Trauma Tips
Fire Victim’s Survival Guide
On the night of October 8th, 2017 I lost my home and everything I owned in Santa Rosa, California to the Tubbs fire. Nothing can prepare you for what it’s like to go through something like this, but hopefully what I learned from my experience can help. This guide can be helpful for those suffering…
Read MoreHow to Recover from Trauma: Tip #6 See a Therapist
Repeat after me: therapy is not a dirty word. Mental health is important. There is no shame in seeking professional help to address the areas where I am struggling.
Read MoreHow to Recover from Trauma: Tip #5 Be Selfish
When It’s Too Much I’ve talked about how in my experience when you’re going through a trauma, most days you just need to focus on being okay and not necessarily worry about making progress in life. Well, sometimes there are bad days. Days like today for me when my mortgage company is struggling to get…
Read MoreHow to Recover from Trauma: Tip #4 Be Bold
When you’ve been through some really hard shit, it’s really really easy to want to put on some camouflage and fade into the background. And by all means, if you are still in survival mode, allow yourself that time. I needed it. A lot of it. I didn’t want to be in the spotlight anymore and I stopped interacting on social media. I stopped asking friends to come over and keep me company.
Read MoreHow to Recover from Trauma: Tip #3 Make New Friends
When you go through a trauma, it creates a rift in your life. For me anyway, there is the life I had before the fire and my son being born, and there is the life I have after.
It’s not even like two different chapters, it’s like two completely different books in the same series – some of the characters are the same, but it could very well exist independently.
Read MoreHow to Recover from Trauma: Tip #2 Accept You’re a Victim
Most of the time there’s nothing we can do about it. When my entire neighborhood was lost in the 2017 Northern California Wildfires, no one saw it coming. I don’t live in the middle of the forest. I’m in a residential neighborhood. That shit just doesn’t happen!
Read MoreHow to Recover from Trauma: Tip #1 Learn to Say Yes
I’ve never been good at accepting help. Call it pride, call it stubbornness, but it’s one of my biggest faults. In college, I literally failed courses because I thought that going to my professor to tell him or her that I was struggling meant that I was admitting I was weak. We all suffer from this to some extent, but I am ashamed to admit that it took me 34 years to learn my lesson.
Read More