What 25 Years in Nursing Taught Me About Trauma Recovery
Twenty-five years is long enough to watch an entire field change its mind about something important. When I began my career as a nurse, trauma was treated almost entirely as a mental health issue, something addressed in a therapist’s office, separate from the body, separate from the exam room. I now understood it very differently: trauma lives in the body as much as the mind, and it shows up in a doctor’s office as often as a therapists.
When Research Met the Bedside
Early in my nursing practitioner career, I had the chance to work alongside the research that became the ACE Study, the large-scale investigation into how childhood adversity predicts adult health outcomes. What struck me wasn’t the statistics, though they were striking. It was watching those statistics play out, patient after patient, in real exam rooms. A theory on a page is one thing. Seeing the affects of childhood adversity show up in person’s actual chart is another.
That shift, from theory to the exam room didn’t just change my understanding of patient care, it changed how I understood my own life.
Three Patterns I Saw Again and Again
Over 25 years in orthopedic and family nursing, three patterns showed up so often that I stopped thinking of them as separate patient experiences and started thinking of them as one story told many ways.
The first was physical pain with no clear origin. Seeing patients who had been through every scan and test available, whose bodies were clearly in distress, but whose charts showed nothing definitive. The second was a pattern of relationships that repeated themselves: the same kind of conflict showing up in a new decade with a new name attached. The third was the hardest to see, because it looked like strength: patients who had built entire careers and identities around never needing help, who arrived in my office only when something had finally broken through that armor.
I recognized all three patterns, because I had lived versions of all three myself. That recognition is part of what eventually became Between Wounded and Well.
Why Clinical Knowledge Alone Doesn’t Heal Trauma
Here is something 25 years in healthcare taught me that no textbook did: understanding trauma intellectually and healing from it are two entirely different processes. I could explain the physiology of a stress response to a patient in detail and still watch them walk out of my office no closer to healing than when they walked in. Knowledge matters, it’s why I still believe deeply in trauma-informed care as a clinical standard. However, knowledge without practice is just a more articulate way of staying stuck.
What changed for my patients and eventually for me, was consistent, repeatable practices. Not a single breakthrough moment, but new practices applied over time.
How the Framework Grew Out of Both
The seven healing practices in my book were derived from watching what worked across hundreds of patients over 25 years and tested against my own recovery from family dysfunction, professional pressures, and mental health challenges. The clinical research told me why trauma shows up in the body. My patients, and my own life helped me discover the practices that help heal, Defining a Purpose, Self-Care, Partnerships, Pardons, Lifelong Learning, Boundaries, and Gratitude.
If you’re navigating your own recovery and you’ve found the research helpful but insufficient or you understand what happened to you but aren’t sure how to move through it, that gap is exactly where this book lives.