Foster care is supposed to mean safety, stability, and a chance to heal.

For some children, it becomes something far more complicated—and far more dangerous.

In this episode of The Truth About Trauma, I share what happened when I entered foster care for the first time and finally experienced life in a community: school, routines, neighbors, and the promise of normalcy. But trauma doesn’t disappear when the setting changes. It follows you—into your body, your decisions, and your understanding of what love looks like.

This episode explores hard truths many people avoid:

• How childhood trauma shapes decision-making and silences instinct

• Why children comply with abuse when it’s disguised as care

• How grooming works—not through violence, but through reassurance and control

• The impact of shame, medication, and loss of bodily autonomy

• How systems protect adults and reposition children as the problem

• Why survivors often don’t disclose abuse until much later

This is not a graphic account. It is a truthful one.

Episode 5 examines how trauma makes choices for you, how survival rewires consent, and how a system meant to protect can instead reset and contain a child rather than confront harm.

Content warning: This episode discusses child sexual abuse, grooming, and institutional failure. Listener discretion is strongly advised.

Some stories are painful to hear.

Some truths are painful to accept.

But silence has never protected children—truth has.

What happens after the psych ward—when the doors don’t unlock, they just change location?

In this episode of The Truth About Trauma, I talk about being transferred from a psychiatric hospital to a residential facility in the middle of rural Kentucky—forty acres of woods, buildings, and silence. No gas stations. No neighbors. No easy way out. Just distance, rules, and a system that calls isolation “treatment.”

This is the truth about residential care that rarely gets discussed:

• How being far from everything can feel more threatening than being locked in

• Why “step-down care” doesn’t always feel like progress

• How staff power, shift changes, and unspoken rules shaped daily survival

• The difference between structure and control

• What it’s like to be placed near a sibling—but kept just out of reach

• Why familiarity, even when it’s painful, can feel safer than the unknown

This episode doesn’t romanticize treatment or demonize every staff member. It tells the uncomfortable truth: that compliance is often rewarded more than healing, and quiet kids are mistaken for healthy ones.

If you’ve ever worked in residential care, lived in it, or trusted the system to protect a child—this episode may challenge what you think you know.

Some stories are hard to hear.

Some truths are harder to accept.

But they still need to be told.

This episode exposes the reality behind intake procedures, life on a locked unit, medication, restraints, and the emotional fallout that no one warned me about.

Questions or comments?

Email--Truthabouttrauma@gmail.com

What is trauma? How does it show up? And why do so many survivors blame themselves for completely normal reactions?

In the debut episode, I break down trauma in clear, compassionate language — explaining the emotional, psychological, and physical effects that often go unseen.