Good News Post - inspiring stories, hope, positivity, well-being, and a happier outlook on life.2d agoPEDAL POWER! Counsellor Sue’s 500-Mile Mission to Save Young Minds
Good News Post - inspiring stories, hope, positivity, well-being, and a happier outlook on life.2d ago
Harmony SeekerAre we overcomplicating trauma healing?
In my latest blog, I explore a question that’s been bothering me as I continue to work on my own healing and my studies in counselling.
Have we layered so many techniques, spiritual ideas, and metaphors onto trauma treatment that we’ve lost sight of the fundamentals?
When you dig into the neuroscience, trauma appears less like “energy stored in the body” and more like dysregulated brain networks and fear memories.
What if the most powerful elements of healing are still the basics of emotional regulation, safe memory processing, and a validating therapeutic relationship?
A critical reflection on EMDR, somatic approaches, and the common factors that actually drive recovery.
Read here:
https://harmony-seeker.com/are-we-overcomplicating-trauma-healing-a-return-to-the-fundamentals/
#TraumaTherapy #Psychology #Neuroscience #MentalHealth #TraumaRecovery #Therapy #EMDR #Psychotherapy #Counselling #EvidenceBasedPractice
During the 2020 Melbourne lockdowns, the daily press conferences became a ritual of dread. Case numbers, death counts, outbreaks, restrictions. Day after day, the language of risk and death seeped into every corner of life. Staying glued to every update initially felt like a civic duty. Eventually, it was simply too much. The constant tallying of the dead and dying, the rolling coverage, the panels of experts. It all started to feel like an assault on my nervous system.
These days, the news diet looks very different. Television news is completely off the table. The internet gets only fleeting attention, just enough to catch headlines and local stories that directly affect my community. I do a check of the broad strokes of what is happening. Then comes the deliberate step back. This is not because I do not care about what is happening in the world. I do feel deep compassion and care for all humans of this •.
However, what has changed is the recognition that since 2020, my relationship with information has had to change. Through that agony, I have learned that I have no control over world events, and consuming endless disaster only floods my nervous system with cortisol I cannot metabolise.
The neuroscience supports my experience. When we scroll through distressing content, the amygdala triggers the fight-or-flight response before conscious processing. The HPA axis dumps cortisol into the bloodstream, and heart rates rise. Muscles tighten, and our body prepares for danger. Yet the danger is not here. It exists on a screen, thousands of kilometres away, filtered through editorial decisions and algorithmic curation. Human brains did not evolve to toggle between massacres, political spats, and kitten videos within seconds. Repeated exposure to traumatic content, even vicariously, activates mirror neurons, allowing us to feel the distress of others as if it were our own.
Over time, this creates vicarious trauma, including intrusive thoughts, hypervigilance, and emotional numbing. The nervous system bears the cost of witnessing suffering we cannot touch.
Psychologists describe the locus of control as the extent to which we believe we can influence life events. An external locus, where outcomes feel beyond personal influence, correlates strongly with anxiety and depression. Consuming media essentially outsources agency, flooding consciousness with crises I cannot solve, tragedies I cannot prevent, conflicts I cannot calm. News presents a curated selection of disasters, prioritised by editorial agendas, economic interests, and the reality that negative stories generate more engagement. This is not ground truth. It is a constructed narrative, shaped by ownership, funding, and attention metrics. The person on the ground experiences a reality infinitely more complex than any headline can capture.
This does not indicate a lack of compassion. The suffering of others is still felt deeply. Sleep is still lost thinking about people I will never meet, in circumstances barely imaginable. The longing to help remains, but resources, reach, and time are finite. What remains possible is stewarding my own capacity: showing up fully for people in my immediate sphere, volunteering, offering skills, voting with values, and maintaining emotional bandwidth for those in my community who need support. That is my actual sphere of influence. That is where the locus of control actually lives.
The media landscape is not reality. It is selection, magnification, and distortion. Media narratives often reflect institutional priorities rather than lived experience. Public and media agendas constantly diverge. The gaps between what is reported and what is true at ground level remain vast. We see not the world, but a particular construction of it, optimised for engagement rather than understanding.
Boundaries become necessary choices. Knowing enough to be informed, but not so much that paralysis sets in and protecting the nervous system so that showing up for what is actually mine to do remains possible. Compassion is not dependent on consumption. Empathy is not a transaction that requires a witness to every tragedy as proof of caring. The work is in the living, not the watching.
#MentalHealth #VicariousTrauma #NewsDiet #Boundaries #Melbourne #PandemicAftermath #Neurodivergent #Counselling #MediaLiteracy #SelfCare
This account, this corner of the fediverse, has become one of the places I let those questions be noisy in public. What does healing mean when the conditions that harmed you are not gone, only rearranged into more respectable shapes? What actually happens inside a counselling relationship when disability or neurodivergence is present but unnamed, or misnamed, or politely ignored? How do we begin to notice the ways power and unspoken norms travel through even the most well-intentioned helping professions? How do we hold culture as something we are constantly creating and being created by, something we may need to grieve and interrogate and occasionally celebrate, often all at once, sometimes in the space of a single conversation?
I keep circling back to the interior labour of this work. The slow, repetitive practice of building emotional regulation when your nervous system's default setting is red alert. The awkwardness of learning self-compassion when sharp self-criticism has been your most reliable survival tool. The moments that feel like failure because you find yourself reacting in an old way, when in reality this is precisely how recovery moves, looping back on itself, revisiting old ground with slightly different eyes. The way trauma and joy can sit shoulder to shoulder in the same hour, the same therapy session, the same breath, and how unnerving and holy that can feel.
Rauch and Ansari suggest that silence can be deliberate and strategic, a form of self-regulation rather than withdrawal, a boundary rather than an absence. I think about this in relation to the freeze response, to the moments in my own history when going quiet was not giving up but holding on. The body stills because there are no safe words yet. Sometimes the silence is the story. And learning to hear it as such, to receive it without rushing to fill or fix it, is one of the things I am still practising, in music and in therapy and in the ordinary, unglamorous dailiness of trying to stay present in a life that sometimes arrives all at once.
I am not arriving anywhere with a finished theory of how any of this is supposed to work. I am coming, again and again, with fragments and questions and a stubborn intention to tell the truth as I understand it in the moment I am writing. That truth is often partial, often shifting. My understanding of myself, of trauma, of disability, of care, keeps moving, and I want it to. I would rather be inconsistent and alive to new information than seamless and rigidly wrong.
If you are still reading, you are already participating in something I care about. A space that treats complexity as ordinary rather than excessive. Where being too much is not an accusation but raw material. Where intense feeling and rigorous thought are both welcome at the same table. Where healing is not a linear journey toward a fixed destination but something more like learning to live inside unresolved chords without pretending they have resolved. Where music is both metaphor and method, both a way of speaking about change and a way of practising it in the body.
True silence does not exist. What we call silence is simply what we have not yet learned to hear. The fullness of life in quieter tones. The heartbeat of thought. The whispered rhythm of resilience. The steady murmur of healing is underway. And when we learn to tune into the music between the notes and into the truth held in breath, we do more than survive. We begin to sing again. This time, in a voice that is entirely our own.
I am not here to introduce myself so much as to keep turning up alongside you. To keep writing from the middle of things, not only from the rare polished moments that look good in hindsight. To keep noticing the small, ordinary, unglamorous ways humans find their way back to themselves, even inside systems that were never set up with them in mind. If any of these threads brush against something in your own story, then you are part of the imagined audience I write towards. And maybe, in a slow, imperfect, occasionally dissonant way, part of the choir that is still learning how to hear itself.
#AuDHD #Neurodivergent #Blind #Deafblind #Disabled #DisabilityJustice #MadStudies #Psychology #Counselling #Therapy #Trauma #TraumaRecovery #Neurodiversity #MentalHealth #ChronicStress #Healing #WindowOfTolerance #LivedExperience #CareWork #Culture #Power #Normality #Access #Inclusion #Ableism #Music #ClassicalMusic #ChoralMusic #Choir #Singing #Writing #PersonalEssay #Silence #LongPost #Fediversea (2/2)
annafCounselling - why didn’t I do that aaaages ago? Just two sessions and I’m loads less stressed. If you can get it or afford it I say go for it (but also do what suits you and don’t take advice from random people).
I suspect it’s a bit of a thing with my age-group. Either fix yourself or grit your teeth, get on with it. But apply that to say, your car, and you see how nuts that starts to sound.
SleepyCattenDon't know if this is useful to anybody, especially any trans+, non-binary, GNC, or queer folks looking for part-time remote work, and who happens to have a:
recognised qualification in counselling, psychotherapy, psychology, social work, or related mental health field...
... but Anne Health currently has a vacancy for a wellbeing practioner.
Full details and application link here.
Hurry if you're interested, as the deadline is 26th February.
For anybody who doesn't know what Anne Health is, they're a not-for-profit gender-affirming care company based in the UK, trying to ensure that trans+ people are actually able to get some kind of care.
#GetFediHire #GenderAffirmingHealth #trans #transgender #enby #NonBinary #counselling #psychotherapy #psychology #MentalHealth #queer #LGBTQ+ #LGBQTIA+ #UK
Droppie [opensoc]abc.net.au/news/2026-02-11/lov…
i aspire to sensitivity here, not just ride roughshod over the grieving "survivors", but nonetheless feel somewhat irritated at the overarching tone of this article.
compare that to hitherto "traditional" options, whereby his partner would have been either in excruciating agony, or medicated into comatosity to avoid the former, for days if not weeks before... ergo, no matter how upset he might feel now, the alternative seems infinitely worse. before, he would have "lost" her far earlier, wrt being able to share their love right to the last.
ofc it is terrible, this is undeniable, as everyone who has lost a loved one, then later returns to the ever-changed home, well knows. however...
this is infinitely more than anyone ever got, or gets, after their loved one dies a "non-VAD" way. so sure, ok, a "post-VAD counselling service" might be able to be made better, but my point is, & thus why this article sits badly with me, from the perspective of the survivors, VAD is so much better than the alternatives, & for that reason this article IMO lacks proper perspective & proportion.
CBC Newfoundland & LabradorHusband and wife counselling duo create a new 'Landmark' in Bay Roberts
Kristy Yetman and husband Desmond Smith of Landmark Counselling want to share with their community.
#counselling #community #BayRoberts
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/husband-and-wife-counselling-duo-create-a-new-landmark-in-bay-roberts-9.7077244?cmp=rss
Kristy Yetman and husband Desmond Smith of Landmark Counselling want to share with their community.
#counselling #community #BayRoberts
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/husband-and-wife-counselling-duo-create-a-new-landmark-in-bay-roberts-9.7077244?cmp=rss
lumpenproletariatHigh demand leads Indigenous healing camp in Yellowknife to pause counselling services
A one-of-a-kind land-based Indigenous healing camp in Somba K’e, Yellowknife, has stopped offering some services.
Black White Blue in the SouthIn Episode 81, Bill and Jumelle interview licensed therapist Kervin Searles about his new book!
Subscribe, download and listen today! https://linktr.ee/bwabits
#SouthCarolina #mentalhealth #counselling #therapy #therapists #author #bookauthor
https://www.amazon.com/Undrafted-Purposed-Living-Loving-Leading-ebook/dp/B0FXNZNFNJ
