What Is the Fawn Response? A Trauma Therapist Explains
The fawn response is one of the four trauma responses, and honestly, one of the hardest ones to recognize. Because unlike fight or flight, fawning doesn't look like a trauma response from the outside. It looks like being nice. Being helpful. Being easy to be around.
Can EMDR Help With Anxiety? What Most People Don't Know About How It Works
If you've been managing anxiety for a while, you've probably tried a few things.
Therapy. Medication. Breathing exercises. Maybe a meditation app you opened twice and then abandoned somewhere in your phone's graveyard.
How to Silence Your Inner Critic (And Why It's Been Trying to Help You All Along)
You know the voice…
The one that shows up the second you try something new, speak up in a meeting, or just look in the mirror on a not so great day.
You're too much. Not enough. Who in the world do you think you are?
Shame Acronym: A Simple Way to Understand What Shame Really Feels Like
Shame is one of the most painful human experiences, and also one of the most misunderstood. It hides inside perfectionism, people-pleasing, explosive anger, and the relentless inner voice that tells you you're too much or not enough.
Sexual Abuse Signs in Adults: What Survivors of Childhood Abuse Often Carry Into Adulthood
This post covers signs of childhood sexual abuse in adults. It is psychoeducational, not diagnostic. If anything here resonates, please work with a trauma-informed therapist who can help you explore it safely.
Polyvagal Theory Made Simple: What It Is and Why It Matters in Therapy
Polyvagal theory was developed by Dr. Stephen Porges in 1994.
The short version: it's a framework that explains how your autonomic nervous system responds to safety, danger, and threat, and why those responses live in your body, not just your brain.
Emotional Dysregulation in ADHD: What It Looks Like in Adults
Here's what most people don't tell you about ADHD: the attention stuff? That's actually the easier part to explain. It's the emotions, the flooding, the shame spirals, the rejection that hits like a freight train, that tend to take people out. And almost nobody's talking about it.
Why Does EMDR Make You Tired? (And Why It Might Actually Be A Good Sign)
Maybe your therapist brought it up, or you fell down a late-night Google rabbit hole trying to figure out why you can't just move on already.
Do I Have an Eating Disorder? Thoughts from an Eating Disorder Therapist
If you're typing this into Google, you're probably not doing it casually.
Something feels off.
What Is Attachment Trauma? And How Do You Heal From It?
Attachment trauma happens when the people you depended on for safety, comfort, and emotional connection were inconsistent, unavailable, frightening, or emotionally immature.
Reclaim Therapy's Favorite Somatic Healing Tools
Traditional talk therapy has its place, but when you're dealing with trauma, anxiety, or a dysregulated nervous system, talking about it just isn't enough to lead to lasting change. Your body is holding the story, and it needs different tools to heal.
How OCD and Eating Disorders Often Go Hand in Hand
You might notice intrusive thoughts about food that won't quiet down, rituals around eating that feel impossible to break, or a sense that your brain has hijacked both your relationship with food and your peace of mind.
Recognizing Teen Eating Disorders: Signs of Eating Disorders in Teens
Eating disorders occur across the lifespan in all body types. And, we know that teens are at significant risk for developing eating disorders. Research has shown that the average onset of an eating disorder is between the ages of 13-18 and that eating disorders occur in close to 3% of teens in that age range.
There are many nuanced reasons for this including puberty, bullying, social media exposure, your family’s relationship with, and beliefs about, food and body, genetic predisposition and athletics.
What Does It Mean to Be Emotionally Available? And, Why Trauma Makes it Complicated
People throw around "emotionally available" like it's a checkbox on a dating profile or something you can will yourself into becoming if you just try hard enough.
And if you've ever felt like you want to be close to people but something inside you slams the door shut? That way of thinking about it doesn't just miss the point, it can really reinforces shame.
7 Signs You Grew Up With Emotionally Immature Parents (And Why They Still Affect You)
Many people don’t realize they grew up with emotionally immature parents because nothing looked obviously “bad” from the outside.
Why Healthy Relationships After Trauma Can Feel So Hard
There’s care. There’s consistency. There’s effort on both sides. And still, something in the body stays tense. Or shut down. Or carefully waiting for the other shoe to drop.
If that’s familiar, it’s not because you don’t know how to be in a relationship.
How to Recover from a Binge Eating Disorder: Expert Tips from an Eating Disorder Therapist in Pennsylvania
Binge eating disorder impacts almost 3 million adults in the United States.
It is also the most common diagnosis among both women and men struggling with an eating disorder.
It’s estimated that almost 80% of people with binge eating disorder are also struggling with another mental health disorder- studies show that 65% of people suffering from binge eating disorder also present with anxiety, and can have up to six times more likelihood of being depressed. Many people struggling with binge eating disorder have experienced chronic life stress, including trauma (PTSD) or complex trauma (CPTSD).
Signs and Symptoms of Orthorexia
As eating disorder specialists here at Reclaim, we’ve seen firsthand how insidious, dangerous and consuming orthorexia can be.
Often starting from a well intentioned place to be more “healthy”, folks who have vulnerability to developing an eating disorder (biological, cultural and psychological vulnerabilities) can easily find themselves in a place that is quite unhealthy.
30 Overlooked Childhood Trauma Experiences (That Shape Us As Adults)
Most people think trauma means obvious harm.
The yelling. The chaos. The physical or sexual abuse.
But for so many adults healing from complex trauma, the story is much quieter. It is subtle. It hides in what didn’t happen. It shows up in the emotional gaps you learned to work around as a child.
How Childhood Emotional Neglect Creates CPTSD
It shows up as a hollowness you can’t quite name. A loneliness you carry even when you’re surrounded by people who love you. A sense that you should be fine on paper, but inside… something still hurts.