It seems like over the last several years a lot of us have been experimenting with elimination diets as a way to treat everything from hormone imbalances to autoimmune to diseases, and mental health issues to medical mysteries. While the old adage: “You are what you eat” has been around for a very long time it’s only in recent decades that science …

It seems like over the last several years a lot of us have been experimenting with elimination diets as a way to treat everything from hormone imbalances to autoimmune to diseases, and mental health issues to medical mysteries. While the old adage: “You are what you eat” has been around for a very long time it’s only in recent decades that science …

Maybe life is always in flux but it sure feels as though this year has brought with it even more changes than usual. If you feel like your life has been completely upended and you’ve found yourself, willingly or unwillingly, on a transformative journey as a result, you’re not alone. We know what it’s like when the hits keep coming, the universe kee…

To a certain degree we all go through life wearing a mask, or a series of masks that we change out based on the social situation we find ourselves in, but when you’re neurodivergent this masking process is taken to another level. Most of us learn at a very young age that our social survivability is dependent upon our ability to read the social scri…

When we think of our mental health, we tend to immediately start making a list of everything that is wrong; and we fall into that habit so easily because, for many of us, something has been wrong for a long time and we’ve been actively trying to sort it out and work on ourselves. Being on a healing and self-discovery journey is one of the most powe…

The march of time never stops, the demands on our personal time never seem to wane, and there’s always more than enough stress to go around. The truth is, most of us tend to burn the candle at both ends, and that habit has a way of catching up to us in the form of burnout. Yes, sometimes we put ourselves in that position unnecessarily but there are…

S-E-X is almost always a taboo topic of discussion, perhaps especially among neurotypicals and “civilized society”. For those of us who are neurodivergent and already regularly struggle with the subtleties of social scripts, the topic of intimacy can feel more taboo and, at times, even confusing. The lived experience of neurodivergents is often dif…

Like many other things in life, neurodivergence is a bit of a double-edged sword. Some of our neurodivergent traits are so impressive that they almost seem like superpowers, while others impair our ability to function so much that they can feel like a curse. What’s even more interesting is how our own perception of these traits may differ from the …

Increasingly more of us are being diagnosed with some form of neurodivergence and/or are accidentally stumbling upon an unexpected sense of kinship among neurodivergent communities on social media. As our knowledge expands, both clinically and culturally, our vocabulary around neurodivergence is also evolving at a rapid rate. Clinicians have been i…

How’s everyone feeling out there? Not gonna lie, 2024 has started off as a very stressful year for us. We have our tried-and-true coping mechanisms and skills but let’s face it, sometimes you just need a little something extra to get you through the storm; so we did a little internet search to see if there were any suggestions that maybe we hadn’t …

We’ve been doing the podcast now for a little over two years and if you’ve been listening for awhile you’d probably think you know us pretty well by now. I mean we do share a lot about our personal lives and past experiences, and we always try to be as authentic as possible, but if you’re neurodivergent you’re likely also very familiar with a littl…

Happy Valentine’s Day! Do ya’ll celebrate this holiday? To be honest, we don’t really celebrate it much ourselves. There’s too much pressure to make things extra special and it’s uncomfortable to eat at an overcrowded restaurant. Also, does anyone else think it’s strange to romanticize an internal organ, especially since a “heart” looks nothing lik…

We’d like to believe that all trauma and abuse survivors are purely sympathetic characters who would never inflict the kind of pain they’ve been through on another person, but the reality is usually much messier than that. When we hear the phrase “hurt people, hurt people” we often think of it as a way to understand and maybe even develop compassio…

If you’re a neurodivergent person, chances are you’re used to feeling out of step with the rest of the world. Those of us in the community have learned the importance of masking and adaptation because we’ve often been accused of being weird, lazy, unmotivated, easily distracted, overly sensitive, immature, inappropriate, unempathetic, disrespectful…

Happy New Year! 2023 was a wild year, and by that we mean it was a feral beast. We may have all walked away from it a little scratched up, bruised, and shell shocked but we made it! Cheers to our survival and to the hope that 2024 will usher in some much-needed relief and happiness; after these last few chaotic and pensive years, we’ve all certainl…

How’s everyone doing out there? If the answer is “Not so great” we feel you. The holiday season is a bit of a trudge for us too, and few things are more grating on the nerves than the inescapably repetitive songs and movies that play for weeks on end every single year. How many times can you listen to Jingle Bells without losing your mind? How many…

Love it or hate it, the holiday season can be the most challenging and stressful time of year. Sure, there are lots of pretty sparkly things and good food and magical festivities and great sales BUT there’s also so much traffic, so many crowded stores, tons of familial and social obligations, and a surplus of financial woes. Santa always comes bear…

Over the river and through the woods, to our traumatic holiday memories we go. Buckle up folks, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride! We may not be able to pick our families, but we can choose whether we laugh or cry at the madness and chaos they bring to us. We’ve personally cried plenty of tears over the years, and while there may still be one or two of th…

It’s here guys. We’re in the thick of it, and we don’t mean mashed potatoes and gravy. We mean the holiday season. Dun, Dun, Dun! If you grew up with a dysfunctional family, you probably had at least a few traumatic holidays with them and that can make you a little skittish when the turkey and jingle bells start coming out. Family is hard. Holidays…

If you enjoyed our most recent episode, we have a surprise for you. We actually held back one extra story to release for Halloween. We hope you all have a terribly wonderful Halloween!By Ivy Turner & Autumn Braack

Happy Halloween! Spooky season is upon us and we need your help to settle a dispute! While we both love fall, Ivy has a fondness for the creepy, crawly, scary aspects of the season but Autumn most definitely does not. Now we’re not debating whether horror is good or bad entertainment, or even necessarily whether it’s good or evil. No, we’re at an i…

Autumn is here! And we don’t mean the co-host of the podcast either. Are you slipping into your flannel shirts, beanies, and boots yet? Enjoyed any pumpkin spice lattes or apple fritters? Have you been busy decorating, watching horror movies, and picking out a costume for spooky season? We don’t know about you, but this year has been putting us thr…

Okay ya’ll, we’re doing something a little bit different this time. Chances are you’ve heard of inner child work, and if you’re listening to this podcast you’ve probably also done some inner child work yourself or are curious about trying it. When we hear the words “inner child work” we often imagine cathartic moments, full of difficult and complex…

It seems like everyone has an opinion about everything, whether those opinions are educated and well-informed or not. If you’re a trauma survivor you’ve probably heard them all, everything from victim-blaming to toxic positivity and everything in between. Some of the people who are spouting these opinions are willfully ignorant and abusive while ot…

There’s a whole lot of crazy going on in the world right now. Maybe there always is but these last few years it has felt worse than usual. The pandemic, social unrest, political corruption, economic downturn, ongoing war, an uptick in natural disasters, and so on and so on. Nearly all of us are feeling the effects of this combined chaos in one way …

In our last episode, we may have picked on neurotypicals just a little bit so this time we thought we’d level the playing field and talk about The Great Equalizer. No, not death. Awkwardness. While we, as neurodivergent people, often think of ourselves as being the most painfully, embarrassingly awkward people on the planet the truth is neurotypica…

Those of us in the neurodivergent community have had our fair share of struggles with social situations. By the standards of the neurotypical world, our social skills come up lacking and we’re often seen as awkward, eccentric, odd, clueless, weird, off-putting, crass, rude, etc… If you’re neurodivergent, you know what we mean. You probably have a w…

Our experience of emotion is something we generally take for granted. Afterall, feelings just tend to happen. Our hearts beat, our lungs breath, our legs move us forward, and we feel stuff. Unless we’re actively struggling with one those things, we don’t often give them much thought or effort. But maybe we should. Emotions and our relationships wit…

We’re in the sweltering stretch of summer and you know what that means... It’s #hotgirlsummer time. Or is it? Join us as we discuss the concept of the “hot girl summer”: what it’s supposed to be; whether the social media image fits its definition; the pros and cons of pursuing that ideal; and some equally valid alternatives if that particular hasht…

You’re afraid of something. We know you are. It’s okay, you can admit it. Fear is part of the human condition, and unless you’ve got some rare and interesting anatomy in your brain’s amygdala, chances are good you’ve felt fear many times before. Some of us are bigger scaredy-cats than others (and if you are one such kitty, we meow in solidarity wit…

Buckle up because we’re going retro! Some of the first important lessons we learn as children come from the kinds of media we’re exposed to and if you’re a Millennial or Gen-Z that probably means your formative years were full of cartoons like Rugrats, Wild Thornberrys, Daria, Hey Arnold, Animaniacs, Magic School Bus, The Simpsons, and more! Join u…

What does a day in the life of a neurodivergent person look like? Well, that depends. The definition of neurodivergence and the number of us huddled together under the umbrella of that term is ever expanding. We are a large community with a vast set of eccentricities, challenges, and gifts but even with all this diversity we also share many things …

Victimhood is loaded with stigmas and complicated, uneasy feelings and so it’s kind of expected that we should jump straight from being traumatized and abused to being a resilient survivor and the hero of our own story. But does slapping a superhero themed bandage on our wounds actually heal them? Join us today as we take a more neutral and destigm…

If you struggle with anxiety, you’ve probably gone down the internet anxiety rabbit hole more than once, looking for guidance on how to cope with it. And there is an overwhelming amount of information and advice being offered by gurus, mental health experts, and someone’s Aunt Gertrude who swears by this or that natural remedy. Where do you begin a…

One of the biggest challenges that comes with experiencing childhood trauma or being neurodivergent is that we often don’t get the opportunity to discover our identity until we are adults. Most people get to cultivate their identity during their early developmental years, but for those of us who were expected to mask or who were living in survival …

Happy Easter everyone! This holiday is a generally fun and uplifting one for most of us regardless of whether we see it in a religious or secular light. The winter is melting away and with spring finally here we feel revived, refreshed, and ready for some goodies and games with our loved ones. Nothing illustrates these ideas better than Easter bask…

We all try to be good people and surely that must mean that our hard work results in us being altruistic angels full of Love and Light all the time, right? Hmmm… Maybe not. The truth is we’re human and that makes us susceptible to feelings of frustration, exhaustion, pettiness, envy, and egocentrism. Our desire to be good makes us want to believe t…

For so long, we were taught that neurodivergence was a glaring flaw in our design and that if we wanted to be successful (or even just normal) we had to mask what made us unique as though hiding symptoms or a horrible disease. Thankfully, the narrative is beginning to change as it becomes increasingly more apparent that we aren’t diseased and that …

Love is wonderful and all but, let’s face it, relationships can be really hard; and one of the biggest challenges when you’re building a relationship and a life with someone is communication. One minute you feel like you’re on the same wavelength, reading each other’s minds and the next minute you feel like you’re not even speaking the same languag…

We often look to music to explore and enhance our own life experiences and, for better or worse, “Love” dominates the airwaves. We are constantly inundated with lyrical messages about what love is, what it looks like, and how it feels. But how many of those messages are healthy, or even true? Love can be wonderful and fulfilling, but many of the ca…

Grief isn't caused solely by death. Grief can be triggered by any important loss we experience: loss of a job, loss of a relationship, or even the losses of innocence, ideals, and potential that so often accompany trauma. What exactly is grief? Why do we experience it? And most importantly, how can we make the experience of grief just a little easi…

Happy New Year! Time to get back to work, lose that holiday weight, set new goals, and Change. Your. Life!!! But what if…and hear us out here….what if you didn’t do any of those things at all? In this episode, we’re discussing the social pressures that confront us at the start of each new year and exploring how to: determine if you really want or n…

Throughout history, cultures have ascribed meaning to the natural cycles of the seasons, seeing in them the cyclical nature of our human existence as well. Spring brings new life and new beginnings. Summer brings growth and abundance. Fall is the season of culmination and harvest. But winter…winter is a time of scarcity, of death and grief, of lett…

The holiday season can be a difficult time for anyone with a dysfunctional family, mental or physical health struggles, neurodivergent traits, or very limited resources; and while boundary setting is always important, that’s especially true this time of year when the pressure is on to play nice, play along, and put our own needs on the back burner.…

Uh oh. The holidays are already upon us again. 'Tis the season, so they say, and while many people are giddy with excitement, some of us enter the holiday season with feelings of trepidation, anxiety, and grief. Even if you have a festive spirit and love the rituals and traditions of the season, it’s still a stressful time because there are so many…

Childhood trauma imprints on us like nothing else can. It lives rent free in our heads and takes a toll on our lives well into adulthood. Our minds and bodies hold onto those memories for decades, expressing them again and again in ways both subliminal and overt. It can resurface when we least expect it, causing us to relive painful memories as tho…

Happy Halloween! It’s that time again, to dress up as ghosts, ghoulies, and whatever else floats our happy little spooky boats. But what about the masks we wear every day, the social personas we slip on each morning when we venture out into the world? Are the masks we wear to convince others, and sometimes even ourselves, that we are the living emb…

There’s a lot of information out there about trauma recovery; some is valuable and honestly, some is clichéd and irrelevant nonsense. It can be a challenge to discern the truth from the myths, especially early on in your healing journey. It can also be hard not to judge yourself harshly when you’re basing your progress on what are actually unrealis…

How can you support someone who is struggling with their mental health, trauma recovery, or neurodivergence? If someone you love has ever experienced these challenges, then you know how painful it is to watch from the sidelines and not know how to help. And if you’ve struggled with these kinds of things yourself, then you know how frustrating it is…

Admit it. You have compulsions. Do you count floor tiles for no reason? Feel a need to correct a strangers' grammar or speling? Do you jiggle the heck out of the door knob to make sure it's locked, only to come back and double-check anyway? Ever felt the desire to scream in a library or church? Are you unable to resist meowing in response to a cat?…