Most clients don't experience the days before a scary appointment as a linear sequence. It's one long blur of dread. Freeze Frame, a technique from Somatic Experiencing, asks them to stop the footage and look at a single image instead. In our first SKILLS class inside the Collective, we walked through exactly how that works: finding the right entry point on the timeline, freezing the scene at the moment it gets overwhelming, and letting a client's nervous system finally do what it couldn't do at full speed. This blog breaks it down for you with words. To watch the full class, head over to the Collective tab to join us.

Lived experience is a source of empathy and embodied understanding — it is not a source of clinical competency.

Those are two genuinely different things, and conflating them does harm in both directions.

There is a version of this post that starts with something like, "Every chronic illness journey is unique!" And while that is technically true, it doesn’t actually tell you anything useful.

So let's try this instead.

This post breaks down what medical trauma looks like, how common it really is, and what best practices in care and recovery look like for patients, families, and providers.