Last week, I shared something I have finally been able to put into words after spending a long time feeling like my work was all over the place. I didn’t choose a niche. I followed the questions.

Those questions started because I desperately needed answers for myself. I wanted to understand trauma, brain injury, domestic violence, strangulation, memory, the nervous system, behavior and healing. Over time, the questions became bigger than my own story. They followed me into EMS, healthcare, professional trainings, conversations with survivors, brain rehabilitation and the many systems I have encountered from very different sides.

Eventually, almost everything I was asking seemed to lead back to two questions: What happened inside someone because of what happened to them? And what changes when we understand that?

Last week, I told you that I could finally see how all the pieces connected. This week, I want to show you what I plan to do with them.

Looking Beyond What We See

There is a question I find myself asking more and more when I train professionals: What if the behavior we’re seeing isn’t the whole story?

Think about how quickly we make conclusions about people based on behavior. Someone misses another appointment. A patient doesn’t follow discharge instructions. A survivor returns to an abusive relationship. A witness changes a detail in their story. Someone shuts down while being questioned. Someone becomes angry over something that seems relatively small. A person doesn’t complete paperwork or repeatedly makes decisions that everyone around them thinks make absolutely no sense.

We have words for these behaviors and sometimes for the people displaying them: difficult, noncompliant, resistant, uncooperative, unmotivated, manipulative or a poor historian. Sometimes those words may accurately describe something we are observing, but I have become increasingly interested in whether they actually explain anything. Being difficult is not always the same thing as having difficulty.

What if someone is having difficulty processing information? What if memory is affected? What if their nervous system is responding to perceived threat? What if coercive control is influencing a decision that makes absolutely no sense from the outside? What if an invisible brain injury is affecting cognition or communication? What if the person is exhausted, afraid, overwhelmed, in pain or trying to navigate barriers we know absolutely nothing about?

There may also be something happening that none of us have considered yet. That doesn’t mean the answer is to look at every confusing behavior and decide it must be trauma or brain injury. That would simply replace one assumption with another. Curiosity isn’t diagnosis. It is being willing to admit that what we can see from the outside may not tell us everything happening underneath. Sometimes the most important question we can ask is simply: What don’t we know yet?

That’s Where We’re Starting

Over the next several months, I want to take you through some of the questions that have changed the way I understand people, but I want to build the conversation slowly instead of trying to talk about everything at once.

In September, we’re going to look beyond what we see. We’ll talk about behavior, trauma, survival responses, the labels we put on people, domestic violence, why people stay or return to situations that may be unsafe, and why understanding someone’s behavior is not the same thing as excusing it.

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and we’re going to look at patterns. I want to move beyond individual incidents and talk about power and control, coercive control, trauma bonding, public versus private behavior, children, loyalty, fear and why domestic violence is far more complicated than asking someone why they didn’t simply leave.

In November, we’re going to look at the invisible. We’ll explore memory, attention, processing, executive function, communication, cognitive load and brain injury. I especially want to talk about what professionals may miss when difficulty functioning gets interpreted as unwillingness, resistance or noncompliance.

Then December brings us to what may be the most important part of the entire conversation: Now that we understand more, what are we going to do with that understanding? Because I don’t want understanding to become the place where the conversation ends.

Understanding Isn’t Excusing

This is going to be an important thread throughout everything I share because I think we sometimes treat compassion and accountability as if we have to choose between them. I don’t believe we do.

Someone can have experienced significant trauma and still be responsible for causing harm. Someone can have a brain injury or cognitive challenges and still need boundaries. A survivor can deserve compassion and make choices other people don’t understand or agree with. Someone who hurts other people may have been deeply hurt themselves, and understanding their history does not erase the harm they caused. Two things can be true.

Understanding gives us more information, but then we have to decide what to do with that information. How do we protect people? How do we hold people accountable? How do we reduce future harm? How do we help people recognize patterns? How do we help survivors reclaim agency? How do we support families without asking them to become collateral damage in someone else’s healing?

I think this question also matters when we turn it toward ourselves. Sometimes understanding why we developed a behavior, reaction or pattern gives us compassion for a version of ourselves we spent years judging. But eventually that understanding can also give us an opportunity to ask whether we still need that response or whether it is hurting us or other people now.

One of the ideas I keep coming back to is this: Our past can explain parts of who we became without determining who we have to remain. I want to have much more of that conversation.

The Same Information Can Look Different Depending on Where You Stand

One thing I’m intentionally changing is how I share information. For years, I’ve watched the same situation look completely different depending on which side of a system someone is standing on.

A police officer has one responsibility. A prosecutor has another. A healthcare professional may be seeing something completely different. An advocate has a different role. A survivor is living something none of those professionals can completely experience from the outside. Meanwhile, a family may be desperately trying to understand what is happening to someone they love.

So over the next several months, I’m going to begin taking some of the same concepts and speaking directly to different groups: law enforcement, attorneys and prosecutors, healthcare professionals, advocates, survivors and families. There aren’t six different truths, but the same information may need to be understood and applied differently depending on where you’re standing.

I see this in a very different way through my work as a paramedic. When you work in EMS long enough, especially in a smaller community, there are patients with chronic illnesses you respond to again and again. Eventually, you don’t just recognize the address when it comes across the screen. You know the patient by name. You know pieces of their medical history. You know the medications sitting on the counter and the hospital they usually go to. Sometimes you have watched their health decline over years.

As I have learned more about trauma, the nervous system, the brain and the body, I started becoming curious about something else. When the situation allows for it, I will sometimes ask these patients whether they have experienced significant trauma in their lives. Every single person I have asked has said yes.

I want to be careful with what I’m saying here. That observation doesn’t prove that trauma caused their chronic illness. It doesn’t mean every person living with chronic disease has a trauma history, and it certainly doesn’t mean we should look at someone’s medical problems and assume we know their story. But it has made me ask a much bigger question: What might change if we became better at recognizing and addressing the effects of trauma before chronic illness has taken control of so much of someone’s life?

By the time I meet many of these patients as a paramedic, we are responding to what is happening now. We are treating the difficulty breathing, the blood pressure problem, the uncontrolled blood sugar, the pain, the cardiac symptoms, the medication issue or whatever crisis prompted someone to call 911 that day. But I can’t help wondering what was happening ten, twenty or thirty years earlier.

What was their nervous system carrying then? What was their body adapting to? What signs were there that nobody connected? Were there opportunities to intervene differently if someone had understood that what happens to us doesn’t always stay neatly separated from our physical health?

Those are questions I want us to become more willing to ask. Maybe part of becoming more brain-aware and trauma-aware isn’t only changing how we respond once someone is struggling. Maybe it’s learning to recognize what is happening sooner.

I think one of the most valuable things my life has given me is the opportunity to see systems from very different sides. I know what it is like to be the professional responding to someone else’s crisis, but I also know what it is like to be the person sitting on the other side needing the system to understand something I couldn’t always explain myself. Those perspectives don’t always fit neatly together. Maybe that’s exactly why they’re important.

I’m Building While I’m Sharing

There is another reason I’m calling this The Courageous Journey rather than presenting some perfectly finished product to everyone. I’m building parts of it right now.

I’m writing my first book for publication, You Were Never Broken. At the heart of that book is a question I wish someone had helped me ask much earlier in my own life. Instead of spending years asking, “What’s wrong with me?” what might have changed if I had been able to ask, “What happened to me? What happened inside me because of it? What did my brain and body learn to do to survive? And what do I want to do with that understanding now?”

I’m also building the first course in what I’m calling the Brain-Aware Professional Series. The first course, Beyond the Behavior: Understanding What Trauma Changes—and What We May Be Missing, is designed to help professionals move from asking, “Why are they acting like this?” toward asking, “What might be happening underneath what I’m seeing?”

I’m going to let you see pieces of both of those things while I’m building them. Not everything belongs online. There are things I teach in professional trainings that belong in the room. There are parts of my story that belong in future books. There are subjects I’m still researching and questions I’m still trying to answer.

But I also don’t want to disappear for six months, build everything behind closed doors and then come back pretending the process was neat and easy. I want to document some of what happens on the way there—the questions, the learning, the things that change and probably even some things that don’t work. Because that’s part of the journey, too.

And I’m Still Going to Be Paula

This part actually matters to me. I don’t want everything in my life to become educational content. I don’t want every run to become a lesson about the nervous system. I don’t want every tomato that comes out of my garden to require a discussion about brain health. And I certainly don’t think six dogs piled on my bed need an educational objective.

Sometimes you’re going to get the research. Sometimes you’ll get the speaker or trainer. Sometimes you’ll get the paramedic. Sometimes you’ll get the survivor who can now look backward at things very differently. Sometimes you’ll get the woman trying to write a book and wondering why she thought this was a good idea. And sometimes you’re probably just going to get chickens.

All of those things are part of my life, and one thing I’m learning in this season is that I don’t have to separate the person from the work quite as much as I once thought I did.

If I’m being truthful about what this season feels like, though, sometimes it is incredibly overwhelming. I have these ideas in front of me now—the book, the course, the content, the trainings and this bigger vision for what I believe all of it could become—but I don’t have the resources to simply hand those ideas to someone else and say, “Build this for me.”

I’m a paramedic. I love what I do, but the reality is that paramedic wages aren’t great. On top of that, much of the savings I once had has been depleted over more than a decade of trying to find answers for my own health and brain. During the periods when I couldn’t work as a paramedic the way I once had, those savings also became what helped fill the wage gaps. So now, as I try to build something new, there isn’t a large budget sitting behind it.

That makes this harder, because if I want to learn how to build an online course, I have to figure out how to build an online course. If I want to understand websites, newsletters, email lists, publishing, video, social media or all the technology that goes along with creating this work, I’m usually sitting at my computer teaching myself how to do it.

There are days when that feels like a lot. Sometimes I look at everything I want to create and everything I still have to learn and wonder how in the world I’m going to do all of it while continuing to work as a paramedic, speak, train, write and live the rest of my life.

But there is another side to it, and I don’t want to miss that part of the story either. I’m learning. I’m learning things I never thought I would know how to do. I’m stretching myself in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with brain rehabilitation and, at the same time, maybe have everything to do with it. I’m building skills, solving problems and figuring things out one piece at a time.

And I’m proud of myself for that.

Would it sometimes be easier to have the money to hand all of this to someone else? Absolutely. But there is also something pretty incredible about looking at something I created and realizing that I didn’t know how to do it before. I taught myself.

Maybe someday I will have a team of people helping me build all of this. I hope I do. But right now, this part of The Courageous Journey looks a lot like me sitting at my computer, probably with a dog or two nearby, searching for answers to things I don’t understand, trying something, getting it wrong, trying again and slowly watching an idea that once lived only in my head become something real.

It’s overwhelming sometimes, but it’s also growth. And when I stop long enough to look at how much I’ve already learned, I’m actually really proud of the woman who decided to try anyway.

I’m Not Trying to Become an Influencer

For a while, I wondered if becoming an influencer was what I was supposed to be working toward. I knew I wanted to reach more people, and social media seemed like the obvious way to do that. But the more I tried to figure out how I was supposed to fit into that world, the more I realized it didn’t feel right.

I don’t want views simply for the sake of having views. I don’t want to create something just because an algorithm tells me people will watch it. I want what I create to leave breadcrumbs.

Maybe a survivor finds a video at two in the morning and realizes there may be an explanation for something they have spent years feeling ashamed of. Maybe a family member reads a blog and changes the way they communicate with someone they love. Maybe a police officer sees a 60-second video before a shift and remembers to give someone a little more processing time. Maybe a prosecutor starts asking a different question about memory. Maybe a healthcare professional looks at the patient they’ve been calling noncompliant and wonders what might actually be interfering with follow-through.

Maybe someone who has spent their entire life believing they are broken begins considering another possibility. And maybe someone who finally understands why they developed a harmful pattern realizes that understanding where it came from doesn’t mean they have to keep carrying it forward.

Those are the conversations I want to change. Not because I think I have all the answers. I don’t. In many ways, the more I learn, the more questions I have. But I have also learned how powerful the right question can be.

A question changed the direction of my own life more than once. Maybe the things I create can help someone else find the question they haven’t known to ask yet.

So Here We Go

That’s the roadmap for the next several months. It isn’t a perfectly finished plan carved in stone. It’s a direction.

We’re going to look beyond what we see. We’re going to look at patterns. We’re going to explore some of the invisible things we may be missing. And then we’re going to talk about how understanding can lead to change.

Along the way, I’m going to share what I’m learning. I’m going to teach, write, build and keep asking questions. I’m going to continue speaking and training. I’m going to continue rehabilitating my own brain. I’m going to work toward things that scare me a little, and I’m probably going to change some things as I learn more.

That’s okay.

Maybe The Courageous Journey isn’t about reaching some magical place where we finally have everything figured out. Maybe courage is being willing to keep asking better questions and then doing something with what we learn.

Last week, I told you that I didn’t choose a niche. I followed the questions.

Now I’m ready to see where they lead. I hope you’ll come with me.

Healing begins with understanding.