What if You're Taught PTSD? How Fences Couldn't Protect Me as a Highly Sensitive Child
Your brain splits off traumatic memories to protect you, but healing means discovering layers you didn't know were buried. A child taught to watch for kidnapping at school can't feel safe even behind fences while other kids play freely, and recording that memory decades later reveals the mind buried the worst part until feeling safe enough to remember. Real-time inner child work demonstrates how placing your hand on your heart and speaking directly to that frightened part creates the relief you've been craving. Abuse survivors feel frustrated when "new" memories surface, but it means you're finally safe enough to handle them, and your sensitivity isn't a flaw but the exact quality that sustains human connection.
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30 Days to Peace Course
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How to Feel Embodied After Trauma
Dissociation isn't a personal failure, it's your mind's brilliant survival strategy when trauma overwhelms your system. The mind and body intentionally separate during abuse, creating distance like a referee stopping a brutal boxing match, but this protective mechanism can persist long after you're safe. You learn what it means when your body won't feel what your mind knows is true, why safer people trigger more alarm bells than dangerous ones, and how trauma flip-flops your natural safety detection system. Through five embodiment exercises, you practice reuniting fragmented parts by feeling baby smiles, warm morning rituals, pet devotion, music's beat, and uncontrollable laughter. Integration requires strength training your emotional muscles through repetition, moving wisdom from head knowledge down into body knowledge where real healing lives. This reintegration work isn't optional if you're now in safer circumstances with adult choices available, because continuing to live by what abusers taught your nervous system means they're still abusing you today.
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Meghan Judge: Living with CPTSD & Misdiagnosis
Complex PTSD doesn't show up like a broken arm - nobody opens doors for you when your nervous system is on fire. Meghan Judge shares how losing her sister at age two, then her father at twelve, then her best friend in her twenties created a lifetime of hypervigilance that looked like "something wrong with her" instead of what it actually was: a body that learned too early that people disappear without warning. The conversation gets raw about female friendships turning vicious (women can smile while destroying you), parenting teenagers when your trauma tells you everyone you love will die, and why meditation advice feels like trying to light a wet match when your brain writes disaster scripts at 2 AM. There's real talk about the years of misdiagnosis - depression, ADHD, bipolar - before finally understanding this is your nervous system and brain trying to protect you. The relief of finding the right therapist after years of bad fits, permission to need continuous support instead of white-knuckling independence, and why you can't unlearn trauma but you can retrain your system to feel safe again.
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What Makes the Female Mind Capable of Bullying?
The female mind works like an intricate spider web - connecting threads across time, memory, intuition, and care - which makes women's capacity for love extraordinarily powerful, but when twisted into bullying becomes devastatingly cruel. The same mental architecture that creates profound nurturing can transform into covert psychological warfare that reshapes perception with five words or less, magnifies mistakes across decades, and undermines targets while smiling. The stark contrast between male and female bullying patterns gets unpacked through evolutionary psychology, showing why female cruelty often feels more confusing and harder to escape than direct male aggression. External female bullying can be internalized as a vicious self-critical voice that can become harmful to ourselves - not from sadness like movies portray, but from rage and disgust. The path forward involves recognizing these patterns, reclaiming healthy feminine power, and learning to spot, boundary, and avoid these dynamics while building genuine female connections rooted in love rather than control.
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https://EmotionalBadass.com/coaching
📰 THE BI-WEEKLY WELLNESS NEWSLETTER
https://www.EmotionalBadass.com/newsletter
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Why Strong Boundaries are your Superpower
Boundaries aren't walls to keep people out - they're your foundation for freedom, and most people get this completely wrong. Growing up in chaos teaches your nervous system that disappointing someone equals death, making you a gold medal people pleaser who manages everyone else's emotions while ignoring your own. Traditional boundary advice like "just say no" fails because it treats complex trauma responses like simple choices. Real boundary work starts with internal boundaries - learning to sit with discomfort instead of people-pleasing your way out, recognizing when you abandon yourself, and understanding that your anxiety might be your soul screaming for you to stop treating yourself like nothing.
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Hosted by psychotherapist Nikki Eisenhauer, M.Ed. LPC, LCDC. This show provides essential emotional education on Mental Health, HSP (Highly Sensitive People), Narcissists & Manipulative personalities, healing from Trauma and PTSD, calming your nervous system, inner child work, and setting healthy boundaries. Emotional Badasses are survivors, thrivers, seekers, and healers! Expand and awaken to your higher purpose, be more present and authentic, find strength in spirituality, quiet the monkey mind of modern society with meditation, and connect deeply with yourself and safe others. We let go of what doesn't serve us to heal old wounds, find our voice guilt-free, and learn to be the hero in our own story. Embrace guerrilla self care, and laugh with lightness on the self development path. Nikki Eisenhauer is an International Life Coach, Licensed Professional Counselor, Yoga and Meditation Teacher. This show is designed to mindfully be the emotional education so many of us crave; Emotional Badass is where we learn to love ourselves without apology. Emotional Badass is where Moxie Meets Mindful.
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