“Hello, friends. Today I want to guide you through a practice that has carried me through some of my hardest moments — a practice called tapping, or EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques). It’s a simple, body-based tool you can use right when you begin to feel panic, or when the weight of worthlessness and loneliness makes you feel like you’re drowning. If you’ve ever felt cut off from Source, or from love itself, this is for you. You don’t need to do it perfectly. You just need to show up. Let’s begin.”

I want to begin with a memory that shaped the way I saw my mother—and myself—at a very young age. When I was five, I woke from a nap and walked in on my mother cheating with a man while my father was out. The moment she saw me, everything stopped and he quickly left. My mother told me something I couldn’t understand at that age, “he raped me”, and then she told me not to tell my father. When I cried—overwhelmed by fear and confusion—she yelled for me to stop crying or she would give me something to cry about. In that moment, I learned to swallow my feelings, stay quiet, and take care of her needs before my own.

Dr. Gabor Maté poses a question that refuses to be ignored: Not why the addiction, but why the pain? It’s deceptively simple, yet it dismantles the way society so often frames addiction. Instead of asking what’s wrong with us, it asks what happened to us. Instead of focusing on the behavior at the surface, it draws our gaze to the fault lines beneath.

Here is a question I had posed to myself many times in the past, as I’m sure some of you have as well:

Two of the most difficult things for a trauma survivor to do are to sit in silence and to be alone. Silence can be very difficult because our minds are not always kind. In solitude, it becomes harder to escape the mind, the looping memories, the old stories, and the pain that resurfaces. We replay what happened, reinforcing beliefs that we’re unworthy, unlovable, or broken. So we avoid stillness. We keep ourselves busy, distracted, plugged into anything that helps us outrun the noise. Yet, paradoxically, it is in silence that true healing begins. It’s in solitude where the deep work of meeting ourselves happens.

Maybe you’re like me.

The thing about rainstorms is they’re temporary — but when you’re in the middle of one, it doesn’t feel that way. The blue sky darkens, the roar surrounds you, and the heavens open. Rain soaks you to the bone until your senses are overwhelmed. All you can think about is finding shelter.