The coffee gods have clearly bestowed their favor upon you.

We had around 150 turn out in Cañon City today, and I could not have been more encouraged to see all the support from folks driving by us in our little town! Sadly our local paper wouldn’t come to report on it, but a reporter from Denver did.

VFW commander and a few others testified at a joint hearing earlier this week, starting around the 30min mark.

veterans.house.gov/calendar/eve...

It truly means a lot to hear that. Thank you.

and heal—and I am so grateful for how beautifully our bodies are able to heal themselves with the right kind of care. But it has come at a tremendous cost to close relationships that were unhealthy for me and require more energy than I have to maintain while doing this necessary work.

likely reenacting their own abuse on little me. The deeper I go and the more I uncover, the more I’m learning how much the early childhood abuse I suffered is directly tied to chronic illness. So for me, much of my decision to restrict contact is to give my body and nervous system time to recover

I have not filed a police report because the memories did not surface until my thirties and are extremely fragmented; now well into my upper forties, I continue to work through new memories as they’ve come up through EMDR, which includes much more sexual abuse perpetrated by older kids who were

Yes, after living through the hell of silence and betrayal following disclosure. It was necessary for me to do so in order to feel enough safety to address and heal from the much deeper layers of abuse—which for me was not the actual sexual assaults, but the systems that enabled them.

That your desire to get as far away from your family (your offenders and their enablers) as possible does not make you bad or wrong, but very brave and very, very wise.