Sponsored by BetterHelp
This is the second part of my BetterHelp review — a continuation of the story I started last month. If you’re new here, last month’s piece was about leaving a decade-long relationship that had quietly eroded my sense of self, packing my whole life into storage, and buying a one-way ticket to Copenhagen at 35. This is the chapter that comes after.
June is PTSD Awareness Month, and I’ve been sitting with what I actually want to say. Not as a wellness practitioner. Not as someone who’s been doing this work for almost a decade. Just as a women who has lived with a CPTSD diagnosis — and who wants to talk to you the way I’d talk to my best friend if she sat down across from me and told me she’d just been diagnosed, too. To talk about it in a way that REMOVES shame, limitation, or the feeling of “there is something wrong with me.” I want every person who relates to what I say feeling liberated.
So pull up a chair. This one is really for you.
PTSD Is Not Just a Combat Diagnosis
Let’s start here, because this is the thing that kept me from naming what I was experiencing for so long.
When most of us picture PTSD, we picture a soldier. A veteran. A specific kind of horror tied to war. And while that is absolutely one face of it, it is only a fraction of who lives with PTSD or CPTSD (Complex PTSD) every single day.
PTSD can come from a car accident. From a medical event or a frightening diagnosis. From assault. From sudden loss. From a long relationship that slowly distorted your sense of reality. From witnessing something you can’t unsee. From growing up in a home where the adults didn’t have the tools to regulate themselves, let alone help you regulate yours.
CPTSD usually develops from prolonged or repeated trauma, often relational and often beginning in childhood. It doesn’t always have one defining moment. It’s the slow erosion of safety over years. It’s the kind of trauma that lives in the nervous system long before you have language for it.
If you’ve been diagnosed and you’ve been quietly carrying shame about it because your trauma doesn’t “look like” what you thought PTSD was supposed to look like — please hear me. Your pain is real. Your diagnosis is valid. And you are in very, very good company.
My Diagnosis Story
I was diagnosed with CPTSD in my early 20s, not long after college. I had spent years thinking I was just anxious, just sensitive, just too much — and then a therapist gently named what was actually happening in my body and my nervous system.
I grew up in a home where both of my parents carried childhood trauma of their own — the kind they hadn’t yet had the tools to process. Without those tools, what played out in our household was a lot of fighting and unspoken hard things that I won’t go into here. They were doing the very best they could with what they had, and I love them dearly. But the truth is, when the adults around you are surviving their own unmetabolized pain, kids absorb what isn’t named. We absorb the fear, the conflict, the unpredictability. We learn to scan the room before we learn to read.
By the time I got to college and out into the world, my nervous system had already spent two decades in survival mode.
The diagnosis wasn’t a relief, exactly. But it gave me something I had never had — an understanding. For the first time, I had a word for what was happening to me. A framework. A reason for everything I had been carrying. The diagnosis didn’t make me sicker — it gave me a map. And a map made me want to start walking.
If you’ve been recently diagnosed and you’re feeling overwhelmed, ashamed, or like something is fundamentally wrong with you, please let this land: the diagnosis is not the wound. The diagnosis is the doorway. I promise.
How Wellness Found Me — and Saved Me
After my diagnosis, I did what so many of us do. I started searching. I needed to feel something other than what I’d been feeling.
That search led me to a yoga class. The yoga class led me to teacher training. Teacher training led me to trauma release work, then sound meditation, then breathwork, then biofeedback — and eventually to a deep study of the nervous system.
One thread, pulled slowly, became a life’s work. And that work has taken me across the world — Peru, British Columbia, Tuscany, Mallorca, and soon Sardinia — hosting retreats for women ready to come home to themselves.
For most of my 20s and early 30s, I was healing myself in real time while teaching others how to do the same.
These practices gave my life meaning — and a deeper understanding of who I am and what my experiences were always preparing me for. Someone once told me: your trauma is your dharma. Your wound is your path.
Yoga was where my nervous system finally landed. On the mat, I learned how to come back to my body — how to notice what I was feeling and begin to make sense of it. Those years spent on a mat and in circle shaped everything I now offer others.
They are the reason I am still here.
But here’s what I’ve come to understand: somatic and self-led wellness practices are one part of healing trauma. They are foundational. They are necessary. They are also not the whole story.
There is a part of trauma work that asks for a witness. Someone trained to hold the harder pieces with you. Someone who can help you connect dots you can’t quite see on your own. Someone who’s there consistently, even when your life is in motion.
That’s where BetterHelp came in.
The Deeper Layer: Why I’m Doing Trauma Work Through BetterHelp Now
By the time I started with BetterHelp, I had already done a decade of wellness work. What I needed wasn’t another modality to add to my toolkit. I needed a structured, continuous therapeutic relationship to help me integrate everything I’d already learned — in light of where I was now.
Because here’s the thing about trauma: it can be reactivated. A breakup. A move. A major life transition. These things pull old patterns to the surface that you thought you’d handled years ago. Coming out of a decade-long relationship at 35, with my entire life in storage and a one-way ticket to a country where I knew no one, I needed more than my breathwork practice. I needed structure. I needed continuity. I needed a therapist who could see the full arc of who I had been and who I was becoming.
(my solo adventure to copenhagen feeling so grounded & expansive)
What’s made BetterHelp the right container for this season of trauma work:
- Continuity of care, anywhere I am. As I’ve moved across cities and countries, my therapist has stayed the same. There is something profoundly healing about being known over time by someone who can track your growth. Trauma thrives in inconsistency. Healing requires the opposite.
- Flexibility that actually fits a healing nervous system. When I’m having a harder week, I can adjust. When I’m in a different time zone, I can schedule around it. The platform meets me where I am, not where it would be most convenient for some clinical calendar.
- Tools for the in-between, not just session-to-session. Trauma work doesn’t stop when the session ends. The journaling, mood tracking, and messaging features have become quiet anchors between sessions — a way to keep noticing, naming, and processing in real time.
- A safe container for the harder work. Trauma-informed therapy isn’t about reliving the past. It’s about gently building a relationship with what happened so that it stops running the show. Having a steady, weekly space for that has been the difference between coping and actually healing.
Try BetterHelp With 20% Off Your First Month
Post-Traumatic Growth — The Part Nobody Talks About
If you’ve ever read about PTSD, you’ve read about the symptoms. The hypervigilance. The flashbacks. The dysregulation. The way it can rearrange your relationships, your sleep, your sense of safety. Those are all real.
But there is a quieter, equally documented phenomenon called post-traumatic growth — the psychological shifts that can come out of working through trauma. Researchers Tedeschi and Calhoun have spent decades studying it. It is not about being grateful for what hurt you. It is about what you become because you chose not to abandon yourself in the aftermath.
Post-traumatic growth often shows up as:
- A deeper appreciation for life
- More authentic, chosen relationships
- A clearer sense of personal strength
- New possibilities — paths you couldn’t have seen before
- Relationships that feel safe or spirituality that feels truly yours
Reading that list, I cried a little. Because that is where I am right now.
I’ve been thinking lately about how intelligent a woman’s body is. How it knows things long before we let ourselves know them. For a long time, mine was trying to tell me something I was too afraid to hear. From the outside, my life looked “good” — and so I kept telling myself it was and that I should be grateful. But my body wasn’t fooled. I couldn’t sleep through the night. I couldn’t dream. I was living in survival mode — bracing, scanning, confused, surviving — and somewhere beneath the life that looked fine, I was dying on the inside.
Then I chose myself. I did the scary, gutting, very hard thing: I left the relationship that was deeply hurting me, and I jumped — fully — into the unknown.
And here is what my body did once it finally felt safe. It let me sleep, all the way through the night, for the first time in longer than I can remember. It gave me back my dreams — real ones, vivid ones, the kind you cannot reach when every part of you is still standing guard. My body had been waiting. The moment it understood I was safe, it began, gently, to come back to life.
That is how intelligent she is. She knew all along.
I would choose that leap a hundred times over. I know now that the unknown was never the dangerous place — it is where all the miracles live. And I am so alive with excitement for the version of me that is emerging from it. I used to fear the death of the ego; now I understand its power. Something in me had to end so that I could be born anew — and on the other side of that ending, I get to experience something entirely new.
For the first time, I get to write a story that is fully mine. From scratch. Not held back, not minimized, not made smaller to fit beside anyone else. I get to choose a life that genuinely excites me — and that, I am realizing, is something I have never let myself have before. I cannot wait to live it.
The wellness practices got me onto the path. BetterHelp is what’s helped me see the whole shape of how far I’ve actually walked.
(me in mallorca about to host a retreat, just weeks after walking away from my relationship)
Building a Life I Actually Want to Live
Trauma teaches you to survive. Healing teaches you to choose.
For most of my adult life, I made choices from a place of fear, scarcity, or the unconscious pull of what felt familiar. With my therapist’s support, I am — for the first time — building a life from a different starting point. From the place of what do I actually want? Not what will keep me “safe”. Not what will keep someone else comfortable. Not what will check the boxes I was handed.
That looks like saying yes to opportunities that scare me in the good way. It looks like choosing friendships that match the depth, and integrity that mean everything to me. It looks like designing a business and a daily life that honor my nervous system instead of overriding it. It looks like trusting that I am allowed to be the architect of what comes next.
This is what I mean when I say therapy through BetterHelp isn’t about fixing me. It’s about helping me build.
If You’ve Just Been Diagnosed — Or You’re Quietly Wondering If You Should Be
I want to leave you with this, friend to friend:
- A diagnosis is not a life sentence — it’s a starting point. The label doesn’t define you. It gives you language and a path forward.
- PTSD doesn’t have to be “big” or “obvious” to be real. Relational trauma, developmental trauma, medical trauma, witnessing trauma — they all count. You don’t have to prove your pain to anyone.
- You don’t have to do this alone, and you weren’t meant to. Somatic work, friends, journaling, faith, community — all of it matters. And there is something specific that a trained therapist can offer that nothing else can. It’s both/and, not either/or.
- Healing is not linear. Some weeks you’ll feel like a different person. Some weeks you’ll feel like you’re starting over. Both are part of the process. Neither is failure.
If you’ve been waiting for permission to begin, this is it.
Disclosure: *Offer valid for new users only. Offer cannot be combined with insurance. BetterHelp providers are unable to make any official diagnosis, fulfill any court order, or prescribe medication.
What’s Next
In next month’s piece, I’ll be sharing about something I’m living right in the middle of — what it really takes to let go of the past and step, fully, into the future. This summer I’m moving back to Europe to find a place to put down roots, and it’s brought a quiet realization with it: the woman I’m becoming couldn’t have made this move carrying everything the old version of me was holding. Some things you don’t take with you. You set them down, gently, so the next version of yourself can finally arrive.
I’ll be writing about building a future on purpose instead of by default — choosing roots intentionally, and meeting a big, exciting change as the person I’m becoming rather than bracing against it. I’ll also share how I’m leaning on BetterHelp as a steady place to work through this transition, so that fear and overwhelm don’t get to drive.
Until then, I hope this piece reaches whoever needed to hear it today. You are not broken. You are not alone. And the work you are doing — even the work no one sees — is making you.
With love, Codi
