The phrase "trauma-informed" has become so overused in wellness spaces that it's almost meaningless now. I know this because I've spent eight years watching it happen.
I started writing about health and wellness in my mid-twenties, doing freelance work for publications that wanted accessible explanations of emerging research. I was good at taking something complex — a clinical study, a theoretical framework, a new model of how the nervous system worked — and explaining it to someone who had never heard of it. That skill turned out to be useful. But the more I worked in wellness writing, the more I noticed a gap.
Polyvagal theory was being cited everywhere. So was somatic therapy. So was IFS. But almost no one was translating these frameworks into language that ordinary people — people who had never been to a somatic therapist, who had no idea what the vagus nerve was — could actually use. The clinical world had the knowledge. The spiritual world had the rituals. Nobody was connecting them for people who needed both.
That's the space I've been trying to occupy for the past several years.
My angle has always been access. "Trauma-informed" shouldn't be a credential only therapists hold. Polyvagal theory shouldn't require a graduate degree to understand. The science of how the nervous system processes grief is genuinely useful to people who are in grief right now, sitting at home, without access to a specialist. I want to give it to them.
My own grief education has been personal as much as intellectual. I've experienced the kind of grief that doesn't have clear language in our culture: the loss of a relationship, a version of a future, a sense of who I thought I was. What I call chronic grief — the kind that settles in for years without a clear cause, the kind nobody acknowledges because nobody died. That experience made me deeply interested in the grief experiences that get the least cultural recognition: caregiver grief, estrangement grief, grief in communities that don't have the vocabulary for it.
Those are the people I write for. Not the recently bereaved (though they find me too). People who are carrying something that has no ceremony, no casserole, no culturally recognized place to land.
I'm rigorous about the research. I won't assert a mechanism I can't point to a study for. But I've also learned that pure research writing doesn't move people. The science has to land in the body before it becomes useful. So I write in a way that tries to do both: here's what the research says, and here's what it actually feels like to be in this, and here's what you can do with it today.
I came to The Ritual Journal Collective because the mission is exactly the gap I've been trying to bridge on my own. Ancient ritual plus nervous system science, written for people who are in it, not studying it from the outside.