There is an old expression “if the horse is dead, get off” which I believe comes from Dakota tribal wisdom, encouraging an acceptance rather than a denial of the changing realities in life. The problem is, I have discovered most humans – including me - are stuck in old templates of reality.

I’m perhaps like most other people in that I grew up with an eye to the future, waiting for that glorious moment in which I could take flight and no longer needed to do as I was told. And I thought I had done quite well in those early years of adulthood.

I had my own person upon whom I could rely (mum and dad always had each other so I thought that was the way to go, find that person who could understand me and complete me), I had my own career (which I did pretty well at) and I had my own property filled with my own things (albeit many were hand-me-downs). Rather than being happy, though, all I felt was stressed and dissatisfied.

It wasn’t until I was in my thirties, and my second husband walked out the door every Sunday to pursue his own interest in cars, that I even had any time to feel what was beneath that. I acutely recall the first time when he first went out on his own to pursue his hobby, I had this belief that couples should do everything together and I literally felt so abandoned that I sobbed my heart out.

This – I later discovered through inner work – likely emanated from an early event I had where I was left alone on a hospital stairwell as a three-year-old, while my father went to visit my mother who had just given birth to my brother; children were not allowed in the wards. Feeling alone, while they had each other, was reinforced in various ways throughout my childhood.

Once I got past the pain of my partner leaving me though, I began to relish those times I had to myself. For the first time in a long time I felt into what I wanted and needed in life and, eventually, it led me to immigrating to a country that feels less burdened and entitled in many ways.

From there, I set about redefining my life with a more steely determination to be who I am, whoever that was – I certainly was far from clear on that point. Things got waylaid again when a need to earn money outpaced any introspective insights on what a more authentic career path could look like, and I was thrust back into my previous career and continued to do well until my children came along.

When I say “do well”, I mean I had what is deemed a good job and salary; I still felt an ever-present nagging within that this was not who I was, or what I was meant to be doing.

Having children and being a working mum brought that pot to boiling point and beyond. When Lisa Marchiano says “You’re going to project your stuff on your kids. There is no way that you are going to get through any amount of time with your children and not meet those parts of yourself you cut off and sent backstage” she is not kidding.

To be fair, in hindsight I had been meeting those parts of myself (some call them the shadow parts or our blind spots) throughout my whole life. Through partners, colleagues, customers, friends, interactions with companies and institutions, I had travelled many a rocky road; I just hadn’t chosen to see them as a mirror of anything within me.

With kids, it’s more intense. For one thing, I couldn’t get away from my kids; they were mine, for better or worse until adulthood.

Thankfully I had enough threads of awareness to know that my baby daughter’s incessant crying and need to be with me in those early months wasn’t her trying to manipulate me out of spite. And that is no joke, I am truly thankful for that because my mind did try and convince (the bedraggled and sad excuse of a human being I felt in those early months) that this might be so.

“Why are you doing this to me?” I’d think in anguish.

Luckily kids are also so small, innocent and mesmerising when they arrive, but adults are not. My partner, who had previously had a romantic desire to be a stay-at-home dad, realised pretty quickly that this intense need for attention and connection wasn’t something he would cope well with 24/7 either. So he carried on working and I went back for the pay check and my sanity once each child started eating solids.

But although my kids were ready for trying out foods, they weren’t ready to dial down on the amount of attention and connection they needed. Despite having a far more calm, caring and nurturing stand-in during the day than I could ever have been at that point, they still had a strong need for mama time.

So inevitably after a few years of nightly feeds, awakening for attention, together with a high-responsibility job and big mortgage, not only did I meet the parts of myself I’d cut off and sent backstage, they were the main players in a very toxic narrative that represented most aspects of my life at that point.

Meltdowns and tantrums were pretty commonplace in our house, and that was just us adults. It was when our kids started exhibiting them too I reached tipping point.

I knew then that I had nothing else to give by running any harder along the same old well-worn tracks.

At the same time, with my mind fully occupied on the process of just getting through each day, my more intuitive self seemed to take my acknowledgement and, dare I say, surrender as a sign to slip new thoughts and circumstances spontaneously into view.

I ended up reading Brian Weiss’s book Many Lives Many Masters after someone recommended it to me, not one I’d have usually chosen as it’s about past lives and wasn’t a topic I felt particularly drawn to. However, since it recounts Brian’s own journey as a psychologist working with patients in the standard way, and how this somewhat surreal subject of past lives came up in his world, it was an interesting read that took me on a journey.

It also put into perspective for me many of the concepts a mentor of mine had talked about many times and I hadn’t really followed, suddenly my view of life clicked into place. Instead of this nebulous sense that we are all part of one thing, I suddenly felt and saw things more clearly. Around the same time I saw the movie Lucy, which cemented this clearer aspect of reality I’d now obtained.

That is what I look upon as my spiritual awakening. What I mean by this, is simply a felt-sense that everything and everyone is connected. There is no scripture, dogma or particular philosophy I follow, I experience my connection to all-that-is through my inner senses. But the most important facet is a knowing that my personal power need never be at the mercy or cost of another.

In short, it was quite a pivotal moment in realising that it was entirely within my gift to change my attitudes and ways of expressing in the world. But although I knew then the horse was dead (my previous ways of relating to the world and experiences it drew) I had yet to figure out how to get off.

Then a couple of months later, after reading Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, I went to a weekend workshop with his partner Kim Eng and learned about presence through movement, as well as listening to Eckhart himself and his musings on life. This gave me clarity and brought my energy into a more centered place than it had been in years. It is probably no coincidence that the very next week I manifested a healthy redundancy package and walked away from my corporate career.

That isn’t to say “happily ever after”. Not only was the proverbial horse dead, it was starting to stink and needed a proper burial.

Therein began the real work of getting to understand myself, which got a lot uglier before it got better. Sure, like everyone else, I have childhood wounds and have suffered heartache and rejection in many guises, but by getting to know myself, what I’m really pointing to is the act of understanding the subconscious limitations I had placed on my psyche.

The root cause of those limitations is the (often subconscious) unhelpful narrative I’d developed about me and my life, and I had to bring that into my conscious awareness in order to address it. More importantly though was awakening to the realisation that it was (and never is) what has happened, it is how I reacted (and react) to it that makes me who I am.

That is not to say I had developed those reactions consciously, especially as a baby and small child, my reactions were unconscious and born out of a need to belong and to feel safe. And there began the firing of neural pathways that would lead to decades of unhelpful thought patterns long after the real threat had passed. This is what lies at the basis of a normal childhood (as we have known it to this point in our society).

Becoming aware of those unhelpful thought patterns has been helped by becoming aware of my reactions in the moment, which has been made possible by practicing meditation for a number of years. Nothing spectacular, just fifteen minutes each day of noticing my breathing, noticing any thoughts that creep in, and letting them drift away while refocusing on my breathing.

That helped me become a more conscious observer in my life, which helped me more quickly notice when I was triggered and needed to self regulate my nervous system rather than act out of fear, anger, guilt or shame.

And rather than “take immediate action” as my brain and nervous system were apt to want to do, I have learned to be with the pain more often, just as I did that evening when my ex-husband started pursuing his own interests, to see what it has to reveal. And have awoken to greater capacities and potential wihin myself.

Terri Cole, in her book Boundary Boss, suggests a three-step-process for using when triggered. I’ve found this is naturally what I’ve been drawn to do over recent years, and it’s effective both in the moment, and as a longer term strategy of getting to know the real me:

• Recognise repeating patterns (get curious, ask: Where am I feeling this in my body? Where have I felt like this before? Who does this person remind me of? How is this behavioural dynamic familiar to me?)
• Release the physical body in the moment by breathing deeply into that spot until it expands. Tell yourself “this is just old stuff” and, if this is a deeply ingrained pattern, take responsibility for healing,
• Respond from a more mindful and conscious place.

Life really is for the taking. When we can accept that our limitations may be a result of our inner narrative not keeping up with changing realities, that the scripts in our head are outdated, and train our bodies to feel safe with new – more helpful - scripts, our potential can be fulfilled.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough, The Journey to Me - My Jonathan Livingston Seagull Story, When to Act on Possibility and Overcome the Greatest Human Fear – Be the True You. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I was having an interesting conversation my hairdresser, a young adult, about childhood trauma. It may seem like the kind of conversation to have with a therapist rather than a hairdresser, but she was fully engaged in the conversation and I love that it’s something she readily recognised as an opportunity for our collective growth.

The kind of trauma we were talking about is developmental trauma, the kind everyone experiences (as distinct from the big issues that are more readily recognised as traumatic). She is at a point in her own development, having recently moved out of home, where she is more readily able to express the impact her parents have had on how she feels about herself.

Like me she comes from a pretty normal family, and in fact her parents both work with people who have experienced the big-T trauma we all recognise, and they regularly have to deal with addiction, violence and abuse. But she can see how her parents, although well meaning, created limitations in the way she feels inside herself and interacts with the world.

That in itself is huge. From what I observe, most people do not want to be held hostage to their childhood if, in fact, they even think about it at all. I certainly felt it was something to put behind me when I was free to live as an adult, determined to be different in all the ways that had irritated or wounded me.

Well, there were two problems with that:

1. I still had to deal with my parents. They still had the same beliefs, ideals and expectations of me having brought me up a certain way
2. I somehow kept attracting unhappy and often difficult experiences into my life through varying relationships (be it a partner, a friend or a colleague or even institutions that I had to regularly deal with).

With enough difficult experiences under my belt, and enough distance from most of them, I could see the patterns. While it’s easy to blame others, I finally recognised that the common denominator in all my experiences was me, and I was the only part of any equation I could control.

Many people never really feel safe to explore whatever junk they have in their own trunk, but I knew that there must be something I was doing or a way that I was being that kept eliciting the same variety of responses, in ever increasing intensity.

I also knew that I had become someone that didn’t feel real to me, but I wasn’t sure what was real for me because I had been moulded and had grown accustomed to the way I interacted in the world.

Now with years of personal work under my belt I can readily recognise that I suffered from insecure attachment, a lack of attunement and enmeshment trauma . I had become a co-dependent, people pleaser with poor boundaries; susceptible to those, like narcissists, who care not for others.

That is a mouthful I know, and it’s all psychology-speak to most people, but what it comes down to is that I needed more positive emotional attention and connection from my parents than they gave.

This had nothing to do with my parent’s intentions, which were good. There is no mystery or malice about any of this; it arises from their own anxieties and ways of being, and the predominant beliefs in our society (for many centuries) about child rearing. That is to say, children are to be moulded rather than to be held as they unfold.

To give some examples, there is the baby who is left to cry, the baby or child who has to eat to a schedule, the child who wants their parent’s attention and will do anything – positive or negative – to get it, the child who is given no opportunity to explain their side of the story, the child who is left alone to think about their actions, the list goes on.

Even if I put my adult self in those shoes, if I am so upset I am crying and everyone ignores me, how do I feel? If I’m not hungry (or feeling sick) and I’m made to eat how do I feel? If I am trying to get someone’s attention and they ignore me, how do I feel? If I appear to have upset someone and yet they won’t communicate with me, how do I feel?

None of these feel comfortable; they actually make me question my very existence at one extreme (especially if they are regularly occurring situations) and, at best, make me feel isolated and unimportant in the moment.

Yet as an adult I have full mental and physical capacities that allow me to express myself, to reason out others’ behaviours and to take action. As a child, and as a baby especially, I have none of those things. It doesn’t take a huge leap to imagine the magnitude of devastation felt by the burgeoning human when ignored like this, especially if it’s the common pattern.

And it doesn’t then take a lot to understand that the chemicals that get released in response start to form our neural pathways, within our brain and nervous systems. The emotional reaction, in the form of chemicals released in our brain and body, starts to wire our responses to similar situations.

This is the essence of trauma. If a baby or child is questioning or worrying about its existence as in the examples above, those chemicals that form our neural pathways are in the survival category. This then creates an ongoing chronic trauma response to similar situations throughout the person’s life.

And, as I have discovered, that is generally what is at the root of all human dysfunction. It manifests from small-t trauma, the kind of developmental trauma pretty much most humans on the planet are subject to, resulting in unhelpful and self-limiting patterns of beliefs and behaviours. As it also manifests from big T-trauma, the reliving of horrific experiences again and again.

It would be easy to see myself, or anyone, as a victim of these circumstances. But what I’ve discovered is that I – and anyone - can form new neural pathways. I also realised that it wasn’t my parents’ behaviour that made me who I am, it was my reaction to it; albeit subconscious. And if these are my reactions, I can change them.

More than that, I realised if I didn’t change them, not only would I be living a life of limitation and chronic unhappiness, I would perpetuate the same thing with my own children through my own anxieties. I realised that the only way for me to be able to be fully present with my own babies and children was to take a good look at the junk in my trunk that was constantly distracting me and weighing me down.

In short, I realised that my childhood experiences were not my fault, but they are my responsibility.

​If we want the next generation unencumbered by the  often invisible chains that have held our families (and the family next door, and next door to that and so on) in bondage to unhealthy and self-limiting responses, then we have to be the one to make it a priority to get free of them by creating healthier responses.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation, Clear the Fog of Trauma to See the Magnificence of Your Being, In What Unseen Ways Are You Abandoning Your Own Free Will? Overcome the Greatest Human Fear – Be the True You and Why Projecting is the Best Tool for Self Awareness. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Someone was sharing with me this week various struggles they are having as a parent, which I could relate to. Partly it was about the challenges in parenting a child who is so different in personality, and partly it was about unwelcome criticism of her parenting style from others.

I was then listening to a podcast with Lisa Marchiano on Meaning making, Motherhood and the Journey of Individuation which sums up what I suspect is actually going on in this situation. Lisa says:
“You’re going to project your stuff on your kids. There is no way that you are going to get through any amount of time with your children and not meet those parts of yourself you cut off and sent backstage (the aspects of yourself that are unconscious but we see in others, our blind spots)”.

I know from my own journey that this is what is going on for me in any situation that is triggering, and I can project onto anyone, it is just the nature of parenting that makes the scenarios so intense and frequent. In fact, so much so, that Lisa quoted Fay Weldon who said “the best part about not having children is that you can go on believing you’re a nice person”, which makes me chuckle.

However, throughout the conversation I was having, what I could feel was this sense of deep longing within the mother to be seen, I suspect this longing comes from the parts of her that were denied, suppressed or disowned in her own childhood.

We talked about her childhood, not so much about details of it, but more the relevance of her own experiences which, like me, she felt were fairly normal. Neither of us had experienced anything that would be typically recognised as traumatic in the sense of physical or sexual abuse, domestic violence or any of the other big-T traumas.

But I know trauma is not just the big stuff. In fact, trauma is not an event, it’s the reaction to an event (or ways of being chronically ill-treated) within our bodies, that becomes stuck and replayed again and again when triggered. What most people don’t recognise is their own trauma, because it has been normalised.

In the movie The Wisdom of Trauma, which features Dr Gabor Maté, I also got a glimpse of Frizi Horstman’s Step Inside the Circle documentary that I found impactful. Frizi runs the Compassion Prison Project and gets right to the heart of the issue by getting everyone to stand in a circle and to take a step forward with every question she asks that the person identifies with.

She starts with “While you were growing up, during your first eighteen years of life, if a parent or other adult in the house would often insult you, put you down or humiliate you, please step inside the circle.”
It quickly becomes evident that – as Dr Robert Block says “Adverse childhood experiences are the single greatest unaddressed threat facing us today.”

The point Dr Gabor Maté really impressed upon me when I first read his work a few years ago, is that trauma is more pervasive than in just those we recognise as being locked in a prison. In fact if the prison guards were asked to step inside the circle (or the prison management, or those working in the Justice department, or the elected politicians, or – for that matter – the lady living down the street) then I suspect it would be become very evident that trauma is omnipresent.

One of the most striking examples Dr Gabor Maté often cites is the crying baby. Babies are helpless; they have very little at their disposal to signal their basic needs. They cry because they are hungry, tired, want connection (need connection), are too cold/too warm, need changed and so on. Yet even today there are parenting methods that actively advocate letting a baby cry without intervention in order to train them (when to eat and sleep to the parent’s – or otherwise deemed healthy - schedule).

Even as I type this I can feel how triggered it makes me. I am incredulous at how little is known about human attachment and attunement among people generally. I want to scream, I’ll be honest. How is it possible that people cannot see that leaving a baby to cry without any intervention teaches that baby, that person, that they are alone, their needs are not important?

There is a time to teach children to wait, sure, but it comes later, once secure attachment and attunement are established.

What does attunement look like? Teal Swan says “Ask yourself the following questions...

• Do I feel like my parents understood me when I was little, or even tried to understand me?
• Did they see into me and feel into me and have empathy for me and adjust their behaviour accordingly or not?
• Did they acknowledge how I felt or did they invalidate it, telling me I shouldn’t feel that way?
• How did my parents treat me when I was cranky, frightened or upset?”

Healthy attunement means feeling understood and having those feelings honoured.

Healthy attachment means taking mutual joy in spending time with, and being connected with someone.

So as I was talking to this lady about her childhood, I asked her – since it was seemingly so benign in its normalcy – whether she would (if she could) send her own child back to live in her own childhood? This created an immediate sense of perspective.

I wondered, why is it she and I seem to share this sense that it was okay for us to go through our own childhood experiences, yet we didn’t want to consciously repeat them with our kids?

In Terri Cole’s book Boundary Boss, which I’ve found both insightful and practical, she says “Get a picture of yourself as a child, every time you look at the picture practice compassion...beam yourself with pure love.”

I’ve had childhood pictures up for a while, and pictures of my partner as a child, so I can have compassion in the times I’m seeing a hurt child acting out rather than a self-regulated adult.

Yet when I look at my own photos it is not compassion I feel. It is more a sense of inadequacy, like maybe this child – me – deserved the childhood I had. Notice I’m being honest here about how I feel.

My intellect does not agree, my intellect knows that a four-year-old cannot be inadequate and that any sense of inadequacy was likely a projection upon me.

In fact if I were to be faced with one of my own kids’ feeling a sense of inadequacy I would be quick to take them in my arms and beam them with pure love, no doubts. Yet when faced with myself as a younger child, I lose all desire to. Isn’t that interesting?

“As a child”, as Dr Gabor Maté explains, “we are born feeling our connection to our parents and we are reliant on them for survival. Being rejected by them in any way, big or small (over an extended period), is devastating. So when we are rejected, we have a choice, to reject them or reject ourselves (or more likely parts of ourselves). But we can’t reject them as our survival depends upon them.”

And through Dr Maté’s work, and that of many many others like Teal Swan and Claire Zammit to name a couple of those often quoted by me, I have come to recognise that right there denotes the kind of childhood trauma I’m suggesting lives in probably every person on the face of the planet.

Now I’m not saying every person would feel in some way ashamed of themselves as a child if they looked at a photo of themselves at a young age. I suspect only those of us who have internalized the feelings would.

To add some depth, I’ll go back to one of my favourite explanations of all time on this, summed up exquisitely by Teal Swan:

“When our parents were not attuned to us, we went one of two ways to cope with the terror of the experience. We either learned that our survival depended on:

1. disconnecting from them and retreating into a narcissistic bubble, where all that was real and all that mattered was our individual experience (otherwise defined by Daniel Shaw in his book Traumatic Narcissism as “The child who externalises their experience, projecting onto others the shame, guilt, humiliation and fear they experienced and cannot tolerate themselves”). Or
2. being hyper attuned to the people in our lives so that we could perceive them, anticipate their behaviour and make adjustments to our behaviour accordingly in order to avoid harm (otherwise defined as the child who internalises their experience and persecutes themselves).”

She goes on to explain that neither state is healthy. “It is not a fulfilling life to spend all your energy obsessively trying to keep yourself safe by attuning to other people at the expense of tuning out to yourself. But the destruction on this planet owes itself to those people who have learned to cope by retreating into the egocentric bubble...

You cannot attune to someone and say the wrong thing to them. You cannot attune to someone and stay in denial about his or her reality.”

I’ll never forget talking to my mum about her childhood before she died. She did not readily share details during her life, she was simply what I would have called very dark on her father and her eldest brother; her father being an abusive alcoholic and her eldest brother was a half sibling who abandoned his family of birth, as his father before him had abandoned them.

My mum, like a lot of people, never saw any value in revisiting those childhood experiences; she couldn’t fathom why anyone would partake in coaching never mind counselling, perhaps because she felt herself adequate enough and externalised her experiences.

She certainly did not believe she was in any way held hostage to her experiences, which is what most of us would like to believe I suspect.

Yet there I was talking to this mother about her parenting and, as she recounted the beautiful demeanour of a coach facilitating a class she was attending, she was moved to tears as she related to me the gentle way this facilitator spoke to and nurtured her audience. In turn I was moved as I saw so clearly how the little girl in her desperately wants to be related to.

Instead she had experienced harsh words, and little warmth and affection growing up. And she internalised this, thinking she must be getting these harsh words because something is wrong with her.

Frizi Horstman, of the Compassion Prison Project, concludes “We are all magnificent, beautiful humans, but we have trauma fogging our vision of ourselves and others”. She makes the point that when we are triggered, we are in our flight-fight mode. Learning how to recognise this and regulate our nervous system is the key to accessing our magnificent selves. Certainly we cannot do this if we are stuck in survival mode.

So if you feel like something is wrong with you, or something is inherently wrong in others, there is, we are all experiencing an ongoing cycle of trauma, passed unconsciously from generation to generation. Our job is to wake up to it, heal and help others. As Gabor Maté says, it appears clearing trauma is the zeitgeist of our time.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy In What Unseen Ways Are You Abandoning Your Own Free Will? How to Find the Courage to Let Us Hear Your Heart’s Voice, Overcome the Greatest Human Fear – Be the True You and Why Projecting is the Best Tool for Self Awareness. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I was looking at my partner’s handiwork the other day; he is currently tiling our hallway floor over the weekends. I initially looked at the area being tiled and had been thinking it could all be done in four or five days, three weekends tops.

What I didn’t appreciate, until I saw the work in progress, is just how complex some of the cuts are, and how much cutting is required for this awkward space so that the tiles flow and look effortlessly even.

This led me to think about the parallels between the hidden complexities of this task and the complexities of each person’s talents, traits and capabilities; and how hard it is to put value on something unless I’ve experienced it.

Earlier in the week I had been feeling misunderstood and undervalued myself, and this new observation shifted my perspective. Having swapped a high paying salary, one that prized many aspects of my mind, for the stay-at-home-mum role has been a double-edged sword. Just as I underestimated the time involved in the hallway tiling, I often feel that what I bring to my role is vastly underestimated and underappreciated in our household.

The part I really cherish about parenting is the part where I get to hold a space in which my kids can unfold; the psychological and emotional support and development role. While this might have obvious outputs as the kids grow, it’s not always obvious day to day.

My partner, who is more in his body than his mind, can more readily appreciate the outwardly visible things like school drop off and pick up, dentist appointments, cooking dinner, managing play dates and so on. These are the parts I find tedious, but they facilitate the psychological aspects that I find more worthwhile.

As an eternal student of the human psyche, human potential, life itself and the metaphysical, I can no more turn off my mind, away from these aspects of who I am, than I can stop the sky being blue. Value of course is subjective. Yet I keep attracting circumstances and people into my life that do not value the musings of my mind, but I desperately want them to.

Here is another example, same wound, totally different scenario. In one job, the boss hired me because he did see the value of my thinking, and he made that very clear. That strategic, people driven, psyche delving, root cause analysis, joining-dots-together brain was both seen and appreciated.

The only problem was he did not run the company, and the only job he had approved to slot me into was a Head of Operations role, the very antithesis of who I am in many ways. Of course this created all sorts of false expectations among colleagues and was – as I discovered – quite contrary to the prevailing culture.

People in that company liked to put out metaphorical fires and be the ambulance at the bottom of the metaphorical cliff, rather than think about – far less do - any substantive transformational work to enhance the customer experience and profit. Given this is where I add the most value, I remember my time there as a painful experience.

Whatever role I play in life, and there are many, are all imbued by this richly multifaceted and insightful mind of mine, along with all its neurosis.  So it’s an interesting process to stand outside myself and look at this pattern of not really being appreciated by those closest to me for what I bring to the table that is of most value.

Terri Cole says “when repeating patterns are active it’s as if the child within us is desperately seeking a do-over of a disappointing, painful or traumatising childhood”. She explains that in psychotherapeutic terms it’s known as transference “you are unconsciously triggered by a person or situation, and your heightened reaction is fuelled by an earlier unresolved experience that is similar in nature”.

She encourages her clients to ask themselves:

• Who does this person remind me of?
• Where have I felt like this before?
• How is this behavioural dynamic familiar to me?

Of course this wound goes back to childhood when I had to do what I was told, and not question. But I love to question, my mother often used to define my childhood by the question why? And to her credit, when she wasn’t saying “because I said so”, she used to answer my questions as best she could.

But she never asked “well, why do you think that is?” In other words, to my young self, she never saw or appreciated the value of my own mind. When I did express myself I’d hear her saying “Oh Shona knows everything” in a sarcastic tone.

There are so many facets to who I am and whether I feel confident about them comes down to where I feel different and whether (and by whom) those differences are embraced or rejected in some way.

Another conversation with my niece led me to think about the many aspects that create each person’s individual identity. She wishes there was a class at school that allowed more discussion around topical issues such as LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning and the plus sign denoting a desire to be inclusive) and BLM (Black Lives Matter).

While sexual preference, gender identity and race are hugely important areas for discussion, there are so many points of difference that a person can identify with:

• Being religious or non religious
• Being spiritual or non spiritual
• Being sensitive to others’ feelings or more in a bubble
• Being intuitive or logical
• Being a morning person or a night owl

To name only an infinitesimal few.

I started to think about my own identity and realised I simply cannot be all things to all people, and nor can I expect that everyone will value all things about me.

But I can still appreciate the things about myself that others can’t. As I said to my niece, “I think there is really no limit to the things we can identify with, the key though – I believe – is to love who you are and find belonging with people who love you as you are too”.

I’ve found loving certain parts of myself a challenge because I’ve often been misunderstood and rejected by those who I have chosen to be closest to in life. This is Terri Cole’s point about “the child within us desperately seeking a do-over of disappointing, painful or traumatising experiences in childhood” and continuing to draw circumstances and people that reflect that.

Now I know I’ve tolerated pain in ongoing situations only because that rejection was familiar to me, in the vain hopes the outcome would be different. While that is very human, is also illogical if I’m not doing something different.

I see now that the only way to stop attracting that kind of rejection is to stop looking for approval in the eyes of people who may not even have the capacity to understand, appreciate and value it.

To come back to the example I’ve used in here, there are of course many other people in my life who do value my mind. And, of course, the point is it’s up to me to decide what I will accept from each of my relationships, but I can’t make particular people value the things I do, I can only appreciate my own value and align with others who do too.

So what aspects of you continually draw rejection from those closest to you? And are you able to see the ways in which this is familiar to past experiences? Are you ready to start making choices that honour you?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy In What Unseen Ways Are You Abandoning Your Own Free Will? How to Find the Courage to Let Us Hear Your Heart’s Voice, Overcome the Greatest Human Fear – Be the True You and Why Projecting is the Best Tool for Self Awareness. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.