The Healing Cottage, 119 N. Belair Road, Evans, GA (2026)

09/08/2026

Written by Amanda Hullum

September is National Recovery Month.

We talk a lot about recovery for the person struggling with addiction, but did you know spouses need recovery too?

Living alongside addiction changes you. You learn to watch the eyes, listen to the voice, question the story, check the phone or the bank account, read the room, and brace for what might come next. This is what survival mode looks like.

For years these behaviors have been labeled “codependency,” and that word makes me cringe when it’s tossed around so flippantly in recovery conversations about spouses. “The codependent is more sick than the addict” is a lie from the accuser. Period. Full stop. We are all powerless over our flesh, and we all need Jesus.

Can unhealthy patterns and codependency develop over time? Absolutely. But if you’ve never walked the spousal side of addiction, you cannot fully understand what chronic unpredictability, deception, and betrayal can do to a person. And if you have walked that road and consider yourself healed, yet still reach for “codependent” as a quick label for another spouse’s survival responses without first getting curious about the trauma underneath them, there may still be some healing left for you too.

What looks like control is often hypervigilance, because fear whispers that if you can just prevent the outcome, you won’t have to survive it again. What looks like distrust can come from repeated betrayal, a nervous system that has learned to take note of who or what has proven safe. What looks like obsession can be a desperate search for footing in unpredictability, because the past has trained you to brace for what’s coming.

Not every spouse develops PTSD. That doesn’t mean unhealthy behaviors don’t need to change, and it doesn’t mean codependency is never at play. It means we should get curious about what someone has lived through before we slap a label on how they survived it.

Not every person who loves someone with an addiction is, or has been, codependent.

When sobriety or separation finally comes, your nervous system doesn’t get the memo that the danger has passed. You have recovery work too: learning to feel safe again, setting boundaries, rebuilding trust in yourself, grieving what addiction took from you, learning how to love someone without losing yourself in the trying. These things take intention.

Trauma-informed research gives us another lens beyond the outdated assumption that every spouse is codependent. Science shows that suppressed trauma can surface later as autoimmune disease, dementia, significant weight gain from prolonged high cortisol, and mental health disorders born from living too long in survival mode. If any of this sounds like you, get yourself some counseling. You deserve it.

This Recovery Month, let’s celebrate the one choosing sobriety, and let’s remember the one beside them, learning how to live outside of survival mode. The person with the addiction needs recovery. The spouse who lived through it needs recovery too. 💜

There is such power in acknowledging our need for Jesus while we talk about our issues, because we all have them, and we all need each other. If you think you don’t need anybody, you’re wrong. None of us, not one, has anything to be ashamed of. We all have something we need to openly deal with, because if we didn’t, we’d have no need for a Savior.

Then I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of His Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren, who accused them before our God day and night, has been cast down. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death.
Revelation 12:10-11

I’ll tell you my story soon. And if your childhood was riddled with addiction, you need recovery too. More to come on that.

If you’re looking for a place of recovery to support or for help, I encourage you to contact The Bridge Center Recovery in Andersonville, SC.

Love y’all, mean it!
Amanda

09/03/2026

🚨 🚨🚨🚨🚨Su***de 🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨

Twenty-seven years ago in the middle of summer, while I was in the hospital with my sick baby, I received a call no one wants to receive…

Sitting in his bedroom on the side of the bed, my Dad put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. My Dad had killed himself. He ended his life with one pull of a trigger. That may sound harsh but...

Su***de is harsh.

It was a harsh loss, a strange, layered kind of loss, since his alcoholism had already taken him from us long before that summer day. We had been grieving him in pieces for years, we loved a man who slipped further away with every bottle, so that when the final loss came, it landed on ground already worn thin by all the losses before it. However, we never saw or expected that would be his end. One moment he was here, the next, he was gone.

Here is something I have learned from sitting across from so many hurting people in the years since: almost no one actually wants to die.

What they want is for the pain to stop. I ask plainly, “Do you want to die, or do you want this pain to end?” And every time, after the truth finally has room to surface, they say some version of the same thing.

“I just want all the pain to stop.”

That single distinction has become one of the most sacred parts of my work, because it means there is still a door to heal, there is still hope.

I tell them plainly what I can and cannot offer them through it. “I cannot meet you on the other side of eternity if you choose this out, I can’t help. BUT I can meet you here, in this moment, in life, if you choose to stay in it with me. So please, let’s make a plan to help you stay.”

September asks us to stop keeping su***de folded away in the quiet corners of our homes, tucked behind polite conversation, and “Newspeak” with words like “unaliving.”

Instead let’s carry it out into the open with its harsh reality where healing actually has room to happen.

Su***de is a wound that lives in families for generations, quiet, until someone decides to speak it into the light. I am that someone. It became a thread of life that runs through the work I do.

If you are the one carrying the unbearable weight tonight, please hear this: the pain that feels permanent is not permanent, even when every cell in your body insists otherwise. It’s NOT permanent. This is a chapter of your life, don’t let it become the whole story.

I’ve sat with parents who have lost children, children who have lost parents, wives who have lost husbands, and a myriad of other family members and friends grieving the loss of someone they loved who who decided to quit living.

Each one carries a grief, tangled and specific to the bond that was severed and I understand a little because it lives within my past.

Healing was never meant to happen in the dark, tucked away where no one can reach us. It happens when we step into the light, together, and let someone else help carry what we were never meant to carry alone.

There are hands reaching for you that you cannot yet see.

Stay Alive

Call or text 988. Someone will answer.

***deAwareness ***dePrevention ***deIsNotTheAnswer

08/30/2026

Historically, Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) became one of the most widely accepted and researched trauma treatments. It helped move the field forward by recognizing the impact of trauma and providing a structured framework for treatment. It remains an evidence based approach that can be beneficial for some individuals.

However, our understanding of trauma has grown significantly over the last several decades.

Today, neuroscience shows us that trauma affects much more than thoughts. Trauma impacts the nervous system, the body, attachment patterns, emotional regulation, relationships, and a person’s sense of safety.

For individuals with PTSD and especially Complex PTSD, healing requires more than changing thoughts.

Trauma is not simply a thinking problem. It is a whole person experience.

For years, many trauma survivors were treated primarily through cognitive approaches and exposure based interventions. While exposure therapy can be helpful in certain situations and for certain diagnoses, I have personally worked with veterans and other trauma survivors who were pushed through exposure based approaches that left them feeling overwhelmed, retraumatized, and significantly worse. I have seen clients come from other treatment programs reporting increased symptoms, deeper dysregulation, and complete regression after being repeatedly exposed to traumatic material before adequate safety, stabilization, and nervous system regulation had been established.

A whole lot of training, research, self learning, curiosity and experiences with clients has shaped how I practice today.

I know better for my clients with PTSD and Complex PTSD, so I do better for and with them.

Before we process trauma, we must build safety. Safety is nonnegotiable in trauma healing.

It is foundational.

Safety in life.

Safety in the body.

Safety in relationships.

Safety within oneself.

Many trauma survivors have never truly experienced these forms of safety. Their nervous systems have spent years, sometimes decades, preparing for danger. So, asking them to revisit traumatic experiences before establishing safety can overwhelm an already overburdened system.

Research continues to show that healing occurs when the nervous system can begin to experience regulation, connection, and security. As Dr. Stephen Porges states, “Safety is the treatment.”

That is why my approach is integrative.

I use evidence and faith based interventions, including elements of TF-CBT when appropriate, but I also incorporate:

• EMDR and trauma processing

• Nervous system regulation

• Somatic and body based interventions

• Attachment focused healing

• Inner child work

• Relational repair

• Faith integration

• Mind, body, and spiritual healing

I do not believe trauma survivors need someone to tell them to simply think differently.

I believe they need a safe relationship, a regulated nervous system, compassionate support, and tools that address the whole person.

When people feel safe enough to reconnect with their bodies, process their experiences, and develop secure connections, healing becomes possible.

When we know more about trauma, we can offer more complete care.

That is the heart behind the work I do with clients every day.

08/23/2026

Imagine being small in a house full of grown-ups who are tired, and stressed, and stretched thin past what they can hold.

Maybe the difficult ones aren’t the children at all.

So much of what we call misbehavior in our kids is actually communication. A nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do when it lives inside a home that holds tension it cannot name.

Children do not have the words yet for what they sense, so their bodies say it instead, in meltdowns and slammed doors and the sudden refusal to put on shoes. The screaming, the whining, the “NO!”

Children borrow their regulation from us before they ever learn to carry their own. When we are anxious, and stressed, even if we speak with calm words and correct actions, they feel it in their bones … in their little spirits and nervous systems. When we are short, sharp, or irritated, they feel it even more intensely.

When we are calm, even in hard moments, something in them settles too. We are their weather system long before they have words to speak.

Listen please, this is not about guilt. It is about awareness, and about grace, both for them and for ourselves. We cannot pour calm from an empty vessel, and so tending our own dysregulation, our own exhaustion, our own unhealed places, becomes some of the most important parenting work there is.

So today, before we ask what is wrong with the child in front of us, maybe the more important question is this: what is the world around them asking their little body to carry?

How am I contributing to their mental health or dysregulation?

Be healthy so your children can be healthy. Children learn what they live.

Image by Little Pine Learners

08/14/2026

When a mom says “I’m not okay,” please listen to her.

Not “she’ll be okay.”
Not “she’s strong.”
Not “she always figures it out.”
Not “she’s a mom…that’s what moms do.”

Stop what you are doing.
Listen.

I’ve been following the Lindsay Clancy case only a brief time and regardless of what we believe about her guilt or criminal responsibility, there is something about this story that should make every one of us pay attention.

Three children are dead.
Their mother is on trial.
The prosecution says her actions were deliberate; her defense says she was suffering from severe postpartum mental illness and was not criminally responsible.

All I can see is a broken woman, who has been begging for help, for a long time.

We do not need a verdict to talk about the fact that a mother was saying she wasn’t okay.

Before that awful day, Lindsay had sought psychiatric care, called crisis hotlines, struggled with suicidal thoughts, and even admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital.

Whether you believe she is guilty or not, whether you believe mental illness explains her actions or doesn’t, we should be able to agree that mothers asking for help need to be taken seriously!

We’ve created this strange expectation that moms are somehow indestructible.

She’s exhausted? That’s motherhood.

She’s overwhelmed? We all are.

She’s crying? She just needs a break.

She says she can’t do this anymore?
She doesn’t mean it.

She’s falling apart? Don’t worry. She’s strong.

…but sometimes “I’m not okay” actually means I’m not okay.

Strength is not an unlimited resource.

Being a mother does not magically protect a woman from depression, anxiety, psychosis, trauma, exhaustion, or reaching the absolute end of what she can carry and many times carry this alone.

Something I don’t see anyone talking about… A meta-analysis of 19 cohort studies found low marital satisfaction was the strongest predictor of postpartum major depressive disorder, with women in low-satisfaction marriages roughly 3.5 times more likely to develop PPD than those in satisfying marriages. Low marital satisfaction was the most significant predictor of postpartum major depressive disorder.

So check on the moms in your life… especially the strong ones. Especially the ones who normally handle everything. When one of them finally has enough courage to say, “I need help,” don’t remind her how strong she is.

Help her.

Don’t assume she’ll survive it because she’s a mom and “that’s what moms do.”

Sometimes the strongest thing a mother will ever say is…

“I can’t carry this by myself anymore.”

…somebody needs to believe her.

I will believe you. ❤️‍🩹
I’m here.

Amanda Hullum

08/08/2026

Growth rarely feels comfortable.

The habits, beliefs, and survival strategies that once protected you can become the very things that keep you stuck. Healing asks you to make a different choice, sometimes daily, sometimes moment by moment.

What happened to you was not your choice, it wasn’t your fault…But what you do with your story today is within your control.

Every time you choose awareness over avoidance, truth over denial, connection over isolation, and healing over hiding, you take another step forward.

The legacy you leave does not have to be one of pain. It can be one of healing, grace, resilience, and health for the generations that follow.

Choose growth again today.

06/30/2026

There is something powerful about sitting with women who truly understand your pain.

Not because they have all the answers. Not because they’re completely “over it.” But because they’ve walked through the fire of betrayal and discovered that healing is possible.

If you’ve experienced infidelity or betrayal, you do not have to carry it alone.

“ He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.”
Psalm 147:3

Up From the Ashes is a betrayal trauma support group for women who are ready to heal, grow, and find hope again in a safe, supportive community.

📍 Evans, GA

📅 Begins Tuesday, August 4

⏰ 7:15 PM to 8:30 PM

💲 $45 per session, materials included

This group combines practical tools, biblical truth, compassionate support, and guidance from someone trained in betrayal trauma recovery who has also walked this journey personally.

If this speaks to your heart, if you’ve been waiting to find others who truly understand your pain…text “HEALING,” to 706.564.7827 for more information.

You don’t have to walk through this alone. ❤️

06/23/2026

Men were never meant to fight alone.

Too many men carry shame, addiction, wounds from the past, broken relationships, and spiritual battles in silence. They appear strong on the outside while struggling on the inside.

WarPath: Men of Integrity is a 29-week discipleship journey designed to help men reclaim the life God intended.

WarPath addresses both spiritual growth and the underlying wounds, beliefs, and patterns that often keep men stuck."

This group combines biblical truth, trauma-informed healing, accountability, and authentic brotherhood.

Each session includes:

• Video supplementation
• Trauma recovery and personal growth work
• Honest discussion and accountability
• Support and encouragement from other men walking the same path
• Practical tools to help create lasting change

Through biblical teaching, brotherhood, accountability, and practical tools for transformation, men learn to:

• Heal childhood wounds and past hurts
• Break free from destructive patterns
• Retrain unhealthy thinking
• Build lives of honesty and integrity
• Strengthen their faith
• Restore relationships with those they love
• Walk in freedom instead of shame

This is not a place for perfect men. It is a place for honest men.

📅 Beginning July 6, 2026

🕡 Every Other Monday, 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM

📍 The Healing Cottage of the CSRA

Investment:
• $40 per group session
• $15 monthly Soul Refiner membership for study guides, member online portal access, and an extensive video library to support your journey between sessions.

If you are tired of fighting alone, there is a seat at this table for you.

Text "WARPATH" to 706-339-1020 for information or registration.

06/16/2026

Post below by Amanda Hullum . She’s now accepting new clients for parenting sessions.

“I Can’t Wait for These Kids to Go Back to School…”
“Is school back in yet?”
“I can’t wait to send you back to school.”

I know many parents say it jokingly. Sometimes it’s spoken from genuine exhaustion or a moment of overwhelm. Summer can be a lot. The constant snacks, the messes, the noise, the sibling arguments, & the lack of personal space can leave even the most regulated parent feeling overwhelmed.

If we’re not careful, the words our children hear repeatedly can settle into places we never intended.

When a child constantly hears, “I can’t wait for you to go back to school,” they likely do not hear, “Mom is tired.”
They probably hear…
“You’re too much.”
“You’re a burden.”
“Life is easier when you’re gone.”

Children were never meant to carry the emotional weight of adult exhaustion.

Scripture reminds us…

“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” Ephesians 6:4

“Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” Proverbs 18:21

Our words help shape how our children see themselves.

The reality is that many of the struggles families experience during summer aren’t because children are a problem. It’s because the structure that helped regulate everyone throughout the school year has suddenly disappeared.

Children thrive with rhythm, predictability, healthy sleep, good nutrition, movement, responsibilities, and clear expectations. Heck, so do adults. When routines disappear, many children become dysregulated emotionally, physically, and behaviorally.
Parents become exhausted.
Kids become irritable.
The home feels chaotic.

Summer doesn’t need to be rigid, but it does need some order…

• Consistent bedtimes
• Predictable meal times
• Chores and responsibilities
• Outdoor play and movement (whatever you think is enough… add an hour to it)
• Limited screen time (I can’t stress this enough)
• Intentional downtime for parents

A well rested parent with healthy boundaries and moments to recharge is far more equipped to enjoy their children than a parent running on empty.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed this summer, don’t carry the guilt and frustration alone. Parenting was never meant to be done in isolation.

Need help creating healthy routines, addressing behavior challenges, or restoring peace in your home? I’d be honored to help.

Message me to schedule a parenting session. Sometimes a few practical adjustments can completely change the atmosphere of your home.

Summer is short…& there are only so many that we get with them.

Commit to making it a time that your children remember as a season where they were welcomed, planned for, celebrated, enjoyed, and loved well. ❤️

06/15/2026

June is PTSD Awareness Month, and I can’t think of a more meaningful time to share this with you.

My new book, I’m Not What Happened to Me: A Trauma-Informed Workbook to Help You Heal from C-PTSD, is now available on Amazon, and I am still sitting with the quiet wonder of how it came to be.

It started as a homework assignment. Somewhere in the middle of the work, it became something else entirely – a workbook woven through with bits of my own story, with an epilogue at the end that opens the door a little wider into where I have been and what I have learned.

So much of the pain we carry comes from believing that what happened to us is what we are. We believe that the wound, the abuse, is the whole story. This workbook was created to walk alongside you toward a different truth – that you are not what happened to you.

You never were.

If those words land somewhere tender in you today, this book was written for you.

The link to order is in the comments. Share it with someone who needs it.

The Healing Cottage

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