On November 8th, 2018, a small fire outside the mountain town of Paradise, CA turned into the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. It burned churches, homes, daycares, and schools, and close to half a million trees. The number of insects, horses, dogs, and frogs that were killed will never be known, but their loss is felt. 86 people died. Most of whom survived did so only through navigating a couple small, winding, mountain roads with emergency vehicles to protect them from impending flames and burning debris.

I felt the pain distinctly when I visited this past weekend with my oldest and dearest friend. She survived the fire by moving slowly down one of the roads, and lost everything but her husband, two dogs, and an overnight bag. At one point during her escape, as burning embers were on the hood of her car and the windows were too hot to touch, she prayed and accepted that this would be how she died.

She took me to where her home once stood; the fire left only their wrought iron gate and mailbox. As we pulled up, she commented quickly that the weeds had grown back since her husband cleared the land a couple weeks ago. Life was pushing through — the land was neither what it had been nor what it would become, something I’d later come to call the BETWEEN (keep scrolling to learn more). We walked the ghostly layout of her house. She told stories of the living room, bedroom, and bathroom. She remembered out loud where the well was, and how many deer would roam in the undeveloped land below. She married in the church two parcels down. All that remained there was the parking lot.

My friend’s yard during my visit

My friend has PTSD now. Post-traumatic stress disorder is marked by the brain's inability to tell past from present. Trauma gets lodged in our systems when something overwhelming happens or is witnessed, it can't be processed at the time, and the nurturing that is needed to soothe the pain doesn’t happen. Standing where her well used to be, she told me that for the first year after the fire, certain smells of smoke sent her right back to that morning, no matter what was actually burning nearby — a neighbor's fireplace, a barbecue three streets over. As humans, it can be easy to expect that what we experience is actually happening, so much so that we can become flippant about what a gift it is to tell if something is present or not. For anybody who has experienced PTSD, you know firsthand what a gift it is to know that the smoke you are smelling is not decades of your life burning, as you are quietly accept that this may be how you die. And once you start to sort it out, why would you ever take it for granted again?

Of course, this confusion of not knowing what is really present is not just a feature of PTSD — it is also a feature of being human. Our minds create a lot of stories to help us survive and organize our experiences, whether they are accurate or not. Anaïs Nin said it well: "We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are." Now hear me clearly: trauma is real, and not every distress comes from trauma. Non-traumatic distress activates similar parts of our brain and body as trauma, but it is not a traumatic response. This distinction matters, because it honors clinical levels of trauma, and it holds us accountable to training our minds in the ways human minds actually need training.

I think of the mind as distorting reality in at least three ways. The first is trauma — the nervous system and body lose its ability to tell past from present, the way it did for my friend each time a smell of smoke sent her back to that morning. The second is the ordinary, story-making, conceptual, mind — the narratives we build, often without noticing, to survive and make sense of what's happening, whether or not those stories are true. The third is foundational structure of mind’s perceptive abilities — the plain limits of our senses. Leaves appear green to most of us, and most of us assume they are green and move on. Under more study, we find that our first assumption isn't entirely accurate — leaves appear green because their chlorophyll absorbs red and blue sunlight. It doesn't mean we're suddenly going to start seeing the yellows and oranges that are also there, but it does mean we can accept that our eyes don't tell us everything that may be present — that what we assume is happening now may really just be past experience or past knowledge wearing the disguise of the present moment. A broader lived understanding of how the mind operates helps us tell which one we're up against. This distinction has broad implications for reducing suffering generally, and for psychological health specifically.

In my work with Dynamic Trauma Integration, a good part of what I help people do is learn to tell these apart — is this a trauma response, is this the ordinary mind spinning a story to keep itself safe, or is this the kind of confusion that shows up on the path of awakening, when what's falling away is simply an old idea of self and the world? Each one calls for something different, rather than treating all confusion the same way. That discernment doesn't come all at once. It's built slowly, through paying closer attention to the body, the mind, and the moment — and it's some of the most important work I do with my clients.

Standing on that scorched lot with my friend, watching her trace the outline of a bathroom that no longer exists, I found myself running the same kind of questions through my mind that I ask on the path of awakening. Who is the "me" that is seeing this? Where is the origin of this thought? How does my breath respond when I hear the wind move through the trees she once knew as a fence line? Over time, one begins to understand that there is a lot more mystery than answers, and that by the time an experience gets registered into conscious mind, its roots have been there for quite some time. Awakening teaches us to experience the falling away of what is false, so that what is real can slowly be revealed and experienced.

My friend's nervous system and my meditation practice are teaching me the same lesson, just through different doors: what one believes is happening in the present moment is not straightforward or simple. What appears to be happening may in fact be a creation of your mind, not reality itself. This is one of the first points to play with when getting used to being more present after you have experienced trauma — and it's the same recalibration my friend has had to make every time a familiar smell of smoke turns out to be nothing at all.

The land that once held my friend's house was far from abandoned, far from destroyed, and far from thriving. It was in a transition period — not trauma, not story, not even a trick of perception, but a real and present state that our minds, so used to seeing things as finished or not, struggle to hold. In my therapeutic framework, Dynamic Trauma Integration, I would call this the BETWEEN experience — one of four levels of presence I work with in this framework. It is there and not there. It is not what it was and it is not what it will be, yet the ingredients of what makes life are undoubtedly present. In the eight years since the fire, the weeds grew back two weeks after being trimmed; the eucalyptus tree that was not much bigger than a seedling grew in abundance. The town was devastated. The land was devastated. The water system was tarnished for years. That really happened. Yet, to say life was destroyed would be inaccurate. Life has its way of pushing through, changing shape, and coming as it is ready. Do you have the courage in BETWEEN to notice this fuller experience?

If the idea of the BETWEEN speaks to you, I write about it — and the rest of the Dynamic Trauma Integration framework — every week here on Trauma Portal. If you’re new here, consider subscribing so these essays land in your inbox.

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This is what I want you to know, whether you are standing on scorched earth or sitting with a memory that still feels like it's happening right now: destruction and devastation are real, and they are not the whole story. Whether what's distorting your view of the present is trauma, the stories your mind tells to survive, or simply the limits of what your senses can register, the invitation is the same. If you are in your own BETWEEN right now — not who you were, not yet who you're becoming — this is your invitation to stop waiting for the transition to end before you call it life. It already is.

If this piece resonated, I’d love for you to subscribe to Trauma Portal so future essays reach you directly. And if you’re looking for more support navigating your own BETWEEN, you can learn more about Dynamic Trauma Integration and download a free guided meditation at dynamictraumaintegration.com.

My grandfather gave me a camera when I was 15. I don’t think he knew what he was handing me.

I didn’t use it the way most teenagers would. I took it into the parts of the world people looked away from. My first photo essay was about trans youth — 1997, when being trans was not understood the way it is now, when the culture had no real language for it and very little tolerance. I was 15. I didn’t go there because I was brave.

I went there because something in me already knew that what I had been taught about the world wasn’t it.

The camera taught me something I have spent the last 30 years trying to articulate: perception is not passive. The angle you choose, the moment you wait for, the frame you draw around what you see — these are not neutral acts. They are decisions about what is real. And when you change them, reality shifts. Not the facts of it. The nature of it.

That was the first crack.

If you are reading this, you probably know what I mean. Not because you picked up a camera, but because something in you has always known that what you were handed — the story about who you are, what the world is, what healing looks like, what waking up requires — isn’t the whole picture. There is more. And you are driven by something you can’t fully name to reach for it.

That force is not confusion. It is not pathology. It is not spiritual bypassing or unresolved trauma expressing itself as seeking. It is something older and truer than any of that. It is the part of you that trauma never touched. The part that conditioning never reached. The part that has been trying to show you something about the nature of your own perception since before you had words for it.

This publication exists because of that part of you.

Trauma Portal is the intellectual home of Dynamic Trauma Integration — a framework I have spent decades building at the intersection of trauma science, ancient wisdom, developmental psychology, and anthropology.

The central claim is simple and it is radical: what makes you who you are is not what you think it is. Trauma shaped you. Conditioning shaped you. Culture shaped you. But none of it became you. And perception — trained, refined, brought into direct contact with what is actually here — is how you discover that.

I write here for clinicians who sense the textbooks are missing something. For dharma practitioners navigating the place where awakening and unresolved trauma collide. For serious seekers who are done with answers that almost fit. And for anyone driven by that unnamed force toward something truer than what they were given.

The essays here move between theory and practice because in this work they were never separate.

The framework emerged from the room — from real people, real suffering, real moments of something shifting that couldn’t be fully explained by the model we were using. I write to understand what keeps happening. I write to transmit what I’ve learned. And I write because some things can only be said in the space between the clinical and the poetic, between the rigorous and the wild.

You are in the right place.

→ Learn more about Dynamic Trauma Integration at dynamictraumaintegration.com

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