Journey Counseling, LLC

04/25/2026

04/24/2026

You’re allowed to grieve the parent you needed without waiting for the one you got to change. Healing doesn’t require their participation.
🖤💛

04/18/2026

04/18/2026

When a child grows up in an environment where blame, criticism, shame, or emotional inconsistency are common, they usually do not have the ability to step back and say, “The adults around me are struggling, projecting, or failing me.”

A child’s brain is still developing. They depend on caregivers for safety, identity, and emotional regulation. So when something feels wrong in the home, children often make it mean something is wrong with them.

This is how toxic shame begins.

Instead of thinking:
“This environment is unhealthy,”

the child starts thinking:
“I am too sensitive.”
“I am difficult.”
“I am the problem.”

This is not because the child is weak or dramatic. It is because children are wired to personalize what they cannot yet understand.

Over time, repeated blame can become internalized. It stops sounding like something that was said to you and starts sounding like your own inner voice. That is why many adults who grew up in emotionally unhealthy environments struggle with chronic self-blame, guilt, harsh inner criticism, and feeling responsible for other people’s behavior.

This is one of the deepest effects of childhood emotional wounds: you do not just experience pain in the moment, you can carry the interpretation of that pain into adulthood.

And if you were taught to see yourself through the eyes of unhealed adults, healing often involves learning to see yourself more clearly and more truthfully for the first time.

I Didn’t Choose to Be Born is for understanding childhood wounds and how they shape you.
Chasing Love That Hurts is for understanding how those wounds can later show up in attachment, obsession, and painful relationship patterns.

Both are at the link in my bio 🤍

04/18/2026

🧠 Trauma is not always created by pain alone.

It is often created by pain with no safe place to go.

A child can survive criticism, rejection, emotional neglect, chaos, or inconsistency and still carry the deepest wounds not only because those things happened, but because no one helped them process what they were feeling while it was happening.

That is what many people do not understand about childhood trauma.

It is not just the event.
It is the lack of comfort after the event.
The lack of protection during it.
The lack of emotional support around it.

When a child is repeatedly hurt and then ignored, dismissed, blamed, or left to cope alone, the nervous system does not simply register pain. It also learns isolation.

This is where many core beliefs are born:
“I am too sensitive.”
“My feelings are a burden.”
“I have to deal with everything by myself.”
“No one is coming.”
“What hurts me must not matter.”

And those beliefs do not stay in childhood.
They often follow people into adulthood as:
overexplaining,
people-pleasing,
emotional shutdown,
hyper-independence,
difficulty trusting others,
feeling ashamed of having needs,
and struggling to ask for help even when they are drowning.

That is why healing is not only about talking about what happened. It’s is also about finally giving yourself what was missing:
language for your pain,
compassion for your younger self,
and the emotional support you should have received a long time ago.

Because the wound is not only that you were hurt.
It is that you were left alone with the hurt.

If this speaks to your experience, my book I Didn’t Choose to Be Born was written for you.

It is for the adult still carrying the pain of being unseen, unsupported, emotionally neglected, or wounded in childhood.

Link here: https://linktr.ee/traumatorecovery

04/18/2026

❤️‍🩹

04/12/2026

You don’t have to go this alone, Fam. 💛🖤



Find a therapist in your area on melaninandmentalhealth.com

04/12/2026

The younger version of you needs adult you. Sending much love you way.

Katie

🩵

04/06/2026

Some children did not grow up feeling safe to express their emotions.

Not because they did not have them,
but because those emotions were met with punishment, dismissal, or discomfort.

They may have been told:

“Stop crying.”
“You’re too sensitive.”
“I’ll give you something to cry about.”
“Calm down.”
“You’re overreacting.”

So instead of learning how to understand and regulate their emotions, they learned something else:

Hide it.
Suppress it.
Apologize for it.

Over time, this can shape the way they relate to themselves.

They may start to believe:

• My emotions are a problem
• I am too much
• I need to tone myself down to be accepted
• It’s safer to stay quiet than to express how I feel

And this doesn’t just disappear in adulthood.

It can show up as:

• apologizing for crying or reacting
• saying sorry for needing love or reassurance
• feeling guilty for having normal emotional needs
• keeping the peace at your own expense
• silencing yourself to avoid conflict

This is how someone learns to apologize… not for what they did, but for who they are.

But your emotions were never the problem.

They were signals.
They were valid.
They were trying to communicate something that needed care, not punishment.

And you were never “too much.”

You were just never met properly.

If this resonates with you, both of my books go deeper into these patterns.

I Didn’t Choose to Be Born explores how childhood experiences shape your emotional world, your nervous system, and how you relate to yourself.

Chasing Love That Hurts explores how those same patterns show up in relationships, especially when it comes to attachment, emotional needs, and feeling safe with others.

Both are available through the link here: https://linktr.ee/traumatorecovery

04/05/2026

Your voice DOES matter. Here are the stories of several DV survivors. https://carolineabbott.com/survivor-stories/