Hi friends! If you missed the latest book news, The Ties That Harm—my book on sibling abuse and healing—is set to be published in April 2027 (you can preorder your copy from wherever you buy books here!).

I was slated to publish a story on what I wish I’d known about antidepressant withdrawal when the Lindsay Clancy trial took over all headlines.

Suddenly, a personal essay on the challenge of trying different mental health medications, experiencing unexpected and harrowing withdrawal side effects, and losing trust in the medical establishment hit differently.

My editor decided it was best to pivot. But the more I reflected on the case, the more I thought this was still a worthwhile story to share—and that the two had more to do with each other than I’d realized.

You likely know the rough outline. Lindsay Clancy repeatedly sought mental health care, saw multiple doctors, tried multiple drugs, and…nothing seemed to help. She ultimately killed her three children before attempting to kill herself, which left her paralyzed from the waist down.

As I write this, the jury is still out. The trial has told two stories: in one version, she’s a cold-blooded killer. In the other, she’s a woman who did the unthinkable in the grip of postpartum psychosis and deserves mercy.

When I saw the list of medications she was on—13 psychiatric drugs in four months, prescribed by psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, ER doctors, and inpatient staff, many of which I’ve also been prescribed—the more I felt for her.

I, too, struggled with confusing and scary symptoms that felt like more than typical depression, suicidal thoughts that were just below the threshold for a crisis situation, and doctors who I felt were not listening to my concerns about medication side effects while my mind spiraled out of my control.

I eventually found meds that worked, but only after years of living on the edge.

There’s a slippery slope between writing honestly about what happens when medication doesn’t work and inadvertently promoting views that discourage people from seeking psychiatric care at all. Antidepressants save lives. I’m not interested in scaring anyone away from them.

But I also think there’s room to say a few things that are still hard to say out loud:

• Antidepressants, among other mental health meds, do not work for all patients. This isn’t an uncommon scenario, especially for complex cases.

• Patients in this situation shouldn’t be ignored or dismissed when they experience negative side effects and/or escalating symptoms.

• These patients and their doctors should know the signs of other conditions that can be mistaken for depression but require an entirely different treatment plan—like bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis.

• And these patients should feel like they are being heard when they express their concerns, because what they have to share is relevant and important, always, and because feeling unheard is a runaway train to hopelessness and dropping out of treatment.

I’ve been writing about women whose doctors did not listen to them for my entire career.

Clancy’s case was uniquely terrible, but her experiences were also relatable: she was dismissed, felt terribly alone as a new mother, and did not receive the level of care she deserved. Most women I know have some version of that story.

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Lindsay Clancy needed medical professionals who were properly trained to identify and treat complicated peripartum and postpartum mental health conditions. She needed mental health care providers to communicate with each other, listen to her, and address her concerns. And her family needed an in-depth safety plan.

They also could have benefited from any semblance of a safety net.

What really stuck out to me, as a woman with bipolar II disorder, was that she desperately needed sleep but could not get it—because when her baby was sleeping, her other children still needed her.

The link between sleep deprivation and mental illness is huge and goes both ways. Sleep deprivation is a trigger for both mania and psychosis, and researchers now consider it a serious risk factor for the emergence of severe mental illness in the postpartum period. Not being able to sleep, even when you’re exhausted, is also one of the most obvious signs that you are escalating into a manic or mixed episode.

Yet we continue to treat lack of sleep like a yearslong everyday hell new parents just have to put up with. For women who are vulnerable to postpartum mental health conditions, we need a serious reframe. We need to understand just how dangerous sleep loss can be. Sometimes, it’s a medical emergency.

We also need to build true villages, with maternity leave and paternity leave and accessible childcare. We need to stop leaving mothers alone in houses that are on fire, all the while pretending there’s no smoke to see anywhere, everything is fine.

Lindsay Clancy needed and deserved so much more. So did her family.

A few weeks ago, the story I’d put off publishing came up again when a friend of mine told me she was breaking up with her psychiatrist after a harrowing experience with Effexor. She had been burned too many times. She was done. But she still needed help. She just did not believe she could get it anymore.

I encouraged her to try to find someone new and to try other meds, but I understood her exhaustion. I’d been there too—almost a decade ago.

Maybe the news cycle has moved on by the time you read this, but the women I’ve spoken to suggest that problems with mental health medications, poor communication, and lost trust keep happening.

While my story is specific to antidepressant withdrawal, the takeaways are helpful in any situation. So, without further ado, here’s what I learned about antidepressant withdrawal in a time when no one was talking about antidepressant withdrawal.

I was sitting in my car in the parking lot after class one night when terror took over. It felt like lightning was striking my brain. Electric-like shocks ran down my arm, my head felt like it was stuffed with static, and the right side of my face went numb.

I called my mom and asked her to look up the symptoms of a stroke. She assured me that was unlikely—I was only 25—but I should call my psychiatrist immediately. She’d prescribed me the antidepressant Effexor after Prozac failed to work for me, and I’d recently stopped taking it because I’d started having suicidal thoughts.

When my psychiatrist picked up, she encouraged me to start taking Effexor again. In the midst of a firestorm in my own body, I was infuriated by the suggestion. I abruptly cut ties and took the matter into my own hands.

What I didn’t know then, and what no one had told me, was that I was experiencing antidepressant withdrawal, now known as antidepressant discontinuation syndrome: a cluster of symptoms that can arise when you stop taking antidepressants, especially if you stop suddenly, have taken them for a long time, or are at a high dose.

Symptoms include restlessness, dizziness, flu-like fatigue, nausea, and muscle aches. The most harrowing, for me, were what I experienced in my car that night: brain zaps. They struck fast because I’d unknowingly come off one of the worst offenders for withdrawal symptoms. Antidepressants that your body breaks down quickly, such as venlafaxine (Effexor) and paroxetine (Paxil), are associated with a higher risk of withdrawal symptoms—and more severe ones.

This was nearly ten years ago, in a time when antidepressant withdrawal was generally considered brief and mild, and conversations about severe or protracted effects largely happened underground. Researchers have since caught up to what patients have long known to be true: for some, antidepressant withdrawal isn’t just a little discomfort for a few weeks; it can be intensely life-disrupting and sometimes span months.

The largest study to date, a 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis in Lancet Psychiatry covering more than 16,500 patients, found that about one in six people experience withdrawal symptoms directly attributable to antidepressants. Most cases are mild, but about one in 35 people experience severe symptoms. Recent research suggests that long-term users—those who’ve taken antidepressants for more than two years—are five times more likely to have severe withdrawal symptoms.

Just how frequently severe antidepressant withdrawal side effects happen and how much attention the issue deserves remain at the center of an intense debate between psychiatrists. Antidepressant withdrawal symptoms can overlap with and be mistaken for recurring depression and anxiety, but they are a distinct phenomenon.

Regardless of the complexities, patients deserve to be informed. Because my psychiatrist had never warned me, she lost my trust, and I relied on Facebook support groups to guide me as I gradually tapered off of Effexor. Taking advice from strangers, I smoked weed every day for months to dull headaches and try to get some sleep. While unconventional, this route seemed safer than the ones others were promoting such as megadoses of vitamins and supplements. When I read others’ stories of breaking pills open and separating them by tiny beads or bits of powder, I felt lucky.

What I heard, repeatedly, was this: No one told me this could happen.

As the years went on, my depression rose and fell but never quite faded away. Part of me just accepted that I had to live with it, that I didn’t get to be happy like other people. I wasn’t alone: For one in three patients, typical antidepressants simply don’t work.

To cope, I self-medicated with anything but medication: meditation, yoga, lifting heavy, sprinting, long-distance running, biohacking, intermittent fasting.

Bipolar II disorder, which I was eventually diagnosed with, lacks the dramatic manias of bipolar I disorder that can result in hallucinations, delusions, and hospitalizations. Its hypomanic episodes are easy to miss—often enjoyable, even if they create chaos in your life—while its depressions are just as bad as those with bipolar I, if not worse.

For years, I was convinced I just had terrible depressive episodes and had a few especially happy and productive days or weeks every spring. Because of these mixed symptoms and stretches of relative normalcy, the depression didn’t feel “bad enough.” I could live with it—until I couldn’t.

In my early 30s, exhausted by caregiving for my grandmother through the pandemic and a soul-killing job, I began to have hours of suicidal thoughts a day. They were beginning to escalate into plans when I reached out for help again. This time, I did my research and found a Duke-trained psychiatrist whose biography mentioned experience with people who had struggled with the system before. Maybe I could trust her, I thought.

With her guidance, I tried one of the newest antipsychotics on the market. My insurance would cover it because I’d “failed” so many other medications. In what felt like a miracle, it quickly brought me back to life, but its side effects were unbearable with runaway weight gain, overwhelming sedation, and frequent nausea and vomiting.

Within a handful of months, I’d gained nearly 20 pounds. When I asked my primary care physician for metformin, a drug my own research suggested could counteract the weight gain, I yet again faced a doctor who downplayed my symptoms. She told me my bloodwork was fine and to keep watching the scale. I broke down crying.

This time, though, I was determined to stay in treatment. My psychiatrist listened to me with care. She took my distress seriously, added metformin, then switched me from the antipsychotic to a mood stabilizer. That medication, along with therapy, a healthy lifestyle, and support, has kept me mentally well for three years now. It also gave me the stability I needed to finish my first book.

The path here was fraught with many years of self-medication and needless struggle, largely due to broken trust and the resulting belief that I was on my own. With growing conversation around deprescribing antidepressants, it’s the people like my past self that I’m most worried about.

Antidepressants can be life-saving, and stigmatizing them carries its own risks. But as is true with any medication, taking them safely calls for an honest, in-depth conversation about both the pros and cons. Psychiatrists should also be clear about what you should do if your medication is not working for you or makes you feel worse, especially if the risk of withdrawal symptoms is high.

As a patient, it’s essential to ask about how to take medications safely, what side effects could arise, and what to do if you don’t want to take them anymore. Don’t quit abruptly or taper alone, and continuously advocate for yourself. When you’re too tired to do that, seek a second opinion or recruit someone else, like a partner or friend, to speak up on your behalf.

What I wish I’d been told was that it’s okay, and even normal, for antidepressants to not work for some and for the withdrawal process to be difficult—but it does not last forever. Bad experiences with a psychiatrist or a medication (or a few) do not mean there are not other options for you, including other types of medication and talk therapy. A good healthcare provider will partner with you to find the right treatment plan for you. And even when you feel like you’ve tried almost everything, trust me: there’s still hope.

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If you're struggling with a perinatal mood or anxiety disorder, Postpartum Support International's helpline is 1-800-944-4773 (call or text “help”). If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988.

How do book covers get designed? I had no idea.

I was pleasantly surprised that my publisher involved me in the process early on. I got to hit up the bookstore, search for my favorite covers, and put together a Pinterest board for inspiration.

From there, we had a back-and-forth on potential designs, fonts, symbolism. And finally: the cover.

A house on fire, with a small child perched in the window, was an image I kept coming back to (one that’s woven through the book). But we agreed that the book doesn’t just name the crisis that is sibling abuse; it also offers healing and hope. I think the orangey red evokes not only fire but vibrancy. And while the paper cutout house is torn in half, dogwood blooms grow from it. Dogwood petals—in dusty pink, white, red—were one of the first signs of spring in my hometown. I’ve always looked forward to seeing them. To me, they’re hope, growth, and joy.

I hope you love the cover just as much as I do, and I can’t wait for the real book to be in our hands.

Now’s a great time to pre-order your copy if you haven’t yet! And if you know of someone who’s been searching for a guide to sibling abuse and how to heal, this could be the resource to nudge them toward.

Below, a quick update on where I am and what I learned after slowing down and taking a deep dive into Eli Saslow’s award-winning journalism.

It wasn’t long after I finished the book that I flung myself into the second. Actually, it was in the midst of the first that I feverishly wrote the initial shape of a pitch, started ordering books for research, and began pouring hours into the project.

A few weeks later, my husband and I went on a honeymoon four years into our marriage and nearly ten years into our relationship. And everything stopped.

I could put my phone away for half of the day because we were in a different time zone, and I didn’t feel constantly on-call. I could postpone meetings that weren’t pressing. I could stop myself from diving immediately back into the working-journalist life. I could take a real break. Something in me said, very clearly: Slow down. You have to slow down.

It’s a difficult thing to do when the first compliment I got from my journalism mentor, nearly ten years ago, was: “You’re fast.” When working in journalism without generational wealth or the support of a newsroom means constant strain and paycheck-to-paycheck living for years. When the full-time jobs are disappearing, when the outlets and verticals you used to write for no longer exist. When the most important work, as I often say, pays the least.

Writing a book gave me financial stability for the first time in my life. But not long after, my old habits and worldview took over: I had to survive. I had to make more money. I had to be fast—again.

I share this because I don’t think we talk about these challenges enough, and that’s a disservice to all of us, especially would-be artists.

I don’t want young writers to mistakenly think “I’m not good enough” when working multiple jobs is, sadly, typical for the working writer.

Just recently, Caro Claire Burke—author of the megahit that is Yesteryear—shared her own pays-the-bills story on the podcast she cohosts, Diabolical Lies: The Caro Episode (it’s worth a listen). Like a lot of us, she wrote a lot of content—not exactly hard-hitting or exciting stuff—because she needed to eat.

Getting a book deal can feel like winning the lottery when you’ve been in the trenches for a very long time. When I could tell the finish line was close for my book, the pressure to write the next one took over before I even got there. This was what I was good at—speeding onto the next thing—but what kind of life was that? Was it the life I really wanted?

There’s nothing like a long-postponed honeymoon in Europe—with a husband who likes to take things slow—to get you reflecting. We’ve long joked that we’re the hare and tortoise, and I’ve long been at war with celebrating my hare nature, urging my husband to pick it up, and all the while also knowing I need to work on building my tortoise nature.

It’s the central to our marriage: the good, the frustrating. I bring adventure, he brings rest. I want him to hurry up, he suggests I consider slowing down.

To do so went against my nature and what I’d been rewarded for, but I’m glad I did. Even just a week off helped me remember that enjoying my own life, as an individual, is also important to me. My job isn’t my entire life or my entire identity.

I forced myself to relax, did a lot of reading, watched interesting movies (Sentimental Value, Backrooms), rewatched old Rick and Morty episodes (which are available abroad!), drank strong espresso not as fuel but to taste it, explored the city, and made dinner slowly, step by step (I highly recommend whatever the historical “poverty food” is in the country you choose to visit, like this bread-into-magic soup açorda à Alentejana in Portugal or Poland’s żurek).

Mostly, my husband and I walked and talked and sat and experienced a lot of awe. I felt like I was coming back into myself, in an old way. One of my favorite parts of life has always been traveling, and it’s only just recently I’ve had the space and ability to do it. I haven’t been across the ocean in about ten years. If I regret anything, it’s the delay.

Since my break, I’ve gradually eased back into work, deciding to take it slow, to really connect with what I want to do next—wholeheartedly, not just out of fear of financial instability. I’ve also challenged myself to think critically about what’s “enough” when everything costs too much and it feels like there’s no escape but to consider leaving the country altogether.

To come back to the work in a mindful, intentional way, I returned to my old methods: structure studies, reading interviews with my favorite authors, tracing how they did it, and considering how I might copy their blueprint.

I dug into narrative nonfiction I’d been meaning to read—Andrea Ellliott’s Invisible Child, Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us. I started flicking through Pulitzer prize-winning stories and found they often circled the same themes: poverty, incarceration, violence. The same playbook: find an issue, make it local, smaller, just one person or family. There was also one name that kept showing up: Eli Saslow.

Eli Saslow has long been one of my idols, and his work is instructive.

He’s one of my favorite writers, which isn’t surprising considering his 14-year-old daughter once described his work as “sad, long stories.”

To get inspired, I read his stories about a swimming pool salesman whose optimism was under threat during a severe economic downturn, a bus driver enduring her city’s decline one ride at a time after the pandemic, a psychiatric nurse driven into her own mental health crisis, a private security guard tasked with managing homelessness, addiction, and madness without training, and a mass-shooting survivor and her mother struggling with her trauma, pain, rage, and the need to tell anyone her story.

As I read these stories and more, I started to notice patterns: the powerful and brief lede, meaty nut graf, small details—mantras people lived by, revealing road signs they passed or hung in their houses, dialogue not between writer and subject but the people he embedded himself with.

How? I asked. I searched for interviews. Saslow has spoken openly about his process:

• Pre-research—weeks of it.

• Digging into data, finding a big, vague story, and distilling it down to a specific place.

• Initial interviews—handfuls of them, searching for the context, knowledge, information, and someone to feature.

• Building trust: “What I’m saying to people is not just, “Hey, I want to interview you about your work.” Instead, it’s: “The best way for me to write a story about this is for me to spend time with you, and for me to be there when you’re navigating these things. Because if I can make somebody understand, in some small way, what it’s like to be in your situation, that might impact the way they think about the world.””

• Investing time and being patient: “Whether you have one day to do a story, or a week, or a month, it’s about investing as much of that time as possible into conversations and reporting, and ideally observing the people that you’re writing about. That’s where the heart of the job is.”

• Talking it out along the way with an editor.

• Writing and reading out loud and self-editing until you could almost read it all out from memory: “For me, by the time I have a sentence the way I want it, I’ve often written it 15 or 20 different times so that the pacing sounds right.”

• Staying balanced, having gratitude, and going home to your life—and then doing it all over again.

• Writing from the hidden place: What stories aren’t getting told? What situations need new examinations? Those are the important questions, he said.

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So off I go again, in search of another hidden place.

I remember when I initially finished my book, part of me thought never again. It had taken years of research, dozens of interviews with experts and survivors, a bookcase full of books for research, and hundreds more pages of studies, articles, stories.

I can already think of so much more I would have done—if I’d had time for one more interview, or ten, or twenty. Someone once told me paintings aren’t finished—they’re abandoned. Melodramatic, maybe, but I get it. My book felt finished enough, my best effort at the time, but it did have to end. It’s been abandoned, which is for the best, and then in a half year or so I’ll get to talk about it with anyone who will listen to me talk about it! So it goes.

Now that I’ve had some time for rest, reflection, and inspiration, though, the love of the work has come back as it always mysteriously, blessedly does. Never again has turned into I hope I get to do this again—and let’s go.

I’m inspired by my friends who do investigative work, holding power to account. I’m inspired by writers like Eli Saslow, who work with the utmost care for craft and humanity. I’m inspired by the individuals who have bravely shared their stories with me, and whose stories I have yet to find.

I’d like to keep working at this, in my own little corner. I can be fast—and I can take it slow. Both are important.

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Every few months, there is another think piece, sweeping feature, or primetime special circling around the same theme: estrangement. Rarely is the focus on legitimate reasons why people, usually adult children, estrange: abuse, neglect, major values differences, and rejection.

Instead, the mission of these reports seems to be to argue that estrangement is a recent trend, one fueled by an ever-expanding definition of “trauma,” and—the latest—a secret agenda of therapists to fracture families.

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Many prominent therapists and estrangement researchers such as Joshua Coleman and Karl Pillemer focus quite a bit on healing rifts, encouraging parents and children alike to expand their capacity for empathy and listen to each other, even if their memories of events greatly differ. Others—such as Whitney Goodman, Lindsay Gibson—support those frustrated with dysfunctional families or emotionally-immature parents (“support” is not the same as “encouraging estrangement”). Folks like Nedra Glover Tawwab emphasize a grounded, practical approach: determine what you want from the relationship, will/won’t tolerate, and set boundaries, find peace.

What these leading voices show is that there are people with a variety of approaches to addressing estrangement, and there’s a need for all of them. People estrange for many different reasons, and it’s a painful experience for both sides.

But when I see stories like Elizabeth Bernstein’s piece in the Wall Street Journal, titled “Are Therapists to Blame for the Rise of Adults Cutting Off Their Parents?”, I can’t help but feel like the balance of the conversation is off. Bernstein dedicates a single line to estrangement related to abuse, noting that most therapists believe it’s justified, but then shifts to hand-wringing about what’s “abusive enough.”

The article centers around one case study in which a woman cuts off her mother, regrets it, and blames her therapist for speeding her through the decision. Should therapists do this? No. Are there some bad therapists in the world? Surely! But the vast majority that I’ve spoken to throughout my career and reporting on family estrangement have said, repeatedly, that it is the client’s decision of whether or not to estrange and how much. It’s simply not the therapist’s job to make any life decisions for their client. This seems to be pretty common practice.

My question is: Why dedicate this much space to this scenario? Why is so little space spent on estrangement related to serious and widespread problems, like abuse and neglect?

When I do a quick inventory of people I’ve spoken with in my personal and professional life who are estranged, here’s what I come up with:

• Dad is committed to a traditional worldview and way of relating where he never needs to change, grow, or adjust—his daughter must (even when that means never bringing her girlfriend home for Christmas because he believes her sexuality is a sin that will send her to hell)

• Mom has assaulted her and other family members multiple times and been emotionally abusive her entire life

• Extended family uses the n-word (long-term partner is Black)

• Sibling has been physically, emotionally, or sexually abusive and family does not believe survivor or has exiled them for causing “drama”

• Parent has committed incest and other loved ones do not believe or support the victim

• Family member threatened them with a weapon

• Family member sexually abused them and their child

• Family hid multiple sexual abuse allegations to protect perpetrator

These are…just a few. Literally just the ones that pop into my head.

These cases are not nothing. They’re not rare. And the stakes are high.

For instance: Did you know that half of LGBTQ+ young people are estranged from at least one family member and one-third are not sure their family would accept them if they came out? Those who do experience rejection are eight times more likely to report attempting suicide. I have yet to see WSJ cover it (correct me if I’m wrong), but they have recently covered the pain of estrangement for dads, moms who are done being “doormats,” and estrangement related to politics.

If we actually want to understand why people are becoming estranged, a recent YouGov poll is illuminating: 24% are estranged from a sibling and 16% are estranged from a parent (why we don’t talk about sibling estrangement is yet another thing I’ll explore in the near future).

Why? They tell us! If you glance at the chart, “personality conflicts” seems like a big one, but when you examine other categories, you’ll notice some meaningful overlap.

For sibling estrangement, 29% cite lies or betrayal, 26% cite manipulative behavior, 9% cite abuse, 5% cite abandonment or neglect, and 3% cite LGBTQ+ identity. I’d broadly label these categories as falling under “mistreatment” (please tell me: where is the “my therapist told me to” category?).

With parents, the picture is pretty similar: 34% cite abuse, 34% cite manipulative behavior, 31% cite lies or betrayal, 29% cite abandonment or neglect, and 6% cite LGBTQ+ identity. Again, I’d say these broadly fall into the “mistreatment” category.

Conflict is also a large category, one where a therapist could lead a client astray if the emphasis is on distancing over potentially improving communication and conflict negotiation skills. But many other reasons cited are more serious than that and require a different approach, one that often involves self-protection on one end and accountability on the other.

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Where are my people who are estranging just because of their therapist? I know none. Haven’t met one.

The stories above, to me, are important. They are real people carrying real grief over the family members they wish they could have and the family they ended up with. Sometimes, the problem is not just a matter of the estranged family member’s sensitivity, Tiktok therapyspeak, or nefarious therapeutic tactics. The problem is their family member. The problem is being mistreated.

It is easy to wave away estrangement as a trend and blame the internet, but LGBTQ+ elders will tell you that being kicked out of your house and relying on chosen family is nothing new. The same is true for victims of incest, whose stories we almost never tell. The hardest task is the most important one: to talk about the reality that the most significant harm comes from within the family, not from outside it.

Is “abuse creep” happening? Is “trauma” being watered down? I’m down to have that debate. I think it’s a worthwhile one. But the estrangement stories I’ve repeatedly heard are not about stretching definitions to expand what counts as “harm.” If anything, I’ve witnessed the opposite: victims of mistreatment will downplay their family member’s harm as long as possible, because it means they get to still have a relationship with them. Often, they’re desperate to hold onto the “good parts” or the surface-level ideal of happy holidays, even if it requires cutting off a part of themselves or risking more mistreatment to go home.

The same is true for those who have been psychologically abused, treated as property by their parents, or expected to love a family member whose only way of relating to them is “I love you if you let me dominate and control you,” or, put another way, “I only love the surface-level version of you, not who you really are. Keep those unwanted parts hidden, never challenge me to stop hurting you, and we’re good.”

The pressure is always on the estranged: Why can’t you just come home? Why are you disrupting the holidays? We almost never focus on asking the person who’s caused harm to stop or reflect on their own behavior. There’s an obvious reason why: It’s harder.

I know that I am not the only one hearing these stories, but they’re rarely reported on.

The most common outcome of being accused of abuse or neglect is to claim it didn’t happen or minimize what happened. Sadly, many people who write about estrangement are doing the same thing: erasing these stories, avoiding them, or underplaying them, quickly shifting the focus to the latest flavor of estrangement apologia.

If many people are becoming estranged from family due to abuse, neglect, values differences, or rejection, there’s no easy answer. There’s only a disconnect, a bridge that cannot be crossed, an impasse. All that’s there, really, is a bottomless well of grief, grief that is unfathomable if you have not experienced it—and if you have. It never goes away.

No one would wish for it, or choose it on a whim.

We’re not talking about these reasons for estrangement because facing them head-on would require calling out family members who are abusive, violent, neglectful, immoral, and irresponsible in the way they treat those they claim to love.

Everyone involved—the family unit, friends of the family—would have to acknowledge what the victim has told them, what they witnessed, or what they suspect could be true.

It is far easier to wonder why ___ doesn’t respect their father, makes their mother cry, wants nothing to do with their brother, or avoids their uncle, aunt, cousin, or grandparent. It’s easier to pressure them to just come back, to stop it with all the nonsense, to prioritize getting along for the sake of the family. When someone you know has caused harm, it’s easier to point out how easy they are to get along with, how they’ve never hurt you, to allow them to gloss over a story that sounds “iffy” to you, than to consider they could have a darker side they have not shown you, than to ask some hard follow-up questions.

Blaming the therapist is about the easiest move you could make, and it shuts down any hope for self-reflection on the part of the person who has, for some reason, been kicked out of their loved one’s life.

Care, accountability, repair, forgiveness, reconciliation, justice, truth, family, love. These are some of our highest values and ideals. I’d really like to talk about them more, for us to challenge each other to figure out how to live up to them. Can we talk about that?

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Seeing the book now listed on Penguin Random House’s website is making it feel all the more real. 2027 can’t come soon enough.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking about the question of why abusers abuse—or, put another way, why people hurt those they claim to love. It’s a question that naturally arises when you’ve been hurt by someone, and one I’ve found myself looping back to for years.

As a child being abused by my brother, I wondered, “Why can’t I make him stop?” As an adult being abused by my boyfriend, I asked: “How can I help him?” The focus was on myself, my behavior, my guilt and shame. But the longer I’ve been in the field of domestic and sexual violence, the more the question of perpetrators’ behavior has come up.

Harm is widespread. Shelters are drastically underfunded. An untold number of victims want to escape—but can’t. Few victims ever experience anything even slightly resembling justice (and those who go through the traditional justice system are typically retraumatized by it).

How much focus and resources, then, should go to those who are abusing and stopping their violence? Can that kind of intervention even help? And what’s the root cause to address, exactly? It makes sense, when you see just how gigantic the problem is, to wonder if you can’t stop it where it starts.

Of all people, it was my hairstylist who brought the same-old question back up for me.

“Why do you think they do it?”

It was my first time since the end of COVID that I’d treated myself to a haircut and highlights, and we had four hours to kill. You get to talking. She gradually revealed her history, and I mine.

We had so much overlap: she’d studied criminology and worked with abused children as well as adult sex offenders. Both of us had considered going into social work but decided against it because our hearts couldn’t take it.

I told her about my book on sibling abuse I’d just finished—and my hope that addressing harm in sibling relationships could be yet another entry point for early intervention and prevention, to help kids and their families before patterns of behavior become a way of being in the world.

I told her, from my point of view, there were the more extreme cases where a young person was causing harm in multiple directions, including harming siblings, peers, parents, and animals, and they continued to escalate into criminal behavior in adulthood. Those were pretty rare (only coming up in a handful of interviews out of about 100).

Then there were many more cases where the abuse trickled down—from parents, other adults, older siblings. And finally, there were cases you just couldn’t make sense of. There was no clear “why.” It just happened. Woven through all of them, there were numerous risk factors (which I examine in-depth in the book).

The cycle of abuse is part of the story.

We both agreed that the cycle of abuse is part of the story, but both of us had also been victims and had made the conscious choice not to hurt others.

A few days later, I stumbled upon the Peabody Award-winning documentary Behind the Rage by filmmaker and activist Deeyah Khan (you can watch it for free in full on Youtube). Khan was asking the same question and went right to the source by interviewing abusers themselves and the people who try to help them stop.

Obviously, it’s a hard watch, but a pretty illuminating one.

Dorothy Halley, who runs the Family Peace Initiative in Kansas with her husband Steve, started providing batters prevention programs after she saw the seventh victim of the same man come in within a five-year timeframe.

Initially, she saw the men “faking” their way through classes and began to shift her focus to helping them access their trauma and humanizing them through connection. Very traumatic childhoods were common, she said.

Kenneth, for example, killed his father when he was 5 in defense of his mother—and was physically and sexually abused in foster care. He went on to be abusive in both of his marriages.

Dorothy had noticed the same patterns I found in my research: a small group were truly “sadistic” and enjoyed causing pain. Others had a significant trauma history, struggled with feeling inferior, and experienced terror and rage related to being left by their partner. Many others believed they had the “privilege and right” to hurt their partner.

Male entitlement and control were a consistent throughline in the men’s stories.

If domestic and sexual violence were simply caused by cycles of abuse, there would be a hell of a lot more girls and women causing harm.

We know that’s not the picture: the vast majority of violence is perpetrated by men and boys. Most victims stop the cycle because they don’t want to hurt others the way they themselves were hurt.

Feminist activists and domestic and sexual violence experts have long pointed to the core of interpersonal violence, especially gender-based violence, as the desire for power and control over another person. To dominate them. To get what you want.

Shawn said he was abusive 85% of the time in his relationships and proceeded to describe a long list of violent acts. He described himself as feeling “superior,” like “I just did some type of drug,” like “I was the man. I’m in my house, so nobody’s gonna tell me anything.”

Daniel, a man who killed his partner and served nearly 30 years for murder, was one of the very few men who dug deeply into his own psychology and background, reflecting on a difficult childhood, drug use, obsession, rage, and self-hatred. He said his partner became a “scapegoat” for feelings he was trying to run from. But he, too, felt entitled to control her.

“I remember her saying that she feel like she was walking on eggshells…I didn’t care. I didn’t care. It made me feel like, Oh, yeah, this is what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to instill fear in her because it’s a controlling mechanism,” he said.

Charles, on his violence in a dozen or so relationships: “It was justified, it was corrective actions, it was just trying to get some compliance.” It was the way he was “programmed,” he said.

Marshel, who’d attacked his wife multiple times, said he was addicted to “dominance.” Why did he do it, even though he knew it was wrong? His answer was simple: “I did it because I could. She was weaker than me.”

Abusers abuse because they can.

What I’ve learned from my own experience is that there are many explanations you can come up with—he was abused himself, he had to learn it from somewhere. We often search for explanations. We want to understand. We want to stop it. We want to solve it.

Women often do the hard work of tolerating, managing, and accommodating the violence of men and boys as well as other women and girls as if it’s the price you must pay for family. All victims do.

Dr. David Adams, co-founder and co-director of EMERGE: Abuser Education Program, whose father was abusive, said that out of the 51 men who had killed their partners he interviewed, only 1 took responsibility for the killing. The rest blamed the victim.

Dr. Sara Brammer, one of the directors of Synergy in Missouri, a shelter for women and children, said the need far outweighed the funding for services. In one year, 1,600 people were turned away.

As she pointed out, there are more animal shelters than there are for domestic violence survivors and their families—and there’s a greater consequence in the United States for killing a bald eagle than there is for assaulting your wife.

As one abuser named Josh shared, “I have always known it’s wrong. I just didn’t care.” Neither did the courts. His first domestic violence case: probation. Second: probation. Third: 90 days in jail. Fourth, an incident that could have killed his partner: just 3 years in prison.

Male violence and dominance are woven into our culture, consistently rewarded, and rarely punished. We don’t give women and children the resources and support they need to stay safe, get out, recover, and rebuild.

We see men get away with it, over and over again, often for years if not decades. We’ve seen it with Andrew Tate, Jeffrey Epstein, P. Diddy, R. Kelly, fill in the blank—there are always more.

So why does he do it? Because he can.

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I say “we” because that’s how it feels. So many people helped me get here—contributing their stories and expertise, reminding me to take breaks and touch grass via group text, listening to me talk about sibling abuse for the gazillionth time. It’s that validation and support—over years of struggle!—that’s made this project possible.

If you’re in my close circle, you’ve already heard a bit about what I’m up to (ha), but now that the Publishers Marketplace announcement is here, it feels really real.

So thank you. 🥹

Today, I wanted to share a quick update. My manuscript is in, we’ve undergone edits, and we’re onto next steps. The expected pub date for THE TIES THAT HARM is in early 2027.

To celebrate this milestone, I wanted to write a little reflection (which, on-brand-for-me, became quite long) about the book-writing process: How do you write a nonfiction book? How do you query an agent? How do you pitch it to publishers? And how do you get a book deal? The route can be pretty twisted—very slow, and then very fast. Let me take you on a journey…

On April 23, 2025, my now-publisher made an offer around 7:30 pm. My agent and I talked through next steps, and an hour later, it was settled. I walked into the living room, shared the news with my husband, and burst out sobbing. I had been thinking about this book, this book built out of pain and confusion and the desire for healing and truth in the face of an unnamed trauma, this book I had written something like four times from the age of 16 to 32, and now, finally, someone wanted it.

I want to share my path here because just one more example of how it got done could help another writer looking for a roadmap feel a bit more supported. We don’t talk enough about the journey from years and years of writing alone and taking care of your little book baby you can’t help but believe in (at least on good days) to querying, getting an agent, editing the proposal, sending it out to publishers, and—dream scenario—getting a deal.

Here’s my story, plus some publishing advice (skip ahead to the highlights and bullets for key takeaways and resources).

Portrait of the artist as a young reader

I read constantly growing up. Early in elementary school, I learned about the Holocaust in the GAP program. I remember one day, our instructor pulled us out of class and took us into a room where the tables were covered with black and white Holocaust photos. Walking silently from photo to photo, I became obsessed. I needed to learn more, and as soon as possible. The historical fiction section in the library became my home. I read every book I could find on the Holocaust. A fire had been lit.

After I read Anne Frank’s diary, I started trying to keep my own. It took a while—writing off and on for years—to finally make journaling a habit. In middle school and high school, it shifted into a compulsion. I’d get home, lock myself in my room, sit down at my desk, and write about depression and fear and my chaotic older brother.

Starting with Ms. Abee in sixth grade, my English teachers took me under their wing. Ms. Abee recommended I read The Scarlet Letter for our big book report project, so I did. She put my essays up on the projector as examples for other classmates. I glowed. Sophomore year, Ms. Smith did the same. The other student whose essays were pulled as examples was Thomas, one of my best friends, and we dreamed about being writers together, trespassing to journal in open fields, perusing the magazines in Border’s (RIP).

My junior year, I entered the Scholastic Arts & Writing Awards, and although my creative writing didn’t place—which made me feel sad and rejected—I did get a national award for a persuasive essay against censorship.

My parents brought my little sister and me from Tennessee to New York City for the awards ceremony at Carnegie Hall, a big deal for people who only traveled for semi-annual beach vacations. It felt important. I was high with joy and potential, gazing up at the first skyscrapers I’d ever seen in the busiest, biggest, most alive city I’d ever been. I felt worth something as I read Sylvia Plath’s name on a line of banners displaying past winners. I quickly walked on and off stage when my name was called and did something I wouldn’t normally do: I flirted with a boy, an artist, in front of me.

Soon after, UNC-Chapel Hill’s writing program sent me a letter encouraging me to apply for a creative writing scholarship. The application was 50 pages of writing. I sped through a would-be novel called A Splendid Invisiblity (yes, it was really called that 😬), and proudly showed my favorite English teacher it all printed out after my high school sweetheart pressured me to be proud.

Like my close friends, I saw an Ivy League education as my escape. I didn’t get into any of my dream schools, and Chapel Hill waitlisted me after inspiring me to apply for that damn scholarship, but my backup, College of Charleston, was six hours from home, and I wanted to get away. Although I didn’t have the words for it yet, I understood that I needed to leave my childhood home in order to break free.

An education

At Charleston, I took creative writing classes with Bret Lott and Emily Rosko, switching from poetry to fiction and finally creative nonfiction. Not long into sophomore year, I wrote a book in a month, signed up for overtime hours, and tacked on a second part-time job. I felt like I was working on a master theory of the universe, stopped sleeping, and quickly spun out of control. Looking back, I now understand it was my first major depressive and hypomanic episode.

Lott helped me get a personal essay about Italy published in College of Charleston Magazine. I presented at English Day on Madness and Creativity about the Romantic Era. And after an intro to philosophy class and one world religions class, I became obsessed with both, but ultimately got a degree in what I was still focused on—English and creative writing. Restless and with just enough AP credits to get away with it, I graduated a year early.

I applied for a Fulbright to study Buddhism in Thailand and teach poetry and got berated at the review panel for pitching something so aimless and unmarketable. I got waitlisted, then dropped.

Broke, I had to move back home. I did freelancing for pennies on oDesk (now Upwork) and felt dried up, like my degree was worth nothing. Teaching ESL seemed like the next opportunity to get away and make a little money. I applied for a job in South Korea but didn’t pass the initial screening because I was on antidepressants. I applied for another gig in a small town in Poland and got it.

I fell in love with Poland and wrote another book (none of these “books,” I knew, were publisher-ready). I loved teaching ESL—the cultural exchange, friendship, and conversation with high school and adult students, the simplicity of the lesson planning for kids, no take-home work. I tried to get a job in Spain after my year was up, but they wanted to pay me under the table, and I wasn’t willing to take that risk. I returned home, got a community college tutoring job, and applied for grad school.

I wanted to apply for a PhD in religious studies, but my closest mentor in undergrad had fallen ill and couldn’t write a recommendation. I also worried about the financial viability of a degree in religion and philosophy, so I decided to apply for an MFA in creative nonfiction instead. I vividly remember my mouse hovering over the application button for UNC-Wilmington. Was I really going to pay $60 just to get rejected? I almost didn’t do it, because $60 felt like too much. It was a big investment for me at the time.

Months later, UNCW was the only school that accepted me, with a graduate teaching assistantship.

Tuition was waived year one, second and third years I believe I made a $13,000 stipend (something around there). I don’t know why I thought I could live on that and freelancing, or how I did. I could hardly afford half of a one-bedroom apartment and started going into credit card debt. My boyfriend at the time—from a hyperwealthy family—literally lived on his mother’s credit card. Our relationship was not equitable, and by the time I got to Wilmington, it was clearly abusive.

I remember I fantasized about coconut shampoo like the kind my aunt had at her house, little luxuries. Because of the abuse, I developed severe anxiety and struggled to leave the house for anything but work or groceries without a black lab we adopted.

I worked so much I hardly had time to write or consider leaving. Didn’t have enough money anyway. During the MFA, I wrote the least while trying to afford the program with minimal debt.

My first reading, my boyfriend got up on stage and cussed out the entire room. I was so humiliated it felt like ego death. Not long after that, I found myself on the other end of a locked door as he tried to kick it off its hinges to get in. Not long after that, one of my few acquaintances offered a spare bedroom for something like $500, a blessing I could afford. Finally, I got out.

My Holocaust Narratives professor, Katie Peel, recommended me for a graduate assistantship in the English department to help Mark Boren, another professor, create a database on the history of student protest. He encouraged what quickly became a hyperfixation on Serbia, Otpor!, and their support of movements for democracy around the world. He gave me an extension into summer to make a little more money.

I became obsessed with power and resistance (this is a story of many obsessions). Boren mirrored my enthusiasm and encouraged me to write my first oped for the News & Observer on the absurd disparity between graduate teaching assistants’ poverty and debt and the president’s salary, mansion, and perks. I reached out to CANVAS, Otpor’s legacy organization, and considered moving to Serbia, but I met someone who made me want to stay before I could take off again.

Half a year later, my acquaintance’s boyfriend became abusive and ultimately targeted both of us. This was the most extreme domestic violence I’d ever experienced. I moved to the beach 30 minutes away just to feel safe.

In the midst of all this chaos—two back-to-back moves due to domestic violence—my thesis was so ragged I worried I wouldn’t get my MFA. My advisor, David Gessner, was gently supportive. Another, Clyde Edgerton, said it was ready to send out (a kindness). Another, who shall not be named, railed at me for most of the defense, covered her copy in red ink, and suggested that I did not know how to write about the topic we were both drawn to.

I hate to say that the experience left its mark, but I also want to be honest because the way our mentors treat us matters. I did not revisit my thesis for about five years after that.

Into the real world

Out of the MFA, I made very little money freelancing. My first gig was $25 blog posts for clients like flooring and home organization companies. I also got another community college tutoring gig. I can’t even begin to list the many terrible writing gigs I ran through. One of the worst, I remember, was focused on male enhancement supplements (welp).

I had this strong feeling that I was too good for this work. I didn’t have any reason to believe that, actually—I belonged in the trenches like any beginner—but I just felt like I deserved better. Ira Glass speaks to this well: the gap between taste and ability. I wanted to write about other things, important things. I wanted to get back to New York City but assumed I couldn’t afford it. At the very least, for a little dignity, I needed money I could live on. I often cried over credit card bills as the debt would not stop piling up.

The breakthrough came when I saw a job post on Binders (a group for women writers on Facebook). A journalist with a decade of experience was offering an internship, $10/hour. I applied immediately. Soon after, she hired me. She taught me everything—how to email sources, find sources, structure an article, quote, paraphrase, research, cite, pre-research, pitch, ask for more $$$ (“Always ask for more money!” she chanted). Then she hired me as her assistant, with a raise. Eventually, she gave me two editors to pitch, and they accepted me. Other editors began to accept pitches on spec. The clips slowly built up.

Since leaving an abuser and losing a dear friend to another, I’d always wanted to write about domestic violence. After I read Rachel Louise Snyder’s No Visible Bruises, I saw my path. I dedicated my career to it.

My first print story was on supporting domestic violence survivors.

After a handful of low-income years, I was in inescapable debt. When my grandmother broke her hip and back, my then-fiance and I moved in to take care of her. During COVID, I made about $45,000, then $60,000, full-time freelancing. I wrote about anything anyone would pay me for. I tried to carve out beats in domestic violence, mental health, and trauma, but I was constantly battling burnout.

In late December, I got a surge of energy, stopped sleeping, got a ton of amazing ideas, called up all my friends to share them, and thought I could write a book in a week. I pitched major outlets and got in. By June, I had to take the whole month off. What I didn’t know then—or really, wasn’t ready to accept yet—was that these brief blips of bliss followed by long depressions were hypomanic episodes.

I got out of debt after a year, but caregiving for my slowly dying grandmother in a rural area, overwork, and the fall of Roe drove me into the deepest depression of my life.

My husband and I moved back to North Carolina for a senior health writer opportunity with a startup. I did not like the culture, but they offered around $78K for easy SEO articles and I was burned out, so I could not say no. We were able to buy a new mattress, bed frame, couch, have some emergency savings, but the depression got far worse. In my early 30s, I was finally diagnosed with bipolar II disorder, and—at last—found medication that worked.

The newfound joy and clarity allowed me to quit my soul-killing job and get a part-time job tutoring at a community college (again). The pay was surprisingly pretty good ($41/hour), and I realized I could comfortably and happily live on less. I freelanced part-time and wrote for a domestic violence nonprofit part-time (another Binders gig).

The medication gave my life a level of stability I did not understand until I saw the results months later. While I was always creative, hard-working, and fixated on the same topic I’d been writing about since 16, now I could outline a book, set monthly goals, schedule writing sessions, and finish a book. I did so according to my own schedule, in one year.

My husband and I were on the lower end of middle class by then, living paycheck to paycheck. I’d saved up some money from the corporate job, but I still had this constant fear of not being able to make rent. In a desperate bid at financial stability, I decided to apply for a Masters in social work (a choice I’ve since learned doesn’t make sense).

Agent shopping + going on submission

In the meantime, I wrote a query letter (thanks, Jane Friedman). And a book proposal (Jane Friedman, everybody!). Here is my very quick guide to the proposal, what I call the best worst part.

I ultimately queried dozens of agents, searching through listings on Manuscript Wishlist, and later, paying for a one-month subscription to Publishers Marketplace to look for dealmakers with their search tool. I got a request for 50 pages from a dream agent, then 100 pages, then a form letter rejection to which I said, No notes?! About ten manuscript/proposal requests from others followed.

I got into the social work program. Toured the campus. Did all the signups. I tried to be positive, but it sort of felt like giving up.

One agent asked for a call after reading the query letter and one chapter. We clicked. She was a major dealmaker. Against logic—because I should have thoroughly considered all options, right?—I canceled all other agent calls and went with her a few days later. (Reader, it was the right decision).

With one week left to commit, I deferred the social work program. I wanted to write the damn book. School would get in the way. I knew with this agent I had a chance. I gave it my all. It was, I told myself, the better investment.

One major problem: My book proposal did not match my query; I had promised sweeping creative nonfiction and delivered a memoir with 5% research. My agent encouraged me to seek an agent for a memoir, if I’d like, or write the bigger book with her. Another agent was, indeed, interested—but only if it was memoir. I decided to try to live up to my own vision. That meant interviews with dozens of survivors, a few experts, and a completely reworked proposal and sample chapters.

I’m shocked and a little dismayed to say it took about eight months, but it takes time to write when you’re working full-time. We edited it. My agent and her assistant sent me a pitch letter and list of editors/pubs. I sent potential titles. They suggested a better one. We sent it out on a Wednesday in April.

A few days later, we got a call request. Then another. And then another.

The next week, we had calls Monday, Tuesday, and Friday. Friday editor asked to shift to Monday, a good sign. We agreed. Monday happened to be the one day I had off from the tutoring center.

The next day, we got the offer.

And…that was it. We were on to the next step. ~The fun part.~

Going on submission (a.k.a. pitching publishers) was the single most anxiety-inducing, terrifying, exciting experience of my life.

No one…had told me this. No one had really walked me through the proposal or querying—the best guide I had was Jane Friedman. And no one had talked to me about going “on sub” as they put it. I wish I’d any idea how much of an emotional upheaval it could be.

I cried for hours the day we went on submission (Don’t know why! Was just emotional and terrified!). When we met, I fell in love with editors’ stories, how they connected with mine, and their editorial visions. When we made the book deal, my heart exploded.

Going on submission was one hundred thousand times harder than querying. Most nights, I couldn’t sleep or only sunk into this shallow semi-sleep, my brain playing book talk and trying to predict the future.

It was a unique hell. And, of course, you also know you’re blessed, and you worry about complaining to your friends who desperately want to be in your shoes, but you also desperately need people to talk to.

If you are here or will be soon, join On Submission on Facebook, where you can post anonymously. It helps.

Looking back, I can think of a few things I’d tell anyone who wants to do this.

What worked for me and what I learned:

• Weave writing and reading into the margins of your life. I wrote in my phone when I woke up with ideas, wrote in the bath after work, wrote weekends, wrote at work when I could get away with it. I tracked reading in an Excel sheet and used that reading as fuel for writing. Nothing—nothing—was an excuse not to write.

• Pay your bills in whatever way preserves your ability to write. I learned that it was best for me to live on as little as possible to pursue the bigger goal. It was risky, and financial stress was my biggest stress, but it was worth the time I had to write. As much as I dreamed of being a full-time journalist, doing quite a bit of content writing and tutoring at a community college—a lighter lift plus a social outlet—helped preserve brain power for projects I cared more about.

• Never stop pitching.

• Always ask for more money.

• Read your idols and copy their roadmap. Follow them. Read their bios. Try to do what they did, as much as you can. Hell, reach out to them. Many will respond. Some could become friends and mentors.

• Build a beat. Set up Google Alerts for what you want to write about. Read all the books to learn the history you don’t know yet but need to know. See yourself as a part of a community and conversation, and strive to become an expert so you can contribute. Think of this as a yearslong, never-ending project—an awesome one!

• Kick the door open and join online support communities to network. LinkedIn, Binders, and Twitter gave me opportunities I never would have gotten otherwise. I didn’t realize until I wrote this what a major role Binders played in my life, and I’m forever grateful. (Also true: for every acceptance, there were far more rejections).

• Use Publisher’s Marketplace to search for agents.

• Query a lot and fast. Rip off the band-aid.

• Follow your gut. Choose an agent you trust who deeply understands your decisions and pushes you to be better.

• Celebrate every step. It’s a long haul.

• Be prepared for your mental health to be shattered on submission. Do everything you can to support it. For me, that looked like heavy rap, heavy climbing and lifting workouts, long hikes with a friend, distractions, touching grass, dinners and group chats with friends. A husband who insisted I go to bed. Use your full toolkit. You will need it.

• If it dies on submission, mourn and then write the next book. See FB’s On Submission and Sub Stories for more insight. You’re far from alone. Sometimes it takes two, three, eight books. The only difference between authors who find success and those who do not are the authors who eventually find success never gave up (Nina de Gramont said something like that, and I think she was right!).

Looking back, there were many times I could have given up, so many rejections over the years. The most important work usually pays the least. Issues with trauma and mental health complicated my journey at times, but I thought they were important to include in this story, to show some bumps on the road and the importance of personal and professional support. Writing about it, shaping it into art and service, also helped.

If you like to write, if writing is what you do, you just keep doing it. You know this already. It is not a choice or a hobby. It is just what you do because you are a writer.

If you have a story to tell, tell it. Think of someone out there who is just waiting for you to write the book, think about your past self who needed it.

That’s it. Just keep going.

Recently, I spoke with family estrangement experts for research into sibling abuse, family dynamics, and the difficult decision many survivors make to distance themselves from their sibling as well as parents and other family members. It’s a decision that is not made lightly. Rather, it’s the end result of years if not decades of struggling to make things work with difficult family members, often family members who deny that the abuse happened, minimize its impact, or even blame the victim.

On the cusp of Thanksgiving, it’s on my mind thanks to a glaring editorial in the New York Times: “Life Is Too Short to Fight With Your Family” (alt title: “A Simple Way to Avoid Holiday Family Drama”). The authors, Mel Robbins (“Let Them” self-help guru) and family estrangement researcher Dr. Karl Pillemer, tell the typical story: Family estrangement happens due to disagreements about values and politics, but you should ignore your crazy father’s tirades in the name of family unity and enjoying the good he brings to the table. Life is too short! They suggest treating your family member like a “friend” and going to a “bingo parlor” or “weaving workshop” together.

This take could not be more divorced from our current political and personal reality, and that’s reflected in the comments. Almost all of them center around one key theme: abuse.

Here are some excerpts from the top reader picks:

I respectfully disagree. There may be people in your life who emotionally and/or physically abuse you. It took me well into middle age and a lot of therapy to realize I did not have to take it anymore because of some fantasy about family and blood ties. I am so much happier now, and it’s been years and years.

One of the best life decisions I ever made was the decision to walk away from horrific family members.

This article misses the mark. At no point does it acknowledge that many of us who are estranged have done the hard work of trying to repair a relationship and realized with intention that distance was hard but better, and also that we are not sad and alone at the holidays - we are with people who are kind to us and love us as we are; those people happen to not be related to us is all.

This article is insulting to those who have recognized that the tenacity of family ties allows for sustained abuse and have decided to tap out to salvage their own sanity. I’ve broken the cycle for my own children and I’m proud of that.

Estrangement isn’t something that happens because you had nothing better to do on a random Tuesday. Estrangement (in my case, at least) came after years and years of trying to have a functioning relationship with someone who abused me, and her enablers. Articles like this one show those of us who have made the incredibly difficult choice to estrange that the abuser often gets a pass, while the one who has challenged the status quo is told to ‘stop holding a grudge’. The victim is so often pushed aside and labelled “difficult” and told again and again that ‘life is short, forgive and forget!’, but I ask, how can you forgive and forget decades of trauma and ridicule and abuse just so you can say ‘pass the potatoes’ in order to make others feel comfortable?

Stop trying to make people feel guilty for choosing to take care of themselves. No one chooses estrangement because it’s fun. They choose it because it’s necessary.

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Despite many, many, many voices chanting the same story, far too often, the problem of abuse is missing from conversations around family estrangement.

The op-ed cites a “family relationships crisis” but not once does it mention abuse. Read any article on family estrangement from the past ten years. Very few of them mention the word. One of the most expansive articles on the topic in the New Yorker, which spanned over 6,000 words, gave it about a paragraph:

Some critics think the movement has gone too far. Do we owe our parents more than we owe romantic partners? Few would argue that one should continue a relationship with a parent when it involves physical or sexual abuse. And yet many estrangements happen for other reasons, including emotional abuse or toxic behavior—more difficult terms to define—or differences in world view. It can sometimes be unpleasant, even horrible, to hang out with your parents. And yet severing ties can also cause harm. What is lost when we render our families optional? Isn’t part of the point of your relationship with your mom that, even if she aggravates you, you still pick up the phone?

This excerpt reflects an assertion that I believe sits at the center of the generational divide on what makes estrangement legitimate versus not. If you’re estranged due to abuse, it must be bad enough. It must be physical or sexual. Emotional abuse? An invention of the younger generation. Much harder to define. Invisible. The definition has expanded so just about anything is emotionally abusive, they chant.

But this is a lie.

When I read through scores of stories about family estrangement from the perspective of the estranged, what I find are genuine complaints about the most insidious form of abuse. Emotional abuse is real, and it’s just as harmful, if not more harmful, than physical or sexual abuse. It is a legitimate reason for estrangement, hard stop. Does Tiktok take things too far? Sometimes, surely. But I think far more often people understand exactly what emotional abuse is and why it’s harmful, because it’s caused them immense pain for years.

Why emotional abuse is often at the core of family estrangement and why it matters

One of the very few studies on sibling estrangement found that the most common description for a sibling by the person who had chosen to estrange themselves from them was abusive. Other descriptions were arguably synonyms — aggressive, bullying, controlling, manipulative.

Contrary to what the critics say, emotional abuse is well understood. Here’s a simple explainer if you need a clear definition. DCS can define it for you. Here’s more info from Prevent Child Abuse America, plus a call for an “urgent need for a paradigm shift to take it seriously from researchers and leading child protection organizations, plus a scientific article on why it’s just as harmful if not more than other forms of abuse. That took about a minute of Googling. So, is emotional abuse really hard to define? No. Is it hard to learn about? Nope! It simply challenges outdated perspectives about abuse, and that’s scary for people who have been emotionally abusive and do not want to face their own shame, take accountability, or change their behavior.

Another scary fact: Families contain abusive people who go on to abuse other people. Imagine if we listened to their family members rather than dismissing them. Imagine if we listened to children.

Research repeatedly shows that emotional abuse and emotional neglect are linked to the most negative health outcomes for adults (see this 20-year study). It’s a truism in domestic violence survivor spaces: The emotional abuse hurt more and did more lasting damage than the physical abuse. Bruises heal. The voice of an abuser can haunt for years.

Shifting the focus back to parents and family members, the impact is the same if not worse because emotional abuse starts in childhood and, for many, is the only thing children know until they begin to venture outside the family home. By then, however, it’s a blueprint for relationships. The lesson learned is that love and harm can and do coexist. Love hurts.

Here’s a simple way to think about the toll of emotional abuse, as a developmental pediatrics expert and neuroscientist explained it to me:

Would you rather have a parent who cannot afford to buy you a winter coat but loves you, or would you rather have a parent who can buy you all the things in the world but dismisses your feelings, tells you your reality is not real, and refuses to comfort you when you are sad?

The answer is pretty clear. Just about everyone would choose love over a coat.

While more research is needed, my belief based on interviews, surveys, and numerous case studies is that emotional abuse is often the reason for family estrangement and it should not be downplayed compared to other forms of abuse. It should be taken far more seriously.

The bare minimum we ask from parents, aside from material needs like safety and shelter, is that they nurture our feelings and help soothe us when we’re sad or afraid—in fact, emotional nurturance is key for childhood development, according to the CDC.

Estranging yourself from a parent and/or sibling who cannot acknowledge your feelings, respond to them with care, and treat you with self-respect is not a crazy, unhealthy, terrible, or selfish thing to do. It’s an act of self-preservation in the face of spiritual and emotional annihilation. In many cases, that’s what family members are, sadly, asking us to do: erase yourself for me. Deny your feelings and your reality for me. Keep the peace and keep us all warm by setting yourself on fire. And you better keep it burning.

The simple truth is, love and abuse cannot coexist.

To paraphrase bell hooks, abuse is the opposite of love. Young people are choosing their own families because their families of origin insist that love and abuse must coexist, that they must accept the bad for the good, but we know better than to accept this old lie. Our health and our well-being matter, so we care for ourselves, we seek love elsewhere, and we find that we deserve it after all. The core lie we grew up with—that we must tolerate abuse—is not true in other relationships. We find that we’re easy to love, we find that love comes with respect, and in many cases, we learn that from our friends.

People hurt each other, we’re imperfect, and we can make apologies, take accountability, and repair relationships. But if a relationship is repeatedly abusive, it makes sense to break up—even when that relationship is with your family.

The authors of that ragebait op-ed call on us, those who have chosen estrangement, to treat our family members like our friends. What if they called on our family members to do the same? Their call to change is pointed in the wrong direction. It’s those that we flee from that need to learn how to love. We’ve tried to teach them. We tried so damn hard. From afar, many of us are still hoping that they could someday learn.

If you were abused by a family member and struggle to protect yourself, know that you can give yourself the care that you were denied.

What people who are estranged want to say about their experiences is so clear if we would just listen to them. The impact of abuse — and the necessity of protecting oneself — should not be understated or invisibilized in conversations around estrangement. In fact, abuse is central in many cases.

If you’re estranged from family to reduce your exposure to hurtful if not abusive behavior — such as explosive anger, screaming, hateful rants, aggression, manipulation, gaslighting, threats, self-erasure, or rejection of your identity — your choice is valid and admirable. There is nothing wrong with protecting yourself from abuse. Estrangement can be okay — and vital — for self-protection and self-preservation. It can also be temporary, change over time, or end if family members truly change.

If this is your story, know that you are not alone. Whether or not our stories are told as loudly as other narratives, they’re real.

Happy Thanksgiving. However you spend it, I hope you’re surrounded by people who truly love you and treat you with the respect, care, and nurturance you deserve and have always deserved.

Chosen family is family.🧡

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It’s Domestic Violence Awareness Month! This month often brings up mixed feelings for me, and this year is no different. Over the past 50 years, we’ve seen tremendous progress: In 1974, the first domestic violence shelters in the United States opened their doors. Ten years later, the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act passed, dedicating federal funds to support domestic violence programs. Another decade after that, in 1994, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was enshrined into law, dramatically expanding protections for victims and survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking. Since then, every reauthorization of VAWA has strengthened support for survivors, expanded services, and recognized new forms of abuse.

And yet…we’re also in a time of serious struggle (I won’t rehash all the reasons why). While I believe that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, I also understand that it does not bend on its own. This has never been clearer in our country.

In our fight against domestic and sexual violence, the past year has been deeply troubling and depressing. Funding for domestic violence organizations has been frozen or uncertain, forcing already overburdened frontline professionals to stall or cancel life-saving programs and do more with less. The very infrastructure that allows us to serve survivors has been threatened by this regressive administration.

Still, we fight. Multiple organizations have filed lawsuits to protect funding, advocates have brought about the passage of numerous federal and state laws to improve survivors’ rights, and every person doing this work—from hotline operators to legal advocates—refuses to let the progress we’ve made slip away. Thanks to these unified efforts, our movement continues to forge ahead.

History shows us that regressive backlash can be met with resistance, enduring hope, social progress, and justice.

Domestic Violence Awareness Month often feels like a month that we “acknowledge,” because domestic violence is such a serious issue that takes lives every year. Nine out of ten women are murdered by a man who is close to them. Three in four struggle to leave—or even go back, sometimes for years, because they cannot afford to leave. But I also think it’s important to celebrate—to honor the visionaries who built the first shelters (and who sheltered women in their homes before then) and the activists who continue to fight for a better, safer, and more loving world that we all deserve, to remind others who are still in the trenches, who are still fighting to survive and recover and rebuild, that things can and do get better. Survivors can find joy again (see some of the most moving stories of survivor joy I collected for SELF Magazine!).

In this spirit, I’m resharing a piece I wrote about my own journey for Shondaland, and why it was pessimism—or a grounded acceptance of my reality, at least—that ultimately set me free. This was the first time I shared my story publicly four years ago.

Domestic Violence Awareness Month provides an opportunity to acknowledge the ongoing epidemic of domestic violence, raise awareness of ways to support survivors, and celebrate our strength, resilience, and joy. I hope you’ll join me in doing that, no matter your history, by sharing the stories of survivors.

Here is one piece of my story. 💜

Many years ago, my partner made me believe I was defective for struggling to see the bright side of things. In an attempt to save our relationship, I found myself taking on an excessively optimistic perspective, which I’ve since discovered is known as “toxic positivity.” At the time, I had no idea how much danger it would put me in.

When we first met, I learned that both of us had been raised in strict, patriarchal communities. We’d both rebelled against the norm and subsequently found our own unique versions of spirituality in our 20s. I was an atheist into mindfulness meditation and Buddhist philosophy, which I’d discovered in college while battling treatment-resistant depression and severe anxiety. The central tenet of Buddhism — life is suffering — rang true to me. I also liked the idea that we were all interconnected in this suffering. This spoke to the urge I had to commit my life to fighting for social justice.

Having grown up in a place where I didn’t accept the dominant religion, I understood the dark side of belief systems.

My new boyfriend, on the other hand, was a firm believer in a pseudoscience of sorts known as the law of attraction. We’d only been dating a few weeks or so when he first introduced me to it. One evening, he switched from playing my selection of music on my laptop — an old Modest Mouse album — to a strange lecture coming from a creepy woman’s voice. He told me he knew this sounded weird, but Esther Hicks was considered a “channeler” for “Abraham,” a group of non-physical entities that spoke through her about how to manifest health, wealth, and happiness.

I felt my heart pounding and wanted to disappear. I’d grown up pretending to be Catholic in the buckle of the Bible Belt in order to ward off Southern Baptists and evangelists who wanted to “save” people like me. So many people — including some of my own family members — had insisted for years that someday I’d “come back” to the church (as if I’d ever wanted to be there). Now the guy I was falling in love with was revealing to me that he believed in what sounded like a cult — and he just assumed I wanted to hear about it.

I firmly told him that I wasn’t interested in this. I said I respected other people’s beliefs — including his — but I didn’t like having them sprung on me like that. He apologized and said he understood. After a while, I gently switched us back to Modest Mouse and the subject fell away.

Our first few dates had been so amazing. We’d exchanged our life histories and dreams, stayed up until dawn talking. I’d already told my mom and my best friend I thought he could be the one. But the closer we got, the more our worldviews clashed.

As I researched it more, I learned that the law of attraction wasn’t just some fringe belief. Oprah had popularized it by spotlighting the self-help book The Secret on her show. And a slew of celebrities seemed to endorse it or at least used the lingo. As my boyfriend explained it to me, you get what you think, so think positively and flourish, or think negatively and get the dreary existence you manifested for yourself. To me, this sounded like an oversimplified version of existentialism: Create your own destiny! But I didn’t like that it seemed to ignore the many outside factors that could block you from succeeding no matter your thoughts: poverty, illness, oppression, inequity.

The cynical side of me saw “manifesting” as an excuse for people to believe they deserved the good things that happened to them. It sounded like one of the many iterations of the same old rugged individuality, prosperity gospel, and meritocracy so many Americans were into.

Having grown up in a place where I didn’t accept the dominant religion, I understood the dark side of belief systems. After studying philosophy and religion in college, though, I also loved the fertile ground they provided for storytelling, meaning-making, community building, and explorations of intense questions and quandaries.

As I fell in love with this person and we began to plan our lives around each other, I felt the need to come to terms with his beliefs — even if I’d never share them. But I couldn’t help but worry he’d been taken by what could be a hurtful or at the very least misleading philosophy. He thought I needed to change my thinking.

When I got into a graduate program in creative writing, he decided to move to a new city with me. We were struggling to get along, but I loved him. And part of me genuinely admired his positivity and seeking soul — he truly believed each of us had endless possibilities ahead of us. We just had to attract them with the right energy.

As my mom had always told me, I’d find God when I was desperate enough, when I really needed Him, when I was down on my knees. That happened after our move. A few weeks in, our fights over what I wore to work, my partner’s paranoia and jealousy over other men (colleagues, would-be friends, even strangers on the street), and just about anything collided into my worries about what the neighbors could hear — I’d even rush to the car when he started yelling to try to contain his screaming inside. Still, I had a relentless need to figure out how to help him.

Soon, however, my partner began to turn his worldview against me. When I found out he’d cheated on me, he didn’t take responsibility for his actions. Instead, he pointed out that I’d chosen to take a trip with my father and abandoned him. It was my fault he’d strayed. I’d made it happen. When I complained about struggling to pay the bills or affording groceries on my small stipend from my scholarship, he insinuated that I could buy whatever I wanted, even a new car, if I just got more credit cards. I was supposed to have faith that someday I could pay off my debt, that the universe would show up for me with thousands of dollars and a book deal, and it was my lack of belief in myself that was holding me back.

The problem with toxic positivity and the law of attraction is that when you fail, you may be primed to believe that other variables don’t matter and that your pain doesn’t either — so you should push it down or ignore it. You could be convinced that you deserve your own suffering and mistreatment because you didn’t think or believe positively enough.

That’s very similar to how an abusive relationship works. Because of my partner’s constant put-downs, pressure, and blame, I came to believe that our relationship problems were because I “triggered” him.

During long baths, I daydreamed about possibilities, my own vision for the future: a dog, marriage, kids. I was so committed to this fantasy, a shared future I wanted so badly, that I believed I could usher us into the life I wanted by sheer optimism and force of will. All the while, my partner’s abusive language escalated into physical violence.

I told myself I could manage and hide the very worst of him if that meant I could keep the good — long Saturday mornings in his arms, romantic dinners out on the town, beach walks at sunset. I was so convinced I could “fix” him, I started recording his “episodes” and used a mantra to get through hours of fighting. “I love you; I don’t want to fight,” I chanted through tears. I really believed that all it took to survive, to make him change, to help him get better … was me. I just had to do, feel, think, and say the right things.

Because of my partner’s constant put-downs, pressure, and blame, I came to believe that our relationship problems were because I 'triggered' him.

In the midst of trying to navigate all this, life got even harder when I crashed and totaled my car. As we walked away from the crumpled mess and it started raining, I semi-jokingly shouted at the sky as I imagined Job would, asking God what else He wanted to throw at me. “You are what you eat,” my partner said to me in a low voice. The meaning: If you ask for more suffering, you deserve what you get.

I was so angry at him for suggesting that I deserved this, something as terrible and random as a car crash or whatever might come after. I felt so down, like I needed a serious change to get through this and reconnect with my partner. So, I decided to do something I never thought I’d do: I adopted a mindset of radical acceptance and optimism. I knew that this wasn’t “me,” but I was desperate to feel better, and maybe my attitude wasn’t helping. Maybe I really did need to adjust my perspective. As we walked back up to our apartment, I noted how sunlight had begun to peek out from the clouds, how the raindrops sparkled.

I began to keep a gratitude journal and tried to practice positivity moment to moment. But “trying on” outwardly good-for-me practices couldn’t solve the biggest problem I was dealing with. And in the weeks that followed, my partner’s “bad side” only got worse. One evening, while he was gone at work, I called the National Domestic Violence Hotline to try to get him help but hung up because I still didn’t see myself as a “victim.”

I’d done my best to keep our issues private for months, but they exploded into public view at my first reading during one of the largest events of the year for my graduate program. Shortly after I’d read, I thought we were in the clear. But then my partner got up onstage and began screaming. He cursed out the entire room — all of my colleagues, my employer, the few acquaintances I had — with a stream of f-yous in a hateful, embarrassing, and unprovoked rant.

I’d never been so humiliated in my life. As bar staff escorted him out, an acquaintance whisked me away and insisted I sleep on her couch. That night, I finally broke down and told her everything he’d done to me: the name-calling, demands and intimidation, other things I’d never told anyone and still don’t like to share. When I tried to explain how complicated our situation was, when I told her how I was at fault too, she was firm. “No one deserves to be treated that way,” she told me.

I broke down sobbing and let her hold me. I let myself ignore his texts and calls. And by morning, I still felt absolutely awful and dreaded going back to school on Monday. I got a pixie cut, thinking if people were going to look at me, I might as well give them something to look at. I started wearing heavy mascara and black eyeliner because it made me feel better. Oddly enough, it felt good to allow myself to feel bad. I needed to be sad, to accept just how terrible things had gotten.

Despite how much my partner had hurt and betrayed me, I was still in love with him and wanted to believe we could get through this with counseling or a batterer’s prevention program. I considered ending things off and on, but we shared an apartment, and I couldn’t afford rent on my own. I didn’t know where I would go or how I would manage on my own. In my mind, it was easier to snap back into our normal routine than to give up on us and let everyone in my life know our relationship had failed.

A month or so later, during our scariest fight, I locked my partner out of our bedroom to get away from him. As he pounded on the door, demanding to be let in, I considered calling 911. But there were no marks, I didn’t know what he could be arrested for, if anything, and I worried the police wouldn’t believe me anyway. In the morning, I called his parents and told them to come get him. We were breaking the lease.

I was heartbroken and didn’t want to leave him, but my acquaintance-turned-friend convinced me that we needed a break at the very least. She helped me move into a spare bedroom in her home. With time, I eventually began to see my ex for who he really was: a sad shell of a person, someone whom I couldn’t help and didn’t need or want to be around anymore. I stopped going back to him.

Recently, research came out that confirmed something I’d suspected about my experience but never had the words for. I didn’t understand that my partner’s worldview — the one I’d tried to adopt — was a form of toxic positivity.

As it turns out, an excessively optimistic perspective can be especially harmful and counterproductive for people in abusive relationships. According to a 2020 review of 29 studies on domestic violence published in the International Journal of Wellbeing, a “positive bias” can set you up to underestimate the severity of abuse and stay in an abusive relationship, subjecting yourself to escalating violence, just like I did.

As it turns out, an excessively optimistic perspective can be especially harmful and counterproductive for people in abusive relationships.

Sometimes, even the darlings of positive psychology — optimism, hope, and forgiveness — can be bad for you, the study says. A firm commitment to them, one that trumps reality, can stifle your ability to see and accept the growing danger inside your own home.

As a victim and survivor, I consider myself someone who is still recovering from what I went through. I’ll never tell you that surviving this person made me a better person or that there was a silver lining or gift somewhere in what really was akin to interpersonal psychological torture.

But what I can say is that I found an alternative to toxic positivity that works for me, which was recently described by Scott Barry Kaufman in a piece in The Atlantic. It’s called “tragic optimism.” The term was coined in 1949 by Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, existential-humanist psychologist, and the author of Man’s Search for Meaning. It means positivity in the face of tragedy. It’s not a demand to feel better or force yourself into a lighter perspective when times are bad. Rather, it’s a worldview that offers space to grow from suffering, to transform guilt into an opportunity for change, to see your own looming mortality as a reason to make the most of your time to try and make the world a better place.

Now, living through a pandemic, climate change, and massive suffering with rates of domestic violence on the rise, there’s never been a better time to give it a shot. In my experience, it’s much easier and more productive than toxic positivity. A few quick pointers: Don’t assume that what makes you feel better is what someone else needs. Make space for people you love to sit in hurt, especially when they’ve been seriously hurt. Consider removing trite, unhelpful, and stigmatizing phrases like “good vibes only” and “think positive” from your vocabulary. And don’t be afraid to simply empathize and listen. Phrases like the following come more naturally, and they’re more helpful, especially when you’re trying to support abuse victims and survivors: Yeah, that sucks. I hurt for you. No one deserves to be treated that way. I’m here for you. Tell me what you need. How can I best support you?

When I hit bottom, more than anything, I just needed someone to see that I was in pain, that things were very not okay, and to take that seriously. That alone — straightforward realism and empathy — helped give me the strength to believe in my own reality and see that I needed to distance myself from my abuser.

Although this might read as less triumphant or inspiring than some other stories during Domestic Violence Awareness Month, I’m really happy to be free from the pressure to “manifest” anything. I’m not going to miraculously skyrocket to success in my career or get rich with some pipe dream. I know that’s not how the world works, and it’s going to take building better, more compassionate communities to get any of us anywhere. I’m still in debt, and my current relationship takes a lot of hard work as we navigate post-traumatic stress and the misunderstandings and hang-ups that come with it.

It’s been a handful of years since I left. To be frank, healing has taken way longer than I thought it would. But I can say I’ve finally found a form of optimism that makes sense for me. And for that, I’m grateful.

I typically don’t write about “the struggle” when I’m in the midst of it. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve thought that maybe there’s some value in talking about something like vicarious trauma when you’re in the thick of it.

So, today, I want to talk to you about vicarious trauma.

It’s not uncommon for people who have survived something to decide to dedicate their lives to that cause, if not a very similar one. This was my life trajectory in a nutshell.

After I got out of an abusive relationship in my mid-20s, I made a very conscious decision to dedicate my career to covering domestic violence, specifically how to support survivors. My first print piece for Women’s Health shared how to show up for survivors during the COVID-19 pandemic, and one of my first op-eds, which appeared in USA Today, made the case for stronger legislation and training for police and advocates to do danger risk assessments after the Gabby Petito bodycam footage came out. I wrote features on economic abuse, teen dating violence, and domestic violence in healthcare workers. I told my own story.

As my career unfolded, I learned more about trauma-informed interviews, journalistic boundaries, and self-care. In the background, I also went to therapy for my own healing. After checking off the typical boxes—EMDR, talk therapy, grounding exercises, meditation, yoga, medication, et cetera—I thought I was “healed.” I thought I could handle just about anything.

And then, suddenly, I couldn’t.

It would take some time to go back and figure out just how many trauma interviews I’ve done at this point, but it’s been about 100, almost certainly more.

When I first heard about “vicarious trauma,” I thought about 911 dispatchers, CPS workers. I thought of my friend, a recently-licensed therapist whose workload—a typical one—scared me off from saying yes to the graduate program I got into for the same alternate career path just a month before I connected with my agent and decided to write a book instead. I thought I couldn’t do direct-practice social work because I could not handle that much pain and suffering. These were people who were really exposed to that, all the time. They saw it and sat with it every day. What I was doing as a writer felt meaningfully different—and it was—but that did not mean that I was untouchable.

I can vividly remember my first few experiences when I started interviewing other people about domestic violence. On the surface, I felt fine. I was an empathetic listener, but not excessively so. I asked questions, listened carefully, asked follow-ups, and avoided overly identifying with the person I was interviewing. I rarely put myself and my own experiences into the conversation unless someone specifically asked for them or it felt like a moment where being more of a human, not just a journalist, was called for, and even then, I tried to keep it brief. I did my job. The details of people’s stories, their honesty, and their pain were moving, but I tried to limit my emotional engagement with them because I had a job to do and I wanted to protect myself. Stories were a way of illustrating a problem, representing different experiences, illuminating paths to healing, and strengthening potential approaches to intervention and prevention. Put another way, these stories had a purpose. That benefited us both.

I felt like I’d built this invisible shield around myself. Even the way I presented myself in interviews was important—neutral outfit, light makeup, professional but warm. After interviews, I often went right back to work on something else or made dinner, focusing carefully on chopping vegetables and grounding myself in the present moment.

But my body had its own experience, one I couldn’t control no matter how carefully I prepared or decompressed. It was this deep trembling that happened after the call ended. It’s hard to describe. I wasn’t shaking in the way that you can hold out your hand and see it moving in the air. This was coming from my core, expanding into my arms and legs, like an internal quaking. I’d go on with my day, but all the while, sometimes for hours, my body endured the aftershocks.

A few months into these interviews, the aftershocks stopped.

About a year in, certain stories got “sticky.” A couple of other people’s memories flashed back into my mind at unexpected moments. I couldn’t “see” them, but I felt them. The imprint of what they’d told me, their silhouette. The emotional resonance. Often, horror or panic. I wanted nothing more than to not think of them, which seemed to only make them worse. My husband—a journalist who covers crime and who had spent years on a serial killer case—had read, seen, and heard things, just like I had. The type of things that make you feel…changed. But even with him, there were certain stories I didn’t want to tell him, didn’t want to burden him with. And without that outlet, without someone to witness what I’d witnessed, the burden felt even heavier.

At my 33rd birthday, it was all I wanted to talk about and all that I couldn’t talk about with friends. Lying on the beach in the hot sand, random pieces of conversation would reintroduce flashbacks and the urge to share. But I had to protect them. I couldn’t tell them these things. I felt this sense of shame, too, like somehow sharing the unshareable would expose some vulnerable and dark part of me. It wasn’t appropriate. I knew I should have been happy and relaxed, but I felt numb. Disconnected. I couldn’t tell if I was getting depressed or burned out or both. The numbness, more than anything, bothered me.

I felt like I needed to talk to someone—and probably soon.

I found a therapist who’d been trained to work with journalists experiencing vicarious trauma through the Journalist Trauma Support Network.

I still didn’t think I really needed therapy, and emphasized that to the therapist over an initial call, but she suggested there was no loss in getting some support. Her approach tended to be brief and solutions-focused, aligned with what I was looking for. I thought maybe I’d go in once a month, like a debriefing session of sorts.

I’m now about a month and a half in. I did need help, as my symptoms only escalated as the weeks went on. The sticky memories faded for the most part, but nightmares and panic attacks—some of which also struck at night—resurfaced. Once, a surge of unbearable anger. Other times, crying—which came as a sort of relief because it meant I still felt things. It was hard to breathe in the evenings, when my anxiety became crushing. What really bothered me was the physicality of my symptoms. Grounding activities I’d learned over the years didn’t do all that much. For hours, it was hard to breathe.

We’re still in that investigatory phase of therapy—the first few sessions—where you’re just trying to get to know each other, identify the problem, and what you have to work with.

I remember when I first started this project, the question I kept getting was whether or not I had someone to talk to, that or people just assumed I had a therapist. I didn’t want to think I needed one. I felt like I could white-knuckle my way through this. But to take on a project like this, to see it all the way through without letting it eat up your life, it helps to have a small, dimly lit room with a view of a mature oak tree where you can let some of it go. To find your humanity again.

I think that’s what I’m working on right now. One of the assignments I got immediately after the book deal happened was to “build a platform”—and fast. I split myself in two: two Instagrams, two Facebooks. The headshot versus the person. Going public, finally identifying as a sibling abuse survivor and as a person who talks and writes about it, something so unspeakable, was terrifying. So I didn’t allow myself to think about it. I built another wall. I think it was easier to pretend *that person*, the person with the Substack, wasn’t me—but the *platform version* of me.

Yet my story has been a piece of this project, where it all started, the whole time. It’s always been personal.

The stories that were the stickiest, I realized, struck me because they ran parallel to my own. They brought to mind a small girl who felt unseen, unsupported, unheard, unsafe. I didn’t want to think she was inside me anymore.

But the way that I had survived was exactly how I had gotten to this point. I kept thinking, “I’ll be okay when I reach the halfway point,” “I’ll be okay when I turn in the book,” “I can finally relax when this is all over.” I just had to grit my teeth until then. Push through it. Work harder. That was how I’d always felt about deadlines, how I’d pushed through the chronic stress of juggling multiple assignments and editors and publications for years. I’ll be okay when it’s over.

There was an endpoint.

One of the first things I had to start thinking about was where this habit had come from. Many journalists have some core trauma that also comes with strengths: hypervigilance makes you a fantastic listener, trying to understand an attachment figure who is unreliable or abusive gives you bottomless empathy and curiosity, surviving an unsafe home might implant in you a desire to get close to danger—and overcome it—over and over and over again.

The “I’ll be okay when___” was how I’d survived: I’ll be okay when I get into an out-of-state school. I’ll be okay when I graduate. I’ll be okay when I leave the country. I’ll be okay when I get out of here. Not now, not soon, but eventually. Eye on the horizon. Escape.

But, when you’re drowning in anxiety and the endpoint is nine months away, it begs another question: What if you could also be okay, at least a little, right now?

I don’t want to just think of myself as a set of symptoms to track (although I am tracking), or someone who is still broken because of the way I grew up. Like anyone else, I’m far more than what I’ve gone through or its ripple effects.

I think the challenge I’m up against now is another wave of healing. The challenge I’m up against is healing without stopping the trauma exposure because I have to finish this book—which starts with acknowledging my relationship to sibling abuse trauma as a survivor, as a journalist, as an advocate. I think doing so will make the book a better book because I am bringing all of myself to this.

Coming back down to earth, I’d want other journalists and people working with vicarious trauma in general to know that it’s okay to talk to someone. It’s okay when the exposure becomes too much for you, no matter how great your coping skills are. Sometimes, it’s just too much.

One of the first things my therapist told me was that nothing was unspeakable with her, and I think that space is extremely important for people with vicarious trauma to find.

Nothing is unspeakable, at least in one room. You just have to find the right person to listen. I’m still figuring out what I need, but more than anything, I think it’s just a little support—professional support—as I do the hardest thing and the best thing I’ve ever gotten to do.

I think it felt a bit cringey when people asked me about therapy because I still have lingering shame around needing or accepting help. But so much of my career has been dedicated to dispelling that stigma and shame because we all need and deserve support. This post is an exercise in normalizing these conversations and acknowledging that it was a good question all along. I was just avoiding it.

So, before anyone asks me again, Yes, I have someone to talk to. Do you?

When I first started researching what I went through (and was still going through) with my brother and family, I Googled things like “extreme sibling rivalry,” “sibling bullying,” “sibling violence,” and “sibling abuse.”

That last phrase stuck like none of the others did. “Bullying” felt too light. “Violence” didn’t capture it all. So much of it, most of it really, was psychological and emotional. I knew after three years of reporting about domestic violence and advocating for survivors that what I had experienced was abuse. To call it anything else was to minimize it in a way that felt dishonest and inappropriate.

And I was really sick of minimizing it. My family had been minimizing and ignoring it for my whole life.

At 31, I was still fighting with my mother about my brother’s behavior. I desperately wanted her to acknowledge the harm he had caused, the harm he continued to cause, and how she had been targeted by him too. But she refused to meet me there. Sometimes, there were glimmers of recognition. A moment of shared reality. But just as quickly as she met me halfway, she reverted back to denial. She often made our situation sound mutual—like a sibling spat, or like it had even been all my fault for “triggering him”—when it was far more complicated than that.

If your brother is much older and bigger than you, physically dominates you, makes you fear for your life, and calls you the worst things you could ever imagine countless times, that looks and sounds a lot like abuse. There’s a power dynamic—often victims are smaller, weaker, and even disfavored by parents. There’s ongoing trauma and chronic stress. Home is not safe. And on top of that, in many cases, there’s also a unique form of parental neglect and secondary trauma for sibling abuse survivors: the refusal from caregivers, or the inability, to keep you safe—let alone call what happened abuse.

My desire to write about sibling abuse wasn’t just an extension of a professional interest in hidden abuses.

It started with that Google search. A desperation for answers, for validation.

What I learned is that sibling abuse is the single most common form of family violence.

We have known this for decades, since the first survey of family violence in the United States. Other surveys around the world find similar results.

A child is up to five times more likely to be sexually abused by a sibling than by a parent. Sibling sexual abuse tends to last longer—often years—and reach greater extremes than other forms of child sexual abuse. Physical abuse by siblings can send kids to the hospital with broken bones. Emotional abuse creates the most long-lasting scars. Ripple effects mirror those that other domestic and sexual abuse survivors experience: anxiety, depression, PTSD, self-harm, relationship and intimacy issues, and more.

But most of it remains hidden, as the vast majority of sibling abuse happens behind closed doors and survivors are often pressured to keep it secret. Don’t air dirty laundry. Family first.

Adults have told me about being thrown down the stairs repeatedly, being beaten, cut with scissors, threatened with knives, shot at with guns. Given concussions and black eyes.

At first, when I heard phrases like “thrown down the stairs,” I thought, I can’t put that in the book. Who is going to believe it?

But then I kept hearing the story.

Some details of others’ experiences truly began to haunt me.

What makes sibling abuse different from rivalry, conflict, or harmless exploration is the pattern of behavior, the intensity, and the frequency.

The abuse often begins so early: 3, 4, 5. Kindergarten. Fourth grade. First memories, core ones, the kind that shape you as you’re becoming who you are.

Survivors told me things they hadn’t told anyone. Some still hadn’t told their children. Spouses.

And some of the worst of it was the emotional and psychological abuse. “Torture” was a word that often came up. Emotional abuse was often described as a constant, and difficult to remember, because it bleeds into everyday life.

That resonated with me. The first time I learned degrading, misogynistic slurs, it was from my brother. The next time I heard them, the same words were coming out of the mouth of my abusive boyfriend. They had a sickening familiarity to them. I remember I even said to him: “No one has ever called me that, no one besides my brother.”

I coped with my abusive boyfriend the way I’d coped with my first abuser, my brother, the way my mother taught me to. I tried not to set him off. I shrunk myself. Until—to save myself, to recover any sense of self—I had no choice but to leave.

My brother, on the other hand, was much harder to cut ties with. We shared a family, a home base, gatherings like weddings and funerals. With my wedding rapidly approaching, my mother pressured me to invite him back into my life—even when he was still actively harassing her.

This story, I’ve learned, is not mine alone. Many of us are struggling to navigate how to heal from abuse when it never really ends, how to manage complex family dynamics when you may be the only one interested in reckoning with the truth or challenging dysfunction. How to cope when, by trying to be honest and authentic, you’re branded the black sheep. Even pushed out. Or forced to estrange yourself for your own well-being.

How do you protect yourself from your sibling? How do you free yourself from the lies they told you about yourself, lies that may have burrowed so deeply into you they sound like your own voice? How do you deal when even your therapist doesn’t seem to get it?

When it all started with them.

If we took sibling abuse seriously, how many of us could begin to heal and avoid being victimized in the same way as adults? How many children could we help?

I think about the untold number of children who are still going through this. Parents who don’t know what to do. Therapists and social workers who have no training to support them. Adults who want to heal from this unnameable thing…and find next to no resources out there. Not even the simplest of words.

In interviews with survivors, one thing I’ve learned is that it’s immensely hard for kids to name and understand their experiences when we give them no words to do so. When it starts at such a young age, it’s impossible to understand and disclose. Education on consent and sex ed typically comes far too late, if at all. At the same time, they deeply know they’re being harmed, that it’s not okay. But because there are no resources out there, because no one’s talking about it, they internalize what they’re going through as shame. They feel invisible—because they are.

As one survivor told UK researchers:

“What happened to me, it didn't matter. It's not really abuse. And I always feel like a fraud when I hear people talking about abuse…because I feel like I struggle to categorize myself as being abused, but I live with extreme sexual trauma from abuse. So, it's so weird.”

This was an adult.

Adults feel this way.

And part of why they feel this way is because leading organizations do not acknowledge them as abuse survivors. They told researchers this.

Many of the leading domestic and sexual violence organizations do not name sibling abuse.

Many do not have even a sentence dedicated to it, let alone a full page.

It’s the smallest ask I can think of: mention us. Give someone the opportunity to Google what they’re going through, the words that they’d use to describe their experience, and give them resources to turn to. Organizations that see them. Even one page to raise awareness.

Sibling abuse survivors deserve to be named. They deserve sibling abuse-specific resources, which are just beginning to emerge, but they also deserve for the organizations with bigger voices, whose umbrella their experiences fall under, to also acknowledge them. Knowing that sibling abuse is one of the most common forms of abuse, it’s absurd not to.

Why is it so hard to name sibling abuse, even for leading domestic and sexual violence organizations? This has to change.

My dream is for other people to do the same searches I did and get the validation they need and deserve.

I do not think that is too much to ask. That’s why I’m writing about sibling abuse.

I want people like me to know: Yes, it was real, what happened to you mattered, and it hurt. There are pathways to healing—with or without your family—and we can support intervention and prevention efforts to help children and their families.

If this resonates with you, there are things that you can do.

• Share resources from the Sibling Aggression and Abuse Research and Advocacy Initiative, a.k.a. SAARA, and 5WAVES, a survivor and parent-led organization that provides resources for those experiencing sibling sexual abuse.

• Share #SiblingsToo stories and #SiblingAbuse awareness posts on social media.

• Find a therapist who can support you if you haven’t yet.

• Connect with me. I’m seeking stories and insight—anonymous is fine!—from victims and survivors, siblings, parents, and professionals who support them. If you’re in a place where you’d like to share your thoughts or you’re an expert who works with survivors, let’s talk.

The bottom line is that sibling abuse is real.

If you’ve read this far, you probably already know that. But if you needed to hear it, know that it’s true and you’re not alone.

I think it’s well past time to start a larger conversation. So let’s talk about it.