Alisa Zipursky Of Healing Honestly: How I was Able To Succeed Despite Having PTSD

An Interview With Eric Pines

Everyone’s healing journey is going to look different. Even though I’ve written a book that offers practical strategies for healing from childhood sexual abuse and living with trauma, I made sure the book isn’t prescriptive in a one size fits all way. What I need for my healing will be different than what someone else needs! We all need to tap into our inner experts to learn what we need for our individual healing.

About 5 out of every 100 adults (or 5%) in the U.S. has PTSD in any given year. Many from post-combat. While many people suffer, many people have been able to succeed despite those challenges. What are some things that can be learned from people who have succeeded despite having PTSD? To address these questions, we had the pleasure of interviewing Alisa Zipursky.

Alisa Zipursky (she/her) is a writer, coach, speaker, and childhood sexual abuse survivor who focuses on supporting other adults healing from trauma. She is the author of Healing Honestly: The Messy and Magnificent Path to Overcoming Self-Blame and Self-Shame from Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Alisa is the founder of HealingHonestly.com where writes about her experiences as a millennial woman trying to live a full life while healing from her abuse. Along with offering group and individualized coaching programs, Alisa travels the country speaking and facilitating workshops at college campuses and conferences.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! It is really an honor. Our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?

So happy to be chatting with you! I want to take you back to 2015 when we couldn’t escape Adele’s Hello and Magic Mike XXL graced our screens for the first time. I was 27 years old living in Washington, DC and trying to live fully while also contending with my complex post-traumatic disorder (C-PTSD) and its impact on every aspect of my life. I felt isolated, as I didn’t know anyone else who was openly living with trauma or healing from childhood sexual abuse as I was, and I was afraid that my trauma would rob me of the life I so deeply desired.

I thought that if I felt this way, then surely there had to be other people out there asking the same questions as me: how do we date and have sex lives, how do we have meaningful friendships, how do we navigate family dynamics, while all trying to heal from childhood sexual abuse? I launched my website, HealingHonestly.com under the hunch that there were other young people out there who wanted to grapple with these questions in a way that felt conversational, approachable, and funny. I had no idea that it would blow up as it has and become a community of 500,000 childhood sexual abuse survivors from all over the world coming together to offer each other support in living with trauma.

As HealingHonestly.com grew, my work expanded to include coaching, speaking engagements, and most recently, my book Healing Honestly: The Messy and Magnificent Path to Overcoming Self-Blame and Self-Shame,which will be out on June 6, and is my pride and joy. It is the first self-help book for child sexual abuse survivors written by a survivor from a major publisher since 1988. I started this work because I didn’t want to feel so alone, and let me tell you, mission accomplished.

Do you feel comfortable sharing with us the circumstances surrounding how you developed PTSD?

My C-PTSD is the result of enduring childhood sexual abuse from a family member. But like so many people who’ve experienced childhood sexual abuse, that history of abuse did not reveal itself to me until I experienced a separate trauma in adulthood, which triggered my childhood trauma.

I was first diagnosed when I was 20 years old, in the aftermath of watching my chosen father die. At the time, I was experiencing nightmares, flashbacks, and was reliving the trauma of watching him die. In the wreckage of his death, I realized I had endured sexual abuse from a different family member. That understanding came to me through previously repressed memories, nightmares, flashbacks, and a smorgasbord of retraumatizing triggers.

What mental shift did you make to not let that “stop you”?

For me, living with C-PTSD isn’t about focusing on my trauma and whether it will stop me from going after what I want out of life. Rather, it’s about learning how to actually stop myself, to rest, to move slowly with intention, to accept myself as an imperfect person, and explore what it means to have compassion for myself.

For many, but certainly not all survivors of childhood sexual abuse, we develop coping mechanisms of being perfectionists or overachievers as a means of trying to find some sort of control in a childhood where we had no control. I’ve spent many years in therapy trying to unlearn those coping mechanisms and explore how to be kinder and gentler towards myself.

When I decided to start working in the world of trauma I made a promise to myself to never martyr myself, or sacrifice my own healing and wellbeing for the sake of this work. It’s a promise that I’ve wrestled with sometimes, but I know that overworking myself, being too hard on myself, and trying to “do more” are parts of me that are fueled by the trauma, and the key for my healing is to do less, and spend more time being present, and tapping into self-compassion.

What strategies, techniques, or resources have you found most effective in managing your PTSD symptoms on a day-to-day basis?

• Finding my community and being in relationship with other people has been one of the most important things I do to help manage my C-PTSD. It can be so challenging, but learning how to ask other people for help, how to be vulnerable and allow people to show up for me, and building community together is so important for me.
• Therapy has been a tremendous tool I use to support my healing. There are so many different forms of therapy out there, and talk therapy isn’t always what’s best for trauma survivors. For me, I’ve found great benefit from talk therapy, as well as somatic forms of therapy, including pelvic floor physical therapy.
• Getting the right medications has been so important for managing my C-PTSD. It’s wild how difficult it can be to get access to healthcare in the United States, and I lament how many barriers there are to us getting the medication that can help us. I have been privileged to be able to work with doctors to find the right medications and dosages that help me manage the day-to-day of living with trauma.
• Lastly, and most importantly, tapping into self-compassion is the most important thing I do to support myself living with C-PTSD. Giving myself permission to honor my needs, to rest when I need to, to not judge myself for experiencing triggers or how long it takes for me to recover from being retraumatized, is the best thing I can do for myself. I remind myself, as often as I need, that my trauma doesn’t mean I’ve done anything wrong, but that something wrong happened to me, and I don’t need to be ashamed of the ways it still impacts me.

Can you tell our readers about the accomplishments you have been able to make despite having PTSD?

I am most proud of the kind of friend, partner and family member that I have become while healing from my trauma. I’ve been able to learn how to be present for the people who matter to me the most and how to work together to talk about and practice honoring each other’s needs and boundaries.

But, holy smokes, I wrote a book! I am incredibly proud of Healing Honestly: The Messy and Magnificent Path to Overcoming Self-Blame and Self-Shame out June 6 from Berrett-Koehler publishers! I was so tired of resources for child sexual abuse survivors either being memoirs that can be really triggering for us, or books written by clinicians who can make us feel pathologized like we are traumatized lab rats worthy of study.

I wrote the book that I have dreamed of and that I desperately needed in my life, one that feels like a close trusted friend talking to you in a conversational tone about what it means to heal from childhood sexual abuse and livewith trauma in a way that doesn’t feel so scary. The book is filled with practical strategies, wisdom and experiences from other survivors around the world, with a healthy dose of humor.

Even though 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys experience childhood sexual abuse before their 18th birthday, the last book written for us by one of us was 1988 which is the year I was born! There are so few resources out there for us, and I’m super proud to have made this contribution. I cannot wait for the book to be in people’s hands!

What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about having PTSD? Can you explain what you mean?

I feel so strongly about dispelling the myth that living with PTSD means we are either:

1. Fully traumatized human disasters incapable of meaningful healthy relationships and a danger to ourselves and others, or
2. We’ve “overcome” our trauma, healed it, or left “the past in the past” and no longer have to live with triggers.

Neither of the options in this binary are based in reality. In fact, they often leave survivors feeling that either we can’t have any of the good things in life, or we are failures when our trauma invariably resurfaces. The reality is that there is no cure for PTSD, and we will always have the capacity to experience triggers and retraumatization, and also, we are capable and worthy of big, beautiful, messy, and colorful lives.

The other myth I want to dispel is that there is some sort of “perfect victim” out there. Survivors are held to completely unrealistic, unfair and oppressive standards that leave many of us feeling invalidated and like our trauma doesn’t get to “count”. This is totally by design! If there are impossible standards for who the “perfect victim” is, then we, as a society, don’t ever have to actually have to address the prevalence of abuse all around us and holding abusers accountable.

I don’t care if someone doesn’t have “proof” of their abuse, if they don’t remember it clearly, if they never told anyone, if their story doesn’t match society’s notion that abuse only happens between cisgender men against cisgender women and girls. The truth is every person’s pain matters and every person is worthy of healing.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are?

Thank you so much for asking! I have had three extraordinary friends and mentors who are all childhood sexual abuse survivors who have been doing work to support survivors and end violence for decades: Amita Swadhin, the founder of Mirror Memoirs Project, Ignacio Rivera, the founder of The Heal Project, and Aishah Shahidah Simmons who wrote Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse.

Each of them have taught me so much about doing this work, caring for ourselves while working in such a retraumatizing field, and deepening my understanding of what it will take to end the epidemic of childhood sexual abuse. My work is possible because of them.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

I feel like I’m bringing so much goodness to the world via my book Healing Honestly! My form of goodness is offering loving support and validation in helping other survivors reduce the volume on the voices of self-blame and self-shame so that they can hear their own inner wisdom louder.

I am most excited that someone who could be googling in the middle of the night for support will be able to find the book and immediately download the book onto an e-reader or put it in their cart. Everyone deserves support and community, whether or not they feel comfortable disclosing their trauma to others. Through the book and the website, I am honored to be able to offer survivors the benefit of the greatest support group ever, which they can engage with in the way that is most comfortable for them.

Here is the main question of our interview. Can you share “5 things I wish people understood or knew about people with PTSD” and why.

1 . Healing from abuse and living with PTSD is a nonlinear experience. When I say nonlinear, I don’t just mean that some days are harder than others, I also mean that some years are harder than others. We may go through periods in our lives where we are intensely addressing our trauma, and then have a decade where our trauma lies relatively dormant, then resurfaces again. This is totally normal but can be very disorienting both for those of us living with trauma and those who love us!

2 . Being triggered isn’t about being upset! So many people throw around the term “triggered” nowadays, and this can be really challenging for those of us living with PTSD because that term means something really specific for us. Being triggered doesn’t mean we are sad or angry, although that can be an emotional outcome of it. For us, being triggered means we are uncontrollably time-traveling back into the very worst, most horrifying, and terrifying moments of our lives and actually not remembering those times, but rather actually physically, emotionally, and mentally reliving those times.

3 . Trauma impacts every aspect of our lives. We can’t compartmentalize how trauma shows up in our lives–it impacts our health, our minds, our relationships, and the ways we understand ourselves and the world around us. We need people to understand how trauma impacts all these parts of our lives while also understanding that trauma doesn’t define our whole lives.

4. Everyone’s healing journey is going to look different. Even though I’ve written a book that offers practical strategies for healing from childhood sexual abuse and living with trauma, I made sure the book isn’t prescriptive in a one size fits all way. What I need for my healing will be different than what someone else needs! We all need to tap into our inner experts to learn what we need for our individual healing.

5 . Too many times I’ve searched for resources on PTSD and nearly everything centers on people who developed PTSD during military service.Combat veterans aren’t the only people who develop PTSD. Don’t get me wrong, veterans need support too, but we really need to reframe who we think of when we think of PTSD. For example, women are twice as likely as men to develop PTSD, yet we often think of a male veteran when we think of the diagnosis. Everyone, from all different experiences, backgrounds, and identities needs healing resources that reflect their reality.

Has your experience with PTSD influenced your relationships with others? How did you navigate those changes?

The biggest way living with C-PTSD has impacted my relationships is that, due to the stigma of trauma, I thought that I had “too many needs” and that would prevent me from having the relationships I so deeply desired. Every human being has needs, and we all have to learn how to communicate openly about what we need and want out of relationships, and it’s okay if we have more needs than someone else at any given time! There isn’t a friendship scorecard!

Something that’s helped me navigate those feelings of shame about how my trauma impacts me that makes me want to hide and isolate is to remind myself that, by modeling how to advocate for my own needs, I am actually being a really good friend because I am modeling for others how to care for themselves. Every Friday I send out a newsletter to my Healing Honestly subscribers, and some Fridays I will write, “I’m experiencing some retraumatization this week, and I don’t have it in me. I have to go take my meds and a nap and take care of myself, see you next week.” I always get messages back from readers that my being honest with them gave them permission to be honest in their own lives about what they need in order to care for themselves. That makes me endlessly happy.

What advice would you give to other people who have physical limitations?

My advice is to remember that you are the expert in your own safety and wellbeing. There are so many people, and so many institutions, including the medical system, that purport to know what’s best for us and may try to minimize our own wisdom about bodies, and that’s an enormous structural problem. But we are actually the authorities of what’s happening in our minds and bodies.

And because we are the experts in our own safety and wellbeing, that also means we know what’s best in terms of how we share our truth, when we share our stories and what we disclose. I put my whole personal story with my government name all over the internet because doing so made me feel safer. But others who may have gone through the exact same thing may need something completely different for their healing. Your story is yours alone, and you make the rules about how you share it because only you know what’s best for you.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this :-)

I am an enormous US Women’s Soccer fan, and watching the US Women’s Soccer team over the years has given me so much strength, joy and a real sense of community.

Following both their work on and off the field, especially players like Megan Rapinoe, Crystal Dunn, Tobin Heath, and Christen Press, really makes me want to be the bravest and boldest version of myself.

Thank you so much for the time you spent with this interview. We wish you continued success and good health!

About the Interviewer: Eric L. Pines is a nationally recognized federal employment lawyer, mediator, and attorney business coach. He represents federal employees and acts as in-house counsel for over fifty thousand federal employees through his work as a federal employee labor union representative. A formal federal employee himself, Mr. Pines began his federal employment law career as in-house counsel for AFGE Local 1923 which is in Social Security Administration’s headquarters and is the largest federal union local in the world. He presently serves as AFGE 1923’s Chief Counsel as well as in-house counsel for all FEMA bargaining unit employees and numerous Department of Defense and Veteran Affairs unions.

While he and his firm specialize in representing federal employees from all federal agencies and in reference to virtually all federal employee matters, his firm has placed special attention on representing Veteran Affairs doctors and nurses hired under the authority of Title. He and his firm have a particular passion in representing disabled federal employees with their requests for medical and religious reasonable accommodations when those accommodations are warranted under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (ADA). He also represents them with their requests for Federal Employee Disability Retirement (OPM) when an accommodation would not be possible.

Mr. Pines has also served as a mediator for numerous federal agencies including serving a year as the Library of Congress’ in-house EEO Mediator. He has also served as an expert witness in federal court for federal employee matters. He has also worked as an EEO technical writer drafting hundreds of Final Agency Decisions for the federal sector.

Mr. Pines’ firm is headquartered in Houston, Texas and has offices in Baltimore, Maryland and Atlanta, Georgia. His first passion is his wife and five children. He plays classical and rock guitar and enjoys playing ice hockey, running, and biking. Please visit his websites at www.pinesfederal.com and www.toughinjurylawyers.com. He can also be reached at eric@pinesfederal.com.