Available Now on Amazon
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Available Now on Amazon *
You Can Interrupt It
A Practical Guide for the Parent Who Inherited Trauma
and Swore They’d Do It Differently
By the author of The Fan in the Window
You swore you would do it differently.
You promised yourself your children would never carry what you carried. And still—in the hard moments—you hear a voice that sounds like the one you grew up with. You feel a reaction rise before you can stop it. And you wonder, quietly, if some things are simply passed down. If you are strong enough to break what was handed to you.
You are.
You Can Interrupt It is a practical, science-grounded guide for the survivor-turned-parent—the adult trying to break generational cycles without ever having been shown how. Written by registered nurse and former forensic nurse Tressa L. Bell, herself a survivor of childhood trauma and domestic violence, it brings together two things that rarely share a page: clinical precision and lived experience.
This is not a book about blame. It is not about becoming a perfect parent. And it will never pretend that healing is simple.
Instead, it shows you how to recognize the patterns you inherited, understand the biology beneath your reactions without shame, and make the small, repeatable choices that change a family's story—one moment at a time.
Inside, you'll learn:
Why your nervous system reacts the way it does—and why that is not a character flaw
How inherited trauma actually passes from one generation to the next
What to do in the half-second between a trigger and a reaction
How to repair with your children after you get it wrong—and why repair matters more than perfection
How to set boundaries with the family that shaped you
The Interruption Model—a practical framework for moving from inherited patterns to intentional parenting
You will not find vague inspiration here. You will find something you can actually do.
If you are the one in your family who decided the cycle stops with you—the one doing the hard, unglamorous, deeply human work of change—this book was written for you.
You are not responsible for the wounds you inherited. But you can become responsible for what happens next.
A companion to the memoir The Fan in the Window: How We Inherit Trauma—And How We Interrupt It.
"This didn't start with you…but you can interrupt it." 🪟
This didn't start with you…
but you can interrupt it.🪟
This Book Is For You If…
You are an adult survivor of childhood trauma who is ready to do more than survive.
You are the adult child of an emotionally immature or unavailable parent.
You want to parent differently than you were parented — but you don't have a roadmap.
You have looked at your children and seen something you recognize — and want to change.
You are a survivor of domestic violence, rebuilding your sense of self.
You are a therapist, nurse, or caregiver who wants to understand this work from the inside.
Inside the Book
The AWAKE Framework
A nonlinear map for the work of interruption—developed from lived experience, nursing knowledge, and the research that explains why we inherit what we inherit.
You don't move through this once. You move through it for life. And every time around the circle, something shifts.
About the Author
Most books about generational trauma are written by therapists writing about their clients.
Mine is written by someone who lived inside the pattern, and then did the work herself.
Tressa L. Bell, MBA, BSN, RN, is a registered nurse, former forensic nurse examiner, author, podcast host, and speaker. She is also a survivor of childhood trauma, child sexual abuse, and domestic violence. For most of her life, she understood trauma from the inside first, before she had any research to explain it.
Her work in emergency and forensic nursing gave her language for things she'd already lived: hypervigilance, appeasement, a nervous system that never fully stood down. She spent years sitting with survivors on the worst days of their lives, translating their experiences into the language of evidence and care. What she could not have told you then was that she was also living inside her own inherited pattern.
Her debut memoir, The Fan in the Window, launched in April 2026. You Can Interrupt It: A Practical Guide for the Parent Who Inherited Trauma and Swore They'd Do It Differently followed in August 2026, the practical guide that grew out of what she learned doing the work the memoir describes. Both are available now.
She is the founder of My Sweet Nurse Life, LLC and the host of the podcast The Fan in the Window: Interrupting What We Inherit. She lives in Maryland with her husband, Jimmy. She is a mother of four and a grandmother. The work of interruption is ongoing.
Start Here
Haven't read the memoir yet?
The Fan in the Window is available now.
The story behind the framework. Where it started—the childhood, the marriage, the forensic work, the healing. Interrupting What We Inherit is the guide. The Fan in the Window is the story. Both stand alone. Together, they form the whole picture.
The Podcast
The Fan in the Window:
Interrupting What We Inherit
Episodes on the patterns we inherit, the work of interrupting them, and the research that explains why it's harder than it sounds—and more possible than you think. New episodes release every other week.
Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or on this website, click the button below…