Grief is a natural and deeply human response to loss, an emotional process that allows us to adapt to life without someone we love. But when grief is intertwined with trauma, the experience can profoundly alter the brain.

When you experience repeated stress or trauma, your brain adapts by creating shortcuts for survival. This is why you might overreact to situations that logically don’t seem threatening. Your brain isn’t malfunctioning. It’s trying to keep you safe.

What if 2025 became the year you rewired your brain for resilience—building a foundation that empowers you to navigate life’s challenges with strength, calm, and grace?

As magical as the holidays can be, they also come with their own set of challenges. This is where setting healthy boundaries becomes a powerful ally.

Suicidal thoughts can be deeply frightening. Understanding their origins, the neurobiology of suicidal thoughts can help in how we approach and deal with them.

This article by Dr. Kate Truitt addresses building a resilient brain after loss and provides a wealth of tools for long-term healing.

In this article, Dr. Kate Truitt helps us understand the development of conditions like PTSD and Complex PTSD, explaining differences and healing opportunities.

Have you heard of post-traumatic growth? Just as the mythical Phoenix rises from its ashes, we too can rise from our difficulties stronger and more resilient.

Have you ever felt like things suddenly changed with a friend or family member after a significant loss? I delve into why relationships suddenly change after loss.

For many, the mere mention of grief summons images of darkness and pain. But what if our response to grief could be reframed? What if this emotion, with its stifling weight, could be transformed into a vehicle for growth?

It’s truly incredible how something as simple as a positive word or action has the power to create a ripple effect, inspiring others and leading them to meaningful change.

Is there a shift in your moods? Are you feeling down or maybe a little depressed? These feelings may be signs of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).

Healing Through the Art of Storytelling. In the face of unspeakable loss, one of the things I turned to is writing.

Trauma impacts our lives and affects us in countless ways. You have the power to create your emotional safe space and create healing from within.

Within our brain, intricate processes and pathways are at play when it comes to suicidal thoughts. By understanding these processes, we can gain valuable insights into prevention and treatment strategies.

Resilience is an incredible skill for overcoming adversity and difficult experiences, and thriving through challenges. It is essential for our mental health and well-being.

Taking advantage of opportunities for healing and self-empowerment requires change. In this article, Dr. Kate Truitt addresses overcoming resistance to change.

In honor of Pride Month, I would like to highlight something we embody in our practice known as “Allyship.” It forms the foundation of our Affirming Therapy.

In this article Dr. Kate Truitt delves into the two D’s of dissociation and defensive rage, which seem like completely different ends of a spectrum but share a common objective.

In this third article Dr. Kate Truitt explores the fourth F of trauma responses—Fawning, also known as people pleasing.

In this article, part of a four-part series, Dr. Kate Truitt explores the trauma survival responses of fight, flight, and freeze.

In this article we will explore trauma labels and diagnoses and how these conditions unfold neurobiologically and show up in our lives.

Neurofeedback uses real-time feedback to assess, train and refine your brain's electrical activity, not only for mental health but also performance enhancement.

For many of us the holidays come with a little dread that these social and family situations might move us, or even forcefully yank us, out of our comfort zones.

This blog article presents the G.O.D. Box and the Gratitude and Wins Exercise. These two tools can help us stop rumination and work toward living our best lives.

Havening Techniques is a combination of the ages-old psychosensory healing power of touch combined with awareness of what is happening in that mind-body connection that traumatizes people.

Is there a scientific explanation for a connection between deep emotional trauma and stress and physical pain and discomfort such as migraines, gastrointestinal disturbance, back pain, and more? The answer is there most definitely is.

In this article we will explore the fourth survival response, Fawn, which can be most easily described as people pleasing.

It is important for us to understand where the deeply painful emotional experiences of shame originate, because in the acknowledgement of their roots we find opportunities for recovery and healing.

Did you know that the experience of anxiety is a part of daily life? Like all of our emotions, it exists to alert us concerns so that we may take action and create change. Generalized anxiety, on the other hand, is just there in the forefront.

Did you know that your brain is hard-wired to look for negative, difficult, or painful things? This is called a “negativity bias,” which means that in your data-processing system, anything negative gets priority attention.

Rejection is difficult for anyone to experience, but some people undergo it with much greater intensity than most others. If that is the case for you, it may be that you are experiencing what is known as rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD).

Waking up on the wrong side of the bed is a real thing. But we have the power of neuroplasticity on our side. Because of our brains are malleable, we have an opportunity to make changes to our neural connections that can help us experience a good night of restful sleep.

One of the most critical methods for developing a sense of personal agency is learning to be in deep relationship with your emotions.

Anytime you notice that your brain is beating you up to keep you "safe," take a moment for challenging difficult thoughts to find kinder ways of getting safe.

The new year is upon us—the time where we traditionally review the previous year. In this article focus on the opportunities that await you in the coming year.

Productive procrastination seems productive, so it can feel good, but if you are putting off tasks that need to be done to do other tasks, it could be building your stress level, and if that continues to build you could be heading for burnout.

Research shows that ERP is effective in treating obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD. Mindfulness techniques and self-havening touch provide added support.

Failure can hurt—our egos and self-brain often have a hard time dealing with it, but failure has helped us learn and grow since the earliest days of our lives.

Finding our purpose significantly increases the ease with which we are able to create sustainable change. It helps us more readily link into new behaviors that align with our desire to live our purpose.

“Opening-Up Anxiety” is about how we deal with change. If you are uneasy about restrictions being eased after many months of isolation, you’re not alone.

Shame is awful to experience, whether we are being shamed by others or shaming ourselves, but as humans we are hard-wired to experience feelings of shame. Learn about the opportunities for self-healing in shame and self-judgment.

Some people are not safer at home, and in fact, the home setting is a real place of danger for many who live with the threat of domestic violence. If you are one of those people, you may be in need of help and support. If you are not one of those people, but think you may know one...

The experiences of physical pain and psychological trauma go hand-in-hand. In order to create empowered change and self-awareness around chronic pain, we need to explore the connection between the mind and body.

Recognizing when your survival brain is throwing up warning signs from your past can empower you to find balance between what your fear brain would have you do, and what you would choose to do. In this article I want to show you some tools for resilience and explain how they work.

In this article Dr. Kate Truitt helps you explore the survival mechanisms you employ in relationships, how much you value what you need in your relationships, and what you can do to help create boundaries that lead to the relationships you want.

As humans, we are naturally moving in and out of different brainwave states every day, and much of that is driven by emotions. This is a sign of a healthily functioning brain. There is a good argument to be made for intentionally experiencing different emotions, whether you might consider them to be “good” or “bad.”

This may sound counterintuitive, but the journey toward creating success and well-being requires leaning into the difficulties you are experiencing. I suggest that you bring a little bit of 2020 with you on your journey in 2021.

Has 2020 been a challenging year for you? I will take a guess and say that it has. Are you looking forward to brighter days ahead? Have you started thinking about what your new year will look like?

With everything that has befallen all of us in 2020, we must assume the holiday blues may be more widespread than usual this year. This means we must get creative when it comes to getting together, but we do need to stay connected.