Diving Gently into Your Own Story

Begin to Uncover the Impact of Childhood Trauma with Writing-to-Heal Strategies Have you ever wondered if experiences from your past might still be shaping how you feel and respond to life today? Unresolved childhood trauma can quietly linger, impacting both your mental and physical well-being. In my latest Substack article, I share eight signs that may reveal how these past experiences still echo in your day-to-day life—ruminating thoughts, critical self-talk, and judging others harshly are just a few of the indicators that unresolved trauma may be rooted in your nervous system. While we can’t change the past, we can take steps to understand and gently reshape how it affects us now, creating space for healing and resilience. Your brain has an incredible ability to rewire old thoughts and emotions, and you can guide that powerful healing process through journaling. Writing about our childhood experiences helps us recognize our triggers and sets us on a path toward healing. The prompts I share in my book, on my Substack, and in my workshops are part of a trauma-informed, mindful Neural Re-Narrating program that I’ve had the privilege to teach in universities and behavioral health groups nationwide. How do I begin with Writing-to-Heal? Are you ready to begin exploring your personal history and how it has shaped you, but feel uncertain about where to start? Feeling stuck or sensing resistance in your body is completely normal. Often, we need a gentle nudge to move past that hesitation and take the first step. A writing-to-heal prompt can provide that guidance, helping you ease into the process of understanding and owning your story. When I teach science-backed writing-to-heal strategies, one of the first exercises I introduce is drawing the floor plan of your childhood home. In my Substack article, I also share this drawing and narrative prompt—a gentle yet powerful way to begin exploring your own story. By simply sketching the layout of your childhood home, you can start to uncover memories and emotions that may have influenced who you are today. This exercise, paired with reflective writing prompts, opens a doorway to fresh insights, providing a unique bridge between past experiences and present well-being. Try My Drawing and Narrative Writing Prompt If this resonates with you, we encourage you to take a moment to try out the exercise in my article. As you draw and write, remember to show compassion to yourself—the child you once were and the person you are now. If any strong feelings arise, it’s okay to take it slow or even reach out to someone for support. You can read the full article here. I hope it provides valuable tools and gentle guidance as you embark on this journey of self-discovery and self-reclamation. Join the Healing Together Community Did you find this exercise helpful? I’d love to hear your thoughts. For further discussion, join my community on Substack.  Right now, all my articles on Substack are free, and it’s a great time to get involved as we shape this supportive space together. Your presence and engagement mean the world to me! (In the future, I’ll be offering additional content, activities, and conversations for paid subscribers. If you want to support my work as a paid subscriber right now as we build this meaningful community together, thank you!)  And if you want many more strategies and neuroscience-based writing prompts, drawing exercises, and visualization practices to help you on your healing journey, might I suggest picking up a copy of my latest book, the Adverse Childhood Experiences Guided Journal and check out my Writing-to-Heal workshops here.  Thank you to everyone who has supported my work and continues to do so—I’m so grateful to be able to share my ideas with you. I truly believe in your ability to find peace and healing. Yours, Donna

Your Story Matters – To You, and to Your Children

How healing your own wounds can transform your children’s lives  What if the one thing your kids are hoping and waiting for is for you to do the work to grow with them instead of staying stuck in old behaviors and reactions that never served you, and certainly don’t serve them? If this resonates, how do you begin?  Your Story Matters – Healing Yourself Heals Your Kids, Too First, know that healing yourself IS healing your children, and their children. Feeling dysregulated, a nervous system stuck on high alert, self-blame, high reactivity, a lack of self-compassion and self-care, all of these are passed down until one person decides to do the courageous inner work to break the cycle once and for all. This is how we begin to heal others. This is how we prevent trauma from being passed down from generation to generation. As a science journalist and author, I’ve spoken with countless parents who feel overwhelmed by the pressures of modern life. They share how challenging it is to stay calm and compassionate when their children are struggling, especially when unresolved issues from their own childhood resurface in moments of stress. But the good news is that you don’t have to stay trapped in those old patterns. It’s never too late to rewrite your story—for yourself and for your kids.  The Healing Together Community In my latest article on Substack, I dive deeper into these themes, share insights from research on parenting and trauma, and offer practical steps to help you start your healing journey. When you begin to heal, your children benefit, too. Right now, all my articles on Substack are free, and it’s a great time to get involved as we shape this supportive space together. Your presence and engagement mean the world to me! (In the future, I’ll be offering additional content, activities, and conversations for paid subscribers. If you want to support my work as a paid subscriber right now as we build this meaningful community together, thank you!)  Click here to read the full article, which includes a simple three-part writing exercise to help you reflect on your past and how it shapes your present. Your story matters. And if you want many more strategies and neuroscience-based writing prompts, drawing exercises, and visualization practices to help you on your healing journey, might I suggest picking up a copy of my latest book, the Adverse Childhood Experiences Guided Journal.  I hope these offer you the tools you need to start breaking the cycle. Yours,Donna

Healing from Childhood Trauma + Building a New Community

Do you feel you have enough connection and community in your life?  I’ve been missing it. My family and lifelong friends fulfill my longing for deep personal connection but sometimes – especially in an era of digital overwhelm, fraught interactions on social media, and a work life of Zoom meetings – I miss having a wider community that is deep, warm, welcoming.  After much thought and deliberation, I have launched a Substack dedicated to exploring the powerful connections between our emotions, trauma, and health. I’m excited about this new platform and truly hope that you all are just as eager to follow along for more in depth content.  My personal story of childhood trauma & illness To kick off this new venture, I am sharing a deeply personal story over on Substack that has profoundly shaped my understanding of health and resilience. When I was twelve, my father’s sudden passing set off a chain reaction of health issues, from fainting spells to seizures, and later, an autoimmune disorder. It wasn’t until a compassionate physician asked me about childhood trauma that I began to see the connections between my early experiences and my adult health. Studies have shown that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) or childhood traumas can reset our stress responses to “high” for life, leading to chronic inflammation and a host of health issues. My journey has been one of understanding these links, learning how to heal, and sharing what I’ve learned along the way from my conversations with the best experts and scientists in the field. As I’ve shared in the past, one tactic that has provided enormous benefit has been journaling – so much so that I actually wrote a book called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Guided Journal (available now wherever books are sold!).  New Healing Community on Substack I invite you to read the full article for free on my new Substack. This space will be dedicated to sharing insights, stories, and science-based strategies to help you on your own path to healing and resilience.  Thank you for being part of this journey, and I look forward to engaging with you over email, via social and now on Substack! Yours,Donna

How adverse childhood experiences or ACEs impact your current wellbeing

Often, people who have a history of trauma in childhood find themselves struggling to flourish in adulthood. Trauma affects the brain in ways that can make you more likely to experience difficulty when faced with emotionally stressful and demanding situations in your relationships, at work, and as a parent. Throughout my life, both growing up and as an adult, I’ve faced a number of challenging life experiences, stressors, and traumas, and I understand this struggle on a deep, intrinsic level. I’ve learned, not only for myself, but through my many years reporting as a science journalist, that chronic unpredictable stress in childhood affects the architecture of the brain in ways that can impact negatively our everyday life.  And yet it is possible though to create new, more powerful healing possibilities for inner peace and flourishing. The brain is wonderfully neuroplastic. And it’s never too late to begin the healing process.  What are adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)? The term adverse childhood experiences refers to chronic, unpredictable stressors that children and teenagers encounter while growing up. The original ACEs questionnaire was first created in 1995 by a team of physicians who asked thousands of patients about their experiences in childhood, and then compared those childhood experiences to patients’ adult health records. This original ACEs survey asks about 10 categories of adversity in childhood.These include facing physical, emotional, or sexual abuse; physical or emotional neglect; and experiencing different types of familial dysfunction, including growing up with a parent who suffered from a mental illness; or who had an addiction; or having parents who separated or divorced; or losing a parent. Our understanding of ACEs has since expanded to include growing up facing poverty, racism, community violence, and other environmental stressors such as the pandemic and climate change. Adverse childhood experiences turn out to have a profound effect on adult health. Over 2,000 studies have shown that individuals with ACEs scores of 2 or more are more likely to develop physical and mental health concerns in adulthood. This relationship between adversity in childhood and health issues in adulthood is dose-dependent. In other words, the more categories of ACEs you experienced as a child, the greater the likelihood of later experiencing physical and mental health disorders in adulthood. For instance, those with an ACE score of 3 have a 60 percent increased risk of later developing an autoimmune disease, such as lupus, multiple sclerosis, or Type 1 diabetes. And those with an ACE score of 4 or more are four times more likely to experience depression in adulthood. Trauma and the brain Adversity in childhood can change the brain in myriad ways, altering neural connectivity in the amygdala, the alarm center of the brain; the hippocampus, where you process memories and emotions; and the pre-frontal cortex, the decision-making center of your brain. Changes also occur in how well these areas communicate and network with each other in what’s known as the connectome of the brain. How brain changes affect you These changes can profoundly affect how you feel on a day-to-day basis, including how well you’re able to: You may find yourself either overreacting or underreacting to the world around you more than you’d like, or feel powerless about how you can exert influence over your history of trauma and adversity, or experience a sense of inertia or hopelessness about how you can manage chronic stressors now. What can you do? You can begin to change the legacy of the past by learning and applying neuroscience-based techniques that have a self-calming and self-regulating effect on you, and doing so in a way that is compassionate, patient, kind, and accepting of yourself. Often, those with a history of trauma have more difficulty showing loyalty to themselves, engaging in self-care, and waking up on their own side. The invitation is to become the “general contractor” of your own well-being and utilize simple, neuroscience-based tools to help replace old neural pathways that no longer serve you with neural pathways that promote your healing and flourishing. This is a process that I call Neural Re-Narrating™. I know how difficult this past year has been for all of us. Many people with ACE’s are finding that the early #trauma and sense of unsafety they endured growing up are being re-triggered during these fear-laden times, amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, political upheaval, and feeling isolated. To help address the stress and uncertainty we are all facing, I’ve created a new course, Your Healing Narrative: Write-to-Heal with Neural-Re-Narrating™️, to help you work through your ACE’s and become resilient in the face of current stressors.  In this course, I teach you a new way to talk to yourself by intertwining writing prompts with mind-body exercises to signal your nervous system to calm down, reverse negative self-talk, and begin to recover from ACEs. This program combines a series of writing prompts with mindfulness techniques and the latest neuroscience to help you engage in Neural Re-Narrating™—creating a new, more powerful and resonant healing narrative that will help you change neural pathways in ways that will help you to flourish in your current life, even in these unprecedented times of adversity.  Learn more here.

How to care for yourself during difficult times

Many people with #ACE’s (Adverse Childhood Experiences) are finding that the early #trauma and sense of unsafety they endured growing up are being re-triggered during these fear-laden times, amidst the #Covid #pandemic, political upheaval, and feeling isolated. Stress and uncertainty can trigger old, sticky feelings of fear, anxiety, or loss from long ago and bring up new, painful negative thoughts and physical symptoms. This can be true even when we’ve worked really hard to resolve our trauma. It can feel like we’re backsliding. I know that this is certainly the case for me, and I know, from so many of you who’ve reached out to me, that this is also the case for many of you. So here’s a gentle reminder. It’s so important to stop, pause, and take care of yourself during these difficult times, as often as you need to. It is OKAY to take a break whenever you need to, even if it’s every twenty minutes. Go for a walk. Order yourself some flowers and put them in a favorite vase. Do five minutes of deep breathing. Call a friend. Reach out to a trusted mental health care practitioner. Do all of the above. Whenever I am triggered in my personal life and old fears emerge (which is often these days), I return to the many different tools in my toolbox. One is a series of basic breath techniques that help me move through old sticky feelings and dissipate the fear, tension, and uncertainty I feel.  To inspire you, here’s a quick review of the science on how breathing techniques can help you to calm your nervous system by activating the parasympathetic nervous system (what I like to call the Purr Now System), or PNS, which helps to boost the relaxation response. Oxygenating the Brain Your nervous system is comprised of an intricate network that carries messages from the brain to the body—telling you whether you are safe or not safe—in order to help you regulate your bodily functions and prepare for any possible situations, interactions, or challenges in your environment for which you may need to prepare. This network is a two-way superhighway of messaging.  Messages rise from the body to tell the brain whether you’re safe, and the brain sends messages to the body about whether you need to prepare for any potential threat. This communication is constant, and one of the ways in which the body and brain communicate is through the breath: You take in 25,000 breaths a day. Breathing Too Fast If your breath is shallow, or coming quickly, as it is when you are stressed, the brain gets the message to act and respond as if you’re in physical danger. Respiratory messages take top priority when it comes to getting the brain’s attention. Breathing and Emotions Your emotional state of mind affects the rate, depth, and pattern of your breath and vice versa. Manipulating the breath in ways that match up with a particular emotion—such as fear, rage, joy, or contentment—can account for as much as 40 percent of how you feel emotionally. Think of screaming out loud in pain, holding your breath in fear, laughing with gladness, sighing with relief, or breathing in deeply as you drink in a beautiful scene in nature. Breathing Technique According to decades of research, the most beneficial breath sequence for stimulating the positive healing power of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), calming your brain and body, and managing anxiety is breathing in for 5½ seconds and breathing out for 5½ seconds. It can also help to make your exhale last longer than your inhale. Filling your diaphragm—by pushing your belly out like a Buddha’s belly—also helps push blood into the heart and slow your heart rate. Slowing your heart rate helps to pump blood throughout the body, thus oxygenating the body and brain. This helps stimulate the PNS and the relaxation response. Breathing vs. Medication Although many medicines can temporarily dampen the stress response and the sympathetic nervous system (or what I call the Stress Now System), there are no medications you can take to boost the rest and relaxation response, or the parasympathetic nervous system. Slow, gentle breathing can stimulate the relaxation response rapidly and effectively—in as little as five minutes. The oldest tool we have is the most powerful—the breath—and it has zero side effects. Stop the negative self-talk and soothe your nervous system The events and stressors of this past year have prompted me to create a new course, Your Healing Narrative: Write-to-Heal with Neural-Re-Narrating™️, to help you work through your #ACE’s and become resilient in the face of current stressors.  In this course, I teach you a new way to talk to yourself by intertwining writing prompts with mind-body exercises to signal your nervous system to calm down, reverse negative self-talk, and begin to recover from #ACEs. This program combines a series of writing prompts with mindfulness techniques and the latest neuroscience to help you engage in what I call Neural Re-Narrating™—creating a new, more powerful and resonant healing narrative that will help you change neural pathways in the brain in ways that will help you to flourish in your current life, even in these times of adversity.  Learn more here.

Paperback Release of The Angel and the Assassin: The Tiny Brain Cell that Changed the Course of Medicine

When I sat down in my attic to write THE ANGEL AND THE ASSASSIN: The Tiny Brain Cell that Changed the Course of Medicine, I never imagined that it would be so needed in our world! 2020 has been chock-full of adversity, uncertainty and distress on so many levels: the worst pandemic in a hundred years, millions facing economic uncertainty, global climate change, and mounting political discord.  The past decade has been a golden era in brain research, one in which scientists have offered extraordinary hope for today’s mental health crisis by rewriting our basic understanding of how disorders of the human brain develop, and how we might help prevent or ameliorate them. And they all come down to one tiny, elusive cell, called microglia (remember that name!), which turn out to be game-changers for mental health. The Angel and the Assassin offers a deep dive into recent groundbreaking discoveries about the brain and how microglia link our mental and physical health. When we are facing external stressors, including viral infections or chronic emotional stressors, these cells can wreak havoc in our brain, sparking inflammation and a wide range of problems. However, under the right circumstances, microglia can be coaxed into becoming healers, able to repair the brain in ways that help alleviate symptoms ranging from memory loss and anxiety to depression. This book offers more hope and promise for human healing than any other science I’ve ever reported on. Today, as we face a pandemic and unprecedented political unrest, we need, more than ever, to understand what helps and what harms brain health, and have new pathways for healing. I am excited to announce that The Angel and the Assassin will be available everywhere in paperback format January 19, 2021. If you haven’t already, grab your copy here! Click here to read the prologue: When the Body Attacks the Brain. ———————————————- To learn more about the brain and the long-overlooked cells called microglia, check out these excellent press releases and podcasts about The Angel and the Assassin:

Your Healing Narrative: Write-to-Heal With Neural Re-Narrating™️

Happy 2021! 2020 was a year unlike any other. But it also brought home for many of us what matters most, including the importance of nurturing and harnessing the power of our nervous system and brain toward equanimity so that we can flourish even in the face of adversity. Your Healing Narrative: Write-to-Heal With Neural Re-Narrating™ is my 2021 offering for individuals, parents, teachers, social workers, therapists, and health care professionals, to help ease a little bit of the anxiety, suffering, and trauma we are all experiencing. Over my three decades as a science journalist, in the course of writing seven books and exploring the intersection of neuroscience, emotion, and the mind-body connection, I’ve sat with many individuals who’ve suffered from adversity and interviewed hundreds of leading neuroscientists. Your Healing Narrative: Write-to-Heal With Neural Re-Narrating™ is a compilation and distillation of all that I’ve learned – a synthesis of all the best strategies I know for flourishing in the face of adversity. In this program, which combines writing-to-heal techniques with science-based trauma-healing interventions and mindfulness approaches, I’ve set out to help you learn how to override your brain’s old, habitual reactions and create new, healthier responses that reset the brain and nervous system for peace and possibility. In the past, I’ve shared how I faced a number of challenging life experiences and traumas throughout my life, both growing up, and as an adult. I know what it’s like to feel as if you’re swimming hard against an invisible tide of challenges and stressors – whether it’s trauma from the past, stressors in your current life, chronic health conditions, or concerns over someone you dearly love. And I know how hard it is to utilize healing strategies when facing uncertainty and adversity. When the world around me, or the lives of those I love, spin into chaos, these are the moments I’ve become most caught up in rumination and self-criticism, and resisted taking care of my own well-being.  All too often, especially if we are women or serve in the healing professions, we may be so busy caring for others that we don’t turn our attention to our own inner well-being with the self-compassion we deserve. This year has been chock-full of adversity, uncertainty and distress on so many levels: the worst pandemic in a hundred years, millions facing economic uncertainty, global climate change, and mounting political discord. Over time, facing unpredictable, chronic stressors can deliver us into a low-grade state of fight, flight, freeze, sabotaging our immune system and our nervous system. Perhaps you’ve noticed changes in your mood, mindset, or health. Or, perhaps you’re not aware of the tension you may be holding onto as you keep on coping, and caregiving for those who need you. Either way, over time, chronic stress can begin to take a physical and emotional toll your long-term health.  Knowledge in and of itself is not enough to change old, neural patterns. When we try to change our thought patterns and reactions on our own, we automatically overlay old, ingrained thought patterns onto newly learned approaches.  That’s why I’ve created Your Healing Narrative: Write-to-Heal With Neural Re-Narrating™ in which I carefully guide you step-by-step through over 100 lessons, activities, and strategies. Throughout this course you’ll go on a journey, using the process of writing-to-heal to recognize old, painful thought patterns; observe how your history of adversity may be affecting your health, relationships, and well-being; and begin rewriting your inner story to create a new, more powerful, resonant, and purposeful healing narrative that will help you to flourish in your life, even in the face of adversity.  My hope is that through this course, you’ll come away with simple but powerful tools to create a deep and lasting inner sense of resiliency. By doing this transformative work, you will not only help yourself through difficulties from the past, as well as in your present life, you’ll also begin to extend that inner sense of safety, and the resources you learn, to help those around you thrive. In truth, I wish I had been able to take this program myself decades ago, earlier in my own healing journey, both as a parent, and as an individual with chronic health conditions. And so, I created it for all of you, to help you thrive through these unprecedented times.  I’ve created two versions of this program: one for Healing Professionals and one for Individuals. You can learn more here. I truly believe that Neural Re-Narrating™ holds the key to creating more powerful healing possibilities for inner peace and flourishing, even in these times of adversity!  You can learn more about the different program offerings here! Be sure to use the code CALM2021 to get $25 off the introductory price!

Quiet Your Body and Mind

Hello Friends. As a SciComm journalist with 30 years of reporting and 6 books under my belt, which focus on how our stress response governs our immune health, I’ve been thinking about what I have learned, and how I might help you quiet your body and mind during this #pandemic.

Big Women, Little Women, Small Oscars

The Oscars are this Sunday, and as war movies and films about repressed male feelings take center stage, I’ve been thinking about why Greta Gerwig’s Little Women had me wiping away tears during the last 30 minutes of the film – something that also happened to me while watching another Gerwig film, Lady Bird.

The Angel and the Assassin: The Tiny Brain Cell that Changed the Course of Medicine – now available everywhere!

Dear Readers, Friends, All,  I’m thrilled to announce that THE ANGEL AND THE ASSASSIN: The Tiny Brain Cell that Changed the Course of Medicine in now on bookshelves and available everywhere! When I first told you, my readers, that I was setting out to tell the story of these tiny brain cells, microglia (remember that name!) that connect our physical and mental health, and why these cells wield so much power over how we feel right here, right now — changing everything we thought we knew about depression, anxiety, chronic pain, mood disorders, and cognitive health, I was moved by your response.