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Unbroken offers a profound new approach to healing trauma, grounded in a radical reframing of how we understand this nearly universal experience.

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About

Hi, I’m MaryCatherine (MC) McDonald, PhD. I’m a research professor and life coach who specializes in the psychology of trauma, stress, and resilience. I have spent over a decade researching, publishing, and lecturing on the psychology, neuroscience, and lived experience of trauma. I am passionate about destigmatizing mental health issues in general, and empowering people to heal by giving them science-based tools to gain mastery over their own experience.

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I’ve got a weekly advice column over on Substack. If you have a question or would like advice on something, submit it here anonymously and I’ll write you a column.

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A smattering of #tinylittlejoys from the last two weeks. That rose is the size of a cantaloupe and that little lizard thing is called a blue-tailed (duh) skink.
I am SUPER excited to be able to say that Unbroken is now available for pre-order in Spanish! As you can see, the cover design is beautiful and it's such a wild gift to me that someone went through and translated the entire thing. Muchas gracias, @ed
Here's a thing that I wish I was taught in the 1st grade: emotions are biological events. They have a beginning, middle, and an end. That means if we let them run their natural course, they end. If we go to war with them, well, then we're at war. The
lunch break, street books, @yung_pueblo, sunshine #tinylittlejoys
🔔 New @psych_today article! 🔔 The Adverse Childhood Experiences (or ACE) metric is ✨supposed✨ to measure traumatic events in childhood, like abuse, neglect, and family dysfunction and then determine your risk for future medical, academic, and soci
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Throwback! This is a snippet from my dissertation prospectus (basically an outline you run by a committee before you do most of your research and writing to see if you could write a whole book-length thing about it) from 2011. It ended up being just
That being said, if you ever catch yourself saying, "I'm just being brutally honest!" you've gone to far. The truth is brutal enough, it doesn't need to be brutally delivered. Ever.
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Warning, rant ahead.⁠ ⁠ (If you are not on substack and want to read the article, click on my profile, and then click the link in my bio and then the button that says 'Substack.')