Spoiler alert: I often write the content I most need myself.
It’s been that way since I started my blog back in 2015 and began carving out a space—if not the space online—for relational trauma recovery. I focused my essays back then on whatever was most salient to me, whatever I needed to learn. And this Substack, ten years later, is really no exception.
This month’s essay, The December Reckoning, was a perfect example.
If you read it, you learned a few things. You learned that this time of year is, quite frankly, the peak season for professionals to question whether they should stay where they are. Job searches spike 26-33% during December and January. Roughly one in three professionals take some form of action during these months—reaching out to coaches, updating resumes, scrolling LinkedIn at 2 AM. It’s a time of reflection, of reckoning with what comes next.
What’s also true—what I didn’t fully spell out in the essay—is that this is a time when many driven and ambitious women from relational trauma histories feel extremely, extremely conflicted.
That has almost always been the case for me.
I have a lifelong pattern of overstaying bad situations.
This started, of course, on the home front. In my family of origin. And it sounds strange to say “of course,” because as a kid you don’t have power. You don’t have the financial resources to leave and take care of yourself. But I waited—I think even too long—to exercise my rights as a young child to tell the courts that I wanted to be legally separated from my biological father, my primary abuser, after he divorced my mother.
I waited too long then.
I’ve tolerated too much in certain family relationships in the years since. Essays for another time. But where this pattern really started to stand out—vividly, undeniably—was in almost every single professional experience I’ve ever had aside from being self-employed.
I had a history of staying in really toxic, bad work environments. Often with female authority figures who were unkind to me. This actually mirrored one of my Peace Corps placement experiences—again, a story for another time. But what became clear, as I look back, is that in many of those work situations, I didn’t choose to leave.
I was forced out. Kicked out.
Fired. My job withdrawn. Because I stood up to authority. Because I challenged them in some way.
Story of my life: losing security when I stand up for myself.
Audre Lorde wrote, “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.”
She was right, of course. Staying silent—staying too long, swallowing what I knew to be true—never actually kept me safe. It just delayed the inevitable. The exit still came. It just came on someone else’s terms instead of mine.
Here’s what’s also true: the level of personal work I’ve continued to do has allowed me to see those bad situations more clearly now. It’s allowed me to sense—somatically, emotionally, intellectually—when I’ve outgrown an environment or when the environment is no longer healthy for me.
Adrienne Rich wrote about diving down to examine the wreck of her own life—not the myth of what happened, but the truth of it. “I came to see the damage that was done,” she wrote, “and the treasures that prevail.”
That’s what healing work does. It lets you dive into the wreck and see both. The damage. And what survived.
That is a wonderful byproduct of all the relational trauma recovery work I’ve done.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés wrote something that stopped me cold when I first read it: “If a woman does not look into these issues of her own deadness and murder, she remains obedient to the dictates of the predator. Once she opens the room in the psyche that shows how dead, how slaughtered she is, she sees how various parts of her feminine nature and her instinctual psyche have been killed off and died a lowly death behind a facade of wealth.”
I think about that phrase—”behind a facade of wealth”—and how many of us have built impressive external lives that mask how much of ourselves we’ve sacrificed. How many rooms in our own psyches we’ve kept locked, because opening them felt too dangerous.
The healing work opens those rooms. And once you see, you can’t unsee.
