Because I was feeling unsettled from exploring family trauma, and because my therapist is of the Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy branch of psychology, and because I wanted to know more about Internal...

As I held my imaginary conversations with these ancestors—Emilie and Emil and Joseph—I got the same sense from each of them. Isolation. They shifted from being story fragments to wounded people,...

When I think of Emilie Folda, I think of her tombstone. The only photo I saw of her is not even of her. My grandmother, a child, looks so small next to the massive stone. How sad she looks in her...

No one ever burned me with cigarette butts or locked me in a closet for hours or days. I was fed and clothed. Whenever a therapist or some other expert said “trauma,” I passed it off. “Trauma”...

Thank you for your kindness, for your care with my story, or whatever it is I’m doing here. I couldn’t tell it if I didn’t feel safe in your eyes. I used to think of myself as typical. “This is how...

We're going down the rabbit hole. I've been doing a fair amount of work on myself. It started with an exploration of anxiety, which led to inherited family trauma, and then internal family systems....