Trauma & Abuse

Hypervigilant, replaying moments, checking for danger, avoiding certain situations, that description fits trauma just as easily as it fits OCD. Trauma or OCD is a genuinely difficult call to make, because the two share so much surface architecture while running on different internal logic. Here's what actually separates them, why they so often coexist, and why treating only one usually leaves the other running.

Nobody wakes up one morning and decides a child is no longer a child. That transformation, when it happens, is slower than that — it happens mostly through language, small and repeated, until the language has done the work a single decision never could. A caregiver can be standing directly over a child and still be relating to a diagnosis instead of a person. This essay looks at how clinical shorthand, euphemism, and fatigue slowly erase a person from view, long before anythi

A room with one adult and one child who cannot speak isn't dangerous by itself. It becomes dangerous in combination with certain facts: that no one else can see inside it, that the child's account wouldn't be trusted over the adult's, and that whatever happens there has to be proven some other way. Power doesn't usually go looking for a fight. It goes looking for the absence of one. This essay looks at why voicelessness, not viciousness, is what most abuse of trust actually d

There is a comfort in the word predator, and it has almost nothing to do with accuracy. The word sorts the world instantly — the danger lives over there, in a category of person we could never become. But most abuse of power doesn't start with a monster walking into a room. It starts with someone who was, until recently, capable of tenderness. This essay looks at what actually separates a predatory dynamic from a predatory person — and why the difference matters more than the