I have heard a lot of wrong things said with a lot of confidence. Said by good people, mostly. People who genuinely wanted to help, who cared about the child or the adult in front of them, who were doing their sincere best with the information they had. The problem was the information. Because when…
Stress has a smell. Not literally — though anyone who has ever sat in a waiting room at a child welfare office might argue otherwise — but stress has a quality to it, a texture. It is present-tense. It has edges. It responds to things. You’re stressed because the deadline is tomorrow. The deadline passes,…
Two kids. Same parents. Same address. Same shouting coming through the same walls at the same hour on the same Tuesday night. One of them grows up mostly okay. A little guarded, maybe. Picks partners who are loud and then wonders why. Goes to therapy at thirty-two and has a fairly productive eight months of…
There’s a word that has done a lot of traveling in the last decade. It started in clinical settings, moved into self-help books, migrated to social media, and now shows up in sentences like “That meeting was so traumatic” and “My mom not letting me go to prom was honestly traumatic.” I’m not here to…