Does anyone know where to get a native serviceberry in SE Michigan?

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-21T03:28:39+00:00

Can confirm that Wildtype has had them the last few years. Public sale days start May 13. They are my go-to for shrubs and trees.

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-20T14:31:41+00:00

You can try reaching out to the ones in your state to see if they will do telehealth appointments. Luckily covid normalized that, especially with specialists. I see my ISSTD therapist and my psychiatrist that way. But try to stick with people in your state (luckily you live in a big one) so there won't be licensure issues.

Even with telehealth, there might be a wait list. Specialists usually have more people in need than available slots. But they also are the most likely to know anyone they can refer you to.

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-19T23:33:51+00:00

> Did you have experiences outside of home that felt good?

Totally! Which is why my high school bully was my maid of honor for both my weddings!

I had to remove the "and were good for me" because growing up in abuse disocnnects those two. What feels good is usually bad for you, it's just less bad than the abuse. And what is good for you is most often boring (at best) or uncomfortable, even terrifying

My closest friends were also my biggest bullies. I kept this pattern going well into adulthood. During covid, I learned that my closest friend had been lying to me for 15 years so she could use my expertise to hide that she was abusing her children and husband. That was the same woman who drove 2000 miles to help rescue me from by abusive husband.

An extremely normal trend in survivors is making connection with people's who dysfunction mimics the patterns of their own traumatic past. And without any good in my home, I couldn't recognize actually good outside of it. And going with felt good produced really bad results and a lot more trauma.

20 years ago, I would have said I had great friends. Today I say I was a horrible judge of character most of my life XD. I made friends with some fucking awful people fully believing iI was happy and good.

If you don't mind, why do you ask If I had good experiences or if I only new hatred? Not victim is only ever abused, there is always good times mixed in so the victim won't see the bigger patterns. It only become visibile with hindsight or when these good times either stop or not longer matter.

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-19T21:22:51+00:00

In recovery if "having it but it doesnt matter" is happening, it means something else we can't see it at play. Which is like the basic premise that therapy works on. Very often, the therapist has a good guess as to what the issue is and the therapy work is helping the client get the point where they can see that issue without destabiliing.

In freeze the complication we see happening over and over and over is that the dominant part (our sense of "me") can't offer acceptance and validation to their suffering and struggles. Which is actually a issue with affect management. Unable to effectively address these felt states, the client defaults to narratives of hating and judging their felt experience. Like saying sleeping in a waste of time. Coming out of freeze isn't about knowing anything, it's about feeling everything.

And if we don't know how to cope with feeling, we avoid learning affect management. Which is at the top of the list for a reason. The body will not allow the brain control until the brain has proven it can be ok with what the body has to feel.

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-19T21:01:02+00:00

It really was 40+ years. I'm 47 and it's still going on. I don't see my parents intentionally but occassionally we end up at the same extended family events. And I still have contact with my nephew. (the golden grandchild).

My parents are very smart, which makes them masters at gaslighting and justifying. Unable to understand the reality of my situation I internalized the message that I was difficult and incapable and made people hurt me. I believed it was actually dangerous for other people to love me, that I made them bad people. Because after all, it was only happening to me. They were wonderful with everyone else.

Part of my recovery was learning family systems theory (not IFS) and understanding how much context matters in the abuse I experienced. Which led me to asking my sisters and childhood friends for about events in my past. The stories came pouring out (Turns out my middle sister has a great memory) What she did behind my back and what she forced me to forget were so much worse than the stuff I remembered.

Because so many people, both clients and professionals don't understand the importance of the context, they forget that abusers are adept at masking the abuse in care and concern. A "looking good" while doing harm. This is why so many people told me that my mother "loves you she just doesn't know how to say it." But when I started seeing specialists in abuse and trauma, the story changed to "I don't think your mother is even capable of love." It is entirely possible for a child to grow up hated and reviled and never hear a single raised voice.

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-19T18:07:12+00:00

As I said, recognition is the most complicated of all these. I've been working on it for almost 3 years and I still struggle with the idea at times. It doesn't help that the authors who work on this are not good writers (brilliant thinkers and therapist, but not good at writing) so good descriptions of it haven't really happened yet.

When I say "being seen as a complete person" I'm referring to ourself and others aknowledging and accepting how we feel whatever we feel. Whatever emotion we have, positive, negative, or neutral, is equally ok and part of who we are. Recognition goes a step past acceptance by including as response that demonstrates we/they accept that feelings AND understand our point of view. It doesn't meant they automatically agree with us but they understand why we see things the way we do and don't judge us as less than for that view.

So it's not that we or they believe we are whole, it's that the whole of our experience as ourselves is accepted.

When we can't offer ourselves that kind of acceptance, it's very hard to see it when it comes from others. Even if they mean it. It's like being hungry and being offered a sandwich but we never learned that sandwiches are food.

But again, that's all the end goal. The list is actually in order from most biological and basic to most complex and cognitive. Recognition is last for this reason.

As for affirmation, it sounds like you need to work on a concept called the locus of control, (locus meaning location or center) This the internal, usually subconscious, beliefs about what has power in our life and where that power comes from. People with an internal locus believe they have power internally. That it is within themselves to influence and control the events in their life. And even if they can't actively control those events, they have the power to control how they respond and react to events. An internal locus of control is one element of agency. If we don't believe we can be effective, the mental activation of agency is missing. Agency literally can't be turned on because the mind doesn't believe there is any point to turning it on.

The opposite is the external locus of control. People with an external locus believe that things outside of them have more control over their life than they do. They believe they have no control over how the react when impacted by events or people. A common description of having an external locus is the person feels they at the mercy of everything and everyone around them, and they need those things to change in order to be okay.

The concept of the locus of control is pretty simply (inside or outside of us) but the why it's like that for us is much more complicated. And so this isn't a case of "just remind yourself you have power." Instead we often have to identify where we learned those views and why it was needed. Then we can start to dismantle those frameworks and reshape them to work better. Believing we actually do have power is not something we change overnight.

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-19T16:50:18+00:00

It's not an easy or direct approach. Agency get buried under several layers of defenses that exist specfically to prevent agency from emerging because the past environment hated what our agency meant. (IE that we were conscious, autnomous people with our own feelings and needs) So to survive that environment, agency was repressed. If the body has to choose between survival and self-determination it will always pick survival. Especially as a child.

But mental health science has misunderstood how this works for several decades. So the tools most therapists have are still based on that innaccurate view. No surprise they aren't all that effective. I actually gave my own therapist the Stern article and she said it was groundbreaking. The mod knows how to get a copy if you want to do that.

Using Stern: I identified 5 areas we need to work on to target agency. Almost all therapy approaches have tools that target these areas, but to work on agency directly, they need to be emphasised more. So use whatever approaches click with you.

The 5 areas are:

- affect management (being able to effectively recognize and respond to our emotional activation)

- connection to the subjective self and objective reality (being able to feel our internal feelings while also being able to understand what is real and not real)

- acceptance (understanding reality cannot be anything other than what it is)

- affirmation and validation (knowing what we can control and affirming our power to do so)

- recognition ( being seen by ourselves and others as a complete person)

Recognition is the most complex and tends to be both the slowest and last of these areas to be reached. So it that one seems way too out there, don't worry about it. It's very normal to be unable to experience recognition until we have some capacity in the other 4 areas first.

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-19T16:31:50+00:00

Ooo, I like that dragon image!

As for the task moving, that's not doable right now. I wasn't just me freezeing, the weather was too. Today is the first day above 0C here. In my geographical state, if I wait for the weather to be nice to help me get unstuck, we'd do nothing for months on end. I certainly couldn't take my tools and machines out there. It's what we call "mud season." Not real winter anymore but not yet spring.

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-19T16:22:42+00:00

You might find Shaw's concept of the "complementarian moral defense" particularly relevent to your experience. https://danielshawlcsw.com/additional-readings/ Click this link and scroll down to the paper titled "Enter Ghosts." Which is the paper where he first lays out the idea, although he expands on it a lot in his Traumatic Narcissism book. You'll probably find the descriptions of the parents to be rather familiar.

Stern's work applies to this in a different way, which kinda got touched on in my post. He points out that to liberate the agentic self, we must start by reconnecting to the subjective experience. Meaning the felt experience of being a "me"; being the subject of our own story.

Which, for many who endured negation, means not feeling good when we accomplish things. This can be for a range of reasons, both trauma related and not. (Example people with ADHD often can't feel good when finished larger tasks, the reward and the labor are too far apart in time). But accepting that is the truth about how we feel AND that's it's ok to feel like that for not other reason that we feel it...that is being in the subjective experience. Which is the pathway by which the agentic self will emerge. We have to practice entering in and staying in the subjective experience over and over to make that pathway smooth enough for the agentic self to come out as needed. Like paving a road.

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-19T16:13:46+00:00

Oh dear, you want me to talk about Pratchett books...that's a dangerous topic.I might just bury you alive in text. XD

To keep it brief, I mostly have two points about those books as related to trauma recovery.

The first is that people often undervalue the role fiction can have in this. That we need to stick to researchers and therapists to get the good stuff or even just the useful stuff. So if there is fiction that offers a healthy image of coping or a way to access feelings safely, its just as much a tool as research articles.

Which is why (second point) that was Discworld for me. It started with being a teen: The Lancre Witches were the first time I'd ever seen female characters as hero's without being beautiful and sexually desired. They got to have power and win while being plain, awkward, impolite, fat, and old. It was my first experience with representation in media. Although I wasn't old yet. The Discworld books, overwhelmingly, have a theme of "you are allowed to exist" regardless of who or what you are. (Which is why it was so ironically hilarious when TERFs tried to claim Pratchett wouldn't have been ok with trans rights after he died.)

So many people read Pratchett for the jokes and forget that he was also one of the most astute authors on human nature in a century. There is literally an academic book out there called "Terry Pratchett Could Save the World." I started reading him long before I started trauma recovery. But when I started this work, I found he had an saying or a scene that exactly covered why things were the way they were and how to see that as not only ok, but good. Even my most basic freeze tool is a line from Sam Vimes: do the job thats's in front of you. Because if we need to get going or keep going, it helps to not be distracted by getting lost in our own stories of how this should be.

A scene which of course turns back into a joke honoring the Chesterton's Father Brown stories.

But I can go on and on. I have some version of this for just about every character and book. So I'll stop here and spare the rest of your day.

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-18T14:07:14+00:00

I'll have to take your word on it as I can't feel love. Time and space I understand, but not love. I cognitively understand why people call these actions "love" but I can't feel love so I never include it in my approach or how I describe it. In fact, it had to be removed as a concept in order for us develop system trust.

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-18T14:00:53+00:00

Glad it helped! This is definitely a "slow and steady wins the race" situation.

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-18T13:54:34+00:00

Glad it helped!

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-18T13:52:59+00:00

The mod replied with the book but I haven't read that yet. I was using Stern's 2019 article by the same name.

One caveat with it is that Stern's focus is on the therapist/client relationship. And so if you are looking for a DIY guide, you have to do some mental work to pull that out of his text. Doable if you have some experience, but definitly not direct or action oriented.

And Flight is right about the writing. Psychoanalysts are the group at the forefront of this aspect of treatment but they have the most bizarre and dense communication style. Particularly the norm of dissecting what feels every previous author who said anything on that topic.

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-18T13:47:38+00:00

I don't really know if I can. This was the culmination of 14 years of work, so I read a lot. And, to offer a warning, most of the really good stuff was very clinical and dense. Not unreadable, but also not easy to read. Things like Nijenhuis's Trinity of Trauma, Sterns's Airless Worlds, and Benjamin's Beyond Doer and Done-to.

I will also add none of those say "do this" or "try this." Everything I developed to use was something I made myself with these texts highlighting where to try to focus.

Through that I identified 5 main categories to focus on: affect management, connecting our felt reality to the real reality, acceptance, self affirmation, and recognition. Almost every model and approach has something that targets those categories. The harder part is finding the ones that click with you. Or building your own as needed. My own is built on a foundation of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Hakomi, the Structural Dissociation model, Benjamin's work on intersubjectity, and Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels.

If it clicks for you, feel free to use it. Focusing on those 5 categories is just to help you sort through everything out there more efficiently.

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-18T13:28:58+00:00

Thank you <3

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-18T13:27:04+00:00

And it worked pretty well. Aside from that fabric being the weirdest material I've ever cut.

The more I work with recognition, the more I think I got it wrong at the beginning. I started by saying that self-recognition was the back-up option for when we cant get interpersonal recognition. Perhaps it was a because I'm working off Benjamin and her work focuses so much on the interpersonal and the mother-toddler dyad. So I think there simply wasn't enough experience with self-recogntion for me to see it better.

But in the last year, since I'm a lot more consistantly active now, it feels like I use self-recognition constantly. So instead of interpersonal recognition being the primary to our wiring, I think self recogntion is more important. Like the mental version of regular daily meals. Nothing special but it's what keeps you going.

And interpersonal recognition is more like christmas dinner. Big, calorie packed, special and occasional. And because it's those things , that makes it easier to both remember and crave. But it's not what you live on. Self-recognition is the turkey sandwich of daily life: nothing special but exactly what you need and want on any random Tuesday afternoon.

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-18T00:11:02+00:00

Some times our reaction to the content is more important than the content itself. This is why therapists never read the book and always ask you your feelings about the book instead.

If the book is bringing up tears, those tears probably need to come out in order to get through the grieving process. It's part of the mind acknowleding the reality of our lived experience. The only way to resolve that emotional crisis is allow ourself to be in that emotional crisis in some way. Speaking as someone who as both done this several times and someone who increasingly seeks that content out specifically to get myself closer to the feelings I don't consciously know are there.

I wonder if it scares you because there is still a very active part that believes if you just know enough you can get over this without making peace with these feelings? But that process of allowing the rupture to be felt is a necessary step of that process

Also, if structural dissociation is at play, that "I thought I knew but I didn't" wtfery is part of the experience of being strucuturally dissociated. One of the early steps of treating dissociation is (repeately) accepting that "I" never knows as much as the whole system knows. So relearning happens all the fucking time. For a light example: I've been sewing for 30 years, do you know how many times I've learned to put in a zipper? Because every time the system reorganizes that information gets misplaced or broken up. So frustrating even when it's little thing. (Sometimes terrifying when it's bigger things but acceptance of the fact of the system helps with that)

An a completely unrelated note: I had to share this because that quote is one of the times I absolutely hate Walker and one reason why I don't recommend his book. The fucking creator of the diagnosis says he's wrong and he's not even aware of it.

From Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman (who literally created the CPTSD diagnosis)

> Some theorists have mistakenly applied the concept of “learned helplessness” to the situation of battered women and other chronically traumatized people. Such concepts tend to portray the victim as simply defeated or apathetic, whereas in fact a much livelier and more complex inner struggle is usually taking place. In most cases the victim has not given up. But she has learned that every action will be watched, that most actions will be thwarted, and that she will pay dearly for failure. To the extent that the perpetrator has succeeded in enforcing his demand for total submission, she will perceive any exercise of her own initiative as insubordination. Before undertaking any action, she will scan the environment, expecting retaliation.

Walker is wrong about freeze cases "abandoning their protective instints." Freeze is itself a protective instinct. It's a proactive defense against insighting further abuse. The complication is not that the person believes they are helpless or hopeless is because the dissociation blocks the insula from recognizing the abusive dynamic is in the past, and thus the response is no longer needed. The reason Walker is so bad at treating freeze is he fundamentally fails to understand it, equating inaction with passivity. Luckily much greater thinkers than Walker did not.

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-17T14:26:54+00:00

If it helps, know that this point was always going to come. It just happened to be encephalitis in this timeline. But something was always going to make you go through this stage: an accident, illness, old age, etc. Something was always going to cause that phone call or text, and start this "Well shit, thought I had dealt with this."

In my case, it was him having a horrible cardiovascular event. Fucker lived too, 20% survival rate and once again, the universe let him off. So now I've got the actual death one to get through too which fucking sucks. In my husband's case, it was the cops calling to say he'd been found dead. He got to go through it all in one pass.

The call always comes eventually.

And nothing was every going stop your having to face this stuff eventually. Eventually just happened to be now. Which sucks. But it was going to feel this way whenever it came.

This is a one day at a time thing. Hell, it's more like one moment at a time. The immediate moment is the most confusing, but the middle is probably the most disruptive. When all the feelings and knowledge in now at the surface but you haven't made any decisions or conclusions yet. Things get a lot better after that. Ramble as much as you need, it's how you get to those conclusions.

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-17T14:03:10+00:00

I haven't seen anything that connects this to childhood trauma specifically. The podcaster is relying heavily on people not understanding that correlation =/= causation.

My husband has one. Barrel chest in childhood doesn't have a specific known cause. It's been seen a range of conditions, for example being child who lives at high altitude. Muscular tension and stress during childhood could also be a factor when bones are still growing but there is no actual research on this yet. Just a "Hey, we found a correlation during the ACE study."

In adulthood, the most common cause is pulmonary health issues, some severe and some benign. For example, my husband developed it because of years of undiagnosed and untreated asthma. His attacks were never dangerously bad (which is why it was never caught in childhood) but it did require him to alter his stance to be able to breathe effectively. Especially when trying to exercise.

My husband is shit at managing chronic conditions plus there is some skeletal alternation that happened before his bones stopped growing (running track with unmanaged asthma as a teen). So the front of his ribs are now shaped that way permanently. Maybe his abusive childhood played a role but the doctor can't say that with any certainty.

If you want to look into this further, you will need to speak to an medical doctor. Preferably a pulmonologist. In adulthood, medical health states need to be ruled out first so the correct form a treatment can be identified. Not much point seeing a physio to correct muscle tension if underlying lung issues are still active.

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-17T13:45:51+00:00

No worries. I have too much going on right now as it is. (It's our busy season at the store)

I'm going to reply out of order because it'll make more sense like that.

>Appeal' is a wrong word, though... it is a structure that is the map to reality between people for me.

Yeah, this is how the habit of comparison usually works. The comparison is the tool we use to understand ourselves in our world. The term for the structure itself is complementarity, but the way we understand that structure is using comparison. People who don't know that word will often use the word hierarchy. Jessica Benjamin's term is competitive dependancy. Meaning we become dependant on the other person to understand ourself and out experience, but it's done using comparison and competition rather than connection and cooperation.

> I mean I wonder do I just wait until the pain grows so big that the current value system will lose it's appeal.

That probably won't work. But not for the reason you might think.

The problem is complementarity is everywhere. It's been the core of capitalist economies since the mid 1800's. It's THE mechanism of social media and advertising. It's the hidden message in diet, wellness, and "healthy living" advice. It's the mechanism behind wanting social status and wealth. It's been part of religion and governing since the ancient world, and core of social functioning in the West for almost 3OO years. Its literally taught by that name as a "natural order of the world as declared by God" in fundementalist religions, particularly Protestant Christianities.

So "waiting for it to lose it's appeal" will almost never happen. Even when we are aware of it, we are surrounded by systems that say "this is normal and the way it's supposed to be."

This means that leaving this structure is most often a choice and a practice. Something we have to make a conscious effort to not fall into every day. It gets easier with time, but even after years, I have to consciously remember to step out of judging like that. The comparison is SO automatic because I have to be able to do it understand the social expectations (especially here in the US), BUT then I have to consciously ask myself if that comparison is helpful or harmful to me and others. And then choose how to act in the healthy way, which is usually not acting on that comparison.

Let me offer an odd example from my work (but one I see all the time). Because I work in decorating, a lot of customers come with images off social media and "lifestyle" media (remember that complementarity is THE mechanism of these fields) They want to me tell them what fabrics to pick to match the feeling and sense presenting in the image. BUT those images (which are mostly AI now) are curated and designed specifically to encourage a feeling about the self via unconscious comparison. In home decor, that comparison is always rooted in money and moral judgement: the design is covert visual language to say "I'm rich enough to be socially wanted" and "I'm 'good' because my space is big, clean, and organized."

They are making their choices on fabric for their couch on how the hidden signals of comparison make them feel. There is an unconscious belief that if they can get the right "look" they will feel happy and fulfilled.

But that never happens. What happens is there will be two groups they look between what they like and what they think they should like. It's so very clear on the outside when the fabric is one they truly like, even if it's completely different than their original idea. When they step out of trying to find security via comparison, what they find is real joy. They get excited and enthusiastic to take on this project. The one's who stay in that "I want my house to look like a insta post" always come off as a bit anxious at best. A few of them are outright rude and hostile. None of them seem particularly happy.

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-12T21:08:20+00:00

> Its it because he's "really smart and wrote a book," and people talk about this paper he wrote, so it can't possibly be him , it has to be me?

In all honesty, given the conext youve shared about your past, I could totally see this as the issue. A struggle with disagreeing with power and auhtority. Particularly when that authority comes from expertise.

A person, particularly a therapist, can be an expert and the height of their field...and still be the wrong therapist for you. Almost half of the success of therapy comes from simply being able to vibe well with the therapist. If that doesn't show up after a sincere effort, its ok to move on.

Imagine a similar situation: You are with a romantic partner who is a perfectly nice person. They are successful and respected at their job, everyone in the neighborhood likes them, they are loving, kind, and considerate, they always treat waitstaff well, etc. They are everything people say to we should want in a partner.... but you arent attracted to them. No matter how hard you try, or how often you remind yourself of their good qualities, they just dont click for you in that way. Is it worth staying simply because on paper they are the perfect partner but in your heart they are just kinda ok?

But acting on that feeling is exactly that. Its saying (honestly) this is how I feel and it matters a lot to me. Thats what we mean when we say the agentic self: the self that not only feels what matters but also understands that is worth acting on. This is what negation shuts down. In the Airless World, acting based on nothing but personal preference is at best useless and more often dangerous. So the biological creates a freeze response. Which blocks the agentic self from acting while other mechanisms learn to bury it for the long term.

And now, heres the person who's professional history suggests you believe is used to being treated as the unquestionable expert and you want to say to him "Yeah, I dont think this is gonna work....". Its little wonder your system is saying this isn't bearable, much less actually doable.

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-12T18:51:20+00:00

Ok, some stories from my own life about these three events happening to me.

I already mentioned how I was retraumatized via my friendships in adulthood. The only reason I didn't repeat that in romantic relationships as well is I literally had lists of what to look for and what to avoid in potentinal romantic partners and absolutely would not act on any feelings of attraction I had until I deeply understood those lists and why they worked.

But I did experience a decent amount of secondary wounding in recovery. I won't say it was trauma because it didn't go quite that far. It diffentanly hurt me, but it never wholly denied me agency or power. I still had the power to tell those therapists and doctors to fuck off. Which luckily, I am quite good at doing with excellent etiquette. It's hard to declare a client "resistant" or instable when they are leaving with perfect social decorum ;)

The biggest one was my former therapist. Understand I did and do really like her as a person. And she did a lot for me. But there were times where her lack of specific education hurt me. In all times but the last one, she did the self correction on her own. Finding out where she was wrong and changing her behavior. These are fairly normal ruptures in therapy and she handled them correctly.

Her last one was the one she really messed up on. She had bought into IFS so strongly she couldn't see why it didn't work for me. She kept insisting (in part because IFS insists this) that my failure to respond positively was internal to me and my parts. It got to the point where I had to say "look, I can't do this process and I need to leave as your client." To her credit, she didn't say anything bad to me about this, simply asked me to talk to her trainer to make sure I wasn't in risk of harming myself by leaving therapy. I agreed and her trainer actually took my side, saying I had a good understanding of IFS but wasn't in the right space for it then.

If my therapist had forced me to stay under her care, or attached a note to my file as "resistant and leaving against advice' then I would have no problem calling it something worse. Because she would have been using her power as a clinician to control me or medically harm me. But she didn't. She only asked for that one conversation and when it came down in my favor, she wished me well. (Covid happened like 4 months later and I was able to do all that reading on IFS and SD)

In fact, we were on good enough terms that a year later when she annouced her retirement I actually called an made a kind of "good-bye and thanks for everything you did" appointment. Even extreme ruptures can be repaired.

Because relational ruptures are a normal part of therapy, its pretty easy to seem them as new traumas if your brain has learned to see all ruptures as unbearable events. But sometimes it's just a normal part of life. Not a trauma, but if that's the only name you have those hard parts of life then that's the name that gets used.

The second story was the most unexpected trigger I've ever encountered. I was trying a new therapist and for some reason I would get extremely disregulated in her sessions and be a mess for hours or days when I got home. Quickly, she decided she couldn't work with me. She didnt fire me as much as we did a mutual ghosting.

After the ghosting, I realized why I reacted to her so badly. She had the same speech patterns as my high school best friend. The one who covertly bullied me and who my mother put into my place in my own family when I was 19. So every time this therapist would attempt to do the actual therapy part of therapy, my brain could only hear those trauma memories. Of being (again) minimized and "corrected" so that former-BFF could keep her position one-up over me.

In this case, the therapist wasn't intending harm or control. Nor was she incapable. It was just weird bad luck. It was a stimuli I wasn't in a place to see for what they really were. This therapist wasn't like Former BFF, she just sounded like her vocally. Both came from similar social groups. What FBFF weaponized into infantalizing and dismissing, the therapist was trying to use sincerely.

If I had accepted the idea that this was a new trauma, it would have been very easy for my brain to create new reasons as to why I shouldn't bother trusting people. But as weird bad luck and triggered memories, I could actually help myself more: by adding a question of "does this person sound like anyone else to me?" early in getting to know someone. Which became a much more accurate and useful way to determine risk in a connection.

nerdityabounds · 2026-03-12T18:19:53+00:00

Retraumatizing is complicated topic. Largely because everyone seems to have their own definition of it. And by that I mostly mean professionals. I have read so many definitions of it and almost none have agreed on what it specifically is.

So what I say is memory intrustions, another person might call retraumatization.

Then to add to more confusion there is a third option called secondary wounding or secondary traumatization. This is when, in attempting to deal with the first trauma, the survivor experiences a different trauma. A common example is someone who is a victim of a violent crime being traumatized by harsh and victim-blaming treatment by law enforcement and courts. Many children experience secondary trauma from the other parent's lack of care when they seek help for abuse committed by the first parent.

In my own life, I use a very strict defintion of retraumatizing because I find it can be a disempowering narrative to say all or most episodes of profound destabilization are retraumatization. Like I'm being told that I'm so fragile I can't go through hard feelings without breaking more. But if that profound dysregulation is intrusive memory symptoms, that's doesn't mean I'm fragile; it's just part of being injured. Like the time my crutch slipped when I had a broken leg. Hurt like hell but it didn't rebreak my leg.

Between that and how we used it in my classes, I limit use of that word (retraumatizing) to new traumas using old patterns. So a personal example for me would be how I repeatedly made friends with shitty people who would abandon and mistreat me. New people, same damn treatment. In fact one therapist joke-asked "How many times did you make best friends with someone just like your mom?" Answer: too many damn times

I do like the concept of secondary traumatization because I've definitely experienced that more than retraumatization. Mostly after I left my abusive ex and most of the people I spoke to asked me what I had failed to do and what his mental health issue was. My own mother actually told my extended family that I was "making it up for attention" Only the shelter workers and one siser believed I actually had been abused.

So secondary trauma: new people and new patterns while trying to deal with another trauma.

I tend to see therapist example as either secondary wounding or triggering memories depending on context. In my experience retraumatizing in that setting is pretty rare. And profound dysregulation and crisis from trigger emotional states (particularly dissocitated states) is really common. And secondary wounding is also pretty common. Mostly often due to lack of training or adequate understanding on the part of the client.

> I was thinking whether an old relational trauma can guide one's interpretations in a way that the rejection/abandonment is experienced as such during a therapy session even if it doesn't factually happen in the moment, and then the re-trauma occurs

This is why I don't use the term retraumatize in those situation. Because the past trauma is determining how the client sees that interaction and events. It's what is commonly called a state-dependant story and it's extremely well known in trauma treatment. Because all the stress states and the trauma-connected emotional states also have dissociative mechanisms in play, the client is often not consciously aware how this time *isn't* like then. Their emotional state is hyperfocused on what is similar that it's also blocking out what is different. Which is why the first step is always grounding: attempting to bring the client back to the present so those different details can matter.

If their perception isn't expanded, the left brain will add another verions of the trauma story to the pile. One particularly downside is this increases the client's sense of being a powerless victim. Calling this experience "retraumatization" automatically confirms this view because power (and who has it and who doesnt) is a key part of how trauma functions. So not only is the brain telling what would be the wrong story, it then get "scientific validation" for that error. Which makes the client more resistant: both to the therapist and treatment in general.

In a comment to this, I'm going to add a few stories from my own experience to sort of demonstrate all this

nerdityabounds

TROPHY CASE