Each article in this category takes a key idea, framework, or conversation from the H.E.A.L. Her Podcast and expands it into a piece you can read, reference, and apply, whether or not you’ve heard the episode. If a conversation stopped you in your tracks, this is where you go deeper.
Healthy Resilience vs Survival Mode: What’s the Difference It happens on someone else’s podcast, mid-pandemic, near the end of the recording. The host tells me I am one of the most resilient people she has interviewed. She means it as a compliment. My first reaction, before I can stop myself, is: am I, though? I […]
When to Share Your Trauma Story: Scar, Not Wound I ask most of my podcast guests the same early question: what is the earliest memory that still shapes who you are? Efia Leatham does not hesitate. She goes straight to a staircase, socks on hardwood, seven years old, already narrating out loud that she is […]
For years, I walked around with pain I could not fully explain. For Black women, trauma healing often begins not with a diagnosis but with finally being allowed to speak the thing that has been sitting in the body for years. I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia in 2006. Chronic muscle pain, fatigue, the kind of […]
There is a specific kind of grief that does not have a clean name. It is the grief of realizing that someone who loved you also hurt you, and that both of those things are true at the same time. I have been sitting with that grief for years. I carried it in a way […]
There is a specific kind of reckoning that happens when you look at your life from the outside and realize, with something between grief and relief, that a lot of it was assembled by default. The job that opened up at the right moment. The relationship began because someone pursued you, and it seemed like […]
Dr. Thema Bryant is a clinical psychologist, ordained minister, author, and the 2023 president of the American Psychological Association. She’s also one of the most grounded voices I’ve had on the H.E.A.L. Her Podcast. This conversation went places I didn’t expect and left me with things I’m still thinking about. When Dr. Thema Bryant sat […]
