If you’ve experienced a loss you may be familiar with the drop-off. Somewhere around the six-week mark, the lasangas stop arriving, the texts thin out. People stop asking how you are with that particular tilt of the head. And you are still standing in your kitchen at nine at night, wondering how everyone else managed to pick their lives back up while you are still here, in the middle of this.

That gap between what grief actually requires and what the people around you seem to expect is one of the most common things people bring into therapy after a loss. Of course the loss itself; but also the compounded loneliness of grieving in a culture that treats mourning like a two-week project.

August 30 is National Grief Awareness Day, which is a reasonable occasion to talk about what grief really does over time, how it moves through a year, and what actually helps when someone you love is carrying it.

Difficulty conceiving and the journey to get pregnant looks many different ways. It can involve losses, failed attempts, and recurring disappointment, along with financial, emotional and physical stress. It also can put a strain on relationships, when the partner going through fertility treatments feels misunderstood or unseen by the partner whose body is not going through the same stress; or when both partners experience grief and disappointment about how this stage of life looks different than what they had hoped for.

It is normal to feel all of these things and more when you experience infertility. At Wild Hope, we consider conception part of the perinatal period; especially when you consider the emotional and physical demands of fertility treatments, it is a time that deserves specialized care from a therapist with the background knowledge to properly support you. 

Earlier this year, the Peanut App took out a full page ad in the New York Times alerting readers to the concept of ‘matrescence’ or the period in which someone becomes a mother. Those of us in the perinatal space have been familiar with the term for awhile, but as the ad pointed out, most people have no idea that the word exists. And without language for something, it is hard to name it. And even harder to understand what is happening to you. 

Becoming a parent changes who you are. Not just what you do, not just your schedule or your priorities or how you spend your Saturday mornings, but who you actually are. Along with your priorities and values, our sense of self reorganizes. Your relationships reconfigure. Things you thought you knew about yourself get complicated, and things you thought were resolved have a way of surfacing again.

The term matrescence was coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in 1973 and has been given more recent clinical attention through the work of reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks. Matrescence refers to the psychological, relational, and identity-level transformation that happens when a person becomes a parent. It is not a disorder, and it is not a failure to adjust. It is a genuine developmental transition, as significant as adolescence, and it has been largely unnamed and underserved in mainstream culture.

When trauma is also part of your history, that transition becomes considerably more complicated. This post is about how those two things intersect.

Long before Bessel Van Der Kolk or Gabor Mate, Judith Herman was exploring how trauma impacted individuals, specifically women who had experienced SA and how their symptoms were often treated as personality disorders more often than their male counterparts. Herman was also the first person to present the concept of complex PTSD and advocate for it’s inclusion in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual. When so much of the research on mental health has been done on white, male, subjects, it is important to understand the nuances of how trauma impacts female-identifying and nonbinary folks. Because of our socialization, the impact it has on our lives and identities presents in an entirely different way. But even further, the trauma we experience is often different as well. Anyone can experience complex trauma; but when you also exist in a female or gender non-conforming body, the complexity is built in.

We’ve all found ourselves pulling at our hair or biting a nail here and there. But, if you’ve noticed that you do regularly, sometimes for long periods of time without realizing it, or in a way that’s starting to cause a physical changes (bleeding fingers, bald patches, etc.) it’s possible you are experiencing body-focused repetitive behaviors BFRBs). And yes, therapy can help. 

BFRBs are more common than most people realize, and significantly misunderstood. It’s important to get clear information about what BFRBs are, why they happen, and what kinds of strategies tend to actually help. And to do so without the layer of shame that so often comes with this misunderstood, but incredibly common, behavior.

Most parents right now are stressed to some degree. The cost of living, the lack of childcare or immediate familial support, carrying the weight of significant cultural events, one after another, all while trying to give you kids a memorable summer. Most caregivers experience a large range of emotions when it comes to how they feel about raising children at any given moment; and sadly right now stress is a very common one in this moment. 

The creating of meaning is essential to therapy, and especially when exploring our identities and claiming agency over the narrative of our life. If you are exploring your gender identity, experimenting with how you express your gender, or considering a gender transition, you deserve support that goes far beyond open-minded or non-judgmental. This is a time that calls for care that is truly affirming, from someone who brings genuine competence and fluency to this specific lived experience, and will support you in creating your own unique narrative of who you are and who you will become. The last thing you need, when something feels this vulnerable and personal, is to find yourself educating or reassuring the very person who is supposed to be supporting you.

Understanding your gender can be one of the most significant processes of your life, and therapy can be a meaningful source of support along the way, but only when the provider is skilled and informed enough to allow you to tell your own story and make your own meaning, without getting in your way. You deserve a therapist who already understands this terrain, so that every session can be about you, not about bringing them up to speed.

Every year, the parents we work with (and the parents among our staff) think it’s going to be different. The kids are getting older, we’re used to the transition, the summer transition will be smoother this time. But without fail, the sudden plummet out of routine and stacked schedules into open days and nowhere to be (or maybe new places to be like camp) lead not just to logistical confusion but emotional chaos. 

If you are a parent, especially a working parent, or if you have kids who are neurodivergent, or if you yourself struggle with transitions and routine disruptions, you probably know this feeling well. Summer can be genuinely wonderful. It can also be genuinely hard. Both of those things tend to be true at the same time.

This post is not about hacking summer or making every day count. It is about understanding why the loss of routine affects your nervous system and your family’s, what actually helps, and how to build enough structure to support regulation without turning July into another version of the school year.

We started talking about identity and trauma in June for Pride month, and exploring how trauma further complicates exploring a queer identity in an already homophobic society. But trauma impacts identity in all sorts of ways and we’ll continue to explore that this July. 

It’s impossible to look at Instagram or Tik Tok and not have someone tell you what is wrong with your nervous system. You probably had plenty of things in your head that you knew you needed to improve, and didn’t necessarily need your entire nervous system added to the list. You've probably come across references to "fight or flight" or something about a freeze response. What gets talked about less, though, is how all of that survival wiring doesn't just affect your stress response in the moment. Over time, it shapes your sense of self, who you believe you are, what you think you deserve, and how much of yourself you feel safe letting other people see.

If you've ever felt like you're not quite sure who you are outside of what other people need from you, or you've caught yourself wondering why you habitually shrink or perform or go along with things that don't actually feel okay, it could be worth exploring how past trauma has impacted you. Not because there's something wrong with you, but because your nervous system was doing exactly what it was built to do to survive, and that meant you had to create a lot of stories to understand what you were living through. 

When we think about how to manage the coming weekend and all it entails, we can utilize things like personal values, boundary setting, and intentionality to figure out what to do with all this ‘celebration’ time. That is one thing in your circle of control. The people currently in power do not get to determine what this day means to you, if anything. That is genuinely your call.

As we’re figuring out who we’re going to be, we use the different stories and narratives available to us to create the blueprint or foundation for what is possible for how we can see ourselves and who we will become. We get these stories from our own families, our communities, and popular culture including everything from what a loving successful relationship looks like, to what it means to be a well rounded, happy adult. But not all of us see the person we feel like we’re becoming reflected back to us. 

The prominent narratives available to most of us as we’re growing up are heteronormative or based on traditional binary gender presentations. Even the romcoms, pop songs, or tvs shows we’re surrounded by rarely provide queer stories to help illuminate all the ways of being in terms of sexuality, gender and love; and therefore folks who don’t fit into the predominant narrative are left without a blueprint or guide for what is possible, or even allowed, that resonate with what they feel and know about themselves. 

When trauma is also part of our history, whether it's developmental, relational, cultural, or some combination thereof,  that process of figuring out who you really are gets significantly more complicated. Trauma has a specific way of interrupting the conditions that identity exploration actually requires, and for folks who already were up against a lack of relatable examples, the experience of developing a solid sense of self becomes even more complex.

Pride Month is bright, loud and fun on purpose. The Pride flag itself has gone through many iterations, but the use of colors has always been meant to represent the diversity of the members of the LGBTQ2SIA* community in colors that were bright, alive, and celebratory. Similarly, Pride events are meant to provide visibility, out loud and up close advocacy, and a moment of peace and celebration for even just a few hours to folks who often are not given the freedom to be visibly and loudly themselves. But for many queer people, June can also feel superficial, overcorporatized, or watered down from its origins in activism and protest. 

Celebration is woven into queer culture, not incidental to it. Throughout decades of criminalization, pathologization, and systemic erasure, queer communities have marked survival with joy. They have built chosen families, created gathering spaces, developed rituals, and insisted on pleasure and festivity even in the middle of loss. This reflects something profound about how humans sustain themselves through prolonged adversity: by creating pockets of meaning, beauty, and belonging that cannot be taken away. Joy, in this context, is a form of resistance and a real and precious resource. But it is still complex. 

June offers a concentrated opportunity to receive that collectively, complexity and all, surrounded by people who understand something about your life without needing it explained, and that kind of belonging has real weight. But the critiques of how different folks show up during Pride month (especially allies) is a fair and important one. And it is worth asking what happens in July.

When trauma is also part of our history, whether it's developmental, relational, cultural, or some combination thereof,  that process of figuring out who you really are gets significantly more complicated. Trauma has a specific way of interrupting the conditions that identity exploration actually requires, and for folks who already were up against a lack of relatable examples, the experience of developing a solid sense of self becomes even more complex.

June offers a concentrated opportunity to receive that collectively, complexity and all, surrounded by people who understand something about your life without needing it explained, and that kind of belonging has real weight. But the critiques of how different folks show up during Pride month (especially allies) is a fair and important one. And it is worth asking what happens in July.

While online therapy has become the norm, a lot of “big box” therapy companies that offer convenient, virtual therapy have become popular claiming to connect you with a competent clinician that will be a great fit or you. While many fantastic therapists choose to run their individual practices through these platforms, a locally-owned private practice can offer a true guarantee that the therapist you are seeing is not only vetted and supported by a business that holds your same values; but that the practice itself is connected to and contributes to your actual community. Even if you never set foot in their physical office. 

When you're looking for therapy, the options can feel overwhelming. A quick search for online therapy or virtual counseling in Ohio pulls up everything from large national platforms with thousands of therapists to solo practitioners to practices like ours. And if you're looking at accessibility and convenience alone, the big platforms seem appealing. They're easy to sign up for, often have quick availability, and their marketing is everywhere.

But ease isn't the only thing that matters when you're choosing a therapist. Who you work with, what they're trained in, what values guide their practice, and whether the place you're getting care actually understands the community you live in shape the quality of your experience.

And as a local, woman-owned small business, Wild Hope Therapy can still provide accessible, convenient online therapy and virtual therapy throughout Ohio. 

For many women and female-identifying people, a late diagnosis of ADHD, autism, or both arrives in adulthood, sometimes in their 30s, 40s, or beyond. The experience of receiving that diagnosis is rarely simple. It can bring relief and grief in the same breath. It can reframe decades of your life in ways that feel clarifying and disorienting at once. It can raise questions about identity that you weren't expecting to be sitting with at this point in your life.

Therapy can be a genuinely useful place to process all of that. Not to fix exactly. Therapy is more a place your go where there is space for all the complexity of what you're figuring out, and someone supportive and skilled and helping you figure out what to make of it all. 

When you're queer, or a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and you're looking specifically for trauma therapy, that process comes with an additional layer of complexity. You need someone who can do both things well: understand your identity and your community, AND actually know how to treat trauma. Those two things are not always found in the same place, and settling for one without the other can make therapy less effective or, in some cases, actively harmful.

This post is for you if you're somewhere in Ohio wondering whether trauma therapy is worth pursuing, what to look for in a therapist, and how to access affirming care even if you haven't been able to find it close to home.

There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with seeking therapy for your relationship when you're not sure whether the therapist you're about to meet will understand what your relationship actually is. Whether you're in an open partnership, a polycule, a hierarchical or non-hierarchical non-monogamous structure, or somewhere in the process of figuring out what ethical non-monogamy looks like for you — finding a therapist who treats your relationship as valid rather than as a problem to untangle is not always easy.

It's worth saying clearly at the outset: ethical non-monogamy is not a phase, a symptom, or a compromise. It is a relational structure that many people choose deliberately, maintain with real intentionality, and invest in deeply. The challenges that bring non-monogamous partners to therapy are not evidence that the structure doesn't work. They're evidence that all relationships — of every kind — benefit from skilled support at certain points.

This post is about what relationship counseling for non-monogamous partners and polycules actually looks like, why the therapist's knowledge and framework matter so much, and how to access that support across Ohio.

Couples counseling and relationship therapy can be genuinely useful for any couple. But for folks in LGBTQ+ partnerships, finding a therapist who actually understands your relationship, whatever shape it takes, is the difference between effective therapy, and an experience that could possibly make things worse. 

It is essential for non-heteronormative couples in Ohio who are wondering whether couples counseling is worth it to understand what affirming relationship therapy for you actually looks like, and how to find someone who won't spend your session asking you to explain your relationship structure from scratch.

At Wild Hope Therapy, we work from a feminist, relational, and attachment-based framework. That's not a political statement layered onto clinical work. It's a clinical orientation that we believe produces better outcomes — for heterosexual couples, for queer couples, for non-monogamous structures, and for anyone whose relationship doesn't fit neatly into the mold that most therapy models were designed around.

This post is an introduction to what that actually means in practice for the couples we work with in Columbus, Cleveland and virtually throughout Ohio.