Grappling with PTSD from emotional and medical trauma, I search for support groups in my community but find none. Instead I bond with characters from outer space. I have followed the character of La’an Noonien Singh on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds with interest, respect, and recognition. And La’an is not alone in being a survivor of trauma on the Enterprise. If only respect and understanding for trauma survivors arrived on Planet Earth, now, and not in a fantasy future.

Recovering from trauma, I use hatred not as a vehicle for hurting others, but as a vehicle for changing myself, for changing the world. Eventually, hatred will be displaced by joy and curiosity.

A survivor of multiple cancers reflects on her relationship with panic, how PTSD has shaped her life and her character.

Looking back, it seems obvious that what happened to me that summer was traumatic. I was a fifteen-year-old receiving chemo for Hodgkin’s...

Hold off, Death, I say, Not for me today, Not for the immediate future. I walk away healthy from the cancer clinic. I walk away healthy...

I keep waiting to be tried for my crimes against humanity. What crimes, you might ask? (I ask myself as well, in constant evaluation of...

Having recently cut all ties with my family of origin, I have moved from anger, shock, and loss to feelings of freedom, joy, and release....

Even before I confronted death at age 15, I had tastes, desires, and a temperament that did not fit. I danced, and sang, and immersed...

Every moment you allow them to occupy you, you are yielding, you are giving them a victory. I am a survivor only of personal history, of...

The single lesson of decades of talk therapy was communicated to my husband by a naked, elder colleague in the close quarters of a men’s...

I used to think of the body as a slipcover for the mind, a mere protective case, suitable for stuffing with facts and experiences, like...

Unlike the character played by Ingrid Bergman in the 1944 film, Gaslight, I had nothing valuable to motivate my father to undermine me:...

If my parents had left bruises, I would, even as a 10-year-old, have found my way to the Auburn Police Station and testified against...

The truth: some of us don’t survive. When I consider what I have suffered at the hands of the ignorant, the brutal, or the narcissistic,...