Traci Spent 30 Years Saving Babies. Then She Had to Save Herself.

Traci Powell spent almost 30 years as a nurse, most of it in the NICU, holding together the most fragile babies you can imagine. She was the strong one. Straight A's, more degrees, more proof she had it all together. Then at 46 it came apart — a first panic attack, and a depression she'd hidden her whole life that she suddenly couldn't hide anymore. CONNECT WITH TRACIFor private clients: https://TheRebuiltWoman.com/Beyond the Script Society Membership: https://community.beyondthescriptsociety.com/Beyond the Script LIVE: https://beyondthescriptlive.com/Free PMHNPs Beyond Meds Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1Dtq92bd4F/Are you interested in Traci's Radical Restoration Fellowship? https://therebuiltwoman.com/intensive-therapy-for-accelerated-healing/So she did everything you're told to do. Weekly therapy. EMDR. An SSRI, then another, then another. She got labeled bipolar and treatment-resistant, kept getting worse, and reached the lowest point of her life. The mental health system she would later join as a clinician had failed her as a patient.What finally worked was something almost no one had told her about: the difference between trauma wounds, the bad things that happen to you, and attachment wounds, the good things that should have happened and didn't. Two wounds. Two completely different treatments. Once she understood that, her life changed fastNow Traci practices psychiatry in a way most people have never seen. Three-day trauma intensives instead of years of fifteen-minute med checks. She's trained whole cohorts of psych NPs to do the same, grown a 3,300-member community called PMHNPs Beyond Meds, and is hosting what may be the first national psych NP conference built around therapy and trauma work instead of medication.We get into all of it — the breakdown, the Frozen moment that finally named what she'd been doing her whole life ("conceal, don't feel"), why she calls medication the Tylenol of mental health, her suicide attempt and the hope on the other side of it, and what she'd say to any psych NP who's been told to "stay in your lane.”One line of hers stuck with me: "One person's spoken story is another person's permission to speak."