Reading about other’s journeys from mental illness to mental health brought to mind my journey from depression that became chronic and verged on suicidal in the late 70’s, though now I know it was massive repression taught to us descendants of Nebraska homesteaders.  What a shock when my marriage failed, for I’d excelled in all the courses about homemaking and was a good wife by farm standards, though I had no emotional life and knew nothing about how to live with an...

For many of us wounded sexually as children, intimacy and sexuality are a struggle between trying to consistently feel our sexual feelings or give up caring about relationships.  Incest and centuries of repressing the feminine and truncating the masculine (in us all) make intimacy difficult for many, often hard work, and sometimes frought with triggers.  I feel healing such pervasive effects requires we come to live in our deeper feminine, the true nature that lies beneath the...

We spend our childhood building emotional armor and our adulthood trying to get free of it.  It serves to honor this armoring and any dissociative process that helped protect us from what seemed shocking or harmful.  When children lack clear guidance, they invent ways to cope -served then, not so useful as an adult.

Honor that your armoring was formed for a reason, a protection against unsavory people or parents’ pain, a defense against unbearable feelings, a response to being...