Rising Above Adversity

Rising Above Adversity Author, Reiki Master

👉🏽👉🏽👉🏽 HOW TO HEAL FROM PAST MENTAL TRAUMA ?🦋 Understand that what happened to you is not who you are—is simply, your pa...
06/05/2026

👉🏽👉🏽👉🏽 HOW TO HEAL FROM PAST MENTAL TRAUMA ?

🦋 Understand that what happened to you is not who you are—is simply, your past.

One of trauma's deepest wounds, is making you believe that the pain became your identity. It didn't. You are far different from what happened to you. Those events were nothing less, or more than your own personal human experience trials.

Each and every-one of those trials, came into your life to assist on tapping into your conscious awareness, and be able to see the world around, as it is, and not through your own thoughts, agendas, and experiences.

🦋 So please, stop pretending that you're okay when you're not ⬇️

Healing begins the moment you stop performing strength, and start being honest about what still hurts you on the inside—speak even if no one wants to hear.

Emotionally healthy people completely understand whatever is it that you’d have to say, while the toxic ones disappear … a win both ways … I’d say. What do you think?…

🦋 Please stop blaming yourself for how you survived. Remember that emotional, financial, physical, sexual, and any other type of abuse, are extremely challenging to overcome,

👉🏽👉🏽 You did what you had to do with the strength, awareness, and resources that you had at the time.

👉🏽👉🏽 Survival is not something to be ashamed of, it’s a type of strength, coined by the fear of ‘bad things are always happening to me’.

👉🏽👉🏽 Please allow your positive thoughts to flow and recharge your mind and body with thoughts of beauty, thanksgiving for the resilience gained through your trials.

🦋 Stop numbing, and welcome the feelings, and thoughts, that you have been avoiding for the majority of your life.

👉🏽 Pain buried alive doesn’t stay buried. The emotions you refuse to feel today, consistently become the struggles you face tomorrow in just about every aspect, and areas of your life.

🦋 Stop telling everyone your worries, and revisiting the wound without doing the healing—that’s gossip. Everyone else will vent as well, and this will keep you stuck inside a dark-hole without real solutions to your personal problems.

👉🏽👉🏽 There is a difference between processing the past, and calling a bunch of people to dwell, or gossip about it. This practice will keep you living in it. Learn from it, but don't build your home there.—it’s time to move.

🦋 Be patient with your progress.

👉🏽 Some wounds take years to heal. Some days, you will feel strong, other days you will feel broken over and over, again. But both are a crucial part of recovery.

🦋 Create safety in your life through maintaining a positive mindset and circle.

👉🏽 Healing happens faster when your present feels safer than your past. Choose healthy people, healthy boundaries, and healthy environments regardless of who you have to leave behind, specifically if it’s your old self—this will be uncomfortable at first, but you will later be happy with this decision.

🦋 Speak to yourself the way you would speak to someone you love.

👉🏽 Many trauma survivors continue hurting themselves through self-criticism long after the original pain has ended. Have you ever thought about yourself…

-that was stupid
-I’m ugly
-I’m fat
-I’m too skinny
-I’m too tall
-I’m too short
-I don’t like my hair
-others look better than me

👉🏽👉🏽 This may be phases you heard from others that were hurting due to their own human experience and reality, but is definitely not who you are at your core.

🦋 Allow yourself to let go of the need to understand why everything happened. Biology, as well as Psychology, automatically take over your brain and body to protect your mind from events that your emotional state could not comprehend, or handle at the time.

👉🏽 Not every wound comes with an explanation. The majority of the time, healing begins when you stop demanding answers, and begin having patience, applying mindfulness into your daily life. Showing as much grace for the lessons, as you do for the blessings, and remain faithful that your life will be as beautiful as you wished.

🦋 Remember that healing doesn't mean forgetting.

It means remembering without reliving. The memory may stay, but it no longer controls your life.

🦋 Stop carrying what was never yours to carry.

Other people's choices, failures, neglect, or cruelty, belong to them—not to you.

👉🏽Their mean words, attitude, looks and so on, are reflection of their reality, not yours.

🦋 know that your future can be different from your past.

The greatest lie trauma tells, is that tomorrow will look exactly like yesterday. It won't, unless you allow yesterday’s events into your tomorrows.

👉🏽👉🏽 If you were hurt deeply...

Please remember this ⬇️

🌸 you still wake up,
🌸 still try,
🌸 still hope,
🌸 still going...

This is proof that something inside of you is stronger than any negative event that might of happened to you.

👉🏽👉🏽 You are not broken.

💫 You are healing from wounds that were not yours to carry … this is a very difficult task—please love on yourself through the process.

💫 And healing is one of the bravest things that a human being can do.

❤️💡
~ Arelis Calkins

A woman asked a question:“I was my now-husband’s mistress. Do you think I should be worried about him cheating on me now...
05/16/2026

A woman asked a question:

“I was my now-husband’s mistress. Do you think I should be worried about him cheating on me now that we’re finally together?”

My answer is strictly my opinion and nothing more…

When a person is willing to break a covenant for you, what makes you believe they could never break one with you?

People often think that somehow, lust transforms a sneaky behavior overnight, but unresolved character issues do not disappear simply because the relationship title changes from mistress to wife, or from friend to girlfriend.

A person who is comfortable creating destruction in one relationship, often carries the same unresolved habits, wounds, temptations, and patterns into the next.

In a situation where unfaithfulness lies as the foundation of a relationship, no one truly wins. The woman pursuing a committed man is just as emotionally unstable as that man, so everybody involved usually loses something, because the unresolved trauma that cause those people to be sneaky remains, tempting them to do the same as soon as they start lusting towards a new target.

Some women believe they’ve won because they ended up with the man. But how can anyone truly win when the foundation was built inside of secrecy, betrayal, confusion, and pain? Relationships built on shaky ground eventually force everyone involved to confront the instability beneath them.

I believe that many people spend so much time competing over a person that they never stop to ask whether the person themselves is emotionally healthy enough to build a life with. Sometimes people are fighting to “win” someone who has not yet healed themselves.

That’s why I believe the real victory is not in taking someone from another person. The real victory is healing. The real victory is accountability. The real victory is learning how to love in ways that do not require deception, comparison, competition, or destruction.

Because sometimes the biggest lesson in all of this is realizing that nobody truly wins in dysfunction. The only thing that wins is the cycle— until someone decides to finally break it.

05/08/2026

I don’t know about you, but I have definitely stayed on some trains far longer than I should have.

And the truth is… if you’d asked me at the time whether I was making the right choice by staying, I would have had to admit that deep down, I already knew I should have stepped off.

Sometimes we stay because we can’t be absolutely sure getting off is the right decision. We want to give it more time, more opportunities, more solutions. We stay for hope, for longing, because we feel stuck, because we can’t see a way off. We can even stay because we’ve invested so much and leaving feels like failure and defeat. The list goes on and on….

The “wrong train” is rarely dramatic at first. It’s subtle. Rationalised. Explained away. We tell ourselves to give it time. To try harder. To be patient. To endure.

But the longer we stay somewhere misaligned, the more it costs us in energy, in confidence, in peace, well being. We pay for it in the health of our mind, body and spirit.

So here’s the truth:
Getting off early is never failure.
Changing direction is not weakness.
Choosing yourself is not selfish.

It is wisdom.

You are allowed to step off.
You are allowed to reroute.
You are allowed to say, “This isn’t for me.”
You are allowed to change your mind.

Your life is precious.
Your energy is sacred.
And you are the only one holding the ticket.

So if you get on the wrong train, be sure to get off at the first stop. It’s hugely inconvenient but it’s easier in the long run.

❤️💡

She grew up being the one who asked too many questions, noticed too many inconsistencies, and refused with a stubbornnes...
05/06/2026

She grew up being the one who asked too many questions, noticed too many inconsistencies, and refused with a stubbornness that was never really stubbornness, but simply the natural resistance of a person whose internal compass was too accurately calibrated to accept directions that pointed consistently away from true north.

She was not the difficult child in any sense that reflected something genuinely problematic about her character. She was the child whose clarity about what was happening in the family system, made her the most threatening presence in an environment that required a specific kind of compliance from everyone within it, to maintain the functioning of the dynamic that the adult at the center of it depended on.

The reputation destruction that followed her refusal to be managed did not arrive as a conscious campaign with explicitly stated objectives, even if its effects were as targeted, and as comprehensive as any deliberate strategy could have produced.

It arrived as the natural defensive response of a system, encountering a member who would not perform their assigned role, and therefore, needed to be disqualified as a reliable narrator of the family's internal reality, before their observations could be received as credible by anyone outside the system.

She was too sensitive, too dramatic, too difficult, too ungrateful, and eventually too unstable to be taken seriously. And every one of those labels arrived in direct proportion to how accurately she was seeing, and how clearly she was willing to say what she saw and understood. The child who cannot be controlled is consistently the child who is most accurately perceiving what the family most desperately needs everyone to misperceive.

Me. Myself. And I
❤️💡

A version of me from 2018 that doesn’t exist anymore…not because of the long hair—I’m growing it back—but because I now ...
04/23/2026

A version of me from 2018 that doesn’t exist anymore…

not because of the long hair—I’m growing it back—but because I now know how to say it…

the words that wouldn’t come out throughout my painful life, now flow freely like a beautiful peaceful river that daily nourishes my heart and soul.

The truth sounds like an amazing song that my mind longed to hear for decades.

It sounds like the peace and harmony I needed.

But here’s what I know…
I didn’t “stay quiet.” My body stepped in.

In that moment, when my chest tightened, my thoughts slowed, and every cell in me felt overwhelmed… my body took over.

Not because I was weak, but because I needed protection.

During those moments, not knowing how to say it?… that was survival

And I know those moments can stay with you

The things you wish you said.
The way you wish you reacted.
The replay in your head of how it “should’ve gone.”

But healing isn’t about going back and doing it differently.

It’s about understanding that your body did exactly what it needed to do to get you through it.

And now… it’s learning something new.

That you’re not there anymore.
That you don’t have to brace like that.
That you’re allowed to feel safe again.

Slowly. Gently. In pieces.

Be real… and please give yourself credit for how you made it through, so you can start to heal.

❤️💡

I’m grateful for the support. Excited to see what develops next. ❤️💡
04/22/2026

I’m grateful for the support. Excited to see what develops next.

❤️💡

Thanks for being a top engager and making it on to my weekly engagement list! 🎉Christine Hraber Slowe, Lizz Copelin, Car...
03/04/2026

Thanks for being a top engager and making it on to my weekly engagement list! 🎉

Christine Hraber Slowe, Lizz Copelin, Carl Mayo

👉🏽PTSD, CPTSD — what trauma really does to your Nervous System and the battles you don’t see…Not the diagnosis, not the ...
02/23/2026

👉🏽PTSD, CPTSD — what trauma really does to your Nervous System and the battles you don’t see…

Not the diagnosis, not the theory, the raw daily reality many of us struggle with.

Trauma is not a bad memory you can think your way out of. PTSD and CPTSD are injuries to the nervous system. When you live through danger, abuse, or prolonged stress, your body rewires itself to survive. The problem is, it doesn’t know when to stand down.

Your nervous system gets stuck in high alert. Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn become default settings. Your body reacts before your brain has time to decide if you’re safe. That’s why a sound, a smell, a tone of voice, or even silence can send your heart racing, your stomach dropping, your mind blanking out or replaying traumatic experiences.

CPTSD adds layers. It comes from long-term exposure, often in relationships or childhood. There is no clear ‘before and after.’ The trauma becomes the environment. This is why survivors struggle with emotional regulation such as trust, memory gaps, dissociation, and feeling constantly on edge or completely numb.

This is not weakness. This is biology doing its job too well.

Regulating the nervous system isn’t about calming down. It’s about signalling safety to a body that learned the world wasn’t safe.

👉🏽Trauma recovery isn’t pretty or linear. Some days regulation means getting through the hour without shutting down. That still counts, so please congratulate yourself on any small progress you make.

Your body adapted to survive. Now you’re teaching it that survival is no longer the only option. You’re re-training your brain that you’re now safe, this isn’t easy.

PTSD isn’t just about flashbacks or nightmares, it’s the random triggers, the hyper-awareness, the exhaustion from constantly being on edge. It’s wanting to enjoy life but feeling trapped between who you are and what you’ve been through.

Some days, you function like nothing happened. Other days, the weight of it sits on your chest, making even the simplest tasks feel impossible. Healing isn’t linear, and ‘just get over it’ isn’t an option.

For many people, PTSD is living with a nervous system that never truly rests.
Sounds are louder.
Light can hurt.
Touch can feel intrusive.
Questions can feel like pressure.

Flashbacks are not memories.
They are experiences that take over the present moment.
There is no ‘control button’ to turn them off.

What looks like withdrawal is often self-protection.
What looks like anger is often fear.
What looks like distance is often the only way to stay regulated.

People with PTSD are not asking to be fixed — because they’re not broken, they need understanding that dealing with PTSD is not a choice.
They are not asking for sympathy.
And they are not playing the victim.

They are asking for something much simpler:
Respect, and silence when needed.

Trauma doesn’t just ‘go away.’
It changes how you think, how you love, how you trust, how you breathe.

Everyday triggers are real. A sound, a smell, a look can send someone right back to a place they’ve worked so hard to escape.

👉🏽 Here are less-talked-about tools that work because they interrupt sensory patterns:

🌱Vicks VapoRub. Yes, really. A small amount under the nose or on the chest can sharply change sensory input. Strong menthol activates the trigeminal nerve and pulls the brain out of spirals, dissociation, or panic. It gives your nervous system something immediate and grounding to focus on.

🌱Temperature shocks. Cold water on the wrists, face, or back of the neck resets vagus nerve activity. It’s not about comfort. It’s about disruption.

🌱Heavy scent rotation. Instead of calming smells, use bold ones. Coffee beans, eucalyptus, citrus peel, vinegar. Trauma brains respond better to strong contrast than softness.

🌱Asymmetrical movement. Cross-body actions like tapping opposite shoulders or walking while swinging arms intentionally help re-integrate brain hemispheres when you feel fragmented.

🌱Pressure over softness. Weighted blankets, tight hoodies, firm cushions. Deep pressure tells the body where it ends, which restores a sense of containment

Love and Light ❤️💡

A lot of "toxic" mother-in-laws aren't just bitter.They're unloved.👉🏽No flowers-on-anniversaries or other special occasi...
02/22/2026

A lot of "toxic" mother-in-laws aren't just bitter.
They're unloved.

👉🏽No flowers-on-anniversaries or other special occasions - unloved.
👉🏽No Facebook-post tributes -
unloved.
👉🏽No doors opened - unloved.
👉🏽No planned dates - unloved.
I mean, emotionally abandoned in their own marriages.
So when their sons grow up and love a woman out loud.. protect her, prioritize her, choose her, it doesn't just trigger jealousy.
👉🏽It triggers grief.
Grief for the love they never received.
For the attention they begged for.
For the partnership they settled without.
Unhealed women don't necessarily compete with other women.
👉🏽They compete for the love they were denied.
And instead of confronting the man who failed them, and look for ways to resolve those traumas,
they challenge the woman who's being loved correctly by their son.
Not every difficult mother-in-law is evil.
Some are walking proof of what happens when a woman spends decades starving for affection and calls it marriage, as supposed to armoring up and walking away.
Savage truth, I know.
Unloved wives sometimes raise sons that unfortunately they emotionally lean on, then resent the woman who ‘replaces them.’

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