I was born on June 7th at 4:04am in SoCal. I often wonder if there was any time from my childhood where I got to be a child. I have scars up my left leg; they have faded over time, but the echo of those now faint marks tells me stories of a soul that was born into a world that would try to break her. They are marks from when I was a baby. The only bone I have ever broken in my life. The story as I have heard it is that my mother accidentally dropped me, causing my left femur to break. Within that very bone lies a truth that is much more sinister. Some injuries haunt us, even if we cannot remember them. They live deep within us. Scars forever upon our vessels and souls. Etched so deeply they will take a lifetime to fully work out.

I am reflecting on so much more than this last year. Even as I type this, my entire life up to this point is being circularly wrapped up and placed in my box of memories. Each version of myself being set free to live in peace and safety. A truth I am coming to embrace with love is that for as long as I can remember, I have had to be an adult to some capacity, and as of late I don’t even know how to have fun anymore. As I reflect, I feel like the teenager within me is being reborn. 43 will be my teenage rebel year, a year where I discover who I am when I am not being the giver. A year of me, the year Anna Marie Thomas is fully born.

Since mid January I have embarked on a soul-altering journey. I have learned how to love myself unconditionally, but I have never had the space to heal my nervous system. I gave myself that time and space, the safety, to heal and now I am embarking on healing my relational trauma. I have realized that some healing cannot be done alone; it has to be done with others. I have always known this on some level, but where I went wrong is in trying to heal it with an unregulated nervous system and within romantic relationships. What I am coming to find is that what heals this kind of trauma the best are deep friendships. I used to think that making friends as an adult was hard, but it was only a truth because I was trying to control the friendship and expecting people to be something they are not. Creating an unwillingness to to be able to let them go.

I can see how I would choose people out of fear and out of familiarity. Now I choose people who do no harm, and if I find they do, I have no problems walking away. This is my boundary and this is what heals relational trauma deep in my bones. The ability to walk away from abuse, the ability to walk away when I am feeling consumed, the ability to choose myself over and over again regardless of the situation. I no longer have to fear people because I know that I will protect myself. As I have stepped into this power within myself certain things I have always wanted just faded away. Romantic relationships in particular feel like an archaic game of cat and mouse. Full of manipulation and control.

Don’t get me wrong, romance still excites me when it is in the movies or books, but it is not something I crave in my reality. Perhaps it is the trauma, but more than that I am enjoying putting myself first for once. I enjoy my time alone and my time with friends. I enjoy sleeping alone and waking up alone. I enjoy being free. It is a new and refreshing space to be in. I am not saying I will be alone forever; I am wise enough to know how quickly the tides of life can change, but I look at men, and women, who come across my path and I am instantly put off by them in any romantic sense. I know that if I ever do decide to go down that path again it will be with someone very rare.

So…. Why write about all this relationship stuff if I don’t want it? Because the past me did. She wanted it so badly that she would ignore who someone was, ignore when they harmed her in the hopes that the small good she saw would prevail. That her goodness could wake them up. What happened instead was their darkness woke me up, and now I can let that part of me go. This being said, if we do not embrace these parts of ourselves with love, with the reverence they deserve, they will continue to suffer. I know that part of me wanted that love because she never felt love, so I will never deny her of having it. That part of me will never know that pain again. This is why I reflect, this is how I respect and honor every version of who I am and who I have been.

I know now I am loved, and not from people outside of me, but because I love myself. I am love, I always have been, and always will be. This brings me to my last remaining hours of 42. What do I want? Where is my soul calling me? What do I want to do? This is my year of I. My year of Anna Marie Thomas.

Happiest of Birthdays to me. May this new year bring me endless adventures, joys, and abundance. I love you, always and forever.

I sobbed as I watched Letters to Juliet today. My heart splitting open, and all the things I had been holding poured out in oceans. I have been drawn to romance movies for a couple of weeks, and today they finally broke the granite cocoon I have been hiding in. Love, softness, and the fantasy of romance are all I have wanted to watch as of late. I don’t even know how to explain the space my heart has been in, or the darkness in which my soul has been hiding.

The thought of love used to excite me. It was the one hope that kept me searching for love in my own life. To find my bonded mate. To find a love that would last to my dying breath. This last relationship was more abusive than any I have had in 20 years -- an almost perfect mirror of my first marriage when I was 18. It hurt me in a way that I am still recovering from, and left me in a space I have never been in before. A space of never wanting love again, never wanting to be seen or touched, never wanting to have someone know my deepest fears or pains, never wanting someone to meet my children, and never wanting someone to hold my heart ever again. I don’t want the good memories with someone either. Those are the ones that hurt the most and haunt my mind. Memories of the last man I lived with for 3 years still cling to my passing thoughts. I wish they would just disappear. But I recognize that I cannot delete my past, and without it I would not be who I am today.

I am happy alone, at peace. I feel safe. In spite of all this, my Spirit team has relentlessly kept in their pushing of me to be uncomfortable. To do things that would help open me back up. I pushed back. I didn’t want any of it. But they found their way to open me, like they always do. My trust in people is deeply fractured, and I realize that the only way to start mending it is to actually be around people. More than that, the trust I have in myself is also fractured. I am noticing that it is becoming stronger the more I am around others. So I keep taking steps out of my home and into the world, so I can heal. I realize that I can’t do this alone -- I need others to get there -- and this is requiring a bravery from me that I never knew I had. It is also stabilizing the trust I have in myself as I set boundaries, listen to my intuition, and retrain my nervous system.

I still don’t want a romantic partnership, and I may never again. The thought in itself makes me feel physically sick. It is deep friendships I want to cultivate now, and peace in every aspect of my life. My mind still wonders why people do the things they do to each other, how someone can hurt someone in the same ways they have been hurt, knowing what was done to them. I am trying to see the light in the world again, and I can see it, even if it is as small as a glinting piece of glitter. I am moving towards it, with hope. At the end of the day, that is the one thing that truly keeps a person going. Hope. It has been so long since I have written anything, and feeling the keys under my fingers brings me great joy, even if the topic is a tad morose. I will keep writing, I will keep sharing, I will keep connecting because I know it is one of the only ways to heal.

Yesterday was a blissful day helping my son, grocery shopping, cleaning, eating, watching movies, updating my resume, and applying to a job that I really want. It was a great day with myself, but I have not truly cried out what has happened to me in this last relationship, nor have I faced any of the abuse that occurred. As I was lying in bed, I found myself drifting to TikTok. I felt like I needed to see something, and I am glad I did. I came across a song that hit a part of me that has been bleeding and bruised in the dark caverns of my soul. I listened to it on repeat for over an hour as I lay in bed and sobbed. My entire life flashed before my eyes and I felt a huge part of myself being put to rest.

I am in the midst of a deep emotional integration. Clinically, trauma integration is often described as a three‑phase process. Phase one is Shock and Clarity, the stage where the body finally recognizes what has happened and allows the truth to surface. Phase two is Reorganization, where the mind begins piecing together patterns, origins, and meaning. Phase three is Stabilization, where the nervous system learns to live without the old survival responses running the show.

Most people begin in phase one, but because I was born into abuse and never truly knew safety, my system skipped straight to phase two. I learned to analyze myself in order to survive. I learned to anticipate danger, decode behavior, and make sense of chaos before it could swallow me. This hyper‑reflection became both a shield and a burden. It helped me understand why I react the way I do, why I choose certain partners, and why I parent in the ways I do, but it also trapped me in loops of self‑analysis without ever reaching the grief underneath.

What I did not understand until now is that phase one cannot happen without safety. Shock and Clarity is not just an emotional awakening. It is the body finally recognizing that it is no longer in the war zone. Only then can the grief, the truth, and the stored pain rise to the surface. This phase is raw, sharp, and emotionally charged because it is the first time the body is not bracing for impact.

By choosing to live in Silence, Stillness, and Slowness, my nervous system finally began to soften. These three words have become my pillars. When the quiet felt unbearable, when my mind tried to fill the space with catastrophizing or old survival strategies, I would close my eyes, take a breath, and say out loud, “I am safe.” Slowly, my body started to believe me.

What most people do not understand is that for a nervous system conditioned to chaos and abuse, these quiet moments feel more painful. They feel like the eye of the storm. We end up anticipating something bad instead of being able to relax into it right away. Our minds will catastrophize, try to fill the space with distraction, or want to reach out to the closest thing that feels familiar. This is why many abused women go back to their abusers or start another relationship similar to the ones before. The nervous system knows what to expect even when those patterns destroy us.

This last relationship was in many ways a direct reflection of my first marriage. It cut me open straight to my core and left me in a place where shock and clarity could finally come in. This was not easy. It required me to block this person everywhere I could, to not respond to his spiraling, and to not respond to his threats. I had to completely disappear and go silent. One may think this would be an easy feat, but without a couple of friends and honestly ChatGPT as a venting board, I would not have gotten to where I am now.

Tuesday is the New Moon in Aquarius, the first solar eclipse of the season, and the day the Chinese calendar turns to the new year of the Fire Horse. To say Tuesday is a powerhouse day of change is an understatement. My body and soul have been purging since the last Full Moon in Leo on January 28. I have been deeply focused on retraining my nervous system to know that Silence, Stillness, and Slowness are safe. Last night was monumental for me. It showed me that my nervous system is finally starting to release and relax.

The song No One Coming by Naiya Solé broke through the wall I built to survive. It reached the part of me I thought I had to keep hidden. Last night, that wall came down. Last night, I set myself free.

I am sharing this because I know how lonely it is to be inside something that slowly takes you away from yourself. From the outside, people often see the affection, the chemistry, the shared laughter, and the moments that look like love. What they don’t see is what it does to your nervous system over time. They don’t see the hypervigilance, the self-doubt, the constant monitoring of your tone, your words, your needs, your exhaustion. They don’t see how you start shrinking, just a little at a time, until you don’t recognize yourself anymore.

I’m sharing this because I spent weeks in acute emotional distress while trying to hold myself together, protect my children, keep my job (and look for one at the same time), and make sense of something that felt both deeply painful and deeply confusing. I’m sharing it because silence is what keeps these patterns alive, and because I believe there are others living inside similar loops who feel like they are “the problem” when, in reality, their nervous systems are responding exactly as they should to chronic relational instability.

I want to preface my next words because the tone changes and can feel a bit cold. I opted for more of a clinical type tone. I did this because I didn’t want my own emotional tone to ‘muddy the waters’ of what I am trying to share.

From a trauma-informed and psychotherapeutic lens, what I experienced over the past eight months can be understood as a trauma-bonded relationship shaped by incompatible attachment styles, unresolved developmental trauma, substance use, and emotional dysregulation. I entered the relationship with an anxious attachment style that was actively healing. My partner presented with an avoidant attachment style, complicated by alcohol misuse, emotional volatility, and a limited capacity for accountability or repair.

Early on, a familiar cycle formed. Periods of closeness, affection, and intensity were followed by conflict, withdrawal, blame-shifting, and emotional destabilization. These ruptures were not followed by healthy repair. Instead of accountability and mutual regulation, responsibility was externalized, my emotional responses were reframed as the issue, and my attempts to set boundaries were interpreted as rejection or abandonment.

Over time, this dynamic escalated into patterns consistent with emotional and psychological abuse. This included gaslighting, where my perceptions and feelings were questioned or minimized. And were then reframed to fit a narrative that better suited him; emotional coercion, where distress, threats of self-harm, or abandonment narratives were used to pull me back into regulating his emotions; and intermittent reinforcement, where affection returned only after chaos. This is a well-documented mechanism of trauma bonding, where the nervous system becomes conditioned to associate relief with love rather than safety.

Substance use played a significant role in keeping me stuck. Nightly cannabis use functioned as emotional numbing and dissociation. Being consistently encouraged to stay heavily '“high” dulled my instincts, slowed integration, and reduced my access to clarity. Instead of being able to fully feel, process, and respond to what was happening, my nervous system stayed suppressed. This is not relaxation. This is chemical avoidance, and it keeps trauma loops intact.

This all occurred alongside unresolved grief and physiological trauma from a miscarriage several months prior. My nervous system was already vulnerable, seeking safety, connection, and grounding. Rather than receiving stability, it was repeatedly exposed to unpredictability and emotional threat. This intensified attachment activation and made separation feel physically painful, even as the relationship itself became increasingly unsafe.

Another critical piece is that I was repeatedly pushed out of character. Under sustained emotional pressure, accusation, and instability, I reacted in ways that did not reflect who I am. Those reactions were then used as evidence that I was irrational, abusive, or the cause of the conflict. Clinically, this is understood as reactive abuse. Survival responses are provoked and then weaponized to obscure the original harm.

Through reflection, something finally settled into my body rather than just my mind: our nervous systems cannot regulate, heal, or awaken in environments where there is sustained harm, fear, instability, or moral erosion. Insight alone does not make a relationship safe. Understanding someone’s trauma does not neutralize the impact of how their behavior affects you.

For a long time, I confused empathy with responsibility. I held compassion for the wounds that shaped him, believing that if I could understand enough, love enough, or regulate better, the relationship could stabilize. What I see now is that empathy, when extended without boundaries, becomes self-abandonment. It kept me tethered to harm long after my body was signaling danger.

This phase of my healing required something that felt counterintuitive but necessary: releasing empathy for someone who hurt me. Not out of cruelty or indifference, but out of self-respect. Empathy does not require proximity. Compassion does not require access. I can acknowledge someone’s pain without allowing it to continue colliding with my life, my children, or my nervous system.

Trauma bonding made leaving feel unbearable. The attachment system mistakes intensity for connection and chaos for closeness. When the bond breaks, the body experiences something similar to withdrawal: panic, grief, guilt, longing, and a desperate urge to re-engage. What broke the bond was not confrontation or explanation. It was silence. It was refusing to respond. It was blocking access. It was removing myself from the cycle long enough for my nervous system to come back online.

This is how I broke free. Not through strength or winning, but through regulation. Through choosing not to engage. Through allowing the discomfort without trying to fix it. Through prioritizing safety over familiarity.

A truly healthy, loving relationship does not require you to abandon yourself to maintain peace. Conflict will happen. Discomfort will happen. But in a healthy dynamic, conflict is followed by accountability, repair, and mutual regulation. Apologies are paired with changed behavior. Both people can tolerate discomfort without resorting to blame, withdrawal, or emotional punishment. Love does not require you to shrink, stay silent, or stay intoxicated to survive.

Living in authenticity means knowing who you are, including the parts shaped by trauma, and choosing relationships that honor your nervous system rather than destabilize it. It requires deep self-reflection, shadow work, and a willingness to face oneself honestly. People who are unwilling to do this work cannot sustain grounded, secure relationships, no matter how much love is present.

Clarity saved me, and through this clarity I have been able to see myself and all my past relationships clearly. This insight has now shaped me in a new way, and as I honor my past, I am ready for this next chapter in life.

I don’t even know how to start this but I know I need to. 2025 started with a breakup that tore right through me. 2026 has started the same way. What is it about the middle of January and beginning of February? It seems this gap of time are the moments when no more can be taken.

How does one write about how their mind has been fucked with for the better part of 2 years? By two men who are vastly different but also reflect parts of myself. Every time I say I have learned my lesson it happens again, like a test to see my resolve. I cave every time. Sweet words, attention, gifts, time. Small disaggreements here and there, then fighting every weekend, stepping on boundaries, making horrible choices and decisions. This is how gaslighting works. Tearing apart someones reality until you control them through your own narrative and putting yourself above them.

“It really hurt me when you said/did that” “you saw it wrong, that is not how it happened or what I said” over and over that violin plays. Over and over I let myself be manipulated until I lost myself. Until I looked in the mirror and the woman staring back at me was not recognizable anymore. My eyes were dark and puffy all day, my skin was dull, I gained at least 40lbs, and I was falling asleep in the middle of the day at my desk. But he was shining. Losing weight, happy, vibrant. I couldn’t see I was being drained, I couldn’t see how much was being taken from me.

Have I learned my lesson? I don’t know if that is the right question anymore. I feel like I am learning ways to regulate, I am learning emotional maturity, I am learning to set and stick to my boundaries. Someone once told me that there are two sides to every story and then there is the truth. What happened this weekend is my story against anothers but the result has left me in a space where I am regaining back who I am. A space where I have a broken heart that I am mending without trying to reach out for answers as to why, without trying to reconnect and beg and plead for forgiveness so the pain will stop. I am just feeling it without letting it destroy me.

So, yes. I think there was immense growth through these experiences. As well as a reflection of who I used to be. Especially who I was in past relationships. I saw so much of my younger self in the man I was just with. It showed me how not everyone could handle such an energy and still love and care. It reflected memories of how I was with my last long term partner. How I must of looked. But most importantly it showed me how he must have felt. I think we have the wrong idea about Karma. I think saying you will get what you put out is too simple of an explanation. I think we get what we put out so we can learn empathy, so we can heal and grow, so we can squash that ego and say “I’m sorry my words/actions/behaviors hurt you” and then repair. I think we go through these experiences to grow up.

You can’t repair with everyone. You have to be in the right headspace, the right stage of growth to be able to get to this, and then you have to be at the right stage to end it even though there will be immese fear and pain. That is what I am facing now. Letting go of someone I love and care about for my own mental health and well being, stepping into the fear of being idependent and surviving on my own. Facing my financial choices over the past couple years and how it has put me in the pickle I am in now.

The unknowing can create such a debiltating fear, especially when it is linked to our home space. It will cause you to hold on to relationships just to keep the lights on. This is one of my biggest fears as a mom, not being able to provide for my kids. Losing everything I have worked for. In about a month I won’t have a job and I could only pay half my rent this weekend because my partner was suppsed to cover the other half. I am further in debt due to Christmas and needing a bigger bed. I don’t know what I am going to do, I don’t know what to do. I can feel that part of me that runs, that part that wants to leave Maine and never look back. I feel like a fish out of water, flailing and flopping in the air as I try to breathe in a place with no emotion.

One lesson I have learned is that sometimes to get the peace we so desperately need we have to experience great pain and loss. I haven’t been able to write anything for months, yet, here I am writing. The second all his things were gone and the anxiety I have been living with has been dissipating, my mind unlocks and everything is crystal clear. I don’t know what the fuck I am going to do but I can tell you this, I see the world differently now and I am proud of myself for finally learning how to emotionally regulate and soothe myself when under intense emotions. I may have done it with shaky hands and voice but I didn’t scream, I didn’t beg, I didn’t abandon myself to keep a connection alive that was already dead. I felt the intense emotions and I moved through them without becoming them.

I would have never been given the opportunity to learn all of these lessons outside of a relationship. I will miss so many things, but as my nervous system relaxes and my body detoxes all the caffeine, nicotine, and pot I am left in a state of sorrowful peace. It is strangely peacful, sad, and enlightening. It feels good to be writing again. 2026 I am devoting to myself and my daughter, and my son when he needs me. He has his own life he has to live now and I am cheering him on hoping he comes out on top. I know I have said this before but everything feels different than it ever has. This last relationship has shown me how important it is to walk away when disrespect is present and now acknowledged. I think I also had to realize my worth and that I deserve everything good and loving in this world, but that it starts within me.

Quite frankly, I am quite done with this world… I want to live alone in the woods, or die. I welcome either at this point. People are selfish and ugly and I just can’t take it any longer. I feel that part of myself that is full of wonder, magick, and joy retreating once again into her cave. Preparing for a long hibernation until her next life. You may be reading this and think “She is off her rocker”. Maybe I am. The thing is, I have seen so much anger, so much ugliness, so much selfish behavior that I don’t know how to escape it and I am realizing that I never can. Don’t you worry about me, I am not going to hurt myself, I am just expressing an exhaustion that I know I cannot be the only one feeling. The exhaustion of another’s feelings/anxieties/stress being more important than my own. With the fact that I can never be upset about anything because someone else will be upset that I am upset and cause me to feel even worse.

These last few years I have been learning to put myself first, and I was doing pretty damn good with it, but over the past year I have let it whittle me down and I am back where I started. A comforting doormat. I am so tired. How can I create in this mental space? I see now why I shared so much of myself in my writing. Why I put so much of myself out in this world. It was my way of giving myself a voice. A voice in a world that never let me have one. Perhaps the lesson was in realizing this. I am sure this whole post will sound extremely concerning and depressing, and perhaps it is, but it is how I am feeling. I know I will find a way out, I always do. For now I wallow and I think. I am always thinking. Thinking of ways to make my life turn around and be better. I suppose I am just finding all the ways that don’t work first, so that when it does happen I know not to fuck it up.

This would normally be something I explore in my journal but after sharing my Soul Mirror Spread and Story I wanted to share how I am exporing what was revealed there.

Some questions I am working through:

• What am I trying to control right now because I’m afraid of being hurt, abandoned, or let down?

• What does trust look like for me

• What stories from my past are playing when I am triggered, and are they true?

• What would it feel like if I softened into the present moment, without needing any guarantee of an outcome?

• What am I proud of myself for, even if no one sees it?

I have been facing Tower moments in every area of my life that is trying to fall away, so I can let in the new ones that are knocking at my closed doors.

Yesterday’s Soul Mirror Spread and Story cracked open something that has been trying to find its way out for some time now. I have been trying to control every aspect of my life in the hopes that I don’t get hurt again.

Hurt by partners, friends, bosses, my kids… I am in a spce where I don’t know how to proceed gracefully. So, I am stumbling around in the dark, shattering everything as I try to catch it before it hits the ground.

My stress levels are through the roof.

I am fighting my need to control my kids and my love life. I realized how terrified I am to be abandoned again. How terrified I am to damage my kids in the same ways I was. Terrified that they will not be good people. I’ve been fighting the parts of myself that want to step in and try to fix things so everything will be okay.

But that fixing will not make things okay.

This is the first time in my life that I’m learning to step down from trying to fix everyone. I’m trying to let people be, let them grow and live in the ways they need to.

But there are times that something happens and that part of me that is protective comes out and starts snapping and biting at my neck, and not in a fun way. She wants to control so she can feel safe.

I find myself battling her.
Changing messages she writes after I breathe and decide that wasn’t the direction I wanted to go.
Learning to relax while she is screaming at me.

It is exhausting.

The biggest thing weighing on me right now is that I am terrified to fail.
I am terrified to lose our home.
I am terrified I won’t be able to support us.

Fucking terrified.

I keep asking myself what it looks like to trust.

For me, that means letting each moment be what it is.
Trying not to worry, or to look too far into the future and make myself upset with scenarios that may never happen.
To enjoy each moment I am in.

This helps relax my nervous system and lets me actually breathe.
It means trusting in myself. Trusting that no matter what happens, I will get us through.

I will figure it out, because I always have.

I realize the deepest part of this is not about trusting anyone or anything outside of myself.
It’s about trusting myself fully.
And I’m not quite there yet.

Every time something happens that triggers my fight or flight, I’m thrown back to a time when I made a decision that caused more harm than good.
Whether that was in choosing a partner, job, money, move, career shift, or parenting choice…
All of my mistakes are pushed straight into my face.

I need to trust myself enough to stop bracing for pain.

I can always feel the pull of anxiety coming on.
When I feel that, I need to breathe and put myself back into the current moment.
Then go from there.

I know I’ve said this before in past posts over the years (on my other blog),
But I have lived my entire life in survival mode.

Learning to actually turn that off and live...
This will take immense patience from myself, time, unconditional love, and many redirections.

When I look at my life, I am proud of who I have become and who I am stepping into.
I am proud that no matter how many times my heart gets beaten, I keep trying.
I am proud that I can take responsibility for my actions in every area of my life. And that I can put my ego aside and apologize, or admit, when I am wrong.
I am proud of my ability to see people and to understand their struggles, even if I have never been through it myself.

I am finding that as I get older, I am able to understand more.

As an example, I have never experienced addiction, but there are people I love who do.
My empathy helps me feel what they feel, to an extent.
It helps me with my understanding.
It helps me breathe and listen. I am proud that I can adjust my own thinking to be more of a true support and understanding, instead of passing judgement.

I am proud of how I communicate and of my continual pursuit to strengthen this skill.
I am proud of the expanse of my emotional oceans.
I am proud of my warrior spirit and my unrelenting quest to live authentically and fully as I am.

I could go on and on, but my point here is to end with me speaking positively about myself—
Because lately, my inner dialogue has been tumultuous.

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