Tomorrow, July 21, I will be talking about Love Letters from the Edge: Meditations for Those Struggling with Brokenness, Trauma, and the Pain of Life on WZZM TV’s Take Five. The show airs from 9-10am ET.
Be sure to ask friends, educators, medical professionals, ministry workers, those who work in the justice system,and employers to listen in for valuable information on post-traumatic stress disorder and the toll it takes on those who have experienced trauma in its many forms.
Photo Credit: Photo by anankkml. From FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Keynote speaker James Watkins, known for spreading hope through humor and writing, will provide practical strategies for communicating effectively with humor. Watkins will also offer insight into how to get your message out into the world, how to write a proposal with the editor in mind, and the ministry of writing. Watkins is the acquisitions editor for Wesleyan Publishing House and the author or co-author of 37 books, including the “Why Files,” which was awarded Christian Retailers Choice for best book series.
Keynote speaker Twila Belk, works with veteran author Cecil Murphy and has written or co-written six books. Her latest book is “Raindrops from Heaven: Gentle Reminders of God’s Power, Presence, and Purpose.” Belk interacts daily with the media, editors, agents, publishers, conference directors and other professionals. She will share her knowledge of the industry through sessions that cover obstacles of getting your message out, thinking beyond book writing, and how to create excitement for your book.
Shelly Beach, co-founder of the Cedar Falls Christian Writers Workshop, will present sessions on becoming a class-act speaker and building plotlines. Beach is an award-winning author of ten books. She is a national speaker with Advanced Writers and Speakers, as well as Daughters of Destiny prison ministry. She is also co-founder of PTSD Perspectives and has co-authored Love Letters from the Edge: Meditations for Those Struggling with Brokenness, Trauma and the Pain of Life with award-winning author Wanda Sanchez on post-traumatic stress disorder.
The workshop will also include sessions on technology, dialogue, poetry, self-editing, memoir, co-writing and research.
The workshop is sponsored by Cedar Falls Christian Writers and will be held at the Riverview Conference Center in Cedar Falls, IA. Early registration tuition is $235 through April 30. Registration from May1 until the workshop is $255. Tuition includes all sessions and meals, except for the Friday evening banquet, which is an additional $20. Tuition also includes a 20-minute conference with one of the presenters.
Paid manuscript critiques are available on a limited basis for $35. Please visit the website for details.
How have writer’s conferences helped you advance your writing goals?
Photo Credit: AltonGansky.typepad
The Selah Awards, which are awarded annually at the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Conference, are awarded to books within Christian publishing that are considered excellent within their genre.
The Selah Awards represent 14 genres, 29 publishing houses, and hundreds of authors. The nominees are listed below:
The 2015 Selah Awards Finalists
Listed in Alphabetical Order According to Book Title
Children’s
Dare U 2 Open This Book by Carol McAdams Moore (Zonderkidz)
Just Sayin’ by Carol McAdams Moore (Zonderkidz)
Our Daily Bread for Kids by Crystal Bowman and Teri McKinley (Discovery House Publishers)
Children’s Picture Books
God is Always With You by Michelle Medlock Adams (Candy Cane Press)
If Jesus Walked Beside Me by Jill Roman Lord (Candy Cane Press)
What is Thanksgiving by Michelle Medlock Adams (Candy Cane Press)
Middle Grade Novels
Bash and the Chicken Coop Caper by Burton W. Cole (B&H Kids)
Johanna’s Journey by Cindy Murray Hamblen (Ambassador International)
Speak No Evil by Mary L. Hamilton (HopeSprings Books)
Fiction: Contemporary Romance
One More Last Chance by Cathleen Armstrong (Revell)
Quilted by Christmas by Jodie Bailey (Abingdon Press)
The Calling by Suzanne Woods Fisher (Revell)
Fiction: First Novel
Mercy’s Rain by Cindy K. Sproles (Kregel Publications)
Miracle in a Dry Season by Sarah Loudin Thomas (Bethany House Publications)
The Covered Deep by Brandy Vallance (Worthy Publishing)
Fiction: Historical
Soul Painter by Cara Luecht (WhiteFire Publishing)
The Hatmaker’s Heart by Carla Stewart (FaithWords)
What Follows After by Dan Walsh (Revell)
Fiction: Historical Romance
Lightning on a Quiet Night by Donn Taylor (Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolinas)
Love Comes Home by Ann H. Gabhart (Revell)
The Pelican Bride by Beth White (Revell)
Fiction: Mystery & Suspense (Third Place Tie)
A Cry From the Dust by Carrie Stuart Parks (Thomas Nelson)
Blind Trust by Sandra Orchard (Revell)
No One to Trust by Lynette Eason (Revell)
Nowhere to Turn by Lynette Eason (Revell)
Fiction: Novella
A Shenandoah Christmas by Lisa Belcastro (Washashore Publishing)
One Holy Night by Elizabeth Ludwig (Barbour Publishing)
The Fruitcake Challenge by Carrie Fancett Pagels (Hearts Overcoming Press)
Fiction: Speculative
Once Beyond a Time by Ann Tatlock (Heritage Beacon Fiction)
Shenandoah Dreams by Lisa Belcastro (OakTara)
Thunder by Bonnie S. Calhoun (Revell)
Fiction: Women’s Contemporary
Just 18 Summers by Michelle Cox & Rene Gutteridge (Tyndale House Publishers)
The Revealing by Suzanne Woods Fisher (Revell)
The Shepherd’s Song by Betsy Duffey and Laurie Myers (Howard Books)
Nonfiction: Christian Living
For the Love of Horses by Amber H. Massey (Harvest House Publishers)
Not Who I Imagined by Margot Starbuck (Baker Books)
Praying Through Hard Times by Linda Evans Shepherd (Revell)
Nonfiction: Memoir
Bethany’s Calendar by Elaine Marie Cooper (CrossRiver Media)
Dead 13 Times by Cam Tribolet (Whitaker House)
Out of the Dust by Avis Goodhart with Marti Pieper (Aneko Press)
Judging will take place Wednesday, May 20th.
Our sincere thanks to the Selah Award contest organizers and sponsors for the honor of this nomination. It’s our desire that the hopeless find hope through Love Letters from the Edge. We wrote this book to help those who’ve been wounded and broken by life to hear God’s words of love poured out specifically for them.
Love Letters from the Edge: Meditations for Those Struggling from Brokenness, Trauma, and the Pain of Life is FREE on Kindle today.
Simply stated, trauma is any event that overwhelms the brain’s ability to cope, is perceived as a threat to one’s safety, and causes physical, emotional, or psychological distress or harm. PTSD is triggered by a terrifying event. The event becomes “stuck” in the right side of the brain when the left side shuts down in response to the trauma. The traumatic event can’t be completely processed and replays, leaving the person in the fight-flight-freeze mode, which produces trauma-related symptoms.
Someone you know is suffering from trauma. In an average rural or suburban church of 200, nearly twenty members (approximately 8%) will be suffering from PTSD, many in silence. Most won’t know that their symptoms are related to trauma or that treating symptoms isn’t the same as treating trauma.
It that church is an urban church of 2,000, the statistics for the occurrence of PTSD are the same for soldiers returning from Afghanistan–more than 30%. That means that over 600 people in the congregation are suffering from PTSD. What is equally significant is that studies now tell us that the effects of PTSD become passed down to our children.
No matter what many roles you may wear–mother, father, pastor, community leader, business owner, medical worker, educator, friend, mentor–you need to know about PTSD. Why? Because people you know are suffering. Many don’t understand why. And many don’t understand that hope and healing are available.
Love Letters from the Edge is recommended by The Gathering for Mental Health in the Church at Saddleback.
For more information, download our FREE ebook The Truth about Trauma at PTSDPerspectives.org.
Photo Credit: Photo by anankkml. From FreeDigitalPhotos.net
On June 1st, my friend Wanda Sanchez and I launched our first co-written book together, Love Letters from the Edge. We wrote this book as two women who’ve experienced abuse and trauma, as well as undergoing successful trauma treatment. Our goal is to provide encouragement and resources for women who have suffered from the devastating effects of wounding life experiences.
One of the most life-changing elements of our trauma therapy was engaging in writing that helped us bring significance and resolution to our traumatic experiences.
In fact, we found writing to be so important to our healing that we incorporated focused writing activities into Love Letters from the Edge. Many of those activities include incorporating Scripture passages as the reader is encouraged to confront negative patterns of thinking with the truth of God. Many of the lies women struggle with (men as well) find their roots in painful and traumatic experiences.
Jan Fishler, author, speaker, writing coach, and creator/presenter of writing workshops, tells about the role that writing played in her recovery from trauma.
Fishler states, “I’d repeated my adoption story many times without the benefit of healing the abandonment issues that were the foundation of my trauma. It wasn’t the act of putting pen to paper either (actually spending hours at the computer), recalling memories as they came up, and turning them into scenes. The real healing didn’t begin until my older, wiser self began to make sense of my situation, filling the gaps between scenes with a perspective that comes only from wisdom and age. In my case, this happened quite by accident.”
For the Christian, that healing comes as we gain God’s perspective of ourself and begin to live in that reality.
Wherever you may be on your journey through trauma, begin by journaling your experience. Take on the role of a reporter and get down the facts. The goal is not to re-experience the event, but to observe it from a distance. The goal is to record, not to judge or evaluate.
When you and your therapist feel you’re ready, take your writing to a deeper level. Look for significance. How did the experience leave you “stuck”? What effect did it have on you? Allow the voices of maturity, perspective, and truth within you to speak to these broken places. The goal is to show compassion,affirmation, understanding, and to unburden these broken parts of yourself through written dialogue.
As your story is transferred to the written page and then back through your eyes and into your mind, your story is reprocessed by both the right and left hemispheres, helping your brain to heal and your trauma experience to be “rewired” with a beginning, middle and end. This same process is often true when trauma survivors create art and music.
Writing is accessible to almost anyone. For more information about writing as a path to healing, visit James Pennebaker’s website.
What about you? Have you incorporated writing in your trauma therapy? Share your story with us.
John 8:32: “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
When my daughter was an infant, my husband I learned that she’d been born with a medical condition that required us to take her to specialists. Over a period of years, various doctors performed invasive procedures on our baby over and over again.
On more than one occasion, I asked the doctor why my child wasn’t processing the experiences that were happening to her as sexual abuse. After all, from where I stood as an observing parent, the procedures looked like sexual abuse. And my child didn’t have the verbal skills to define them in a “medical” category, as opposed to a “sexual assault” category. My baby only knew what she felt–pure and unadulterated terror–an instinctual trauma response.
The truth of the matter is, she did because she had no way to compensate for the “locked in” memories, once the left side of her tiny brain shut down and trapped the experience in the right side of her brain.
The American Psychological Association describes trauma as “an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape or natural disaster.” Preverbal and early childhood medical trauma are as real as is adult medical trauma. Someone you know is suffering, and they probably don’t know why.
On June 1st, my new book, cowritten with friend and colleague Wanda Sanchez, Love Letters from the Edge released. This book provides a voice for the tens of thousands of women who suffer–many in isolation and silence–with symptoms produced by trauma. That trauma may stem from medical procedures or treatment like breast cancer. It may be rooted in abuse. It may be related to the heartbreak of long-term caregiving. It may come from the wounds of abandonment. It may have been caused by the whims of natural disaster.
Who do you know who needs a love letter from God?
Photo Credit: Minnieland.wordpress.com
“I just finished treatment for complex PTSD. Nobody understands trauma, so I rarely talk about it.”
The woman sitting next to me on our flight from Denver to Seattle was an accountant. Confident. Self-assured. Professional. And a recovering addict who’d struggled for years with symptoms PTSD stemming from early childhood medical procedures.
It had taken her years to recognize that childhood medical procedures were at the root of the long list of symptoms that had taken her life hostage.
The reality is that life is a series of traumas that the brain processes as either “Big T” or “little t” events, depending on a number of factors. Any event that is so threatening that it (1) overwhelms our brain, (2) triggers a reactive chemical wash that shuts down one side of the brain and causes us to “freeze” initiates the Instinctual Trauma Response (Big T trauma with potential resulting symptoms).
In the past few years, my colleague Wanda and I have met dozens of men and women suffering from PTSD who never realized before meeting us that trauma was the source of their various symptoms: hoarding, self-abuse, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, hearing voices (one of the easiest symptoms to treat), eating disorders, depression, suicidal fixation, and other symptoms.
This week our book Love Letters from the Edge: Meditations for Those Struggling with Brokenness, Trauma, and the Pain of Life was released in bookstores and online. This book addresses the desperation and despair felt by those who suffer from PTSD. It gives a voice to those who often feel unfixable, hopeless, and isolated.
But more importantly, it offers hope. As women who have experienced PTSD, Wanda and I understand the desperation and the struggles. This is why it was critically important for us to write a book that honestly expressed the feelings of those dealing with PTSD, but also offered compassion, hope, and truth. This book also offers practical resources for family members and friends, as well as support communities, such as churches.
Learn what it feels like to walk in their shoes. Learn what you can do to help. And if you’re struggling, take the first step toward healing by telling a trusted friend or medical or mental health professional.
That’s what I am. Today is one of THOSE days.
I don’t know what God was thinking when He placed the gifts inside of me that He did! It seems like lately I battle this sinking feeling that I am not going to be able to pull it off! Must it all be so hard? Not that things need to be easy… they don’t. But how about just not so hard?
Yesterday I told my BFF that I’ve been fantasizing about just dropping everything that I am involved in – and just walking (or running!) away into the sunset. Forever. Yep… I am having moments of wanting to quit.
Afraid of failing. And that fear of failure causes me to want to run.
I don’t want to embarrass God.
I don’t want to be afraid of saying the wrong thing or of offending people.
I don’t want to get in the way of whatever plan God has for the people who will see/hear me speak.
Simply because of time, I worry about not being able to do everything I’m supposed to be doing: speaking, writing books, blogging, producing, singing, etc…
All I have ever really wanted is to be a successful Christian – a Christian who’s rooted and grounded, who knows how to utilize the weapons of warfare; a strong woman of God who isn’t tossed around or taken by surprise by any of the adversary’s wily tactics.
That’s where I’m at today. Relax, my friend… I am NOT quitting. I just feel like running away – but I have choices today. I can make the choice to listen to the lies that say I will be an embarrassment to God – or confront that lie with the TRUTH about how God sees me: I’m the apple of His eye, y’all! Today, I can choose to listen to His voice as He whispers in my ear and tells me that He is so tickled by me that He sings over me!
It doesn’t matter what I see, what I hear, what I smell, what I touch or what I feel. I know that He sees me as His beloved daughter and that He couldn’t possibly love me (or you) anymore than He does at this very moment! With your whole heart and both feet, step into the position God has placed you in!
Zeph. 3:17: The LORD your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.”
Photo Credit: JoyHaynes.wordpress.com
On June 1st, Love Letters from the Edge releases. Over the next ten days, Wanda and I will be posting notes to the brokenhearted from God taken from Love Letters.
* * *
Have you ever felt abandoned and alone? Have you ever prayed a thousand times for the torture of your life to stop until your prayers seemed to stick in your throat?
If you’re like most people I know, the answer is Yes.
Here’s God’s love note to you.
My Beloved Child,
I understand why the world doesn’t make sense to you, and I understand your rage and pain. As you come to know me better, you will recognize that trying to understand answers beyond your comprehension is less important than trusting my character.
You didn’t see me. You didn’t heart me. And you didn’t feel me in your pain. But I was beside you, holding you close to my heart, loving you, and wiping away every tear. I came for you, and I have never left your side. –Your Loving Father
Photo Credit: TweenyRandall.com
According to the Sidran Institute, approximately 10% of women will develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) during their lifetime. These women feel isolated, guilty, trapped, and confused. And they suffer from a wide range of symptoms ranging from depression to addictions to self-abuse to suicidal thoughts.
I know because I’m one of them, even though I didn’t recognize the symptoms of PTSD for many years.
At the age of 19, I was attacked by a serial rapist. In my early forties, I suffered a walnut-sized brain lesion that nearly took my life. I also experienced accumulated grief as I cared for a mother with Alzheimer’s and a father-in-law with Parkinson’s in my home, as well as a number of close friends whom I lost to cancer.
But I didn’t begin to understand the devastation of untreated post-traumatic stress disorder until I walked the path of healing from CPTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder) beside my best friend and co-author Wanda Sanchez. When I met Wanda in 2010 through a series of real-life miracles, she was clinging to life by a thread and had exhausted her ability to cope.
God answered Wanda’s single-word prayer for “Help!” when she went for successful trauma treatment after decades of ineffective counseling, rehab, and therapy. It was my privilege to be her companion for a journey of hope and healing. Today we invest our lives helping people better understand PTSD (PTSDPerspectives.org) and encouraging women about God’s relentless love and grace.
This week, Wanda and I will submit the final manuscript for our new book Love Letters from the Edge: Meditations for Those Struggling with Brokenness, Trauma, and the Pain of Life. The book is available now on Amazon and will release in June.
You or someone you know is struggling in the aftermath of abuse, betrayal, and trauma. They feel as if they are the one person beyond the reach of God’s grace. Love Letters from the Edge is a message of compassion and healing to the broken-hearted–whispers of hope from God’s heart to our own. This book of meditations expresses God’s relentless love for us. It offers weekend prayers, journaling questions, and weekend features. It also contains valuable resources about post-traumatic stress disorder, its related symptoms, and where you can find help.
You know someone who needs this book: the one in four women who have been sexually abused or experienced domestic violence, abandonment, or neglect. Caregivers who have been devastated by loss. Those who have been decimated by suicide. Women who have experienced the trauma of abortion, miscarriage, or the death of a child. Those who have suffered medical trauma.
In the shattered places of your life, what do you long to hear God say to you?
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