Attachment Trauma Archives | Centering Healing

Code-Switching at Work: Why Racialized Performance and the Pressure to Belong Are So Exhausting

Your boss is talking during a team meeting about how employees should handle difficult customers, and he says everyone needs to smile, remain pleasant, and keep the customer happy even when the customer becomes rude or aggressive. You immediately think about what happened to your coworker last week, when a customer started yelling at her…

Was I Sexually Abused by My Mother? Why You Keep Questioning What Happened

By Chana Ceasar

Woman sitting quietly in warm window light beside a faded image of a young girl, representing childhood memories, uncertainty, and the lasting effects of trauma.

You may have asked yourself the same question hundreds of times: Was I sexually abused by my mother? Maybe something happened during bathing, dressing, sleeping, touching, affection, privacy, or what she called “care,” and when you remember it now your stomach tightens or you immediately want to move away from the memory. There may have…

5 Ways Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse Can Reclaim Their Gifts After Grooming

By Chana Ceasar

Professional woman looking sad and reflective beside the title “5 Ways Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse Can Reclaim Their Gifts After Grooming.”

Children develop a sense of identity through relationships, and the adults around them help shape what their natural capacities mean by noticing, remembering, encouraging, and reflecting them back. A child may feel drawn toward writing, music, movement, visual creativity, humor, leadership, curiosity, emotional sensitivity, pattern recognition, or problem-solving, and those gifts begin to take form…

Why Can’t I Relax in a Healthy Relationship?

By Chana Ceasar

A racially ambiguous professional woman lies awake in bed looking at her phone while her partner sleeps peacefully beside her, illustrating the anxiety and hypervigilance that can occur in healthy relationships after attachment trauma.

How Attachment Trauma Makes Safe Love Feel Unfamiliar You and your partner have just gotten home from another lovely evening together. Both of you have been working hard, juggling responsibilities, and you decided to end the week with something simple and kind, a dinner at your favorite place, the kind of night you both enjoy…

Why Do I Feel Like I’ve Lost Myself? How Attachment Trauma Makes Competence Become Your Identity and Why Life Begins to Fall Apart When It Doesn’t Work Anymore

By Chana Ceasar

A thoughtful Black woman sits at a table by a window, looking out while surrounded by a notebook, papers, photographs, and a coffee mug. The image accompanies a blog about how attachment trauma can lead to building an identity around competence and losing a sense of self during major life transitions.

You’re sitting at your kitchen table staring at a life you worked incredibly hard to build, and yet somewhere along the way it has begun feeling unfamiliar. Maybe your business isn’t growing the way you expected despite everything you’ve invested in it. Perhaps the career you’ve chased so hard unexpectedly, hit a snag due to…