The Power of Being Understood

Last time, we talked about grief — not just from death, but from all kinds of loss.Today, I want to talk about what helped me carry it.For most of my life, I didn’t even know that what I was carrying had a name. I thought I was too emotional. Too much. The problem. I believed that if I had been better, quieter, less difficult… things would have been different.But they weren’t different because of me.In this episode, I share how moving into a nursing home brought back memories of being institutionalized as a child at the Ann Carlson School — and how that led me to a trauma group connected to the North Dakota Center for Prisons with Disabilities.I talk about what it was like to sit in a room with other adults who grew up in institutions because we had developmental disabilities. To hear a social worker explain what trauma actually is. To slowly connect the dots. To understand that being isolated for crying wasn’t because I was bad — it was because I was a child expressing normal human emotion.For decades, many of us believed we were the problem.We weren’t.In this conversation, I share how being given permission to feel changed everything. How understanding trauma reshaped the way I see grief. How finding language for what I lived through brought a kind of peace I didn’t know was possible.If you’ve ever carried something heavy without knowing what to call it…If you’ve ever been told — directly or indirectly — that your emotions were too much…If you’ve ever wondered whether what happened to you really “counts”…This episode is for you.You didn’t do anything wrong.And you don’t have to carry it alone.