season feels heavy, give yourself room to notice it without judgment. There’s value in acknowledging what was missing, and real strength in being honest about what hurts.

And if you’re sitting with all of this wondering what you’re supposed to do next, you’re not alone. Grief like this takes time. It starts to ease when you let yourself feel what’s actually there instead of pushing it down, when you can speak the truth of your experience without turning it against yourself, and when you let supportive people offer whatever care they can.

It shifts a little when you slow down enough to notice what’s happening, whether that looks like a quiet moment or tears you didn’t expect. And over time, it changes as you face the reality that you can’t turn your family into something they’ve never been, even if you wish things could have been different.

You may not have had the family you hoped for, but you can still experience love and safety in the relationships you choose now.

12/10/2025

People often hear “let it go” as if trauma responds to effort. But trauma doesn’t live in logic - it lives in the body, in the beliefs formed during overwhelming moments, and in the protective patterns that once kept you safe.

You can understand your story and still find yourself reacting to things you cannot explain. Not because you’re unwilling to let go, but because your nervous system learned to stay ready for danger long before it felt safe.

True healing asks for something deeper than trying harder. It asks for safety, compassion, curiosity, and a way of relating to your internal world that helps the body update its memory.

This is the work of integration.

On December 12 & 13, and I will teach this integrative approach to trauma healing. We’ll guide you in recognizing the living legacy of trauma and supporting the physiological shift that makes letting go possible.

Link in bio to learn more and sign up.

12/05/2025

In the immediate aftermath of acute trauma — things like a serious accident, assault, a sudden medical crisis, a natural disaster, or exposure to mass violence — the brain enters a high intensity state of trying to make sense of what happened.

During this window, the body is flooded with cortisol, norepinephrine, and glutamate. These chemicals help you survive, but they also shape how the memory gets stored.

Because these levels surge in the first days and weeks, the brain is already working hard to organize and store the experience. When someone is pushed to retell what happened over and over again, or is given medications that interfere with memory formation, it can disrupt the body’s natural processing.

And the opposite extreme — no acknowledgment or support at all — can leave the nervous system without what it needs to begin stabilizing.

This is why early care after acute trauma has a sweet spot. People need safety, grounding, and connection. They need the option to talk, not pressure to recount every detail. They need support that honors what their nervous system is already working to do.

As science evolves, so does our understanding of trauma. We’re learning that early support isn’t about rushing people through their pain. It’s about creating conditions that allow healing to unfold — the kind of integrative, compassionate care that meets people where they actually are.

12/04/2025

Conversations about religious trauma can feel complicated because faith is personal, and spiritual communities can be both meaningful and painful at the same time.

Naming these experiences is not about blaming religion. It is about acknowledging the environments where your sense of safety or agency may have been affected.

Not every difficult spiritual experience becomes trauma. Trauma develops when these patterns are ongoing, when fear or pressure is constant, or when there is no space for repair, honesty, or support.

Many people learned to hide their needs, silence their intuition, or override their bodies because it helped them stay connected. Those adaptations make sense.

Healing doesn’t require abandoning your beliefs. It’s about rebuilding safety within yourself, understanding what shaped you, and giving yourself permission to reconnect with your own clarity.

For some people, that happens inside their faith tradition with healthier support. For others, healing begins with distance, therapy, or new forms of spirituality. Both paths are valid.

You get to choose what healing looks like for you, and you deserve a path that honors both your history and your humanity.

12/03/2025

It makes sense if you have spent years trying to understand what happened to you. When something overwhelms you, the mind believes that clarity will bring relief.

You replay moments. You look for patterns. You try to understand the story so you can finally feel free.

But here is a part of healing most people never hear: Even when you finally get the explanation you always wanted, peace doesn’t always arrive.

Someone can apologize. They can give you their reasons. They can tell you everything you wish you knew then. And you can still feel unsettled afterward.

That’s not because you are unforgiving. It’s because your system is still holding the impact.

Trauma often shows up in the body before you can put words to it. When something is too intense to process in the moment, the brain struggles to integrate it, and the body absorbs what the mind couldn’t hold.

Understanding can organize the story, but it may not release what got stuck in your physiology.

Insight brings clarity, but it doesn’t automatically undo the tension, fear, or activation your system learned to carry.

This is why healing isn’t just about knowing. It’s also about helping the body let go of what it’s been holding.

Through somatic awareness, memory processing, and other integrative practices, your system learns how to complete what it couldn’t complete at the time.

Release isn’t dramatic. It’s often slow, gentle, and felt in small shifts that tell the body the danger has passed.

So if understanding hasn’t freed you, nothing is wrong with you. Your system is asking for a kind of support that reaches both the mind and the body.

When the story makes sense and the body can finally release what it carried, healing becomes possible in a different way.

11/28/2025

Regaining connection to your own clarity is hardly ever talked about in trauma healing.

Many people lose access to instinct and intuitive knowing after trauma. Even as kids, we can feel when something isn’t right. But when those signals are ignored, dismissed, or gaslit, we learn to second-guess ourselves instead.

Over time, that sense of “something’s off” gets buried under fear, confusion, and everything it took to get through what happened.

If you’ve lived through trauma, especially the kind that made you doubt your own perception, it makes sense that self-trust feels far away. You might ignore your gut, question your needs, or assume others see things more clearly than you do.

Healing invites something different: slowly rebuilding your connection to your own inner signals, the ones that got disrupted in the process of surviving.

That clarity isn’t gone. It’s just been overshadowed by the protective habits that helped you cope.

So what helps? 👉 It often starts with noticing how protection shows up in your body compared to how clarity feels.

🔹Protective reactions tend to be fast, urgent, or all-or-nothing.

🔹Clarity usually feels quieter and more grounded. And when your system is stressed, it’s much harder to access.

As your nervous system feels safer, you regain access to the parts of the brain that support perspective, calm decision-making, and a more reliable sense of what feels right for you.

And we don’t do this alone. Self-trust is shaped both internally and through relationships. We heal by listening to our own signals and by being with people who are safe to lean on — people who help us name what we’re feeling, make space for our perspective, and never override or shame us in the process.

The goal isn’t to always trust your gut or never trust it. It’s learning to tell the difference between fear and genuine insight. That’s what real self-trust becomes over time — not certainty, but a clearer inner sense of “this feels right for me.”

11/27/2025

The holidays can make gratitude feel a lot more complicated than people admit. If you’re going through something hard, all the talk about joy and thankfulness can feel a little tone-deaf…almost like it highlights the gap between what you’re “supposed” to feel and what you actually feel.

And that’s completely understandable.
When your system is overwhelmed, your brain isn’t reaching for gratitude; it’s just trying to keep you safe.

There’s nothing wrong with you for not feeling what the season expects.

Gratitude can support healing, but only when it grows out of something that actually helps your body settle - feeling supported, feeling understood, or simply having a moment that isn’t as heavy.

Start there. Those moments matter, and they make space for gratitude to return in its own time.

11/26/2025

If you’ve ever heard yourself say something to your child and thought, “Oh God… that sounded just like my parent,” it hits like a punch to the gut.

Most people respond by beating themselves up: What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I stop? Why am I doing the very thing that hurt me?

But beating yourself up never creates change. It just pushes you deeper into the very patterns you’re trying to break.

And those patterns aren’t always about being “overwhelmed.” Sometimes you’re scared.
Sometimes you’re trying to protect your child the only way you were taught. Sometimes a small moment hits a deep, unhealed place.

And sometimes your body just defaults to the blueprint it was handed.

None of this excuses hurtful behavior.
But it does explain why “trying harder” hasn’t worked.

Real change starts with pausing long enough to understand what was actually happening inside you a not from shame, but from clarity.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself in the moment:

❓What was I trying to do just now—protect, control, prevent, avoid, or calm? (There’s always an intent behind the reaction, even if it came out harsh.)

❓What did that moment touch in me - fear, old helplessness, rejection, shame? (Your child activated a wound, not a flaw.)

❓What did I need growing up that I didn’t get here - reassurance, patience, softness, space? (Whatever you needed then is usually what your child needs now.)

❓What would help me respond from the adult me, not the protective, wounded me?

When you meet these moments with honesty and compassion instead of shame, your system actually starts to learn something new.

Breaking the cycle doesn’t start with never messing up.
It starts with noticing, repairing, and choosing again.

Frank Anderson, MD

12/19/2025

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