We eventually began to talk about the end of the flight, how far we had to go before we slept, who was waiting there, and so forth. She ment

Let us look deeply inside the children in our lives. The “me” I described in the above paragraph was overlooked and lost in all my survival

There are lots of us who can’t ask for what we need or want. We have stories that caused this and it affects us in relationships and other h

Jeannie, the resourceful and resilient child self of author Janyne McConnaughey takes center stage in this companion book to BRAVE: A person

We often stop ourselves and the children in our lives from doing everything necessary for the body to heal from trauma. We stop our tears, w

I don’t want to dwell there either, but I find the populace in general to be very much lacking in an understanding of the effects of not hav

Listen to the children. Talk to the children. Follow the clues they leave to their faulty connections. Help them be free to live the lives t

Not only was I telling my story to the world, but I was also was putting it in printed form. My fear of being corrected was well founded sin

Jeannie was and is tenacious, but I don’t think there is really anything inside me that is not available to every human being. We are born t

My daughter and I were sitting beside the pool playing a card game. My granddaughter was swimming with a newfound friend about her age. Off

Then, I felt it pass over me like a wave. It felt like I was just outside the place where the waves broke and crashed onto the sand. The emo

I was watching a small girl at the next table when she suddenly lost it. Hysterical. Pulling at her blouse. Inconsolable. It was something a

I lived my life well. I kept the rules that I was told to keep only now realizing that most of those rules have been discarded. Some say tha

I stood in the doorway. I was very small, maybe two. I was sucking on my two middle fingers and watching my mother in the kitchen. I was for

From somewhere deep inside of me, I can still feel myself gather up strength in order to be brave for my father. We never talked about that

When I was a little girl, I had a book with Nursery Rhymes. I still have it. I kept it through all my moves. The picture I attached to this

To have our children point out our inadequacies and accept it with grace is probably the hardest, bravest, and most helpful thing we could e

This is my day before Mother’s Day epiphany: My dad was my mother. I blogged earlier about the difficulty of buying cards on Mother’s Day. Father’s Day cards never fit either, but for totally different reasons. They didn’t fit because he had to fill the role of the nurturer! Maybe he broke the mold of father’s roles before it became popular? He didn’t cook (but then I don’t either). He didn’t go shopping with me. He didn’t do lots of traditional mother things, but I do unders

While watching April, the giraffe, give birth this morning, I thought it was a perfect illustration of new birth and bonding. It was a bit unsettling to watch the baby giraffe fall to the ground and lie there with no obvious movement. The birth of a human is a bit traumatizing but we don’t fall to the ground unless something goes wrong. Then April began to lick her new baby. I am not proposing we human mothers should start licking our babies, but there is much to be said for