Blog Posts

Six Things to Remember When Working Through Childhood Trauma

3/17/2023

Young woman looking into the camera. This illustrates that Sacred Circle Holistic Healing offers therapy and counseling for childhood trauma in Lawrence, Kansas.

Remembering these six things can help when working through childhood trauma:

Not all trauma comes from a single, obvious source or experience.

Complex trauma is traumatization that happens repeatedly and chronically over long periods of time. Childhood trauma, or developmental trauma, is almost always complex and relational. Relational trauma is often more difficult to see and acknowledge because the trauma itself is unfolding within relational dynamics, which can be both subtle and pervasive.

For those of us who have developmental trauma as a result of pervasive family dynamics—opposed to obvious, overt forms of abuse—realizing and validating the source of our struggles with low self-worth, shame, guilt, people-pleasing, anxiety, etc. can be an added challenge.

Emotional Parentification: The Role Reversal of Parent and Child

3/3/2023

Photo by fotoweedio on Unsplash

What is Parentification?

Parentification, or role reversal, is a dynamic that occurs when a child is regularly tasked with providing emotional or practical support to a parent, instead of the other way around. Parentification is a form of childhood trauma that negatively impacts development and attachment.

Internal Boundaries: The Importance of Setting Boundaries with Yourself

2/17/2023

Young woman standing on the beach representing a therapy client in Lawerence, Kansas who healed their anxiety and low self-esteem.

Photo by Marie-Michèle Bouchard on Unsplash

What are Boundaries?

Boundaries are the guidelines and expectations we identify for ourselves about how we’d like to be treated by others and what actions we’ll take if someone oversteps those limits.

We learn how to set boundaries as children through modeling from the adults around us and through the experiences we have growing up. What were the messages you received about saying “no”? Was your “no” respected? Did you get in trouble for saying “no” to adults? These kinds of questions can tell us a lot about the training we received about boundaries and autonomy. For a more in depth discussion about different types of boundaries and how to set them, check out this blog post about boundaries that I wrote a while back.

Typically when we think about boundaries we think about the boundaries we have with other people, but sometimes the boundaries we need to set are actually with ourselves. These boundaries are called internal boundaries. In this post you will learn what internal boundaries are and why it is important to have them.

Do You Have Unhealthy Boundaries?

2/3/2023

Young woman resting her head on her knees. She represents a young adult living in Kansas who is struggles with childhood trauma and has come for online therapy.

Photo by Daniel Monteiro on Unsplash.

Healthy Boundaries

Healthy boundaries are:

Clear
Expressed
Enforced

Read more about what makes up healthy boundaries.

Understanding Childhood Trauma

1/20/2023

Young woman with blonde hair swimming water represents someone who has experience childhood trauma. I offer treatment for childhood trauma, anxiety, low self-esteem, and codependency for adults in Kansas and Florida.

Photo by Alex Perez on Unsplash

What is Trauma?

Trauma is a subjective experience of psychological distress. What may be highly traumatic for one person, might not be traumatic at all for another.

Trauma occurs when 1) our brain interprets something as a threat to our survival, 2) our nervous system becomes overwhelmed, and 3) we feel alone in that overwhelm. That last part is really important, especially when trying to understand trauma that occurs in childhood.

You Don't Have A Mental Illness, You Experienced Trauma

1/6/2023

Young man wearing yellow sunglasses representing a young adult who is attended online therapy to trauma treatment. Sacred Circle Holistic Healing offers individual counseling for adults in Florida and Kansas.

Photo by Wassim Chouak on Unsplash

It's All About Trauma

Many of my clients come to therapy thinking that there is something fundamentally wrong with them. I hear them say things like,

“My brain just doesn’t work right.”
“I struggle with anxiety, so does my mom; mental illness just runs in our family.”
“I have mental illness.”

But usually what we find is that the issue isn’t with their brain at all, but rather the unresolved trauma they’ve been carrying.

Four Reasons Why Being Highly Sensitive Is a Good Thing

9/16/2022

Photo of young woman laughing representing a client in Lawrence, Kansas who has worked with Maggie Jones Boyle in online therapy for Highly Sensitive People and now feels confident in who she is.

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

What is a “Highly Sensitive Person” (HSP)? Highly Sensitive Person is a term used to describe 15-20% of the population who are born with a unique sensory processing trait that allows them to notice more subtleties in their environment, resulting in both deeper processing (thinking & feeling) and a tendency toward becoming overwhelmed by stimuli more quickly. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of high sensitivity you can start here: The Highly Sensitive Person: A Form of Neurodivergence.

Being Highly Sensitive in a Non-Sensitive World

As a Highly Sensitive Person, I understand what it’s like to live in a world where sensitivity is misunderstood and undervalued; it created a lot of shame in me for a long time. But now many of my favorite things about myself I attribute directly to my sensitivity, and part of my job as a therapist who specializes in working with Highly Sensitive People (HSPs) is helping others unlearn all the negative messages they’ve received about themselves and what it means to be sensitive. Almost everyone I work with sees their sensitivity as a weakness or a liability; something they have to “overcome,” or hide, in order to be “normal.”

Grieving Awake: Will I Ever Feel Better?

9/2/2022

Close up black and white portrait of a Black man, looking into the camera with his hands up supporting his face. This illustrates the pain for grief and that Sacred Circle Holistic Healing offers grief counseling in Lawrence, Kansas.

Photo by Qwerqu McBrew on Unsplash

Will I Ever Feel Better?

Today is my daughter Olive’s birthday; she would be turning ten years old if she were still alive. I’ve been thinking about her birth, her life, how much I miss her, remembering what it was like to hold her, remembering her laugh. I’ve also been reflecting on my own grief journey and asking myself—eight and half years in—“do I feel better?”

Building Emotional Intelligence: Demystifying Emotions

8/26/2022

Portrait of a Black woman with her hair pulled back into braids staring into the camera in front of a gray background. This illustrates that human being feel emotions and Sacred Circle Holistic Healing offers holistic online therapy for anxiety and low self-esteem in Kansas, 66044.

Photo by Jota Lao on Unsplash

Emotions are Energy in Motion

Emotions can seem mysterious until we understand that emotions are simply energy moving within our body. We don’t tend to enjoy feeling intense emotions. Even the emotions that we often think of as positive can be experienced as quite unpleasant and overwhelming if the intensity is too high. But conceptualizing emotions as energy that simply needs to move through our bodies can help us begin to let go of negative conditioning and fear we have been taught around feeling and expressing intense emotions.

Grieving Awake: Our Collective Grief

8/19/2022

Black and white portrait of a young white woman with long, straight hair looking over camera. This illustrates that Sacred Circle Holistic Healing offers therapy for young adults struggling with anxiety and low self-worth in Lawrence, Kansas.

Photo by Horváth Attila on Unsplash

Strangers Yelling on the Internet

It’s no secret that social media isn’t a pleasant place to be these days. It takes less than one minute of scrolling your feed to encounter arguments and insults being thrown. I used to be active on Instagram with a large following, but made the choice to step away from it a couple of years ago. It started to feel like being in a room with hundreds of people yelling over each other unintelligibly—not my idea of a good time!

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