
Notes from My Blanket Fort: Healing Overwhelm in Trans Survivorship
I’ve cried every day for about three weeks. I have been left clawing for words from an empty throat. It’s one of those seasons in my survivorship, progressive illness, and young adulthood where I am completely overwhelmed by the sum of my life’s parts in America. Even...

Why every trans and nonbinary survivor should read Learning Good Consent
My identities as an agender survivor of polyvictimization working in anti-violence settles a lot more comfortably onto my awkward bones when I return again and again to asking what consent means to me and my partners. I never assume the answer is static or as frozen...

Building bridges while six feet apart: healing with Beyond Survival during COVID
Summer’s scorch was stunning. Nationwide, we saw protests ignite to honor the lives of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Toyin Salau, and the hundreds of thousands of other Black people who have been killed by police in American history. An energy emerged to not just defund...

Meditations for Healing Trauma
A recent post on Trans Survivors, “Mindfulness Meditation for Trans Trauma Survivors” (https://trans-survivors.com/2020/02/28/mindfulness-meditation-for-trans-trauma-survivors/), gives specific and detailed advice for trauma survivors on how to meditate safely. Would...

Choosing an Imperfect Therapist
Therapists don’t know everything. Sometimes they are generalists, and sometimes they have focused their training on very particular techniques, illnesses, and challenges their clients might face: depression, anxiety, trauma, personality disorders, CBT, DBT, or EMDR....

Healing as an Intentional Act
Many wounds heal by themselves, with little intervention: a scraped knee, a papercut, a strained muscle. Some emotional wounds (a slight by a stranger, a break with the past) are like this too—healed, as the adage goes, by time. But other forms of emotional harm are...