Holey House Blog
A sanctuary of truth, tenderness, and trauma-informed transformation.
Healing from incest trauma is not a straight line, it’s a lifelong homecoming. It’s the steady unraveling of old survival patterns, the rebuilding of emotional truth, and the subtle moments where you finally breathe in your own worth. The Holey House Blog is where all the pieces of this healing journey come together: survivor stories, partner support, therapist guidance, research breakdowns, emotional literacy, dissociation education, and the raw, sacred expressions from the 10,000 Matchsticks project.
This isn’t a typical blog. This is a lighthouse for anyone who has ever felt lost in the dark.
If you’ve lived through trauma, loved someone who has, or you support survivors in your work, this is your space. A space built with tenderness, honesty, and the deep knowing that trauma changes everything… but healing does, too.
Below, you’ll find each section of the blog, a constellation of resources designed to meet you exactly where you are.
Articles for Incest Survivors
A home for the ones who carry invisible histories.
This section speaks directly to those healing from incest trauma, the survivors who learned to navigate the world with a fractured sense of safety, truth, and self.
Here, you’ll find education, emotional guidance, nervous system wisdom, boundaries, inner-child repair, trauma literacy, dissociation insights, and gentle explanations of why you think, feel, and react the way you do.
Every article honors your lived experience. No shame. No pathologizing. Just truth, compassion, and the kind of clarity that makes healing feel possible.
Your Long-Term Healing Journey
Healing doesn’t end with understanding trauma, it continues through integration, identity reconstruction, meaning-making, and learning to live as your full self. Learn about the long arc of healing: rebuilding identity beyond trauma, finding strength and purpose, cult…
Healing Tools, Skills & Daily Practices
Trauma doesn’t heal from insight alone, it heals through repetition, practice, safety, and small daily habits that slowly retrain the brain, body, and nervous system. Learn concrete skills for grounding, emotional regulation, returning from dissociation, calming shame…
Family, Culture & Breaking the Cycle
Survivors of incest rarely grow up in families that protect them. More often, they grow up in systems built on silence, denial, and distorted loyalty. Learn why families minimize or blame survivors, how scapegoating dynamics develop, the role of the non-offending parent…
Sexuality, Intimacy & Reclamation
Sex after incest trauma is complicated. Your body remembers what your mind tries to forget, and your nervous system reacts long before you have a chance to think. Learn why sex can trigger panic, numbness, shutdown, or confusion, and how to reclaim your sexuality on you…
Relationships, Attachment & Love
When the people who were supposed to protect you were the ones who caused you harm, love becomes tangled with danger, confusion, longing, and fear. Learn to unravels the patterns that incest trauma creates in adult relationships: why you cling, why you shut down, why yo…
Healing Your Relationship With Yourself
Incest trauma disconnects you from the most essential relationship you will ever have, the one with yourself. Reclaim your body, your voice, your emotions, and the younger parts of you who carried what no child was meant to hold.
Articles for Partners
For the ones loving a survivor, and learning how to do it safely.
Partners often want to help but don’t have the language, tools, or trauma education to understand what’s happening beneath a survivor’s reactions.
This section is a bridge. It teaches partners how to approach emotional flashbacks, communication, intimacy, triggers, boundaries, conflict, and trust. All without causing more harm.
Compassion doesn’t require perfection, only understanding. These articles help partners become safe, supportive witnesses to the healing journey.
A Word of Caution for Anyone Who Loves (or Wants to Love) an Incest Survivor
A list of characteristics, behaviors, and relational patterns that do not align with a survivor’s healing.
Partner Well-Being, Emotional Health & Boundary Care
You can’t support an incest survivor sustainably unless you protect your own emotional health, boundaries, and well-being with the same tenderness you offer them.
Supporting the Survivor’s Healing Journey Without Overstepping
You can’t heal your partner’s trauma, but you can become the steady, compassionate presence that makes healing safe enough to happen.
Understanding Reenactments in Love, Attachment & Conflict
Reenactments aren’t signs of incompatibility, they’re trauma patterns that dissolve the moment both partners stop personalizing them and start understanding their roots.
Boundaries, Autonomy & Healthy Interdependence
Healthy boundaries transform a trauma-affected relationship from a cycle of over-functioning and collapse into a balanced, mutual, sustainable partnership.
Communication, Conflict & Emotional Connection
Emotional connection with an incest survivor blossoms when communication becomes a place of safety instead of a battlefield of misunderstood triggers.
Articles for Therapists
A resource for the professionals who walk this sacred terrain.
Working with incest survivors requires nuance, patience, and a deep understanding of developmental trauma’s impact on attachment, identity, dissociation, and the nervous system.
This section breaks down research, therapeutic frameworks, relational strategies, and insights from the survivor’s perspective.
It’s here to support clinicians in doing trauma-informed, survivor-centered, shame-free work.
Supporting Survivors Beyond Symptom Reduction
Healing for incest survivors does not end with symptom reduction, it deepens into identity reconstruction, relational safety, and the creation of a life defined by agency, not survival.
Ethical Practice, Therapist Well-Being & Anti-Harm
Ethical, effective incest trauma treatment requires therapists to understand their own reactions, regulate their nervous systems, and avoid common pitfalls that unintentionally mirror the survivor’s original wounds.
Working with Family Systems
Incest trauma is sustained by family secrecy, loyalty binds, and intergenerational patterns, and therapists must navigate these dynamics with caution, clarity, and survivor-centered care.
Understanding Reenactments
Reenactments are not pathology—they are survival strategies replaying unresolved trauma, and therapists can help survivors break these cycles through attuned, trauma-literate intervention.
Sexuality, Body, and Boundaries
Incest trauma reshapes a survivor’s relationship with their body, sexuality, and boundaries, and therapists need specialized tools to help survivors restore safety, agency, and embodied choice.
Treatment Approaches for Incest Trauma
Effective treatment for incest trauma requires phased work, dissociation-informed interventions, and a relational frame grounded in attunement, pacing, and safety.
Knowledge Hub Articles
Where research meets real life.
Survivors often spend years piecing together answers from random studies, clinical jargon, and whispered conversations online. The Knowledge Hub organizes that chaos into clarity.
This section distills academic research, breaks down complex theories, and translates scientific findings into accessible, compassionate guidance.
Think of it as your trauma encyclopedia, curated, simplified, and survivor-centered.
Understanding The Trauma of Incest
Incest trauma doesn’t just hurt, it shapes your nervous system, fractures your identity, and alters the way you experience yourself and the world. Learn the truth behind your reactions, your memories, your feelings, and your pain, so you can stop blaming yourself for …
Book Review: The Right Brain and the Origin of Human Nature by Allan Schore
Below is a full-book, chapter-by-chapter summary. The core concepts are distilled, and along with their direct applications for incest trauma, its long-term effects, why it’s so hard to heal, and what healing actually requires. Trauma deserves reverence. Neuroscience…
What Healing from Incest Really Looks Like
Healing isn’t becoming someone new. It’s remembering who you were before the world taught you to forget yourself.
Why You Reenact the Old Pain of Incest Trauma in New Love
You don’t repeat old pain because you’re broken, you repeat it because your nervous system is trying to resolve a wound it wasn’t safe enough to understand the first time.
Understanding the Responses to Incest Trauma: Fight, Flight, Flee, Fawn
Your trauma responses are not flaws, they are the brilliant survival codes your body created to protect you long before you had words for what was happening.
How Incest Trauma Shapes the Brain
Childhood trauma doesn’t just hurt, it rewires the brain’s architecture, shaping how survivors think, feel, remember, and relate long after the danger is gone.
10,000 Matchsticks Posts
The art, the stories, the soul-level truths.
This section is where healing becomes art.
Where the survivor’s voice, my voice, is not cleaned up, softened, or sanitized.
Where the raw pieces of my story, the reenactments, the patterns, the heartbreaks, the awakenings, are illuminated like a figure made of 10,000 glowing matchsticks at midnight.
Here you’ll find deeply personal reflections, creative essays, emotional landscapes, and memoir-style writing that holds the reality of trauma and the brilliance of survival.
It’s the fire that lights up the dark.
It’s the truth that won’t stay silent.
“I Love You” Doesn’t Fix What You Broke
A Letter From the Woman Who Finally Woke Up “I love you” doesn’t fix anything. Empty syllables aren’t the stitch that mends a wound. So why do you keep treating those three words like they’re holy water? Like you can drizzle them over the damage you caused and wait…
A World Unheard and Unseen: A Poem for the Silenced Soul
A raw and haunting poem about the lifelong echoes of incest trauma, the silence, the disbelief, the isolation, and the unbearable search for a voice in a world that refuses to listen. It speaks to the survivors who ever wondered if their pain mattered.
Boundary Medicine
My boundaries are not negotiable—they are essential tools for safety, self-worth, and emotional healing.
The Benevolent Abuser
The Cruelty You Never Saw Coming Benevolence. A word that wraps itself in warmth, kindness, generosity, compassion. A soft place to land. The light we search for when the world has grown cold. But what happens when that light blinds us instead of guiding us? What…
What You See
What You See… When you first lay eyes upon me,You might label me a queen,At first, I’ll seem without a flaw,As if the life I live’s pristine.You’ll meet a woman that is kind,Living a life peacefully serene,“I must have her,” you’ll say to yourself,Ignorant of…
Dumb Bitch Shit
Once again I feel like I’m just a dumb bitch doing dumb bitch shit. Every word I long to speak gets trapped in my throat. Every dream I chase is merely an illusion, never seen or shared by another. I knew it would go this way. I felt it coming. I’ve…
Disclaimer: I am not a licensed therapist or mental health professional. I am a trauma survivor. If you need help, please seek the services of a licensed professional (see my Resources Page for suggestions). The contents of this website are for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only. Information on this page might not be accurate or up-to-date. Accordingly, this page should not be used as a diagnosis of any medical illness, mental or physical. This page is also not a substitute for professional counseling, therapy, or any other type of medical advice. Some topics discussed on this website could be upsetting. If you are triggered by this website’s content you should seek the services of a trained and licensed professional.