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The Empowered Therapist, 12720 Hillcrest Road, Suite 106, Dallas, TX (2026)

02/13/2026

Love languages, trauma-informed, somatic experiencing edition.

Love can come in big and small exchanges, gestures, and intentions. What safe and trauma-informed things would you add to this list?

To those of you learning to let love in, one small encounter at a time, I see you.

02/12/2026

Romantic love can be meaningful. It can be supportive. It can be healing in certain ways. But no relationship can do the work of giving you an identity, a voice, or a sense of internal safety.

When a sense of self was interrupted early, it’s understandable to look for that grounding in another person. That doesn’t make you needy. It means something essential wasn’t protected. To those of you learning how to stay connected without disappearing, I see you.

(IC: No relationship can replace a sense of self.)

02/11/2026

If you learned that love meant caretaking, shrinking yourself, or managing other people’s emotions, closeness can feel confusing as an adult. You may crave connection while losing track of where you end and someone else begins.

This doesn’t mean you’re bad at relationships. It means closeness once required you to disappear. Learning to stay connected without losing yourself takes time, and often grief, and wanting both autonomy and intimacy is not too much.

To those of you unlearning enmeshment while still longing for connection, I see you.

02/10/2026

When someone acts in a way that is out of alignment with their words, this might feel really activating. When someone says one thing but does another, you might not be sure what to trust. When someone misrepresents themselves or their intentions you might feel confused or triggered.

When neglect is present in childhood, the child becomes really skilled at reading their surroundings. They learn to pick up cues, read the room, and infer what is happening in the absence of clarity and open communication. The neglected child begins to fill in the gaps and look for answers that don’t exist. They may spend their life evaluating others’ words and actions, desperately seeking what is not freely given to them.

The child who experiences emotional neglect learns to look for patterns and discrepancies. They begin to make meaning out of every interaction, shift, and gesture. They surveillance their surroundings and likely never really settle in relationships. They are desperate to know if they are okay and if so, for how long.

Emotional neglect is sneaky, and it keeps us on our toes. We may find ourselves trusting actions more than words. We may not believe what is right in front of us because we learned to second guess everything. We might be seeking for someone to wrong us because that’s what feels most familiar.

To those of you who notice patterns, incongruence, and discrepancies because it’s how you learned to survive, I see you.

02/09/2026

No matter how carefully you choose your words, someone will have an opinion about how you should have handled your pain. Say something and you’re told you’re dwelling. Say nothing and you’re blamed for the silence. Create space and you’re labeled distant. Stay and try and suddenly your boundaries are the problem.

At some point, the work becomes less about finding the perfect response and more about noticing how often your needs are being edited for someone else’s comfort. You’re allowed to stop contorting yourself to be understood. Alignment doesn’t require consensus. It requires honesty with yourself.

If you’re choosing what keeps you steady instead of what keeps the peace, you’re not doing it wrong.

To those of you learning how to identify and meet your own needs, I see you.

02/06/2026

Anger is often a sign that something in you is still oriented toward protection, dignity, and care.

Many of us were taught that anger makes us unsafe, unlovable, or “too much,” especially if our existence already lives under scrutiny. But anger can also be wise. It can point toward what matters, what hurts, and what needs repair.

The work isn’t about shutting anger down or letting it take over. It’s about creating enough support and steadiness inside your system so you can hear what it’s communicating. When anger is met with care instead of fear, it often softens into clarity. Into direction. Into movement that serves you and your relationships rather than burning them down.

If you’re learning how to be with your anger without abandoning yourself or others, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re listening more closely.

To those of you feeling really freaking angry and not knowing what to do with it, I see you.

02/05/2026

Complex trauma can really shift our sense of safety, our personality, and the way we experience the world and those around us. Complex trauma can be especially challenging to heal from because the nature of our trauma impacts us in (often) invisible ways over time, thus making healing a complex process.

When our nervous system is negatively impacted all the time, we don’t get to establish a healthy baseline. Our coping skills never have the chance to fully develop. We don’t have a strong sense of ourselves to return to as we’re attempting to heal.

Our trauma responses can become so normalized that we don’t even realize them as trauma responses. We can shift into survival mode without even knowing it. We may find ourselves confused about what our authentic personality is and what was formed as a defensive accommodation in response to something that was too much, too fast, or not enough for too long.

Your responses to trauma make sense. And, healing is possible. As you are able, allow both of these statements to be true. We can validate what is while still working towards something different. Change doesn’t need to invalidate our wounds.

To those of you coping with the aftermath of your trauma, I see you.

02/04/2026

When everything feels like too much, it’s often because your nervous system is on high alert. Resourcing isn’t about pretending things are fine or pushing yourself into positivity, it’s about giving your body small cues of safety so you can stay here, grounded, and able to function.

That can look like slowing your breath, stepping away from constant input, resting, moving your body, or leaning into connection and routine. You don’t need to feel calm for this to matter. The deeper work is learning how to stay connected to yourself while holding everything that’s real.

02/03/2026

If your emotions have felt louder lately, fear showing up faster, anger closer to the surface, or numbness settling in, there’s nothing wrong with you.

Your body is paying attention.

We’re constantly absorbing information, especially in a world where threat, violence, and instability are everywhere and often unavoidable. Even when your mind feels calm, your nervous system is still tracking safety.

Feeling seen by yourself is often the first step toward settling your system.

To those of you seeking safety, I see you.

02/02/2026

Complex trauma can really throw off our sense of what is right for us.

Sustained traumatic experiences often keep us so externally focused that we may struggle to tune into our inner wisdom and knowing. Repeated instances of harm, neglect, or pain from the past may have shifted us into perpetual survival mode.

Social media keeps us perpetually connected to our phones and what's going on all over the world. And the truth is, we aren't meant to take in this much information. We aren't meant to be in contact with this much suffering.

Note: I'm not suggesting that we should be looking away; rather, I'm suggesting that we need to check in with ourselves about how much we can handle. We need to check in with our bodies and tend to ourselves when it's all been too much.

So many of us are in a habit of doomscrolling. We feel horrified, but we keep watching. We scroll and scroll and take in more information- hoping that somehow more information will make things better. But the truth is, tending to our overwhelm is actually far more resourceful than consuming more information. Listening to your body better prepares you for action than feeling immobilized on your phone.

We need to care about what's going on around us, and that doesn't require us to become flooded by videos of people being harmed or killed online. We can fully acknowledge the atrocities without becoming flooded and thus, non-functional.

You need you, but so does your community. As you are able, step away from the phone and mobilize for yourself. Attending to your basic needs. Notice glimmers. And respond to what's going on in a way that serves you and others, as opposed to leaving you flooded and disconnected.

To those of you learning to find the balance between being informed and becoming flooded, I see you.

01/27/2026

I tend to dislike all of the cliché statements that are offered to trauma survivors. This one about time healing all wounds really gets me, especially as someone who shares space with adults who are painfully carrying around aches from their earliest years. I can assure you, sometimes time magnifies and intensifies wounds, and doesn’t heal them.

Time isn’t the only thing that helps us to distance from our trauma. Many survivors will feel intimately close to their traumatic past for years after the trauma has ended. Trauma can grab ahold of us and keep us feeling stuck in the cycles and patterns our bodies created in an attempt to keep us safe. Time alone doesn’t tend to shift these patterns, and without tending to the here and now we are often left floating somewhere between where we’ve been and where we want to go.

What does time offer? Perspective. We can’t adequately address trauma until safety has been established. When someone shows up to therapy, they have experienced the perspective shift that accompanies time. Meaning, their right now self has awareness that something about what they endured back then is continuing to show up for them. Time has taught them that moving forward without addressing the pain is not an effective long-term coping strategy.

It’s time, plus resources, reflection, intentionality, body-based awareness, and gentleness.

To those of you letting time offer what it has to offer while you do the rest, I see you.

01/26/2026

I don’t know how else to tell you that we need to care about one another.

To those of you who understand that people’s lives matter more than anything else, I see you.

(IC: Slide 1: One of the issues with collective trauma is that we are all worried about different things, all at once; Slide 2: People aren’t often able to access flexible thinking when they believe their survival is on the line. And the reality is, some people’s survival is on the line, and some people are fearing the loss of their privilege- and these are not the same experiences; Slide 3: We need to understand the difference between losing access to safety and discomfort; Slide 4: So many people believe that their comfort is equally or more important than someone else’s ability to survive, and this is creating more division and more collective trauma; Slide 5: Let’s be clear: Everyone deserves safety, and safety and comfort are not the same thing. The answer we’re needing is one where everyone’s survival matters.; Slide 6: Collective healing is needed, but so is individual work. We need to look at our shadows, face our fears, and acknowledge the difference between safety and comfort.; Slide 7: Now is as good a time as any to recognize that people are dying because some of us are too afraid of taking a good, hard look at ourselves)

The Empowered Therapist

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