When did you first realise the thing your parents punished you for was simply existing as a separate person?

What gets praised as composure under pressure is sometimes collapse in disguise. Dan Siegel calls it the window of tolerance. Below it: numbness, flatness, shutdown. I spent years being praised for a trauma response I didn't know I was having.

Standard Clause | Sun, Interrupted My mother told a family member she was certain I would kill myself. She didn't call me. She didn't text. She reached for a story about a notary that wasn't even true.

My mother told a family member she was certain I would kill myself. She didn't call me. She didn't text. She fabricated a story that wasn't even true.

I wrote about it. #writesky #writing #cptsd
suninterrupted.com/standard-clause/

You could read a room before you could read a book. Other children played. You monitored. That skill followed you into adulthood, into leadership, into every room you walk into where you scan for danger before you've taken off your coat. It wasn't a gift...

Sun, Interrupted Anonymous personal essays on CPTSD, psychoanalysis, and the long work of becoming. Recovery without platitudes. Written from the inside.

I've been in therapy for over a decade. I started #writing to make sense of what was happening to me. Now I'm sharing what I wrote with you.

Anonymous essays on CPTSD, narcissistic family dynamics, leadership, and the long work of becoming.

#writesky #amwriting

suninterrupted.com

To feel heard and truly seen is a powerful form of support

Listening with compassion - without judgement or trying to fix - can mean more than we realise. It creates space for real connection

Offer that space to someone - and remember you deserve the same compassion too

#mentalhealth

The phrase "it's okay to not be okay" has become a kind of corporate liturgy. Everyone says it. Almost nobody means: and here is the infrastructure to support you when you're not.

#mentalhealth #workplace

💯

Added to my tbr!

This is one of the hardest boundaries to hold. Deep empathy for what’s driving someone’s behaviour and a line that says: I see your suffering, and I will not let it override the safety of everyone around you. Both can be true at the same time. Most people feel you have to choose.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

This one hits. Especially when the people clinging to denial are family. You can’t recover on their timeline. You can’t wait for them to catch up. And the grief of that, of building something real while they stay in the distortion, is its own kind of loss.

This isn’t you failing to regulate. It’s backlog overflow. Cptsd does that, it builds pressure quietly, then releases all at once, even from small triggers. You’re not broken, just overloaded. Reduce input and try to step back a bit. This wave will pass, even if it feels nonstop right now.

Nobody Trained Me for This | Sun, Interrupted When you lead a hundred people and two of them are in crisis, the organisation expects you to hold it all. Nobody asks who holds you.

I wrote about this. About what happens when leading becomes holding, and no one holds you.

suninterrupted.com/nobody-trained-me-for-this

#leadership #mentalhealth #containment

Nobody asks what it does to the manager’s nervous system. The late-night messages. The lies you can prove but can’t stop. The migraine that vanished mid-sentence. You absorb it, because that’s the job.

#leadership #management

Bion called it containment: absorbing someone else’s feelings and returning them in a form they can tolerate. He was describing mothers and infants. He could have been describing middle management.

#psychoanalysis

I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership and being the container for other people’s distress. What happens when someone on your team is in genuine crisis or has underlying issues, and the organisation gives you nothing but a benefits PDF and a reminder to “lead with empathy.”

That the person you’re seeing clearly for the first time has always been that person. The clarity isn’t new information. It’s the end of the accommodation you built to survive. Trust what you’re seeing now, even when it rewrites everything you thought you understood.

This is the kind of research that sits at the intersection of everything I think about. Where biology meets the mind. Where genetics shapes the terrain that trauma then moves through.

There's a difference between a coping mechanism and a survival strategy. One you choose. The other chose you, a long time ago, and you've been running it ever since without reading the manual.

#CPTSD #trauma

What Are Dreams For? Converging lines of research suggest that we might be misunderstanding something we do every night of our lives.

Neuroscientists have long believed that our bodies are paralyzed during REM sleep to prevent us from acting out our dreams, and the twitches we make are movements that slip through the cracks—but recent research tells another story.

My bookshelf brings all
The geeks to the yard, and they're
Like, better than yours.
#whistpr #bookshelf #haiku #senryu #poem #writing #writingcommunity

The Pain of Perfectionism It’s the fault people humblebrag about in job interviews, but psychologists are discovering more and more about the real harm it causes.

The idea of perfectionism as a form of admirable striving is a dangerous misconception. “I can’t stand it when people talk about perfectionism as something positive,” a psychology professor said. “They don’t realize the deep human toll.”

a pink background with two cartoon figures and the words i like your weird brain very much ALT: a pink background with two cartoon figures and the words i like your weird brain very much

Good morning, weirdos ☕️😘

“The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced “
- Gerard van der Leeuw

My move: curiosity. Start with what–why–how, listen more than you talk (70% listening / 30% talking) and build on what you hear. Easy.

What It’s Like to Brainstorm with a Bot At the frontiers of knowledge, researchers are discovering that A.I. doesn’t just take prompts—it gives them, too, sparking new forms of creativity and collaboration.

When a neuroscientist was stuck on a research problem, he enlisted the help of an A.I. chatbot. “The exchange wasn’t quite spitballing; it was something more organized—human and machine feeling their way through the fog together,” Dan Rockmore writes.

Cognitive reflection correlates with behavior on Twitter - Nature Communications Performance on a cognitive reflection test correlates with a wide range of behaviours in survey studies. Here the authors investigate the relationship between cognitive reflection and some aspect...

Research links reflection to less gullibility.
But does reflection actually make us wiser, or just lonelier in our thoughts?

🔗 nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20043-0

what do you think people hide most from themselves?

#writingcommunity #writing #prompt #psychology

a cartoon character is yawning with his mouth wide open ALT: a cartoon character is yawning with his mouth wide open

Good morning. Happy Sunday. Still deciding if i woke up, or just ran out of sleep

A weekend should have more days. I’m off next week so basically shouldn’t complain, but still. More days