Rest as a Missing Practice

Posted on June 29, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

Last week, I drove from Wilmington, DE to Baltimore, MD, a distance made challenging by multiple chronic pain conditions, including bodywide myalgia and quadrilateral Complex Regional Pain Syndrome. A fellow tall ship sailor, visiting from far away, had suggested we go to Charm City to see some of the tall ships celebrating Sail 250. I was up for it, made the drive without too much pain, and greatly enjoyed seeing ships I hadn’t seen before, and touring the largest I’d ever been aboard, the Peruvian BAP UNION. We walked all over the city’s Inner Harbor, and by the time we returned to my car, my feet were in near agony. I knew that was just the beginning of the price I would pay for a day like that. Otherwise, I would have had to cancel any plans I made for the following two days.

But I had learned over the years that I must plan rest days around high-activity days. So, the day after seeing the ships, I stayed in my jammies and hardly got out of bed. Because that’s what my body said it needed.

For a long time, rest was not something I could access without conflict. When I first started working with my Alexander Technique teacher Imogen Ragone, I could not tolerate rest. It felt unsafe in a way that was hard to name at the time. I resisted it because I could not settle into it. My system did not know how to feel safe while resting.

Seven and a half years later, rest is now part of my daily pattern. Thanks to the influence of Imogen’s Construcive Rest sessions, I rest for at least twenty minutes most days. Sometimes it becomes much longer. There are days when I take a two-hour nap.

Still, the day after the Baltiomre visit, there was still a small familiar thought in the background questioning whether this was laziness. That is common in a culture that treats constant output as the default measure of value. But my experience has also given me a more important reference. My body makes it clear when rest is needed. When exhaustion is present, rest is not optional, even if it is still negotiable in story.

Mainstream culture tends to treat rest as something that has to be earned or justified. It is often framed as recovery from overwork rather than as a basic condition for functioning. There is a strong emphasis on pushing through, optimizing output, and finding ways to override signals of fatigue in order to continue producing. The underlying assumption is that capacity should be extended regardless of internal state.

From a Relational Neuroscience perspective, this misses how closely regulation is tied to experience over time. The ability to rest is not just a decision. It is shaped through repeated experiences of safety, attunement, and permission to pause without consequence. When those conditions are not present earlier in life, rest can initially feel unfamiliar or even threatening, because the body has learned patterns of continuity under strain.

Over time, those patterns can shift when new experiences consistently contradict older expectations. Through small, safe, frequently repeated experiences, rest becomes something that can be entered and left without losing stability. It becomes part of the body’s rhythm rather than an interruption.

I now recognize that rest is one part of how function is maintained. When it is absent, everything becomes more effortful. When it is present in sufficient amounts, there is more clarity and less strain in ordinary activity.

The idea that people should continuously override their own signals does not account for how much those signals are already shaped by history and environment. It assumes that persistence is always the solution, when persistence without restoration leads to reduced capacity over time.

Rest is not a reward for productivity, but one of the conditions that make sustained living possible. When those conditions are recognized, the question shifts from how to do more to what actually supports continuation without depletion.

For me, that shift came gradually. I learned it through experience rather than instruction. And it has changed my experience of daily life, measurable in my own body in the difference between strain and steadiness.

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Practitioner Certainty Blindness: The Problem with Wrongful Reassurance

Posted on June 26, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

“Hypercritical Allostatic Load,” by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD. Watercolors, ink, psychiatric hospital pencil. 12×9″

Six years ago, I was dying from hypercritical allostatic load: far too much stress with far too  insufficient support for far too long. My body was shutting down. I spent much of my 60th year in bed. The strain had been building for decades through developmental trauma, repeated adversity, loss, chronic stress, and, most absurdly, a growing accumulation of medical harm in response to my requests for help.

Instead of finding real help, I encountered certainty, over and over. Practitioners were certain that they knew better than my lived experience in this body. They could not believe what I said.

The more my condition deteriorated due to lack of appropriat care, the more confidence I encountered.  That pattern revealed something important about healthcare. Certainty blindness occurs when a practitioner is more attached to their explanation than they are interested in the information in front of them.

Once that happens, contradictory evidence often stops registering. The patient says they are getting worse. The practitioner says they are not. The patient reports increasing functional impairment.The practitioner focuses on reassurance. The patient keeps returning because the problem is not resolved. The practitioner sees repeated help-seeking as evidence that the original conclusion was correct.

From a Relational Neuroscience perspective, human beings make sense of reality together. We rely on one another to help us understand what we are experiencing. Healthcare relationships carry particular weight because practitioners hold specialized knowledge and institutional authority. When a practitioner repeatedly dismisses a patient’s observations, they give their own interpretation more weight than the patient’s lived experience.

In practice, certainty blindness often looks like reassurance. It sounds kind, calming, and reasonable. But reassurance based on an inaccurate assessment is not protective.It delays investigation, treatment, appropriate support, and shifts attention away from what is actually happening.

In my case, nobody needed to know exactly what was wrong. They simply needed to recognize that something serious was happening. “I don’t know” would have been far more useful than misplaced confidence. Curiosity would have been more useful than certainty. A willingness to observe what was unfolding would have been more helpful than explaining it away.

One of the most damaging assumptions in healthcare is that access equals care. It does not. I had access, appointments, practitioners, and their opinions. I did not have appropriate care. Care that listened.

Many people assume that if someone is suffering for years, they must not have sought help. Often the opposite is true. They sought help repeatedly, but were trapped in systems where certainty was valued more highly than observation. 

When people repeatedly bring forward accurate observations about themselves, and those are dismissed, important information is overlooked. Opportunities for intervention are lost. Trust in healthcare relationships is ruptured. The practitioner leaves the appointment believing they have reassured the patient, while the patient leaves carrying the consequences of being wrongfully reassured: feeling unseen, unheard, disbelieved, and unhelped.

Effective care requires a practitioner to hold space for the unknown rather than closing it with premature answers. The responsibility remains with them to value observation over their own internal narrative. By choosing curiosity over conviction, they create the necessary room to truly hear what a patient is communicating, ensuring that clinical certainty does not override clinical evidence.

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The Question Psychiatry Cannot Answer: If Depression Is a Chemical Imbalance, What Threw It Off?

Posted on June 24, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

Psychiatry long claimed there’s a “chemical imbalance,” in mental illness, but it never answers the obvious questions: if it’s chemical, what threw it off? Why now? Why not at birth? And why does it so often follow trauma, neglect, chronic stress, or loss?

Looking at the facts, the assertion falls apart. The “chemical imbalance” idea was simply an effective marketing slogan, not science. It gave doctors something to say, patients something to believe, and pharmaceutical companies something to sell. But it ignores what Interpersonal Neurobiology shows clearly: that our emotional states emerge from our lived experiences, our relationships, and the safety or danger our nervous system perceives over time.

When someone’s life becomes too unsafe, too demanding, too isolating, the system adapts. The so-called “depression” is not a broken brain, but the body’s way of reducing output to survive unrelenting overwhelm. It’s a survival adaptation to chronic threat or depletion.

So what disturbed the balance? The same thing that disturbs any living system: too much demand, too little support, too much fear, or not enough care. When life becomes something to endure instead of something that feels safe to inhabit, the body protects itself the only way it can. And psychiatry, instead of asking why, numbs the messenger and calls it treatment.

But it makes sense when we understand that 💊💊🟰💲💲‼️

 

 

 

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Not Feeling: A Survival Adaptation

Posted on June 22, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

Not feeling emotions can be a survival adaptation that develops when your nervous system has been overwhelmed by chronic stress or trauma. It’s a way of protecting yourself from feelings that once felt too intense or unbearable. Reconnecting with your emotions takes time, safety, and consistent gentle practice.

Start with cultivating a sense of safety in your body and environment. This might involve grounding practices like focusing on your breath, noticing physical sensations, or engaging in activities that feel calming or soothing. The goal is to let your system know it’s okay to feel again, even just a little bit at a time.

Engaging in relationships or safe connections can also help. Being with people who are empathetic, non-judgmental, and present can create a space where you feel supported to explore your emotions. Sometimes it’s easier to start by sharing your thoughts or experiences with someone else and allowing feelings to emerge gradually in that context.

Creative expression can also be a gentle way to reconnect with emotions. Writing, drawing, or even listening to music can open a pathway for feelings to surface in a way that feels less direct or overwhelming.

Most importantly, be patient and kind to yourself. Emotions are part of your system’s natural way of processing the world, and reconnecting with them is a gradual process. It’s okay to take small steps and to seek support from trusted individuals who understand trauma and can help you feel safe in this journey.

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No Justice With the Midwife But What I Create

Posted on June 19, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

“The Midwife Who Couldn’t Stop Talking,” which expresses my experience with a highly dysregulated practitioner. The only “accountability” was that, after my complaint letter, the practice withdrew its efforts to bill me for this visit.

I keep talking about what happened to me because the lack of justice makes it impossible to “let it go,” as if that is even a thing. The forced FGM surgery didn’t just happen; it continues to resonate in my mind and body every time I feel the impact of what was done, which is countless times a day. Every time I try to move past it, the system reminds me I can’t: none of the doctors who harmed me are held accountable and are allowed to continue harming others, the institutions protecting them are silent, and the world at large doesn’t see the ongoing cost.

The failure of justice is the reason I create justice where I can, through my own expression, which carries its own undeniable power and transforms my experience into something real, seen, and felt.

“Confronting the Predatory Gynecologist,” which shows how it felt to calmly inform him that informed consent should have been a thing, and for him to puff up like an angry genie in reaction. There has been no institutional accountability, and no justice that I haven’t made with my watercolors, words, and wits.

The non-consensual surgery was years ago, and while it was by far the worst violation, I’ve had many healthcare practitioner attempts to invalidate. Very unfortunately, the most recent was with a midwife, the kind of practitioner I trusted with both of my pregnancies and births. The midwife’s inability to attune and meet me where I was caused me significant harm. As in too many prior encounters, responsibility is denied, and there is no attempt to make a repair. The midwife answered my email with excuses instead of an authentic apology. The director is silent. I’m left with no choice but to integrate this betrayal myself. My nervous system feels it, my body carries it, and I have to respond.

The process involves ongoing integration in small bits. Each begins when I notice the signals, the emotional and physical echoes, and I do something supportive with them. I write. I post on social. I sketch. I begin to paint a watercolor. I illustrate my lived experience so people can understand it, because otherwise it is invisible and impossible to explain.

Our nervous systems are built for connection. They need compassionate witnessing to integrate experience. When that witnessing isn’t available from the people who caused harm, or the systems that should protect us, the nervous system remains unsettled, frozen in a loop of stress, alertness, and planning. Expressing my experience through words and watercolors is how I give my own nervous system what it needs: acknowledgment, validation, and release. It’s how I repair a relational rupture with myself when relational repair from others isn’t possible.

“A Lion at My Neck,” which expresses how it felt when a Coast Guardsman sexually assaulted me after our vessel needed a tow. There has been no accountability, no justice.

Every sketch, watercolor, or blog post expresses what happened and what I need now. It is me giving form to the pain, anger, and betrayal. It’s me showing my experience to the world because otherwise it disappears into isolation. This is what it means to create accountability when no one else will: to be your own witness, to find your own compassion, and to offer your story so others can witness it, too.

Sharing my watercolors with my healthcare practitioners is especially powerful because it gives them access to the reality of my experience in a way words alone can’t. These images carry the emotional and physical impact of what I’ve lived through, and they appeal for acknowledgment where there is often avoidance or denial. When I show them my work, I’m not asking for permission or pity, but offering a direct, undeniable witness to my truth. It shifts the dynamic from one of passive reporting to active recognition, and in doing so, it creates a space where my nervous system can feel seen and validated, even within the healthcare system that most often fails to provide it.

I don’t have the justice I want from the institutions that failed me. But I do have the ability to respond to what my body, nervous system, and mind need. That’s how I survive, keep being me despite the pressure to shut up and go away, and that, in its own way, is a kind of justice, too.

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What if Mental Health Care Actually Cared?

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

Mental health doesn’t come from a drug or cognitive behavioral therapy. Real mental health is built on what has always made humans whole: safety, connection, dignity, and the right to be felt and seen in the truth of our pain.

The mental illness industry treats symptoms as if they float separate from the life that holds them. Depression, anxiety, dissociation, and compulsions are not glitches, but adaptations. They are natural responses to overwhelming conditions and signs of systems doing what they can to survive in a world that does not offer enough regulation, protection, or relational support.

Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) teaches us to examine the whole system, not just the brain, not just behavior, but the context: the relationships, the body, the past, and the present moment. It shows us that what the culture calls mental illness often arises from disconnection from others, from the body, from safety, and from hope. It illustrates that healing does not come from managing symptoms, like the mainstream mental illness industry asserts with its pills and ineffective therapies. Healing comes from restoring the conditions in which a human nervous system can finally rest and repair.

If mental health care actually cared, it would center on regulation instead of compliance, performance, and symptom suppression. It would respect our deep biological need to feel safe enough to exist. It would be a place in which people are not judged or pathologized for how they’ve survived, but gently supported back toward coherence. It would offer community models that prioritize co-regulation, not just professional intervention. It would understand distress as relational, not defective.

Imagine a world where trauma responses are met with curiosity and presence instead of suspicion. Where grief is allowed, not rushed. Where children learn how to feel their bodies instead of being taught to fear and distance themselves from them. Where a psychiatrist asks about your relationships before prescribing a pill. Where no one has to earn the right to be believed.

This isn’t idealism. It’s biology. The nervous system is built for connection. And because the mental illness industry rejects that, it will continue to fail the people who need it most.

People don’t need to be fixed. We need the conditions that let our system do what it knows how to do: heal. Real mental health care starts there.

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The Mental Illness Industry is Delusional 

Posted on June 15, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

In a medical or psychological context, a delusion is a fixed, false belief that is not based on external reality and persists despite evidence to the contrary. This is often associated with delusional disorder or other mental health conditions.

The mental illness industry often treats its own worldview as fixed truth: that suffering can be neatly categorized, symptoms are isolated from context, and the right label or chemical adjustment will resolve the problem.

When service users say, “this isn’t helping me,” or “this framework doesn’t fit my lived experience,” the industry often responds as though the person themselves is “delusional” or resistant, rather than questioning the framework.

The industry and the culture that follows it hold the assumption that the experts already know what reality is, and the job of the service user is to adapt to that imposed story. This can leave people unheard, invalidated, and further harmed. Instead of creating genuine safety and connection, the conditions that allow nervous systems to stabilize, the industry doubles down on its fixed belief, even when the evidence of harm is right in front of it.

So in a way, the industry often enacts the very dynamic it claims to diagnose: holding onto a rigid, unexamined narrative in the face of lived reality that contradicts it.

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Systemic Blindness: The Ignored Story in My Health Chart

Posted on June 12, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

My weight data from the past few years is one of the most important indicators of my overall health. When I am in environments that support me, my weight moves toward a healthy range. When my environment is unsafe or unsupportive, my weight rises. This is not a matter of “lifestyle choices.” It reflects how my body responds to stress, trauma, and metabolic factors, including my MC4R genetic mutation.

From an Interpersonal Neurobiology perspective, this is exactly what we would expect: the nervous system constantly gauges safety and threat. When the environment is unsafe, the body shifts into survival mode. Weight changes are one measurable way my system signals whether it can maintain balance or whether it’s under chronic strain.

Virtually every healthcare practitioner I see–multiple times each month over years–records my weight. Yet nobody has ever noticed, asked about it, or connected it to my overall health. It’s recorded for billing purposes. It doesn’t inform a treatment plan. It doesn’t spark curiosity. It’s just a box to check, like blood pressure or oxygen saturation. The data is there, but its meaning is invisible.

Isolated readings of blood pressure or pulse can never show the ongoing impact of trauma, chronic stress, or nervous system dysregulation. When my system is overloaded, my capacity to manage food, shopping, cooking, and social interactions diminishes, creating a downward spiral unless I receive the right level of care.

I have experienced extreme medical harm, and the effects of that trauma continue to affect my health every day. My weight, tracked over time, tells the story of my nervous system, my environment, and my life in ways no single measurement ever can. To disregard it is to disregard me, my experiences, and the very real physiological signals my body sends about what it needs to survive and thrive.

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Learning to Feel and Trust Our Instincts

Posted on June 10, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

When early relationships repeatedly dismiss, override, or punish a person’s signals, the body learns that its own cues do not lead to safety or effective response. Over time, attention shifts away from internal sensations because registering them did not result in protection, understanding, or relief. That makes instincts feel unreliable. It is a learned pattern shaped by conditions around them.

Building capacity starts with restoring accurate contact with internal signals in small, tolerable doses. That means noticing basic sensations like muscle tension, breathing changes, gut shifts, temperature, and posture, without forcing interpretation. The goal at first is not “trust,” but recognition. When recognition becomes more consistent, patterns begin to show up. Certain sensations tend to precede certain outcomes. Predictability returns.

The next step is linking those internal signals with present-moment context. For example, noticing what happens in the body when a boundary is crossed versus when there is mutual respect. This requires environments that are stable enough that the body can compare experiences. Without enough consistency in the environment, the body cannot sort signals from noise.

Trust develops when internal signals are followed by responses that work. That can be as simple as acting on a small cue, like taking a break when tension rises, and then observing whether that action reduces strain or prevents escalation. Each time there is a clear link between a sensed signal, an action, and a meaningful outcome, the system updates. Over time, this builds a track record that internal cues are relevant and useful.

Relational context is not optional in this process. Being around people who notice, reflect, and respond accurately to what is happening supports this rebuilding. When someone else names what is observable and it matches the internal experience, it strengthens integration between internal sensation and shared reality. When others consistently misread or dismiss, it disrupts that process.

It is also important to reduce conditions that overwhelm the system. When activation is too high or too shut down, internal signals become either too intense to sort through or too faint to detect. Widening the window of tolerance by expanding the range where the body can stay engaged without overload allows more access to subtle cues, which is where instincts become clearer.

So the sequence is: re-establish contact with sensation, notice patterns over time, test small actions based on those signals, and do this within relationships and environments that provide enough consistency for the body to learn from the results. Trust is not something you decide to have. It forms when the system repeatedly experiences that its signals lead to effective outcomes.

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Listening to My Nervous System is Not Optional

Posted on June 8, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

Trauma recovery is not a belief system, moral stance, prescription, or a choice based on what feels convenient, politically aligned, or socially condoned. Recovery is about learning, often the hard way, what my nervous system actually needs in order to move toward health rather than collapse.

What it needs is highly specific.

After psychiatric abuse, non-consensual surgery, and the institutional betrayal that followed, my capacity for social engagement was profoundly impaired. Authority became dangerous. Medical settings became dangerous. Male power in particular became fused with violation, dismissal, and threat. That learning did not happen in thought. It happened in my body, in real time, under real harm.

You do not undo that kind of injury with ideas, avoidance, or by telling yourself a better story.

From a Relational Neuroscience perspective, what was learned in relationship has to be repaired in relationship. Slowly, repeatedly, with real people, under real conditions that contradict the original harm.

For me, that includes safe connections with men, especially men in positions of power such as doctors and other professionals. This is not a preference. It is not a philosophical position. It is what my body requires in order to reestablish a basic sense of safety in the world I actually live in.

When I am with a male doctor who is respectful, boundaried, attentive, and collaborative, something shifts. My vigilance eases. I can stay present. I can think and speak without bracing. My body learns, again and again, that authority does not have to mean harm and that proximity does not have to mean violation.

That is how the social engagement network comes back online after betrayal trauma. Not through isolation, but lived experiences that reliably contradict what the body was forced to learn.

Avoiding men would not protect me. It would freeze the injury in place. It would narrow my world and reinforce the same patterns of threat and separation that nearly destroyed my health. A nervous system does not recover by shrinking. It recovers by carefully, deliberately expanding under conditions of real safety.

This is not a universal prescription. Other nervous systems need other things. That is the entire point. There is no one-size-fits-all recovery path. The work is learning how to listen to what your own system is asking for, understanding why, and honoring that as your capacity allows.

And capacity changes.

As my capacity improves, my nervous system is already asking for more. Things I don’t particularly want to have to do. Things that are tiring just to contemplate. Like speaking to large audiences again.

I have done that before, with hundreds of people. It’s been a long time, but the idea itself doesn’t worry me. What overwhelms me is the distance between here and there. The many steps required to rebuild the ability to organize, to gather people, to move within a community again.

That kind of engagement used to be central to my life. Grassroots work, organization building, multiple circles, and different purposes, all aimed at making things better. Connection multiplied, momentum happened, and change started to take shape.

What made it work was not me alone. It was the connections between people. I invested in others. I helped where I could. I treated people like human beings. And when I needed help, the community responded in ways I never could have planned. Sometimes it felt like magic. Other times it was a hard-earned victory.

That capacity was taken from me through medical and psychiatric abuse. Rebuilding it now requires listening closely to what my body needs, even when I don’t like the answer, when I’m tired, and when I’ve already done versions of this work before.

My quality of life depends and longevity depend on this. That’s not hyperbole, but biology.

So I am learning to listen more carefully to what my nervous system tells me about people, environments, and systems, and to what supports life and what leads back to collapse.

This is how I make my way back to some semblance of health and well-being. Not by choosing what is prescribed or easiest, but by honoring what my nervous system says is necessary.

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