“Bill,” a 64-year-old client I’d worked with several times but hadn’t seen in nine months, arrived for an emergency appointment. Without preamble, he jumped to his feet and yanked his shirt up, displaying an ugly patchwork of fiery red, oozing sores on his back. “Look at this psoriasis!” he demanded. “It started on my […]
Healing Trauma/PTSD: What Happened to You, (Not What’s Wrong With You)
“Time heals nothing” is one of the trade secrets therapists don’t want you to know. If you’ve been in “counseling” for trauma/PTSD for a reasonable period of time and you aren’t healing or changing, either you have blocking internal beliefs I call “stoppers,” or maybe your therapist has emptied their conventional toolbox and quietly labeled […]
Gangs and Bullying: A Virulent Societal Plague
Gangs and Bullying: A Virulent Societal Plague © SueHannibal.com Bullying, whether it’s primarily emotional, physical, racial, cultural, sexually motivated or all of the above, is spreading through the world. Terrorist gangs, better armed and a more lethal version of street gangs, play by similar rules, killing anyone, including cops and rival gang members, to protect […]
Can Chronic Stress Make You Sick?
This Woman Got Breast Cancer From a Bad Marriage. Here’s a story that illustrates the painful damage just one negative, limiting core belief can do to a person’s life. This woman “didn’t believe in divorce” and stayed married to a man with a mental disorder who wouldn’t work for 15 years. According to tons […]
Obituary For a Cruel and Abusive Mother, Written by Her Adult Daughter
A gut-wrenching obituary about an abusive mother The obituary below, written by the daugher of an abusive mother, has gone viral. The story is gut-wrenching and tragic, but sadly, in my experience treating childhood trauma for the better part of 14 years, it’s not unusual. Abandonment, rejection, abuse, cruelty, shaming, torture and beatings disguised as “discipline” have scarred the lives of millions […]
Why Hoarding and OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) is so Hard to Heal
The Secret and Shameful World of Hoarding With the advent of the Hoarders and Hoarders: Buried Alive shows on A & E and TLC, the previously secret and shameful world of hoarding has gone public. Hoarding is a particularly chronic and difficult to treat manifestation of OCD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Conventional psychological approaches including Cognitive […]
Food Sensitivities, Autoimmune Disease and Unhealed Trauma—Is There a Connection?
Studies have shown that chronic stress affects everything from your gums to your heart and can lower your immunity to everything from the common cold to cancer. In the 1930s researcher Hans Selye first coined the term “stress” to describe the damaging effects that the stress hormone cortisol had on the long-term health of rats. […]
Can Stress From Unhealed Trauma Cause Autoimmune Diseases and Chronic Pain? Science Says YES.
Traditional psychotherapeutic approaches to trauma and PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) which focus on cognitive “restructuring” and insights too often supply clients with coping skills for their pain instead of healing. Likewise, medical treatments that do not diagnose and heal the cause but instead rely on symptom suppressing medications and treatments that do not also address […]
The ACE Study–link between autoimmune diseases, chronic stress and childhood trauma?
According to the landmark ACE Study, Adverse Childhood Experiences, (www.acestudy.org), the connection is unmistakable. In 1992, doctors at Kaiser Hospital in San Diego, CA and the federal Centers for Disease Control began a collaborative and still on-going study that would eventually involve over 17,000 people in the Wellness Program at Kaiser and offer solid evidence […]
The Many Faces of Panic
When a doctor takes your physical history and notes your symptoms, she’s comparing the symptoms you report against a list of symptoms of various conditions she suspects and looking for a match that fits your specific symptom profile. When she gets a hit, she might follow up with tests to confirm the diagnosis. Or, […]