Ready To Build a Life You Love to Live? Start Here.

kellywilsonwrites

22 Sep, 2023

I am evidence that you can build a life that you love to live. That you can overcome the negative effects of childhood trauma. That you can enter into a consistent healing cycle as you move forward in life.

I’m so happy to have been selected to speak at the Building the Life You want to Live 2023 Summit. You are, of course, invited – it will be FREE to watch for seven days.

I am speaking about PTSD, cPTSD, symptoms, and treatment options. Plus, I’m on the live panel that takes place on November 4th.

If you experienced trauma in your past, and the impacts are still affecting your life, relationships, health & happiness…

You are not broken, and you are not alone,

While these wounds might run deep, the good news is, you CAN heal from them.

Green background. Text - Healing Trauma: Building the Life You Love to Live Summit 2023; sponsored by The International Association of Trauma Recovery Coaching

To learn how, you won’t want to miss The International Association of Trauma Recovery Coaching’s latest online Heal Trauma Summit that I’m participating in – specifically designed to help you heal from your traumatic experiences.

It’s called Healing Trauma: Building The Life You Love to Live and begins November 2, 2023.

This online event is brought to you by Bobbi Parish, MA, CTRC-S, Founder and Executive Director of The International Association of Trauma Recovery Coaching. Bobbi pioneered the field of Trauma Recovery Coaching. The Association was the first, and remains the only, professional association for Trauma Recovery Coaching. With six different certification programs they have educated more than 800 coaches around the globe in the last six years.

Building the Life You Love Speakers and Subjects

Here’s just some of what you’ll learn from our trauma-informed experts, trauma recovery coaches, somatic practitioners, authors, comedians & more:

· Map Your Healing (that’s me!): Learn the difference PTSD and CPTSD, symptoms and treatment options.

· Reframing Responsibility to be Our Greatest Gift: When it comes to trauma learn what you responsible for and what you are NOT responsible for and how to recognize the gift of responsibility and how it can set you free from trauma.

· Raising Thriving Children after Leaving a Narcissistic Partner: Understand the impacts of narcissistic abuse, how to co-parent with a narcissist, how narcissists sabotage their children and how to recognize warning signs, how to support your children and help them build resilience and navigate what they are experiencing.

· What is Domestic Violence: Learn the SCARS (Survivors Carry A Real Story) trauma cycle of domestic violence model and the 4 stages of recovery.

· Process for Changing Undesired Behavioral Patterns: learn where you developed your behavioral patterns, why they developed and how to begin changing these patterns to serve you better.

· Embodied & Empowered – Somatic Tools for Navigating the World: learn somatic techniques for healing trauma, create awareness and presence of the body and nervous system.

· Respectful Parenting with Complex Trauma: Introductory for parents to learn how to recognize their own complex trauma triggers “unpack” them and transform their interactions and relationship with their children, caregivers, and even their own parents.

· Sibling Coach: learn why being the sibling of someone with a disability causes trauma and how recovery can be life changing.

· Not Parent Expected (NPE)– Learn to identify what the Not Parent Expected lifequake experience is and why it matters and discover practical tools to revive the mind, body and spirit.

Here is the lineup of other speakers during the online event: Dr. Paulette M. Bethel, Jami Carder, Vincent Castellanos, Tana Gaudi, Pepper Joy Greggs, Sherry Yuan Hunter, Kristen Kellett, Bobbi Parish, Stacey Uhrig, Susie Miller Wendell, and Paula Wiese.

Attend Live on November 4th

Light green background, orange border. Text in orange: Join us November 2023 for three days of expert guidance about trauma recovery. Healing Trauma: Building the Life You Love to Live Summit

Don’t miss out on our LIVE day, November 4^th, from the comfort of home. We will have book giveaways from some of our favorite authors, a live panel, a Q&A with our audience and 3 live experiential workshops where you will learn more and experience powerful healing processes.

· Befriending Your Inner Critic Using Parts Work: learn the neuroscience behind the development of your inner critic and experience the process of befriending one of your inner critics and transforming it into a source of wisdom.

· Rapid Transformational Therapy: learn a pathway to release the grip of developmental trauma, rewrite your narratives, and embark on a journey of holistic healing and personal transformation.

· Restorative Response System Theory (RReST): learn this theory firsthand from the author and theorist and gain a comprehensive understanding of how these resources serve as powerful tools to regulate the nervous system and walk away with actionable insights to assist yourself or trauma survivors from survival modes to restorative states.

Will You Join Us?

Mark your calendar and save your spot right here.

After you register, keep an eye out for The IAOTRC HEAL TRAUMA email for specific details on accessing the expert workshops. (Replays will be available until November 10^th for FREE).

Now is the time to heal from trauma and effects that often follows…

…get started by registering right here for the International Association of Trauma Recovery Coaching Healing Trauma: Building the Life You Love to Live online summit.

Cheers to your ongoing recovery!

P.S. Please share the healing and forward this email to your friends, family and community – anyone who needs hope, healing and love. Thank you for helping us change lives.

Save your spot for The International Association of Trauma Recovery Coaching Healing Trauma Summit right here.

Latest Posts

Try Trauma Recovery & Grief Recovery Coaching

Four Truths About Thriving in Trauma Recovery | Map Your Healing Journey

Sign up here to get a free copy of Five Things Every Trauma Survivor Needs to Know AND

61 Tips About the Grief Experience.

Find out more about Trauma and Grief Recovery Coaching

I offer one-on-one sessions, groups, PTSD Remediation, and classes. Appointments are offered in-person and online.

Try Trauma Recovery and Grief Recovery Coaching for Free! Book a free 30-minute Discovery Call to find out more!

Healing Happens in Stillness

kellywilsonwrites

11 Sep, 2023

I like to sit on my back deck, especially in the mornings when I’m drinking my coffee. The dogs (Chloe and Milly) run around the backyard while I sip and think and stare into the distance and – quite frankly – wake up.

Right now, I can feel the season changing from the heat of summer into the more gentle coolness of fall. I pay attention to the breeze on my skin. I listen to birds chirping and whirring and cawing, and I watch them fly around. There’s no drama or chaos or anything but me in the present moment.

Is this comfortable? No.

Am I learning to like it? Yes.

Why?

Healing happens in stillness.

Trauma Survivors Have Been Raised in Chaos

For many of us as trauma survivors, chaos has been our reference point for daily life.

This can feel like walking on eggshells, living in survival mode, and feeling constant fear and/or nervous system activation (fight-flight-freeze). Wanting to hide and isolate. Never knowing what is going to happen next. Feeling hyped or “manic” or the opposite, defeated or depressed.

Because our nervous systems have been trained in chaos, we are attracted to it. Not because we are dumb (we’re not), but because that’s what our nervous systems KNOW.

What is known is far more comfortable than what we don’t know. And if we have never known safety, how are we supposed to recognize it when we see or feel it?

Chaos keeps us in a cycle that’s comfortable, but detrimental. Unfortunately, so does our culture.

Our Culture Teaches Us to Distract

Practical Strategies to Tame Overwhelming Emotions | Kelly Wilson | Map Your Healing Journey

One of the biggest epiphanies of my life was realizing that our culture works against trauma and grief recovery.

Our culture teaches us to avoid and distract, to spin in the chaos. To fill the void with any of a variety of vices: food (this has historically been mine), alcohol, sex, drugs, shopping, and sleeping are some of them. These are also coping mechanisms that work…until they don’t work any more.

I say this not as a shameful thing, but as an observation about what we have learned in lives of unprocessed trauma and grief. As we use these coping mechanisms, our culture encourages us to KEEP using them long after they have become detrimental to our well-being.

One of the Most Popular Trauma Responses

One of the most popular trauma responses – keeping BUSY – grows out of both a toxic family system and our culture’s love of productivity.

For example, when I was a kid living in my abusive family, staying busy kept me safe. If I wasn’t moving or busy with something, I would get into trouble. I learned early on to keep myself under the radar, looking busy when I was at home or being busy with school and sports and work outside of the home.

This morphed into decades of BUSY. Moving-moving-moving until I was exhausted, and then crashing.

Workaholism is how it showed up for me. Even still, I find comfort in “being busy” and working a lot. It’s an old comfort and it’s not sustainable for long, but I still see it.

This chaos-busy-work pattern kept me disconnected from abusive people, and then, when I was safe, it kept me disconnected from those I loved. I found myself stuck in an infuriating cycle of working myself into exhaustion, feeling completely alone and taken for granted.

This cycle worked until it didn’t. But here’s the thing about trauma and grief – there comes a time when it needs to be processed.

We are not meant to live in survival mode.

We are meant to transition out of survival mode and into a more calm state in order to process what we’ve gone through and find some peace and healing.

How to Get Comfortable Healing in Stillness

So how do we do that? How do we move into a more calm state when our nervous systems, toxic family and group systems, and even our cultural systems are encouraging us NOT to?

There are many things in our lives and beings that we can NOT choose.

There’s far more in trauma and grief recovery that we CAN choose.

One of the ways to begin feeling more comfortable in a regulated state (inside) and calm surroundings (outside) is to PRACTICE.

Some of the choices we can make:

To sit in stillness (however long – 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, 10 minutes – anything)
Practice being in the present moment (use the five senses)
Disengage from emotion spirals
Recognize when our physical bodies and nervous systems react to something/become activated
Regulate our nervous systems into a calm state
Process emotions and feelings from the outside in

Is this easy? No, but not because of you.

We are taught the OPPOSITE of how to make these choices. This is partly what makes trauma and grief recovery so dang important.

Feel It to Heal It

Woman in blue shirt and and blond shoulder length hair holding a coffee cup that says Wear Your Scars Like Stardust — Me, sitting on the back deck, drinking coffee. Sept 2020, halfway through PTSD Remediation.

One recent morning, I sat on my back deck with my coffee and felt…off.

Even with my knowledge of the Gottman Feeling Wheel, “OFF” was the best I could do.

As I sat and sipped my coffee, I allowed myself to be still.

I noticed the feelings bubble up – deep sadness and anger. I noticed that these feelings felt…older. When emotions and feelings feel older, this is typically – for me – grief-related.

I realized that this particular day was five years since I had separated from my ex. He and I had a conversation that afternoon, which was the day before we were to leave on our 23rd anniversary vacation, and he said, “You have been unhappy for a long time…perhaps we should separate.”

And then, the next day, we absolutely went on that trip to Niagara Falls. It was, after all, non-refundable.

So…yeah. I’ve got a lot of Big Feelings about that time in my life and the decisions that I made, and my body remembered. I spent time that morning and throughout the day in calm and quiet, feeling and grieving.

“Feel It to Heal It” has been coming up a lot lately, because it is necessary in the trauma and grief recovery work that we do together.

One of the reasons that I hold a safe container for myself and my clients is to allow us to FEEL whatever we need to feel. To PROCESS tough emotions and feelings, to grieve and mourn, and to INTEGRATE our experiences.

In other words, to make open wounds into scars. This healing process happens in stillness.

There’s nothing wrong with you. No shame in this game. If something in this post touched a nerve, I would love to chat in a Discovery Call.

Latest Posts

Try Trauma Recovery & Grief Recovery Coaching

Sign up here to get a free copy of Five Things Every Trauma Survivor Needs to Know AND

61 Tips About the Grief Experience.

Find out more about Trauma and Grief Recovery Coaching

I offer one-on-one sessions, groups, PTSD Remediation, and classes. Appointments are offered in-person and online.

Try Trauma Recovery and Grief Recovery Coaching for Free! Book a free 30-minute Discovery Call to find out more!

What You Can Do When Grief & Trauma Show Up in the Body

kellywilsonwrites

27 Aug, 2023

You don’t get trauma without grief.

One of the aspects of trauma that many mental health professionals don’t know or don’t talk about is that trauma and PTSD recovery require grief processing.

This is the main reason why I got education and certification in both trauma and grief recovery, so that I could offer practices that cover both.

Why Grief AND Trauma?

Gradient background, from ivory to light blue, right to left. Text: Trauma survivors grieve the family they had, and they grieve the family they did not have.

The easiest way that I can illustrate this idea is with an example from my own life.

I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse by my father. This predatory behavior does not happen in a vacuum; instead there’s a whole toxic family system that supports it. In my toxic family, there was alcoholism, disordered eating, narcissistic behavior, enabling, emotional abuse, and more.

I officially entered trauma recovery in 2006, when I was diagnosed with PTSD. As the years have passed, I’ve been able to see my sexual abuse experiences in context of this toxic family system. A lot of these realizations happened when my children were young, and I worked really hard to give them a childhood completely different from my own.

In this process of parenting my children and re-parenting myself, I grieved.

I grieved the family that I DID have, and I grieved the family that I DIDN’T have.

Releasing Trauma & Grief

One of the reasons why The Body Keeps the Score is so popular is that it validates what we’ve always known on an intuitive level. Our bodies bear our burdens, physically and emotionally.

These burdens can be released. What is stored in the body can be released by the body.

This article arrived in my email inbox this morning, and it is fantastic – Physical Symptoms Of Grief: How To Deal With Grief Pain. I believe that this applies to grief AND trauma because the ways that our bodies store trauma is similar to how they store grief.

Here’s what’s covered in the article:

Physical symptoms of grief (and trauma)
Where we hold grief (and trauma) in the body
Why grief hurts so much
How long grief lasts
How to deal with grief
Releasing grief in physical ways, including somatic exercises

Hopefully this is a helpful resource for you to use now and in the future!

More Helpful Resources

I LOVE helpful resources. Why? Healing happens in community, and recovery opportunities need to be accessible.

If you haven’t seen it yet, the Resources page has changed in a good way! Now there are TWO different pages of free and low-cost trauma recovery resources:

Go here for Trauma & Grief Recovery Resources
Go here for PTSD Resources

As always, if you find something awesome out in the world that can benefit this community, please send it my way and I’ll add it.

Latest Posts

Try Trauma Recovery & Grief Recovery Coaching

Sign up here to get a free copy of Five Things Every Trauma Survivor Needs to Know AND

61 Tips About the Grief Experience.

Find out more about Trauma and Grief Recovery Coaching

I offer one-on-one sessions, groups, PTSD Remediation, and classes. Appointments are offered in-person and online.

Try Trauma Recovery and Grief Recovery Coaching for Free! Book a free 30-minute Discovery Call to find out more!

Free Grief Workshop About When a Child Dies

kellywilsonwrites

23 Aug, 2023

Grief needs a witness.

When a child dies, it’s tough to find witnesses to see parents and grandparents through their pain. Plus, this kind of grief is unique.

David Kessler is offering a free grief workshop about this experience, called When a Parent Grieves.

Grief Workshop Details

During this workshop, Kessler will discuss:

How the grief after a child dies is unique
How to remember with more love than pain
Techniques and tips to navigate your changing roles
Ways to forgive, release the burden of guilt, and create a legacy of love

This is a virtual event that happens on August 31, 2023, 9:00 am PT/ 12:00 pm ET. Not able to make it? No worries, you will get a recording.

You can sign up for When a Parent Grieves here.

Who Is David Kessler?

David Kessler is a well-known grief expert, with significant losses of his own and decades of experience. Here’s his official bio on a recent email:

David Kessler is a grief specialist, speaker, and author of six books, including his latest bestselling book, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. He co-authored two books with Elisabeth Kubler Ross. His first book, The Needs of The Dying received praise from Saint (Mother) Teresa.

David’s personal experience as a child witnessing a mass shooting while his mother was dying in a hospital helped him begin his journey. For most of his life, David has taught physicians, nurses, counselors, police, and first responders about the end of life, trauma, and grief. However, despite his vast knowledge of grief, his life was turned upside down by the sudden death of his twenty-one-year-old son.

Latest Posts

Try Trauma Recovery & Grief Recovery Coaching

Sign up here to get a free copy of Five Things Every Trauma Survivor Needs to Know AND

61 Tips About the Grief Experience.

Find out more about Trauma and Grief Recovery Coaching

I offer one-on-one sessions, groups, PTSD Remediation, and classes. Appointments are offered in-person and online.

Try Trauma Recovery and Grief Recovery Coaching for Free! Book a free 30-minute Discovery Call to find out more!

Grief & Gratitude Interview: Never Give Up

kellywilsonwrites

21 Aug, 2023

I was honored to be interviewed for the Grief & Gratitude podcast. I can talk about grief (and trauma) all day long. Yeah, it’s weird when I talk about trauma and grief in general public, so I appreciate these types of outlets even more. Plus, I was able to make them laugh during the interview, which is frosting on the cake!

Scroll down for the introduction and podcast recording. Enjoy!

Grief & Gratitude, Episode 13
Kelly Wilson, a blond woman in black and red checkered flannel shirt, sits on wooden stairs and smiles at the camera.

We’re delighted to bring you episode 13 of Grief and Gratitude with the fabulous Kelly Wilson. On number 13 Kelly reads a piece about birthing her sons and birthing a garden during the pandemic. She shares how gardening taught her the beauty of the cycle of death to life.

Kelly is a trauma recovery coach (and so much more) who says she’d tell someone who’s struggling, “It might feel hopeless, but you don’t have to stay here.” And, “Never give up. Never never never give up.”
She shares what it means to be a trauma recovery coach and how she’s grown her practice, how she helps others through asking questions, providing validation and compassion.

She had us laughing and we hope you’ll listen and laugh along with us.

Kelly Wilson entertains and inspires with stories of humor, healing, and hope. She’s a mom, an award-winning author, a comedian, a mental health advocate, and a speaker. Her books are *Don’t Punch People in the Junk, The Art of Seduction, *and Caskets From Costco. She is the co-founder of PTSD Parent Podcast, covering all things Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. She doesn’t practice yoga but wears yoga pants while practicing awkwardness, which you will experience first-hand if you talk with her. Find out more about Kelly at: Mapyourhealing.com and on FB and IG at Map Your Healing Journey.

Listen to the podcast below or on Apple podcasts.