What if the story you can't tell anyone is the one that could save you?

In this talk, Dr. Sarah Long shares how an email from a stranger, who turned out to be her biological sister, launched her into a year of cascading loss: a broken engagement, a bipolar II diagnosis, a farm sold, and a birth mother she'd never meet. Working the Pennebaker Protocol kept her alive and transformed rumination and trauma into healing and a memoir.

Drawing on neuroscience research and her own memoir Uprooted (Regal House Publishing, July 2026), Sarah reveals what happens in the brain when we move from "this happened to me" to "this happened because" and offers a simple, evidence-based practice anyone can use to turn their unprocessed trauma into the soil where resilience can grow.