I keep living into the same answer. It is the same answer because it is the same question. I give people millions of chances. I don’t start from cynicism. I make allowances for mistakes, fatigue, and frailty. And still I am disappointed. I am hurt, ignored, mistreated, or misunderstood. Time after time, I reach the same conclusion of midnight desperation: No More.

Invincibility. It doesn’t exist among humans, but I love invincibility as masquerade, as defensive strategy in cancer and trauma...

There are many ways to kill people without physical violence. All it takes is obedience. A willingness not to think or care. A vulnerable person might cringe as the faces harden, and the backs turn into impenetrable walls. The sanctuary turns into a collapsing house of cards, where someone is always going to end up crushed at the bottom. I offer this writing as an incendiary and hope that the flames give warmth and light to those looking for relief from the cold and the dark

Perhaps I shouldn’t have had the massage. It had been almost two years since a professional had touched me in a compassionate, and not a clinical, way. My chemotherapy for breast cancer had finished, and I was trying to reconnect with my body and find some physical relief. My cancer recovery had begun. But massage releases both the angels and the demons within.

We are still mired in disease-centred care. As to being seen as a whole human in the healthcare system, you are out of luck.

Rule #1 and #1000: Never try to cheer up a cancer patient. Is it really so hard? Letting others be themselves?

Having long been gaslighted by authority figures, I tend to gaslight myself, but I am done. Believing myself is healing, is health.

I didn’t have a PTSD episode while awaiting my colonoscopy to annoy my gastroenterologist, but annoyed he was. He is a busy, important...

A survivor of cancer and childhood abuse explains how empathy and defense have become her superpowers, sprung from scarcity.

What does trauma look like? Appearances can be deceiving, as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are common and can happen to anyone.

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

Medicine as transaction. I suppose I am not suited for it. But I ask myself, what are these startling realities calling me to do?

Recent revelations about author Alice Munro cause this writer to reflect on her own childhood

A Canadian cancer patient shares observations from the front lines of an overtaxed and underfunded system

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...

Before, during, and after my bone marrow transplant as a teenager, the experts at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center did not disguise...

Because my parents punished me every time I asserted myself, my nervous system continues to recoil every time I do so, even at the age of...

While Gabor Mate in his new book, The Myth of Normal (https://drgabormate.com/), explicitly forgives parents who inflict their trauma on...

I shall close the long and gruesome history of gaslighting in my life with the following fact: my psychiatrist of almost 20 years lost...

I have broken the family contract. My mother enforced it: we (mother and three daughters) were never to acknowledge or object to my...