One of the biggest challenges for me in learning and maintaining healthy boundaries is letting other people own their own reactions, rather than taking them personally.

I was reading a booklet on managing separation for children, which sums this up nicely under a section on reassuring them. One of the key points is “Just listen, don’t feel you have to fix their feelings; it’s painful and you can’t change that”.

However well placed that advice is “don’t feel you have to fix their feelings” telling me (or anyone) not to feel something is not helpful. I feel what I feel. It has been more helpful to me to explore why I feel the need to fix other people’s feelings.

In particular, in the last few years I’ve become aware that my people pleasing tendencies have deep hooks. Usually the more critical a relationship is to me the more I’ll bend over backward to please, not just to be nice or considerate, but rather as a response rooted in trauma.

That said, I have also always had a critical mass where I eventually get fed up and blow up about injustice and exploitation, which Complex PTSD expert Pete Walker says is typical of people who have codependent relational tendencies.

Codependency is the continual state of being focused on the needs, wants and problems of others in order to gain approval and attempt to control outcomes. It's very intertwined with enmeshment trauma and people pleasing.

Enmeshment is when there is no real recognition of self in the family or relationship. The signs I have learned to recognise are when I find myself confusing my emotions with those of a person I have a relationship with, and the cost of individuality feels high.

This means that when someone who is important to my perceived survival (be it in personal or professional relationships) has a negative opinion of me or a negative reaction towards me it can elicit a trauma response within me.

Once I understood why I felt this way, which began in childhood as I explored in Are You Overly Responsible? Actually Seeing Yourself Through Fresh Eyes, then it was a matter of starting to recognise my reactions in the moment and changing my response.

None of this is comfortable, not by a long way. In Perpetua Neo’s article on Fawning: The Fourth Trauma Response After Fight, Flight, Freeze, she talks about stress responses and trauma responses. She says “These are ways the body automatically reacts to stress and danger, controlled by your brain's autonomic nervous system, part of the limbic system. Depending on our upbringing, we can sometimes learn to rely too heavily on one of these responses and this is where the trauma comes into play”.

A critical part of healing is learning to reset my limbic system to, as Perpetua puts it, “update the timekeeper in your brain to understand that then is not now”. This way old trauma can stop replaying in my body in the present.

It sounds simple, but rewiring my brain is a matter of consciously catching what’s going on in the moment and actively working to regulate the nervous system while changing how I react. This is no easy task when, by the very nature of these triggers, the frontal thinking part of the brain shuts down.

To give an illustration of just how challenging this can be in everyday life, I only have to look at what relationship expert Terry Real refers to as the Core Negative Image (CNI) we have of our partners. He says it’s an exaggerated version of our partner at their worst.

For example, Terry’s wife Belinda has a CNI of him as an irresponsible, selfish, undependable, charming boy. His CNI of her is a demanding, insatiable, critical, micromanaging witch.  As Terry says, it’s not their baseline, it’s certainly not their best, it’s not even an accurate description of them at their worst, it’s more like a caricature of them at their worst.

So, in action, Terry might leave the milk out of the refrigerator on the kitchen counter, just as he used to do years ago when their kids were growing up. This triggers Belinda’s CNI of Terry, so she starts talking to him like he’s an irresponsible child. This would trigger his CNI of her and he’d react saying something like “Oh come on it’s just a milk carton, don’t be such a witch” and so on it goes.

Most people react to the exaggeration and fight against it. To break this cycle, Terry says our CNI of our partner is something we want to learn take with a grain of salt. What we should really take notice of is our partner’s CNI of us.

Most people know exactly what this is without asking, because it’s the characteristics and behaviours that get thrown at us like bombs when the other person is triggered.

He says “The beauty of knowing their CNI of you is, instead of fighting, you can duck under. The more you push against it the tighter it gets, so move under or into it instead of opposing it. That would mean, instead of opposing Belinda’s opinion about him being irresponsible, he could own it and say “I know I can be like that at times, I just forgot sorry (and puts the milk away).”

I suspect anyone putting themselves in these shoes can appreciate how tricky it could be to do this without getting sucked into the CNI wrangle. While it is very disarming to know and own the CNI someone has of me, there’s still that deep tap root that feels owning something that is not only negative but perhaps untrue (or at least grossly over exaggerated) feels really unsafe in my body.

For this reason Terry recommends firstly having a modicum of self recovery around self esteem and good internal and external boundaries. Once good boundaries are developed a person is then better placed to observe and think “Mm, so this is what my partner is making up about me. This is their CNI of me, isn’t that interesting? Isn’t that important information about my partner?”

What I notice in going through a separation, if not careful, the predominant interactions can be a tango between each person’s Core Negative Image of the other, making all the sensible advice I was reading extremely challenging.

Even with something that doesn’t elicit a trauma response though, it can still be a challenge to let others have their own reactions. This week I was talking with a close friend who is going through what I can only describe as an existential crisis.

My heart aches for all the challenges life has thrown her way over the last few years, it’s been incredibly intense. My tendency is to want to find words to help, to at least sooth. Nothing I could think of felt adequate. Then I remembered some words I’d read in an email from Teal Swan about self love:

“When people tell you about themselves, receive them without trying to fix them or change their minds. Provide a safe apace to connect.”

So I focused on just that, stopped thinking about it and spoke from the heart instead just acknowledging where she was at and that it’s okay to be there. I just wanted her to feel seen and held.

Then I realised, that is my job, it’s not to fix anything, I simply want the people I love to feel seen and held (emotionally) by me. And, when dealing with negative reactions directed towards me, I want to feel seen and held – by me first and foremost. That is where my boundary work comes in.

There are lots of wonderful boundary statements I’ve read but I’ve found that, in that moment of fire when the frontal lobe of my brain closes up shop and ducks for cover, the only statement I’ve been capable of is the raw observation of the emotional reaction I’m witnessing.

But the great thing is, instead of getting stuck for words, pulled into the line of fire, pushing onward in frustration through the emotional blast determined to make my point, or exploding in fury, I reflect what I am observing and retreat with dignity.

While I’d love to do some deeper somatic work, I know that by calling out the reaction and retreating I’m rewiring my brain and retraining my body to feel more confident and less threatened in those situations. It just takes practice.

​Are you able to see how your nervous system reacts in response to someone else’s difficult emotional reactions? Ultimately becoming aware of why it is happening and when it is happening, then starting to change your reaction is the work to empower yourself instead of allowing it to throw you into a tailspin. 

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Resentment, the Family Business. Are You Willing to Let It Go?, Your Mind Will Try to Protect You By Resisting Your Healthy Boundaries, I Am a Recovering Approval Seeker and Control Freak and What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Space to me feels like opening, expansiveness, finding my centre. But it can also be terrifying when the cosy world of my making seems suddenly blown apart and I find myself freefalling through the vast darkness of an unwelcome space.

My friend asked me to name the three biggest moments in my life when things felt out of control, she recognised my trauma and distress. It was hard to prioritise just three if I’m honest. 

There were the days, weeks, months and years that followed when the person I loved with all my heart told me our relationship was over; the same when I had my first experience of death and both my paternal grandparents died within a couple of months of each other. And there was the day I started at university, alone, and had to navigate my way to a lecture theatre holding three hundred students I didn’t know to study a subject I hadn’t a clue about (computer science), to name just a few.

Then there was, of course, the childhood memory of the day I accompanied my dad to the hospital when my brother was born, all excited, to be left on the stairwell alone while dad went to visit mum and new baby. Children were not allowed in the wards, so I waited unaccompanied, age three, and recall hearing every set of footsteps, watching the door open in hope, anxiously awaiting my dad’s return.

I remember thinking “What if he doesn’t return?”

Circumstances beyond my control that shake the foundations of the reality upon which I’m standing are not new to me. The feeling of being in freefall is not new to me. The fear of the huge space that opens up uninvited can be overwhelming, but I’ve been through this enough to know that the space which appears can also be my growth and expansion if I will befriend it.

As Sarah Blondin says “We walk invisibly cocooned with all the things we wish to control, we think that by keeping these things close that we will be able to manage them. If we keep our worries in plain sight we will have less of a chance of them coming true”.

I have always believed that, once children were involved in a relationship there is no backing out. Of course, that is my belief and a relationship consists of two people. Having had the experience of being jilted before, I was well aware that I actually have no control over whether the other person will stay in relationship with me.

So, since having children, it is fair to say that I have always harboured a fear about this. No more so than since leaving my career, and my financial independence, to be at home with my kids.

In Learning to Surrender, Sarah says “The more we constrict, the more worry and burden we pick up along the way. The denser we become, the more we sink like rocks to the bottom of our river. We then ground ourselves in the turbulent waters rather than allowing ourselves to be carried to the cool, calm waters”.

When I listen to Sarah’s captivating voice her words come from a place far beyond her lips and far beyond the reaches of my mind, the words carry truths that only my heart instantly recognises:

There will be moments in my life where all will seem in chaos and disharmony, and in those moments I must remember the universe is reordering my life to match more of what I am calling forth. Fear is useless in these times; trust – however - is paramount.

This is what I know above all else, I have known this with certainty for a long time.

So while I rage and feel helpless against this dramatic change in my circumstances, it is a dance of the mind versus the heart. My body, knowing this sense of abandonment, begins its trauma response.The mind, in trying to keep me safe, plays out all the “what if” scenarios and, meanwhile, my friend asks me to remember because – in remembering – I also remember the vital part: this too shall pass.

At some point I will stop freefalling through the empty black space and start to construct a different reality. In fact, I can see the glimmers of it now, the many positives that could exist on the other side of the many changes afoot for me and for our kids.

Some words Teal Swan wrote this week in relation to self love caught my interest. She said “The tension you experience is a sign you are giving away your power. It is calling your attention to the areas of your life where your free will is needed as a necessary agent for progress.”

Tension was the word that reeled me in, having chronic tense headaches, shoulders and neck. It will be no accident that in Learning to Surrender, Sarah Blondin also says “These places of tension are where you are holding a secret fear that you are not supported, you’ve been forgotten, that life does not love you, and that you are failing. Imagine cutting the ties to these tense places and allow yourself to be carried into the mysterious and rushing waters raging around you”.

She explains that this does not mean I stop trying to create my best life. It does not mean I give up in the face of stress or adversity. It simply means I let go of the hold it has on my physical body.

I can do this, I know I can, I just need constant reminders right now. And they come in many guises and forms, through the friends who love me, and the wise sharing of people like Teal and Sarah, whose work I love.

It occurs to me that the space that feels like freefalling through the vast darkness and the space that feels like opening, expansiveness and finding my centre, are one in the same. It’s all about perspective.

I hear Sarah’s words “You are being asked to surrender to the beauty trying to unfold, the beauty of that far off land of dreams you have been looking outside yourself for. Understand that it has been trying to take you there all along. Now get out of your own way and allow it to.”

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Even in Grief There Are lessons to Be Learned, What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances, In What Unseen Ways Are You Abandoning Your Own Free Will?, The Soul’s Yearning – How to Recognise Your Inner Work, and Make the Invisible Visible - Celebrate the Gold in Your Emotional Reactions. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

In a podcast called Making Money, Making Change, Rha Goddess said “For a lot of us, we’ve been taught that we have to do certain things in order to get love, and that love is just not forthcoming, When we feel that anything we want to do, or feel passionate about, isn’t important or doesn’t deserve to be sustained, we are in the wounding of indoctrination”.

The wounding of indoctrination basically points to the way my inner world was shaped by my upbringing and the unhelpful beliefs I developed about myself and others along the way.

For example, Lisa Romano, who specialises in co-dependency and enmeshment trauma, makes the point “If a child does not know they have a self, how can that child love, honour, respect or care for the self it does not yet have conscious awareness of?”

Codependency is the continual state of being focused on the needs, wants and problems of others in order to gain approval and attempt to control outcomes. It's very intertwined with enmeshment trauma and people pleasing.

Typical codependency behaviours are compulsively wanting to fix others problems, perfectionism and doing for others things for that they should do for themselves. A great statement I read is "High functioning codependents may find themselves believing they are acting out of love, when in reality they are acting out of fear"

Enmeshment is when there is no real recognition of self in the family or relationship. The signs I learned to recognise are when I find myself confusing my emotions with those of a person I have a relationship with, and the cost of individuality feels high.

Lisa talks about common situations where this arises: if one parent is narcissistic, or one is self sacrificing, or parents live in denial, or addiction is the go-to, chaos is the norm, or poverty the reality.

She says “Yes, emotional, verbal and financial abuse all count; demeaning, devaluing and demonising a child counts; being conditioned to be your parent’s therapist, caretaker or pseudo partner counts; and being raised in any form of chaos, unpredictability and instability counts. Unless something changes within us, patterns continue to unfold outside of us”.

Rha, in the podcast, paints a beautiful picture of possibility when she says “There are, however, others who have been loved and love positively, especially in the formative years, who hold maybe a different belief system. They see love everywhere, they have no problem receiving love and participating in the laws of reciprocity, the giving and the receiving”.

For someone like me, who in Lisa’s terms suffers from codependency post traumatic stress syndrome, I aspire to see the world in this way. I can and do for short bursts, but I want to be able to sustain it, that is my work because I truly believe there is only love and resistance to love.

Lisa asks “Imagine if within every atom of your being you felt and believed you are enough and it’s your birthright to imagine the life you desire, in spite of any unwanted experiences?”

Yet those unwanted experiences can be traumatizing, bewildering and downright distracting. I’d go so far as to say they have completely consumed my existence for the most part of my life. In my relationships I’ve often attracted people who are very different to me, opposites in many ways: I find myself being the giver in relationships with a taker, the internaliser with the externaliser. Why does this happen?

“Understanding and changing is healing” Annette Noontil

If part of healing is understanding I am pretty sure I have that part down pat. While I’ve written in the past about What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People, I recently read a fictional novel by Santa Montefiore that helped me understand this dynamic more deeply from a soul perspective.
The Secrets of the Lighthouse is focused around a wife and mother who has died but, rather than following the light, she remains tethered to the earthly plane unseen by the people she has loved and lost.

In life she had constantly set her husband challenges to prove his love, and nothing he ever gave was enough, eventually he inevitably became weary and resentful. He had given her everything he had to give and still she wanted ever increasing devotion.

As she watches on she initially delights in her husband’s misery at her death but, eventually, she begins to see the light, and reflects:

“I know I have little love in my heart that is not tarnished by jealousy. I also know that light is love and it is strong enough to slay the snake. I realise then that I do have the power to raise my vibration, after all the only thing capable of transmuting negativity is love… I recognise that this pain that weakens my jealousy and fills me with guilt is compassion.

This new longing to take away his pain makes me feel strangely uplifted. How odd it is to feel pleasure in this way. I have only ever thought of myself. My love was a selfish love and therefore not love at all, but neediness. I realise now my whole life was driven by this desperate need – and my death a result of it.

I wanted more and more and went to terrible lengths to get it. I never felt loved enough. If only I had thought of what I could give and not of how much I could be given, I would have been happy. If only I had shown him love, I would have felt loved enough, that’s the irony of it.

I am not as powerless as I had previously thought; I am powerful if my actions are motivated by true love. Why does it take so much unhappiness to make us realise there is nothing of value in our lives but love? … It is all that I am, I just never knew it.”

Having given everything I had to give in my relationships, I could identify with the widower. While it was useful to see a possible return to love from the other perspective, it was also a useful message in the futility of hanging on in the hopes someone will change and validate and love me by just doing more of the same things.  

So identifying the parts of me that were self sacrificing and over giving, and why, has been a huge part of the journey. As has recognizing that these are not patterns I’d want to perpetuate in my own children.

Changing is the harder part, and for that I have worked consciously to define and start to hold my boundaries and to ask myself in more situations “What would someone who loves themselves do in this situation?”

To end on another quote of Rha’s “We do have to, on some level, make peace with the fact we are here to grow. Sometimes those lessons feel yummy and sometimes they feel lousy. But if we can get the insight, if we can pay enough attention to get the gift of the lesson, we do become more of who we are meant to be. This work is all about the invitation to become more of who you really are, then you are free.”

Do you yet recognise your inner work?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Resentment, the Family Business. Are You Willing to Let It Go?, Your Mind Will Try to Protect You By Resisting Your Healthy Boundaries, I Am a Recovering Approval Seeker and Control Freak and What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

When I was growing up, I tried to minimise the exposure I had to any kind of negative emotional reactions towards me, having been at the sharp end of many of those from my mother. I did this by trying to be good, and thinking ahead about the consequences of my actions on her emotional state.

How that has translated to my adult life is an over developed sense of responsibility towards the way other people feel. It is one thing for me to be considerate, another to lose myself in the process. This of course points to learning about having and communicating healthy boundaries, something that was a foreign concept to me until the last year or two.

I was under the impression that being in relationship meant doing things I wasn’t actually all that comfortable doing in order to make other people happy, and them doing things for me in return. Making sure other people were not unhappy with me is what felt safe for me within my body, when they were unhappy it made me feel anxious and out-of-kilter.

While I have a huge capacity to do a lot for others, and a high tolerance in not necessarily receiving much gratitude, there has always been a limit to my martyrdom. Inside, I’m sure my soul has been screaming, and when this limit had been reached – albeit when I’m way beyond an already unhealthy threshold – that expresses through me in anger and resentment.

Then I read Annette Noontil’s life lessons and I had lots of ah-ha moments. Annette Noontil was involved in looking after others for a large part of her life, first in caring for her father, then in nursing before having a family. Later she took what she had learned about healing and, with more research and determination, she began to share the wisdom she had gained, summed up as “your attitude is reflected in your body”.

This resulted in one of my favourite do-it-yourself books The Body is the Barometer of the Soul 2 which helps people recognise the concepts that limit them, how they show up in the body and how to look within for answers and activate change. In her very Aussie ‘to-the-point’ way of describing things, here is what jumped out at me initially:

• We only see what we need to see and grow from, so what we see in others we have in ourselves. If it aggravates you, you have that attitude or concept quite badly. “Wow, that takes a lot of swallowing” I thought, “but it kind of rings true”.
• Treat others as your equal, we all have good points. Take note of everything positive in people as they reflect you also. “That also takes a bit of swallowing, but if it’s true of the bad stuff then it makes sense it’s true of the good stuff too right?”
• You attract what you need to learn. “I’m starting to get it”
• We have all come here to learn from each other. “Okay, it makes sense”
• Respect people for where they are at and accept them when they challenge your patience. Notice their good qualities and just get on with your life. Nobody needs to be saved. “Really? This is kind of taking away my excuses to be mad at people.”
• Understanding and changing is healing. “Gotcha!”

Then there were the parts that popped out and helped straighten my thinking around this issue of responsibility:

• We love to be of service but nobody loves being a servant. “You got that sister!” I thought
• It is best not to do more than 50% for people because you take away their opportunity to learn and grow. “Um, yes, okay that makes sense, oops!”
• If you have to do for others make sure you learn something for yourself from what you have done and then you will not be drained. “Drained, yes, that is how I feel”
• Ask for what you want instead of waiting for permission. “Really? But shouldn’t people who truly love me know what I want?” Uncomfortable realising dawning...
• Your life is your business and you have to take responsibility for it. “Oh crap, I’ve been too busy taking care of everyone else’s business.”
• If you are about to do for others, make sure they have asked for your help. “Really but am I not just being nice? Mm, light bulb moment, on occasions when others do do something for me I can feel like they think I’m inadequate. Drats!”
• By doing for others what they could be doing for themselves you are taking away their opportunity to grow. “Oh, I didn’t think of it that way.”
• Learn to receive as well as to give. “Receive? How?”

This was a bit of a wakeup call. While I didn’t have a name for it then, she also said a lot about boundaries:

• You need to be caring for yourself then those others will begin to respect you because you will have respect for yourself. “I didn’t think of it that way before but it makes sense.”
• Beingness is using all your inner power to be yourself and in your own energy, no matter what negativity is around you. It is living in your feelings and letting others do the same. When you are in control of your power you do not want to control others. “But I often don’t know how I feel until I get mad.”
• The compassion you seek is mostly for yourself, so when you learn to show it to yourself, you will then show it to others and more loving relationships flow. “That sounds good, but how?”
• You need strong boundaries to practice detachment, but life is so much more relaxed when you do. “Strong boundaries sound exhausting” was my first thought.
• Be married to the process of looking inside yourself for answers and divorced from the result – what people do with your information is none of your business. “Mm, I might have to work on my delivery then..and what if they still get mad? Oh, how they react is not my business. Lightbulb moment!”

From there I started to read a lot more about boundaries, Evette Rose’s Healing Your Boundaries book was great for helping me define my boundaries, and Terri Cole’s book Boundary Boss for giving me tools and words to help communicate my boundaries and hold them in difficult situations.

This hasn’t been a linear learning path, it’s been more like one step forward, two to the side, five back and finally another leap forward again. A lot of my old stuff got dragged up out of the murky waters and continues to as I react to situations, reflect and relearn.

In my experience it’s often the very thing I try to avoid, or to resist, that needs to be faced in order for me to grow and fulfil my potential. Relationships that aren’t working, or jobs that are miserable, I plough on in a state of discontent, fear and anxiety. That is what it comes down to, a deep seated fear that the real me, my real needs and desires won’t be accepted. I’m trying to avoid rejection. And yet,in the process I’m rejecting myself.

Eleanor Roosevelt said “Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility.  For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.”

When I was taking responsibility for other people who gladly let me, I used to think of this quote smugly. But now I realise I was a co-conspirator in that and the quote applies equally to me.

Ironically for someone with an over-developed sense of responsibility (towards others), it’s actually taking responsibility for me that matters most. Each time I come back to myself after taking responsibility for what I really need and asserting my boundaries, I wonder why I hadn’t done it so much sooner.

Have you caught a glimpse of yourself anew in reading this? Are you ready to take a helicopter ride high above the canopy and see yourself from a different perspective? To see that all you desire awaits
if only you can take more responsibility for your own needs? Are you ready to face your fears?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Resentment, the Family Business. Are You Willing to Let It Go?, Your Mind Will Try to Protect You By Resisting Your Healthy Boundaries, I Am a Recovering Approval Seeker and Control Freak and What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I was listening to relationship expert Terry Real recount a conversation with a client whose partner had really changed his ways. He had become a nice, thoughtful, connected guy; having previously been a “prize jerk”. Despite this, his client was still stuck in resentment, what he calls “her dysfunctional stance”.

So Terry asks his client who the resentful one was in her family growing up, where did she learn this from? He knows that his clients are either reacting to this, or learning to repeat it, or some combination of the two.

She responds “My mom, she was resentful for breakfast, lunch and dinner. She hated my dad and made it perfectly clear”. Rather than enlisting her daughter as a co-conspirator against her father (one possibility), she had instead been very narcissistic and had little connection with her daughter. So the client’s stance in resentment was actually a way to be close to a parent who did not want to be close to her at all.

He observes “So resentment is the family business. You are in union with your mother by sharing a vision of what a relationship looks like. If you let this new man in, you’re going to be leaving your mother.”

In short, she unleashed a lot of grief as she let go of the last vestige of unity with her mother and embraced her husband. And, so far at least, the resentment hasn’t resurfaced.

While I didn’t have that same dynamic growing up, I recognise the ugly truth of resentment in my life.
I grew up with a mother whom I felt resented having to take care of me. She was often tense and overwhelmed, especially when on her own with my brother and I (which, since she was the primary caregiver was often). And if we “weren’t being good” it would throw her into fits of rage.

In short, I grew up feeling that my needs and desires were secondary to ensuring that my mum’s emotional landscape was smooth and even, and I was responsible for that. This developed into a pattern of being a co-dependent people pleaser with no idea about boundaries and – as I grew – I resented my mother for putting all that on me as a young child.

In How to Let Go of Resentment Teal Swan defines resentment as “a state of being in pain as a result of perceiving you have been treated wrongly, unfairly and unjustly”.

She makes the following key points:

• Whether something is right, fair or just is subjective
• Whether circumstances were such that a person was or was not treated fairly, either way resentment can be present
• Resentment is one of the strongest hooks that anchors a person to the past
• Resentment immediately converts itself to distrust (when you feel you’ve been treated wrongly you cannot rely on the person to care for your best interests)
• Resentment is almost always fuelled by years’ worth of earlier experiences of being treated unfairly
• Letting go (or forgiving) can give people the feeling that they have to let go of the unmet need to be treated fairly and justly, and so to honour this need they will not forgive
• Resentment may be kept as both a boundary and a personal reminder as if to say “no one will ever do this to me again”
• The ego can feel a sense of itself being right and good when it is in the victim role with someone else in the perpetrator role
• In close relationships being the one who was wronged puts the other person in a role where they have to “make it up to you”, creating a power imbalance
• Resentment kills relationships but it is not a monster or enemy, just the natural by-product of a lack of resolution.

I can attest to all of that. Resentment is the toxic by-product of the unhealthy cycle my children’s father and I were stuck in for years. Coming into the relationship we were two people seeking to find ourselves and to have a family. Both those things happened, and both are true blessings. But they happened painfully because we were both unconsciously stuck in unhealthy patterns of behaviour and unable to express our personal truths.

We were two symbiotic dysfunctional beings, one accustomed to taking on too much responsibility (especially for others), the other accustomed to having others take responsibility for them. Putting this another way, I felt safe and like I was fulfilling my duty to love by doing for him things he was capable of doing for himself. He felt safe and entitled to those things in a love relationship. Yet both of us were resentful.

Annette Noontil says “By doing for others what they could be doing for themselves you are taking away their opportunity to grow.” Both souls were calling out for a healthy balance, replaying ingrained patterns in hope of a resolution.

From a broader perspective I definitely feel happy to have arrived at a point of being able to express my truths, and he his. But – as with all growth – I often shake my head in wonder at why it took so long and had to be so painful.

Terry Real says “What we long for is the divine... the gods and goddesses that are going to complete us...and what we’re stuck with is an imperfect being. What we’ve lost in our culture is that it’s exactly the collision of your particular imperfections with mine (and how we manage that together) which is the stuff of intimacy...that’s what drives us deep”.

In her article (which is also available as a video) How to Let Go of Resentment Teal gives a wealth of information which she then sums up as “Focus directly on resolution and the by-products of non-resolution – including resentment – will cease to exist.”

So what remains unresolved in your life? Where do you still feel pain as a result of perceiving you have been treated wrongly, unfairly and unjustly? Has resentment become your family business? And what are you willing to do to let it go?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Take Heart - It Takes Courage and Tenacity to Step Into Your Power, Your Mind Will Try to Protect You By Resisting Your Healthy Boundaries, Are You Aching to Be Accepted By Someone Who Doesn’t See You?, Normal Is Dysfunctional That Is the Growth Opportunity and Why the Integration of Feelings and Logic Will Save the Human Race. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Shame, pain and guilt have a lot to answer for. I remember thinking that a while back when I heard of someone who had committed suicide and his family hadn’t known what had driven him to it because, on the face of it, nothing was amiss. There seems to be so much we humans keep hidden because of shame, pain and guilt.

V (formerly known as Eve Ensler), who wrote The Vagina Monologues, an episodic play that began in the 1990’s and speaks in many voices and in many ways about violence against women, said recently:  

“If something doesn’t exist you can do anything to it. If something only exists in the dark you can rape it, colonise it, own it and destroy it. Once you declare Vagina Monologues you’re saying vaginas have voices, they can speak, they can be seen, and they can be visible.”

Her feeling is that making the invisible visible is a very scary thing, especially in a time when people wanted women to be controlled. As a child she suffered violence, sexual abuse and humiliation at the hands of her father. As an adult she is determined and says “I’m not going to have shame, I’m going to be powerful, funny, I’m going to own it”.

In a world where movements like Black Lives Matter and Ni Una Menos are gaining traction, there continues to be a lot of big-T trauma being outed so to speak. Yet, in tracking the human rights movement back to Cyrus the Great, who freed all slaves in Babylon and declared in 539 BC that people should choose their own religion, it becomes painfully obvious that we humans are not quick learners.

I suspect that is because behind all big-T trauma lies little-t trauma. I’m talking about the kind of trauma that derives from the more insidious kinds of behaviours that result in adults who feel the need to take power from others (by projecting and deflecting their own pain) in order to feel worthy in themselves.

I call it insidious because I think we each have our own little stories, which seem so benign in the face of the stories of the horrific big-T trauma we hear about every day, yet shapes lives nonetheless.

Although I grew up with two parents who loved me and wanted me, I felt loved conditionally. As I said in Normal Is Dysfunctional That Is the Growth Opportunity, for a long time the predominant theme of child rearing has been about teaching children to be good and fit in.
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So growing up conditioned to “be good and do not upset my parents” seems a typical experience. Certainly I didn’t feel like I was in any better or any worse a position than any of the other kids I grew up with. Grooming us kids to fit in and be good members of society was where it was at. 

However, in terms of the development of the human psyche, growing loving and connected adults first requires kids who have a healthy sense of self and safety.

It’s not the forced sleeping and eating schedules I remember, though I suspect my body does, it’s the anxiety I felt being around my mother (who was the one at home looking after us most of the time). When I read Dr Maté’s words “it’s not our children’s behaviour but the anxiety it elicits within us that we have to learn how to manage” I knew I’d finally found an explanation for what I sensed my whole childhood.

Left on her own with us kids, my mum was always hyper-tense, it was like entering an alternate reality as she wasn’t like that around others. I learned to anticipate how things might play out and to be as perfect as I could to stay out of trouble. Looking back through adult eyes I can connect the dots to her own childhood, something I only really learned about when she was dying.

Although I had always sensed my mum’s dislike of her father (who had died when she was seven), she never told me anything specific until just before she died, when she said “I remember sitting on the floor drawing, and hearing the crack behind me, and seeing your gran go from one side of my peripheral vision to the other”.

Trauma begets trauma. I know because when I had my own kids and they needed my positive attention all the time, I came unwound. I found myself getting angry at them, yelling at them and wandering around chuntering the same way my mother used to chunter – even using some of the same words.

That “oh my, I’ve become my mother” moment was a wakeup call. Instead of putting it all on my kids, as I’d had done to me, I decided to take full ownership of my behaviour before it became ingrained and marked the pattern of another childhood.

Basically, I had to reparent myself. If I caught myself reacting, I’d stop mid-yell, apologise for yelling and actively work to calm my triggered nervous system. I explained to my kids what I was doing. They may have experienced schizophrenic behaviour but I figured that it was better than experiencing me putting it all on them.

I also made myself a chart and got my kids to decide whether I got a tick for talking to them respectfully. They still had boundaries, but I was getting better at holding them in a healthy way. In short, I made the invisible visible.

When my youngest daughter had a bout of meltdowns recently and started lashing out, I was inspired by a story I’d heard from relationship expert Terry Real, I said:

“Hey, you’re my daughter, I love you and I’m always going to love you. But it’s not ever going to be okay for you to yell and scream and lash out at us like this. You know dad and I grew up with too much yelling and screaming and we work hard to make this a better environment, what do you need right now to help you calm down?”

We are committed to breaking the chain of pain, but it’s not always easy. I don’t know about you, but my litmus test has always been who I am at home, that is where any mask I’ve been subconsciously wearing falls.

It is easy to blame other people and circumstances, but most of the time I’m emotionally charged it’s because I’ve triggered the little child inside who is subconsciously trying to be good to appease her inner parents.

“When we give ourselves permission to stop being the obedient daughter, we become the responsible adult.” Glennon Doyle

I suspect that is the case for most people when they are emotionally charged and it’s out of kilter with the actual circumstances. Well, either being obedient towards or rebelling against the inner parent.

When I look through my adult eyes, once the emotional charge has passed, I find I’ve either not had or I’m not holding a healthy boundary and I’ve over reacted towards the person or circumstances.

For example, when I had to catch a return flight home the other day, I was in a pretty triggered state because of the time constraints involved. As I child I was always being hurried along by mum, who used to speed walk everywhere with us, and was always anxious in case we were late.

I even have recurring dreams about not being able to get packed in time to catch a flight. So when my partner saw me having trouble packing the cases and said “you’re shaking”, I was aware that I was in a traumatised state, my body remembering.

While we caught our taxi and go to the airport in plenty of time, my nervous system was still on high alert, anticipating getting through check in and safely home (flying not being a favourite thing of mine at the best of times).

When one of our bags registered slightly overweight – and the others being underweight - I will confess I had a momentary meltdown. The airline we were flying with is really pedantic about the 23kg limit, and the choice is to repack your bag there on the check in floor or pay an $80 excess fee.

Having felt like I’d just survived something in getting the bag packed in the first place, there was a moment when I had to shift gear to get the job done. That moment felt like a slow motion freefall, and the airline worker’s calm but directive voice cut through to restart my system. She said “it’s okay; it’s only a kilo or so, find a couple of books or toiletry bag and put them in your other bag.”

Part of me wanted to scream “it’s not okay!” but another part of me knew the futility of my resistance so I obeyed and moved past the moment. After the emotional charge had calmed I was extremely grateful I hadn’t completely humiliated myself by expressing the full blown tantrum I’d wanted to have.

But it also made me realise I hadn’t actually catered to my needs by organising the help I needed to pack and get us back to the airport, instead I’d just taken it all on my shoulders, and I then wanted to lay that anger and resentment at the feet of those I travelled with. I became aware that, on the inside, I was waiting for my hard work to be noticed, resentful it wasn’t an old well worn pattern.

Lesson learned, I resolved to organise things quite differently the next time we took a trip, having each person pack and unpack their own case instead of playing the martyr.

This is the essence of small-t trauma. It lives within, invisible, reigniting the well worn thought patterns and pathways in my nervous system. But by making the invisible visible, becoming conscious of what is really at play, and learning how to react differently, I can create newer, healthier reactions that empower and serve me - and those around me - much better.

What is within you that would benefit from being brought into the light?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Clear the Fog of Trauma to See the Magnificence of Your Being, Normal Is Dysfunctional That Is the Growth Opportunity, You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough, Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Is Your Responsibility and Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Someone, who knows I’m interested in childhood trauma, recently told me she thinks I should “just let go of negative memories”. Another person wondered, if something was so lacking in my relationship with my parents, how am I not experiencing greater dysfunction or even death, which he proposed was statistically more likely than being able to draw intelligent conclusions.

Interestingly I have never said nor felt that my childhood was negative, it was normal, with some good memories and some not so good memories; and I certainly had two parents who wanted and loved me. They were just two people doing the best they could, parenting in the normal way.

So I decided to write this as resource for people like me who do personal work in order to move past any suboptimal wiring and fulfil my potential, while some look on in bemusement wondering why I would feel the need to do any work when I had such a normal childhood.

Normal doesn’t mean optimal, and can be as traumatic within our bodies as a readily recognised trauma. In fact, I believe this is society’s biggest opportunity for growth.

For a long time the predominant theme of child rearing has been about teaching children to be good and fit in. This is all very well, but it is best done after a healthy sense of self and safety has been established, and this appears to be little understood.

Feeling safe relates directly to the nervous system, the command centre of a human’s flight-fight response. Neural pathways connect one part of the nervous system to the other and neural pathways do not care whether parents/caregivers intentions are good or how much they love their children; they simply start forming in response to the child’s reaction to how well (or not) their needs are met.

“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, 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.”

Some examples I gave recently: 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. These are all normal, everyday occurrences, not things an adult necessarily thinks of as rejecting their child.

However, if I put my adult self in those shoes, imagine I am so upset I’m 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; at one extreme they actually make me question my very existence (especially if they are regularly occurring situations) and, at best, make me feel isolated and unimportant in the moment. So it’s not hard to imagine how utterly devastating such things are to a baby or small child who is completely dependant on that adult to meet their needs.

This creates a type of developmental trauma, which is sometimes known as small-t trauma. This kind of trauma is normal in our society, and it happens bit by bit over time.

Then there are the inherited patterns of behaviour in parents that children react to, and unwittingly develop patterns in response to. These are essential for survival in childhood but become unhealthy patterns later in life, and will certainly get passed on unless the cycle is broken.

The best description I’ve seen of these is in James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, he describes four archetypes (on a scale of aggressive to passive) that are “control strategies we each develop in order to stop others’ draining our energy”. He says “It’s often easiest if you start by taking a look at which strategies your parents employed:

• Intimidators threaten verbally or physically and come on too strong, making others frightened. They are so wrapped up in their own anger they don’t care what is happening inside the other person.
• Interrogators constantly question, criticize, nag and find fault, making others self conscious and eroding their confidence.
• Aloofs shut down when confrontation happens. They often withdraw physically or verbally, forcing others to struggle and dig to find out their true feelings.
• Poor Me’s tend to guilt trip, projecting themselves as the helpless victim in need of care and attention. This makes others feel guilty even if they know there is no real reason to feel this way.

Each of these are linked with the corresponding strategies that created them, and that they create. For example, Intimidators create Poor Me’s appealing for mercy, or, the child will endure until they are old enough and big enough to fight back, creating another Intimidator, and so the cycle continues”.

I suspect no one wants to feel like a victim or held hostage to their past circumstances, but rejecting the idea that unconscious reactions in childhood may have inadvertently created limitations or unhelpful belief patterns and behaviours is a missed opportunity for growth.

The kinds of common subconscious unhelpful belief patterns that get perpetuated are: I’m unworthy, I’m too much, I’m alone, I don’t have, I’m powerless, I’m not wanted, I’m invisible, I’m bad, I don’t belong, I’m a burden, I’m crazy, I’m different, I’m not enough, I’m a failure, I’m not important, I’m inferior, I’m not loved, I don’t matter, I’m not safe and/or I’m worthless.

Claire Zammit and Kathrine Woodward Thomas created a fantastic document that goes into each of these in much more depth and is well worth a read.

This is not our only trauma of course, I just think it’s by far the most common and least recognised and – bottom line – the one that needs addressed in order to grow and evolve from the other types of trauma we create.

One therapist told me she has worked with children who have no apparent developmental issues but instead inherited predispositions to emotional dysregulation (having emotions that are overly intense in comparison to the situation that triggered them). Considering genetics does, on the face of it, seem sensible.

But as you may deduce from what I have written above, I find it hard to imagine that most people are not in some way affected by parental – usually well meaning – interactions in our early years. I am also not keen on the genetics argument; it feels too much like a free pass to behaving poorly on an all-too-regular basis, when I truly believe that (if you can read this) it is within your gift to change how you react when triggered, and also in fact your responsibility.

Remember those neural pathways? As in the seemingly normal and benign examples I gave of rejection, these became very entrenched in my system throughout childhood, as my nervous system did what it needed to continue to do to keep me feeling safe.

I can’t change those pathways that fire ever time, say, someone criticises me (which is exactly the kind of situation in which I may have emotions that are more charged than the situation warrants). However I can:

• Become more aware of my reactions and start to understand if and why I overreact
• Take responsibility for helping my body feel safer, using techniques to calm/regulate my nervous system
• Learn new ways to respond, like learning how to have compassion and to have and hold healthy boundaries

I cannot change my reactions through a decision alone; it requires awareness, curiosity, focus in learning new skills and persistence.

Also bear in mind that no child is born with emotional regulation, so it’s having a parent or caregiver who cannot model effective coping skills that puts a child at risk of emotional dysregulation.

Upon suggesting we educate future generations on the impacts they have on newborns and young children through secure attachment and attunement, the therapist I was talking to was concerned that would put huge pressure on parents and create a sense of blame for those who are doing their best.

I believe each person is always doing their best (in any given situation, with the cards they have been dealt and with what they know). But it is the adults (not the children in their care) who have the capacity for reflection, insight and change, to develop healthier coping styles.

That said, even with good intentions and good emotional regulation it is inevitable people will suffer other types of trauma in the journey through life. But, overall, people would begin with a sense of safety and self, and that would make a huge difference to the way other trauma is dealt with and, in fact, whether it is even created.

Therapists like Dr Terry Levy, who runs the Evergreen Psychotherapy Centre, won’t work with children until they’ve worked with the parents. They also use a life script that gathers the kind of information that is relevant to getting to the heart of the types of dysfunctional beliefs and behaviours at play in a person’s life.

For me it's not about "oh look at my trauma" in the sense of "isn't it terrible". As light-touch as my experiences are (in comparison to some of the atrocities that happen to people), they have shaped me deeply. I see how I have been limited by my own beliefs and trauma reactions within my body, it has kept me playing small, from fulfilling my potential and acting from a place of compassion.

So I can wholeheartedly appreciate that if light-touch trauma can do that, what a slam-dunk the big-T trauma (sexual abuse, violence, war or political violence, natural disasters, serious accidents, life threatening illnesses etc) causes.

Now the real key for me is this. Big-T trauma and its effects are becoming well recognized. But little-t trauma, especially normal developmental trauma, remains largely unseen and yet lives within almost every single person on the planet today. It creates disease, chronic pain and illness and it stunts our ability to address systemic issues within our relationships and within our society.

That is why I share my experiences and insights, to shine a light on the microscopic stuff, the irritating sand in the oyster shell that are our pearls of wisdom, our key to compassion and evolution.

Could I be wrong? Sure there’s always room for a misread of reality because it’s all about perspective. But if this resonates with you then I have every confidence that with awareness, curiosity, focus in learning new skills and persistence, you can fulfil your potential in every area of your life.

As family therapist and author Terry Real says “We may not (right now) be able to bring peace to the Middle East or to Syria or whatever else but we can bring peace to our living rooms. So start with your life. And your life is your relationships. So learn how to do that and do it really well.”

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Clear the Fog of Trauma to See the Magnificence of Your Being, Life Really Does Support Your Deepest Desires (And How to Access Its Support), You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough, Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Is Your Responsibility and Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

A while back I started some intensive chiropractic work in a bid to see if I could unwind some of the chronic pain I experience in my right shoulder, having tried a few other avenues unsuccessfully.

While I can appreciate its effectiveness in unblocking my nervous system (every session is filled with satisfying releases of tension along my spine and in other parts of my body), I’ve also become aware that the pain I experience cannot be attributed to a single event so it’s not so easy to let go of, it’s more like peeling away the layers of an onion.

If I had had an accident that had created pain, treatment like this could ease it relatively quickly. But when the cause is more a series of events that could be physical, mental and/or emotional, the path is less clear. Worse, I have a suspicion that the events are not necessarily relegated to past experiences, they may well be current day thoughts, actions or feelings that I’m (as yet) unaware of as being related.

To this end I asked the chiropractor whether she knew anyone locally who does somatic therapy/retraining. Somatic therapies are ones in which the body (the soma) is the guide, and the key is connecting the physical symptoms with a conscious narrative and feelings.

This led to an interesting observation on her part about common patterns she sees in bodies and the biggest issue she observes in the pursuit of getting back to a fully reset/healthy state (for want of a better expression). That is that people don’t make time to fully process their feelings, she says, so they get stored like another layer on the metaphorical onion.

As a person who has tended to be very in my head as opposed to my body, I have only recently begun to appreciate what she means. Until a few years ago, feeling what was happening in my body was generally secondary to me, and very unconscious, my body needed to be talking very loudly indeed to hear it.

But as I’ve begun to regularly meditate I’ve definitely become more aware of the connections between my mind, body and emotions. A key piece of advice I’ve heard from many quarters is, when I’m triggered about something, focus on where I’m feeling it in my body.

This has a couple of benefits, one is I start to become aware of patterns within me, the second is it brings my attention back into my body and calms my nervous system.

There are some great visuals out there that show what’s happening in a body when particular emotions are felt. In this Bright Side article it shows how emotions like happiness, love, anger, anxiety, depression, fear, disgust, shame, pride, contempt and jealousy show up in our systems in terms of blood flow and the effects.

For example, it says “when we are frightened, the blood literally drains from our face, making us pale. This happens thanks to the autonomic nervous system, the flight-or-fight control system. When we face a trigger, blood vessels pinch off the flow to our face and extremities, sending blood to our muscles and body so we are ready for either flight or fight”.

As someone who internalises a lot of my emotions, I’m aware that my nervous system has been in flight or fight mode for much of my life. And instead of taking the time to actually feel that, as the chiropractor pointed to, it was more that the baseline feeling within my body was a state of anxiety.

But to give a specific example, just the other day I read a negative personal comment condemning my perspective. The first thing I was aware of was a feeling akin to a general anaesthetic being pumped into me. The feeling started in my tummy and washed up and around my chest, and my thinking brain shut down. I felt startled, frozen.

Without attaching too much of a story to it, because every emotion comes with a story, I was aware on the edges of my consciousness that there was a familiarity to this feeling, but I just wanted to be present to what was actually happening in my body. My mind wanted to jump in and solve this; in short it wanted to keep me safe.

But what was obvious was that the well worn path for my norm in this kind of situation was to either push it down and get on with something more productive, or to start getting indignant and angry about it to propel me into action.

At this point, despite the allure, I resisted taking that well worn path, the chiro’s words still freshly ringing in my ears, and I just sat with the feeling and let it intensify while remembering to breath into where I was feeling it the most. It was uncomfortable, painful even, I can understand why I wanted to avoid feeling this feeling.

But after a few minutes of just leaning into it, like being hit by a wave, it started to subside. I could feel the ebb as feeling returned to the rest of my body and my brain started to come back online. I knew instantly that this reaction was an echo of unfair criticism directed at me as a child.

But as Glennon Doyle said “When we give ourselves permission to stop being the obedient daughter, we become the responsible adult”. I did not need to respond from the wounded child. This was not a person who was genuinely seeking to understand my personal conclusions, there was nothing to answer to, and so I let it go. For once, my body need not add another layer, weighing me down further.

As I was sharing this observation with my partner, we reflected on the many times in each day when we each might each feel discomfort or pain, and we push it to the side out of habit, not allowing ourselves to actually feel what is going on.

Traffic, that is something that pushes my partner’s buttons, and he spends a lot of time driving in it. Learning where that tension comes from (the narrative in his head), and how to healthily disperse it, is the optimal way forward.  

And that is what appeals to me about somatic therapy as it connects the psyche with the body, looking at cause and effect and how to approach things differently. Despite pioneers like the Peter Levine working in this field for decades now, it is still a relatively uncommon discipline among therapists.

But that is not to say that I can’t make progress. Just as I did the other day, if I use my body’s signals to tune into what else I have stored there in a bid not to feel the pain in the moment, there is much to be learned.

It occurs to me that our bodies’ carry a wealth of information, far more than our minds can consciously process. As such, learning to read our body’s signals can make an excellent doorway into our personal and collective growth.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Take Your Broken Pieces and Make a Beautiful Life, Learn to See What Is in Plain Sight, Want Better Health? Be Shrewd About Stress, What is Your Body Telling You? and Why You Should Consciously Engage in Body Talk. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

“When people treat you like they don’t care, believe them.” Samuel Rodenhizer

One of my big discoveries in the last year was this premise that some of us internalise feelings, thoughts and emotions, whereas others externalise them. What I’ve found, put simply, is people who internalise things feel pain; people who externalise have troubles (usually because the people around them are in pain).

I’m an internaliser, and I’m hyper-attuned to other people’s feelings. I used to live in hope that people would see just how hurt or upset I was, the same way I could tell that they were upset at me, and – in the same way I would seek to create harmony – they would seek to create harmony with me. But it’s often not the case, especially since I seem to attract people who externalise their feelings.

The best explanation I have found for this dynamic/ coping style/ way of being in the world, takes this back to how well caregivers tune into a child’s needs from the cradle through the school years. When I ask myself:

• 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?”

This gives me an indication of how attuned my parents were to my needs. Big clue here is that parenting until the late twentieth century predominantly treated kids as an empty vessel who needed moulded to fit society. A child’s feelings did not feature so much as the drive to be good, to fit in and most definitely – as I quickly learned - not to upset the apple cart (being my parents and their anxieties).

So, as Teal swan says, “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).”

Understanding this helped me to understand my partner (and others) more, because he is an externaliser. There was many a time he would project something onto me and cause me pain, or I would be feeling pain from an interaction from some other quarter, and he just couldn’t empathise.

Something relationship expert Terry Real (founder of Relational Life Therapy) talks about in his series Fierce Intimacy, and Wendy Behary in her book Disarming the Narcissist, is that people who externalise their pain (Terry refers to their behaviour as grandiosity), projecting it onto others, need motivation to change.

They agree that people who externalise don’t feel bad, in fact Teal Swan goes so far as to say “the destruction on this planet owes itself to those people who have learned to cope by retreating into the egocentric bubble”.

Terry Real says the kind of conversation he has when working with someone who has this coping style might go along the lines of “What kind of father did you have? What kind of father do you want to be? It must really kill you to realise that – in this family – you’ve become your father. What kind of relationship do you want your kids to have with you?”

He has a saying “Pass it back or pass it on. If we don’t wrestle this together, the people who are going to be most damaged are your children.”

For both my partner and I this has become our biggest motivator for change, we don’t want to pass on our dysfunctional ways of being in the world to our kids. We want our kids to have healthy self esteem, healthy boundaries, compassion and empathy for their fellow beings and the creatures and planet around us.

Figuring out what my limitations are, as a result of the way I subconsciously reacted to the people and my environment growing up (psychologists call this maladaptive schemas), and weeding them out, has been part of a healing journey.

As an adult I found myself longing for acceptance, validation and recognition of who I am, what I need, what I feel and what I achieve. I was longing for support and connection, and a feeling of safety to be vulnerable. I began to understand that the way I was being in the world was basically subconsciously attracting repeat experiences into my life as opportunities to have a more successful outcome.

Once I became conscious of a lot of these patterns of beliefs and behaviours, and why I had developed them, it became a lot easier to see where I was shooting myself in the metaphorical foot.

But as Terry Real says, “it takes more than putting our past in the past, it takes skills to have healthy relationships with people, and skills can be learned”. He explains “There’s a skill in learning to love yourself, there is skill in learning good boundaries, there are skills in learning how to stand up for yourself with love and how to respond with generosity instead of defensiveness”.

I was asked by someone why they found themselves having to discard friendships, because she seemed to be attracting friends who could only talk about themselves and never asked about her. She couldn’t figure out how some people could focus so totally on themselves.

I shared with her that I’ve found it takes getting good at expressing and holding my boundaries to get what I need from relationships and, for that, I’d definitely recommend both Evette Rose’s Healing Your Boundaries and Terry Cole’s Boundary Boss.

But I also really like Terry Real’s approach where, in Relational Life Therapy, he teaches relational empowerment, the golden rule being “What can I give you to help you to give me what I want?”

While that is indeed empowering, he also admits that one of the core skills required in any relationship, and he calls this the proto-skill, is shifting out of that triggered part of you (the wounded child that is the knee-jerk reaction, automatic, unthought, compulsive response) back into the adult part, with a fully functioning prefrontal cortex that can think and make deliberate decisions.

Regardless of the new skills I’ve learned, I was somewhat heartened to hear him admit that one of the things he personally still finds hard is containing that desire to react when his wife comes at him with a triggered self-righteous energy. He says:

“Containing that impulse, settling into my adult, holding myself with warm regard, holding her in warm regard (even though she’s out of her mind), and doing whatever I can to make things better, that moment right there, that’s a tough moment.”

The point is, though, it can be done. And while some people seem not to care about others, I find it useful to remember it’s just a coping style, and I am often able to have compassion for why this is the case (if not in the moment, enough to keep me in the game in some longer term relationships).

I also have figured out my boundaries, what I am and am not willing to put up with, what the deal breakers are and what I’m willing to do about it. I am getting better and better at speaking my truth and holding those boundaries. What I know for sure, though, is I cannot change anyone else; the only thing I can change is how I think, feel and react.

Ironically the more those of us who do care about others can connect in with ourselves and honour our own needs, wants and desires, and can hold those who seem self absorbed accountable in a loving way, the more aware of our own needs and those of others we will all become.

In addendum, I observe we all have the capacity to internalise and externalise, just the same as we all have the capacity to be narcissistic or people pleasers at times. It’s perhaps more helpful to think of these things in more general terms rather than as definitive labels. For example, as a newborn and young child, I internalised a lot of pain, shame and guilt, but as an adult I often subconsciously projected this outwardly when triggered (meaning I experienced emotions that were overly intense in comparison to the present situation as it had re-triggered the pain I internalised as a child and I then put that pain on/blamed something/someone else). Different circumstances and different people elicit different responses depending on what they echo from our earliest experiences of feeling safe and seen. 

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Change Unhealthy Reactions, What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People, 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.

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.

A few weeks ago, at a school parent’s evening, the teacher was quoting from author Charles Covacs who drew parallels between human development and the development of humankind. This sparked my curiosity because I believe my personal growth and evolution – and your personal growth and evolution – is what will evolve our society.

Then I came across a recent article by Deepak Chopra that really underlines the need for this kind of evolution. The article begins by talking about the limitations of the current world view – Materialism - based on physical objects as the stuff of creation and yet reality remains inexplicable.

He cites examples and poses excellent questions, it’s a fascinating and – for Chopra – very readable article. One of his juicier questions is “If you don’t know where the universe came from and are equally baffled by where thoughts come from, how reliable is your explanation of reality?”

But, he goes on, “no worldview explains everything, and so humans must prioritise the things that need explaining most urgently”. He cites our most urgent problems as overpopulation, pandemic disease, refugeeism and climate change and says “you may hope and pray that science and technology (which have been the most urgent things in the age of materialism) will come to the rescue, but the chances are tenuous without a huge change in how we think”.

All of this leads him to conclude that the change necessary is a change in self awareness. He says “We have had the luxury of ignoring self awareness for a long time and it has given us the chance to deny responsibility for the problems that no self-aware person would tolerate. A self-aware person wouldn’t go to war, stockpile nuclear weapons, harbour racial prejudice, mistreat and abuse women, and foul the environment”.

So as I ponder this issue of self awareness and link back to Charles Covacs’ thoughts, he adds another dimension, one that explores the development of feelings and logic within each of us.  In his book Botany, Covacs was pointing to the Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato and Aristotle) as a turning point in human history because that is the time when scientific enquiry (as we know it) began.

He explains that prior to this, in older civilisations (India, Babylon, Egypt), a myth was as valid an explanation of the world as scientific explanation is for us. He continues “the time of those Greek philosophers is the time when one could say fantasy and logic became separate and independent functions of the human mind. It is also the same time when poetry emerges as a separate art”.

The thrust of his observations are the parallels between that and human development, being that we start our lives in the feeling state and, as we get older, develop logic.

The relevance in that particular book is in coming to how to teach botany. In a child of ten or eleven this separation of fantasy and logic hasn’t yet happened. Children want facts, but they must be linked in a way that satisfies the feeling, the fantasy, the poetry in the child. Given only facts, he says “their fantasy, imagination and original creative ability dies and withers”.

Feelings versus logic, in some ways are quintessential aspects of feminine versus masculine qualities. When I started undertaking psychometric tests earlier in my career, I was always taken down a metaphorical rabbit hole as I tried to place myself in one camp or the other. To me, I always felt human nature – and certainly mine - was more multifaceted than that.

Over the years my understanding of masculine and feminine traits has expanded and deepened. Back in the 1990’s, the era in which I began cohabiting with a significant other, I remember feeling somewhat enlightened by John Gray’s infamous Men Are From Mars, Woman Are From Venus books.

But it wasn’t until I heard Allan and Barbara Pease speak at a conference, and read Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps that I was really more clearly introduced to this idea that human gender is not just a duality in the sense of identifying as male or female. It’s a duality within each male and female, meaning each person is comprised of both masculine and feminine traits.

In their book Allan and Barbara cite the science (of that time) of brain development in the fetus, and estimates that about 15-25% of men have feminised brains and around 10% of women have masculinised brains. However, both are  a composite.

This came up for me personally earlier in the week when getting some therapy to ease pain on the right side of my body. The therapist said, “Your right side simply doesn’t want to work with your left side, it’s holding on tightly”. The idea that the right side of my body is the male side, the left being the female, gives me something to work with.

Note that while the idea of right side/left side of the body relates well to the theory of left/right brain thinking (as the left side of the brain supplies nerves to the right side of the body and vice versa), working with the body as an indicator of our internal conscious and subconscious psyche is not new as I discuss in What is Your Body Telling You?

In terms of my own growth and development, these male and female qualities within me seem to be screaming for more attention and integration. There certainly seems some old patterns at play and it’s something I’m looking forward to delving into more.

Bringing this back to Deepak Chopra’s ideas on how the future of the human race depends on self awareness, there is also an old article of Teal Swan’s where she asserts “the restoration of balance within the human race is not about decreasing masculine power while increasing feminine power...it is about both rising to power simultaneously”.

She takes this further by addressing the elephant in the room (as she is apt to do), also known as the “Wait, men have been in power for thousands of years” thought. Her response? “Far from it. Instead, they’ve been stripping power from women for thousands of years. There is a big difference between gaining power in and of yourself and stripping power from another.”

As with everything, I suspect the extent to which male and female qualities show up within us is a mixture of both nature and our life experiences. I particularly like the short article from psychologist Shari Derkson that explains the aspects of masculine and feminine and what integrating them within ourselves might look like.

She says “There is a movement towards inviting more feminine aspects into our lives, states of being, rather than doing; such as through stillness, meditation and tapping into our intuition and creative processes. Equally, it is important for both male and females to develop the more masculine qualities of rational and logical ability, clear non-attached thought and problem solving etc.”

So as we begin to look within ourselves at how to integrate both our feeling states with our more logical states, this begins the kind of self awareness that is perhaps more suited to addressing our most urgent  problems for the human race today.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How to Find the Courage to Let Us Hear Your Heart’s Voice, How to Appreciate Our Differences Enough to Admire and Want to Embrace Them,  Kneel at the Doorway of Your Heart to Usher the Dawn of a New Era and Embracing the Feminine within All of Us. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I have to admit I’m a champion at complicating matters for myself. I’ve noticed as I have committed to becoming more attuned to my own needs and developing healthy boundaries, I often fail miserably as my mind goes down a familiar rabbit warren of thoughts that try to dissuade and confuse me.

While I feel better knowing it’s just a protection mechanism, it is something I have to be alert to as I determine to get better at holding healthy boundaries.

Why is it a protection mechanism?

Like many people, the main philosophy I experienced from the adults around me growing up was that they knew better than me what was correct and good. If I was good, I avoided punishment, simple. In response my “spidey senses” were acute, I was hyper attuned to people around me so I could think ten steps ahead to avoid danger, and my general strategy was striving for perfection in everything I did.

In short, my mind learned these strategies to keep me loved and safe throughout childhood. Unfortunately it hard wired those responses into my thinking and patterns of behaviour, whether or not they were suited to my changing, less dependent circumstances as I grew.

Once in the workplace and out in the big wide world of relationships, any criticism or conflict threw me into a tailspin. And, as I began to undertake psychometric testing in my career, a really confused picture began to emerge as I seemed to have adopted a little bit of everything along the way in order to stay ahead of any perceived danger; my nervous system on high alert much of the time.

By the time I was reaching my forties I became more determined to figure out who I am if I stripped away all the layers of fear and expectations.

So here I am another decade on, a recovering people pleaser working my way through the legacy of enmeshment trauma and co-dependency. Basically meaning I had no sense of self (where me ends and you begins), and no idea that personal boundaries were a thing (never mind a healthy thing), I thought good people were those who put others before themselves.

In traditional fashion, opposites attract. My partner’s challenges are quite different, having placed himself in a metaphorical bubble to protect himself from feeling pain, shame or guilt as he grew, he tuned out from any depth of feeling in himself or others. Empathy is a foreign word to someone who can’t relate because he has never let himself feel his own pain.

As I determine to develop healthy boundaries, in practice that means putting my needs before others who are used to quite the opposite. I can imagine that a people pleaser becoming healthy isn’t a comfortable experience for those who have been used to being indulged.

My experiences this week reflect this dynamic wonderfully. Both my partner and I suddenly found ourselves very busy. His workload increased just as the time approached that he’d scheduled to get some work done tiling the walkway through the heart of our house. Meanwhile I had been busy clearing everything out in readiness, while also preparing for another out-of-town trip with the kids.

Simultaneously one of my children decided it is now time to move to her big room, instead of the one adjoining mum and dad’s room, which will become an office. Being the think-ten-steps-ahead person I am, I suggested to my partner that we take the opportunity to recarpet since both rooms will be in an upheaval anyway.

Getting new carpets throughout was on our to-do list already, though not until next year, but logic and efficiency drove me to consider doing it sooner. But after introducing the idea to my gung ho partner (not a wise move for someone like me who likes to float ideas and mull things over before making decisions), I quickly regretted it as I started to contemplate clearing not just two rooms but six, in readiness for carpet to be laid.

Just thinking through the practicalities of adding that to my to-do list right now almost tipped me over the edge of my sanity. So here was a glaring signpost to a boundary. All I had to do was say, “Mm, it’s too much right now, let’s revisit later”.

But no, my keep-me-safe mind was in overdrive, it was thinking perfection, efficiency, discussions having raised expectations, not wanting to let anyone down and wanting to get this ghastly task behind me.

Short of Marie Kondo coming in and working with my kids directly on decluttering their stuff though (while I sit on a beach doing nothing except watch the sun glint on the water), my body did not want to cooperate with this plan at all, it simply filled me with dread.

So began the internal war within. I came up with a plan – not quite Marie Kondo, but a packing service. We have used a packing service a few times when moving, it’s always a small component of the cost and yet worth its weight in gold; especially for someone as ponderous as me.

Unfortunately, I tackled my highly stressed partner with my marvellous idea in the wrong way at the wrong time. The result was ugly, with all the worst aspects of our well worn old dynamics coming to the fore.

This set my keep-me-safe mind into hyperdrive.

But it was after observing my daughter attempting to write an answer to a question in a ten minute timeframe that it dawned on me how complex the workings of my own mind can be, and how it can completely coax me away from seeing what is obvious.

My daughter had to write about her favourite game and the three things she loves most about it. True to her nature she went diving down the rabbit hole, her imagination instantly filling her mind with all sorts of pictures and visions that make it incredibly hard for her to ever get to the part about the three things she loves most about it without having some sort of structure and tools to keep her focused.

In a similar way, my mind completely distracted me from that simply boundary “Mm, it’s too much right now, let’s revisit later” by instead taking the well worn pathways and patterns of codependence, defence and heartache.

It became so clear to me that I was making this whole deal way more complicated that it needs to be. I was making my needs into something I needed to fight for, because that is what I was so used to having to do to get my needs met as I grew up. In true fashion I felt deeply hurt and unseen.

My big win was I didn’t jump into the flaming pit of anger and outrage that I would have previously used to assert my needs. But I will admit my relief when my partner handed me a parcel that had arrived while I’d been away, it was Terri Cole’s Boundary Boss book that I’ve been waiting on. Terri has a beautiful way of communicating and instructing on boundaries and it’s clear I still have a lot of work to do in that area.

But I am grateful that endlessly unconscious cycles of “getting triggered and distracted” in my relationships have been broken, and what I have achieved is much greater awareness. As my partner says we “are a work in progress”.

And let’s face it, it is better to become aware of things, even if belatedly, than unconsciously repeating the same patterns of painful experiences without any learning.

If like me you have a pattern of co-dependency, your mind will likely try to protect you by resisting your healthy boundaries – especially in moments when you are highly stressed. But be encouraged knowing that this is normal, and why. Being aware of the pitfalls that can occur as you move towards your goal of healthy boundaries puts you far further along the path than you were before.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Take Heart - It Takes Courage and Tenacity to Step Into Your Power, Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, In What Unseen Ways Are You Abandoning Your Own Free Will?, How to Appreciate Our Differences Enough to Admire and Want to Embrace Them, How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight and What You Need to Know When You Feel Pulled in Different Directions. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Last week I was watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy in which the character Jackson Avery has a realisation about his calling in life.  He reflected “No one said it was easy becoming the person you’re meant to be. It takes bravery to step into your power, power you’ve discovered, earned and deserve.”

Then just a few days ago I received an email where Teal Swan echoed this sentiment saying “The journey to self love is not comfortable, it will feel scary and you will want to quit. But personal growth is within your power; others can teach you but only you can walk the path towards your unique truth.”

When I think back to my childhood, I had lots of stories about how life was, and would play out. For example, I had accepted my own lack of personal power to make decisions about many aspects of my life as a necessary but temporary evil of being dependant on my parents. I imagined that, as an adult, all would be well.

Actually though, having not had enough practice at making my own decisions, it didn’t exactly all go well. Especially when I add in the dynamic of co-dependency and enmeshment trauma, put simply as being taught to put others needs before my own, and my happiness depending on the happiness of those closest to me; anything else being inconsiderate and selfish.

I didn’t suddenly shrug off those unhealthy ways of being as I grew up. They had become ingrained habits, ways of interacting that were wired into my nervous system and thinking and being, mostly subconscious.

So much of my experience in adulthood has had me tolerating things I didn’t enjoy or, at times, even felt were unhealthy for me, in order to please others. Having learned to attune to others’ needs in childhood as a survival technique, it didn’t simply disappear, even with awareness. I can feel tremendous guilt, pain or shame if I contemplate choices that aren’t going to make others happy.

This was the point Teal was picking up in her email, she says “Every time we give up on ourselves we open the door to let in self hate, feelings of worthlessness, a fear of being seen, an inability to speak up, sleep problems, depression and abusive or unhealthy relationships to mention just a few; this is an act of self betrayal.”

Having made the link between giving too much to others in order to be perceived as useful (or not calling out someone who mistreats people) as an act of self betrayal, she then goes on clarify “this internal self betrayal is what caused us to stop trusting and loving ourselves, and self-love and self-trust are all about having healthy boundaries.”

Boundaries. Again. Until about a year ago I hadn’t even heard about healthy boundaries – and, if I had, it had passed me by.

Terri Cole, author of Boundary Boss, says that with healthy boundaries “you have separate needs, thoughts, feelings and desires from others. You recognise that your needs are different from others. You are empowered to take responsibility for yourself. You have good self respect. You share personal information gradually, over time, in a trusting relationship.”

Suffice to say I have since done, and continue to do, a lot of work on defining and holding my personal boundaries. It’s definitely a work in progress and takes conscious effort and focus to keep moving forwards without swinging to the opposite behaviour and being narcissistic. Balance isn’t something I’ve really seen modeled in my life.

Teal’s email suggested listing ten things I am unhappiest about in my life right now, and ten things I’d like other people to stop doing around me, or to me, or saying to me. That was a good litmus test as I could previously have written ten and more things easily, whereas now I struggled to write more than a few.

I was also reminded this week of the work of Terry Real, a relationship therapist and creator of Relational Life Therapy. He has devised a relationship matrix depicting how people show up in relationships. It has a horizontal axis showing boundaries (from boundary-less to walled-off) and a vertical axis showing self esteem (from shame-based to grandiosity) which shows the various dynamics between people.

I find his matrix is another helpful way of seeing what healthy looks like, and for seeing where I used to sit versus where I currently sit, as opposed to those other important relationships in my life.

He also made an excellent point about self esteem, sharing how the extremes on that axis (shame versus grandiosity/elitism) are based on the same emotion – contempt. Shame being contempt turned in on oneself, grandiosity being contempt towards others. With boundaries, the extremes are being love dependent versus love avoidant.

In hindsight, when I look back on things that didn’t work out the way I had hoped for, I can see the way those dynamics played into each scenario. I can also see that there was usually a silver lining.

Obvious examples are the friends and self interests I gave up when becoming involved in relationships, it took a few times around that same track to recognise my chameleon behaviour and begin to wonder who I am. 

Getting healthy; physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, and staring into the abyss where all my feelings of self love and self worth had been shunted in years gone past is a journey.

These did not slip into the abyss overnight, in fact the best analogy I can think of is one of those coin-drop/nudger/pusher arcade machines where I drop a coin in and it joins lots of other coins on a moving ledge, perhaps shunting the ones at the front to spill over to the next ledge and so on.

It’s as if every time I said no to myself, that was another coin I’d dropped into the machine, eventually those no’s nudged more and more of my sense of self into the abyss. So I would have been foolish to think I’d regain this healthy sense of myself overnight. The benefit of hindsight, though, has helped me to trust that life is always working out in my favour, even if it seems backhanded on occasion.

There have been times I have wanted to give up, and times I have given in to previous thought patterns and behaviours, but with the light of awareness it’s become too hard to tolerate the way that feels for very long. Just this week I uncomfortably declined a request from one of my daughter’s friend’s parents, I still want to please and help people, but it wasn’t the right thing for me in this situation – in fact, it wasn’t even possible and yet I still felt that familiar twinge of guilt.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever feel great about saying no to others, but I know it feels a whole lot better than compromising myself. Even when I listen to Terri Cole talk about boundaries, and she speaks so gracefully and uses her words so well, she admits it’s still uncomfortable for her at times.

Despite the heartbreak and pain I’ve endured in various situations, I wouldn’t swap those experiences for what I’ve learned from them. It took a while to get the message but I’m a wiser, kinder, more self aware person than I was. And, perhaps, most importantly to me, I feel more at peace with myself and the world around me more often.

I would encourage anyone who gets disheartened to keep going. As we each regain more awareness of the parts of ourselves that we have denied, suppressed or disowned, we start to move towards a more healthy, more connected, balance between me and us. And right now, this world needs a healthy sense of perspective more than ever.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, In What Unseen Ways Are You Abandoning Your Own Free Will?, How to Appreciate Our Differences Enough to Admire and Want to Embrace Them, How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight and What You Need to Know When You Feel Pulled in Different Directions. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

There is a Scots expression about making a “helluva caffudle” which translates as “a lot of confusion” that sprung to mind this week when dealing with the corporate office of the online grocery supplier I’d used for many years.

The conflicting replies I received were indeed confusing, on one hand sympathetic and responsive, on the other contradictory, uncaring and disingenuous, which pointed to a culture that isn’t exactly customer driven, the experience depending entirely on the individual who I happened to be interfacing with.

Not much different to most places right?

To be fair, it’s one of the key reasons I exited the corporate world. It gave me a bit of a litmus test of where the customer experience has evolved to (or not) since I last worked in that field. And I realised that, after all my study and experience of human potential, psychology and dysfunction, if I were to liken most organisations to a personality, it would be a narcissistic one.

To explain what I mean by this, I’ll quote from a few sources to explain what lies at the heart of most dysfunction among humans, and thus at the heart of most organisations of humans – lack of attunement.

Dr Dan Siegel says “Attunement is the process by which we form relationships”. When we attune with others we allow our own internal state to shift to come to resonate with the world of another.”

One of my all-time favourite articles happens to be on this topic, and the crux of the issue is summed up exquisitely by Teal Swan:

“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?”

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 by Daniel Shaw 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.”

So let me tell you the story about strawberry jam, and you can judge for yourself how much a lack of attunement contributed to my online grocery company losing around $25,000 per annum of our business...

I’d been having trouble with my online grocery shop for the last year and things seemed to be getting worse, with more and more items appearing to be in stock at the order stage and then not getting delivered because they were out of stock on a regular basis. This was resulting in regular trips to other stores to get what was needed, far from ideal.

While it is plausible that, between me ordering, and the store picking my order from the shelves, other customers may have come off the street and purchased those items each week, it seemed to me that it was happening with such regularity that something wasn’t right. Somehow, behind the scenes, the demand didn’t seem to be informing the supply.

Calls to Customer Service, and discussions with people at the store directly, resulted in no change. So I did what I’ve learned is most effective when I want to get to the bottom of root cause issues, and I contacted the Managing Director. This is usually an excellent entry point to find the person in the organisation who can investigate and help fix the cause of chronic issues.

All I really wanted to know was whether the company had some management, process or systems issues it could easily fix, or whether this was a good as it gets for now.

It was a disappointing start, having contacted the Acting-top-bod (whose day job is looking after the online offer, which I thought fortuitous at the time) but having had no acknowledgement after week, I had to follow this up. This, however, led to a phonecall from one of the online managers, who assured me this was not the level of service that I should be receiving.

She investigated and found some process issues and she also mentioned that the area’s online store should be the one offering the widest variety to customers, which makes absolute sense to me. She asked if I had any other issues aside of the ones I’d mentioned so I brought up the topic of the strawberry jam.

I buy a particular brand that has no refined sugars added and, about a year ago, the online store mysteriously stopped supplying the strawberry option. It still offered the raspberry, blueberry and apricot, but no strawberry.

However, the same company have another store a couple of kilometres away who offer a much wider variety but don’t do online deliveries (begging the question “why not?” apparently it’s something to do with loading bays, though it’s not entirely clear to me). However, what they do have is stock of the strawberry jam. So this told me – and the online manager - the company itself is obviously not having supply issues around this particular product.

So I allowed a number of weeks to pass to see whether the process issues would be sorted and I could rely more on stock levels. This was a bit hit and miss, but certainly there was no reappearance of the strawberry jam.

So I decided, last ditch attempt, to go to the newly appointed top-bod and see whether this could be resolved. This was delegated to another digital manager who replied:

“The size of the store means that unfortunately the full range is not available. Unfortunately the review of the spreads range won’t take place until March next year (i.e 10 months away), but we’ve made a note of your feedback... It’s always our intention to provide our customers with a great online shopping delivery experience – feedback like yours will ensure we can continue to improve this service.”

Then there was the matter of their other store, the bigger one with more variety, not being the online store. Aside of loading bays, the response cited “the location of the store is in relation to the suburb demand to keep our carbon footprint small.” While this might seem sensible, I should point out one store is 6.7 kilometres away, while the other is only 6.8 kilometres from our suburb.

I will confess this response tipped me over the edge, eliciting from me frustrated expressions like “Seriously?”, “Give me a break”, “Shame on you” and “Utter utter garbage, what a complete waste of my time”.

By this point, I’d come to the conclusion that this was the best I was going to get from my online shopping experience with this company. While in some ways it would be awesome to have a one-stop-shop for all our consumable needs, it is a bit like saying it would be awesome to have a partner who meets all my emotional needs. Neither is really realistic nor, actually, desirable since life would then likely lack variety, growth and expansion.

So I decided the best way forward was to register with another online grocery company and split our business between the two, thus insuring a wider variety of product availability. Despite the time consuming process of registering and filling that first virtual trolley, it was worth it to have options.

I will say that my spluttering response, while not actually eliciting a response from the Managing Director directly, did result in a response from their leadership team; the person who is in charge of the company’s public relations. Those of you not familiar with corporate set ups might not know that this is the person usually responsible for a company’s reputation via the media; it’s quite a different field from those who deal directly with customers.

For someone who has worked in both fields, I would have preferred and appreciated an authentic response from someone directly involved in the leadership of the day-to-day operations and customer supply chain.  I then received two crates of strawberry jam, some cereal and the promise of a discount voucher for my inconvenience. Despite the generosity and immediate follow up, I would have just preferred an explanation for the disparity in previous responses if I’m honest, and clarity on the real issues.

While I’m not wedded to the idea of a response directly from the person I’d written to, I would have expected an answer coming from, or being delegated by, a leader to be an honest reflection of the shortcomings. As I concluded on this question of character last week, people who own up to their faults and weaknesses are to be admired, and so it is with business.

I will never forget when I left the railway industry in the UK, one of the extremely frustrated customers I had spoken to many times over the years said “while I will probably never like the service (since it was prone to delays and failures on occasion due to infrastructure issues that were not quick fixes nor within the direct control of the company), your honesty has made it tolerable and I have felt that at least the issues were tabled and someone cared”.

It is my experience that behind the customer interface of most well established companies, quite aside of political agendas, is a veritable feast of legacy systems and spaghetti junctions of often cumbersome processes to manage, the archetypal swan on water. Knowing the limitations and being able to articulate them goes a long way.

There is no doubt that, on my wish list for online grocery shopping,  I’d want a reliable system to capture not only the customer demand failures of the stock the company does offer, but which products the company does not and customers’ buy elsewhere (i.e. opportunity). While that seems a long way off based on my recent experiences, it would certainly create more loyalty.

What I had come to realise though in the years I did work in the field of customer experience was, whether the customer is on the agenda (from a universal experiential perspective, rather than the individual hit-and-miss interactions) entirely comes down to whether its leader is attuned to the customer needs.

By leader I mean the person who actually determines a company’s culture, which is not always obvious. It can be the local Managing Director or Chief Executive, or a Group Executive or at Board level – and that not only changes from company to company, but at different points in time within companies as well. For example, I’ve found its pretty common for many local chiefs to be left alone so long as they are meeting Shareholder expectations. In times of economic or political turbulence the screws come on.

Having worked behind the scenes in a few large organisations, and had exposure to many more inside views of corporate structures, systems and processes through colleagues and consultants in the field of customer experience over the years, I came to the conclusion that organisational dysfunction will only resolve and evolve once people – in particular the leaders of organisations - start to do their own personal work to evolve beyond the dysfunctional patterns of behaviour learned in childhood.

And, so, it seems on the face of it, that this is where society remains still. That said, I have great hopes as we move forward with initiatives like the Inner MBA Programme (a Sounds True collaboration with LinkedIn, Wisdom 2.0 and Mindful NYU) leading the way.

And how do those of us who are not the true culture leaders of these organisations make a difference? How will we get organisations to meet our needs?  Get healthy. By recognising and rinsing out our dysfunctional ways of relating to others, attuning to ourselves and each other, developing healthy boundaries, and learning to communicate them and holding others accountable with grace, it is inevitable that organisations will start to attune more to those whose needs they serve.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy You See What Happens When Leaders Are Not Grown Up on the Inside, What Do You Want The Prevailing Global Culture to Look Like?, Stand in Your Own Truth and How to Be True to You When Life Pulls You in Different Directions. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

In this climate of polarization, do you have the strength of character to look at where your own beliefs come from and really do your own research before dismissing others’ seemingly strange and wild beliefs?

I’ve been noticing extremes as they cross my path this week.

Before I begin, I will say this is not an article about pro or anti any subject except:

• maintaining freedom of choice
• using critical thinking and
• thinking for oneself.

The first extreme I noticed was a pro vaccine post titled “Why I vaccinate”. It included statements like“I choose to accept the consensus of science, not focus on one discredited study in isolation”,”I value evidence, not anecdote”, and “I make a choice from clear rational thinking, not unfounded fear or conspiracy theories”.

All that sounds great but since the post lacked any of the science it mentioned, nor any evidence
of rational thinking having been applied, it sounded more to me like a very deliberate dig at those who choose not to vaccinate.

I can understand where this groundswell of opinion arises from though. In fact, another post credited to Linda Gamble Spadaro, a licensed mental health counselor in Florida, sums it up well:

“Please stop saying you researched it.

You didn’t research anything and it is highly probable you don’t know how to do so.

Did you compile a literature review and write abstracts on each article? Or better yet, did you collect a random sample of sources and perform independent probability statistics on the reported results? No?

Did you at least take each article one by one and look into the source (that would be the author, publisher and funder), then critique the writing for logical fallacies, cognitive distortions and plain inaccuracies?

Did you ask yourself why this source might publish these particular results? Did you follow the trail of references and apply the same source of scrutiny to them?

No? Then you didn’t f*cking research anything. You read or watched a video, most likely with little or no objectivity. You came across something in your algorithm manipulated feed, something that jived with your implicit biases and served your confirmation bias, and subconsciously applied your emotional filters and called it proof.

Scary”

In some ways, yes, I agree. However, I have to step back and ask myself where my own opinions have arisen from. As I grew up in the world I accepted a number of truths. In the case of vaccines, that really came from the government literature and medical professionals I was exposed to, and the adults around me readily accepting those as truths, and so I formed an implicit bias towards them; I didn’t compile a literature review from a random sample of sources and apply any of the rigor Linda points to.

A friend of mine was talking to a family member about the roll out of COVID19 vaccines here in New Zealand, and she was questioning the efficacy of them. His view was “why would they lie to us?” This is precisely the sort of question that is useful to ask if used to examine motives. In this case though it was an indication of blind faith placed in a system of power, not dissimilar to my own when I was growing up.

When I relook at the original post I read on pro vaccines, I do know there is not just “one discredited study” that challenges the efficacy of vaccines in general, there are mountains of literature out there both pro and against. That kind of glib statement, to my mind, discredits the point it’s trying to promote. Yes, sure, as it says, there are thousands of safety studies looking at vaccines from all angles, but who is the author, publisher and funder of those?

My own journey with health issues in the last few decades of my life has caused me to question many aspects of the government and medical views I was fed as a matter of course.

I covered this journey in a series of articles back in 2019 (Wake Up to the Truth About Healthcare and Healing, Want Better Health? Be Shrewd About Stress and You Have Amazing Options When it comes to Healthcare) but the one thing that I can’t deny is pharmaceuticals are extremely profitable, and who stands to make from those profits? And what power (direct and indirect) does that give pharmaceutical companies?

On the other hand I don’t see the same incentives for health. Yet I know how astonishingly well my immune system works when supported by the right mindset, diet and lifestyle. I feel that the fact my kids had twenty routine vaccines by the age of four, essentially intentionally infecting burgeoning immune systems twenty times, should be something I’m encouraged to investigate and question.

I have another friend who is most definitely in that corner of having no trust in what the powers-that-be tell us and questions everything. She feels “the programming that occurs is not okay, and that we should not allow ourselves and our children to be fed bullsh!t and be kept in the dark in order to control us”.

Certainly British politician, writer and diarist Tony Benn concurred in his interview with Michael Moore in the documentary Sicko, looking at America’s healthcare crisis, when he said “An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern”.

Someone who had been diving into the world of Flat Earthers encouraged me to listen to a series that apparently gave lots of scientific data. I couldn’t bring myself to watch it beyond the first part though as there was no ownership of who the commentator and director was and I like transparency so I can delve more into the credibility of a source.

While it sounded extremely scientific in some of its language (to the extent I’d need to be or have access to experts in the field of physics and so forth to be able to corroborate or refute the points made), there were also a couple of things questioned that, to my mind, were no real mysteries at all.  
I agree it’s important to question things, but I try to limit that, particularly to things I'm interested in or I can control and have a direct impact on me. Whether the Earth is a disk that is essentially a platform for a hologram is an idea I’m merely intrigued by, and why it’s of such importance to so many.

But I also think we need a shared understanding of reality in order to remain stable. As Tristan Harris says in The Social Dilemma “Imagine a world where no one believes anything that was once held true, and everyone believes that the government is lying to them about everything, and everything is a conspiracy theory. We need a shared understanding of reality in order to remain stable”. 

That's what is great and simultaneously unsettling about the online world these days. On one hand there is much greater access to information than ever before. On the other hand the artificial intelligence does not know the truth and is wired for popularity.

So its ability to bring out the worst in society, create polarisation, outrage, instability, lack of trust in each other, loneliness, alienation, election hacking, populism and distraction is also an opportunity to create an inability to focus on the real issues, which is indicative of a society devolving into chaos. 

I personally feel the real game changer, aside of disengagement from the feed and the rat race, is the internal personal work required to defrag our mental and emotional dysfunction as a collective in order to be able to discern the truths that will allow us to grow and flourish as a society.

Much of my journey in recent years has focused on becoming conscious of the dysfunctional patterns of thinking and behaviour I adopted when growing up, recognizing they no longer serve me as a free thinking adult, then creating interruption to those well worn neural pathways, and deliberately creating newer, healthier responses.  

But another aspect of human nature has also caught my attention lately, and I think it relates directly to a person’s ability to question the kinds of things I’ve been talking about here; that of human character.

Thanks to the kids’ thirst for Enid Blyton’s St Clare’s book series lately, I’ve been thrust into the world of a fictional 1940’s Girls’ boarding school, and met an inspiring head mistress, Miss Theobald, who says:

“We are not out to cram facts and knowledge into the girls’ heads all day long, but to help them form strong and kindly characters.”

“I may not know what type of brain you have, exactly where you stand in class, or what your gifts and capabilities are without referring to your form mistress, but I know your characters; the good and badin you, the possibilities in your nature, your tendencies, your faults, and your virtues.”

“Unless you have enough courage to face up to yourself, and try to tear out the unpleasant failings that are spoiling and weakening what character you do have, we have nothing to offer you”

“Faults such as greed, irresponsibility and silliness, these arouse disgust but can be forgotten and forgiven. Spite and malice rouse bitter feelings; they rankle and are never forgotten”

Instead the stories about the school promote such qualities as honesty, self awareness, ownership of failings, bravery, leadership, resourcefulness and ingenuity. And I believe these are the very qualities required to really critically question some of the aspects of our lives that can lead to the growth and evolution of our species and planet.

So when you are confronted by someone’s strange and seemingly wild beliefs, do you have the strength of character to look at where your own beliefs come from and really do your own research before dismissing them?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy The Internal Shift You Need to Help Solve the Social Dilemma, Are You Getting Distracted From Who You Came to Be This Life? What Are the Right Questions to Ask Right Now? and What Is the Deal with Conspiracies? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

My young niece had shared with me a powerful poem she has written about women, in part of it she wrote:

“Imagine a life
Where she wouldn’t look over her shoulder
And see a man doing no work
But he will still be paid more than her”
 
I longed to be able to say “We’ve evolved beyond that” but, while many men do of course work (and work hard), it gave me pause knowing this was an observation from our next generation and correlates with many of the facts and statistics I’ve read about ongoing inequality.

She gave me permission to share it and a good friend of mine responded:

“It is true, our hearts are somber that our young rising women look out and see a world that works only for a few. However, we, the elders, know there is good work to be done, and we eagerly pass on the baton encouraged because we can now hold better reflections and conversations than our elders did.”

This is so true.

When I was invited to speak as an influencer at a summit for woman this week, an interesting mix of emotions ran through me. I was grateful for the opportunity, surprised to be thought of as an influencer and excited about the prospect of women taking a fresh look at themselves.

But while speaking fits with my longer term vision, I had to step back and really assess whether this is something I’d like to say yes or no to in this moment. My gut told me “Not yet, I’ll be over extending myself”, my mind niggled “Am I just making excuses? Am I afraid?”

I sat with these questions for a while. I can’t deny wondering how I’d measure up, but I generally enjoy public speaking. I find it easier to express myself when I know people are actually interested in what I’m talking about and the platform is mine uninterrupted for a while.

So I laughed at myself and thought how ironic that the true issue lies at the heart of an aspect of my feminine side that needs to be honoured.

Having operated in the corporate world for many years running from meeting to meeting, which plays to the masculine aspects of my nature, I now try to keep everything as fluid as possible because so much of my life still revolves around the kids’ schedule, which in turns revolves around school (again a very masculine way of working).

I’ve discovered I need time that is fluid so I can dial it up or down depending on how I’m feeling.

For example, I was reflecting in a conversation this week on how I see a woman’s monthly menstrual cycle in terms of my energy; to me it’s like four seasons in a month. There are days when I feel decidedly Spring-like and want to get on with more physically-taxing tasks, there are days that are Summer-like when I feel very social, then there more Autumnal days when I turn inward and reflect,and finally the Winter days when I really do not feel like going out at all and want to rest a lot more.

Why is this talked about so little still?

The whole female physical structure gears up month after month, for four decades of a woman’s life, to create and host another being. And having brought two beautiful little beings into the world, I know it’s nothing short of miraculous. The whole process is not an aside, it’s inherent in my existence as a female, and I feel the beat of my life goes way more smoothly when I can go with that rhythm instead of a man made one.

I was reflecting on my life changes further after having a quick e-catch up this week with a publisher I haven’t spoken to in quite a while, who was wanting to use a quote from an old article I’d written. I was asking her how she is finding motherhood and, in return, she asked – other than busy – how I’ve been?

I know that seems like a routine kind of exchange, but given the topics I write about and the ones she publishes, I thought more deeply “how have I been?”

The ten years since I began my own journey into motherhood flashed through my head.

In that time everything has come under a spotlight, no stone left unturned. When the pressure is on – and it was, the heat higher than at any other time in my life, everything came into sharp focus.

I had a short, pointed reminder of my old life a couple of weeks ago when I found an old schedule of my day I’d written out when the kids were very young:

You can probably guess by the schedule I quickly lost patience and energy for the career and corporate world I had worked so hard to attain success in. Motherhood demanded the more feminine aspects of me to come to the fore, the children needed me to really see them and be able to hold their space emotionally.
 
The codependent relationship style I had unwittingly entered into as a child and unconsciously adopted in adulthood became untenable. My strong desire for my children to be who they truly are, forced me to identify and take responsibility for my people pleasing ways. Becoming healthier and creating better boundaries has shaken all my primary relationships to the core.
 
It’s been nothing short of a metamorphosis, one I’m still emerging from. It left me depleted and, while I’ve found more balance, I’m only really starting to rebuild strength from that more authentic platform.
 
But the thing that struck me was just how intense and polarizing the middle years were, suddenly thrust into the realms of watching my mother die (from colon cancer) while simultaneously dealing with violent outbursts and constant tantrums from both kids over a period of a few years as they started school and struggled (neurodiversity can be subtle).
 
I swung from one extreme to the other in my close relationships. No longer able to give others the attention I once had, being hyper attuned to their needs, I became much more self centred out of necessity; getting angry and resentful when my boundaries were trodden upon. While I survived, it was painful.
 
I see this in a similar way to the male-female balance having swung to an extreme as women have tried to reclaim a more worthy sense of place in the world. So many women, in the name of equal rights, have swarmed to university, to jobs and a world that was predominantly the domain of men.
 
In the process a new archetype arose in our collective consciousness, the superwoman, she who can do it all. In truth, having been one of those for a while, I feel it was nothing short of torture, and I was certainly not comfortable in my own skin. I think men too have become confused and resentful about their roles. What’s the answer?
 
What I’d dearly love to see more than anything, is the needs of the newest born of our race being recognised far more than they are so the emotional pandemic and dysfunctional cycles of human existence are broken. In those earliest months and years, if I had known then what I know now about healthy attachment and attunement, I would not have shipped my children off to someone else while I went to work, no matter how wonderful she was.

But what my kids needed wasn’t just their mother present in body, they needed me fully present in myself, not the wounded child in an adult body that I was.

As Teal Swan so eloquently says “You cannot be attuned to a child and have them grow up narcissistic or codependent. You cannot be attuned to someone and drop a bomb on them or shoot them. You cannot be attuned to someone and say the wrong thing to them. You cannot attune to someone and stay in denial about his or her reality”. 

If a woman wants to become an engineer or a CEO, sure, why not. Or if a man wants to become a stay-at-home-parent or a hairdresser, fantastic. Or, possibly even more controversially these days, if a woman wants to stay at home to look after their kids while the man wants to work, let’s make that work.

But I think the key to all this doesn’t lie in equal rights or opportunities the way it’s been played out, the key seems to me to lie in each of us stepping into conscious awareness of the dysfunctional cycles of thinking and behaviour that appear to get played out generation after generation. In short, while I was hyper-attuned to others, I had to learn to tune into my own needs and desires.

As I have become aware of and ferreted out that dysfunction in my thinking and habits, I’ve rediscovered that the only true power exists within me – a fact I suspect that man-made power constructs like schools, health systems, governments and economic systems would prefer I am not acquainted with.

I can only imagine as people begin to attune to and honour their own unique needs, talents and desires, men and women will see each other through fresh eyes.

My niece wrote:
 
“Imagine a world
United at last
The thick fog of inequality
Raised at last”
 
I believe the inequality of opportunity that exists will melt away in a world where we attune to ourselves and others. We will become comfortable enough in our own skin to be able to admire and embrace the diversity around us. The structures of success will fall away and morph into structures that support the many, rather than the few. This is not a conversation about male or female, this is a conversation about re-parenting ourselves, creating healthy boundaries, truly seeing ourselves and others and fulfilling our potential as unique, wonderful, strange, marvelous beings.
 
If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How You Are Complicit in the Oppression of Others, Womanhood: A Story of Our Time, Even in Grief There Are lessons to Be Learned, How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight, Take Back Your Power - Only One Thing Need Change for You to Feel Good  and You See What Happens When You Learn to Speak Your Truth. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

A number of quotes from different authors clicked into a cohesive picture in my mind this week of the many ways in which I had been subconsciously turning away from my true self and the choices that have existed over the years that I had been blind to, instead feeling trapped in so many unnecessary ways…

Saying no to someone by saying yes to me (with grace) is, I believe, one of the most commonly missed opportunities in my life. I have awoken to the many ways in which I abandoned my own free will and now see quite clearly when others are doing this, or – at the opposite end of the spectrum – doing what they want regardless of the cost to others.

I was contemplating this early one morning and found my thoughts gathering some momentum. It started with thinking about my kids’ school, and then expanded across other aspects of education, into the health, financial and government systems.

When I am told to do something I get triggered.

Now I can see that there are situations in which telling versus asking would be important, such as life and death situations. But actually, my experience and observations lead to me believe it’s the predominant mode of communication among families and coming from institutions who hold some sort of (often perceived) authority or power over the people they interact with.

From my own experience I’d say this all comes down to the authentic parts of myself that I denied, suppressed and disowned over the years, in favour of a more palatable me that could survive the indoctrination into my family and society.

In the field of child psychology, and psychology generally, the word Attunement is well known. Dr Gabor Mate, an expert on childhood trauma and its effects on development, says “Attunement is necessary for the normal development of the brain pathways and neurochemical apparatus of attention and emotional regulation. It is a finely calibrated process requiring that the parent remain him/herself in a relatively non-stressed, non-anxious, non-depressed state of mind.”

This can be a huge ask. I am the first to admit that – if I was never aware of my shortcomings before – they certainly became very obvious with young children to challenge me. Of all my relationships, the one with my children is the most intense, followed by the relationship with my partner.

And guess what lies at the heart of our relationships?  Attunement.

“We learn attunement by virtue of other people being attuned to us” says Teal Swan. 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?

As I’ve said before, I would imagine most people would recognise the lack of attunement in their own childhood, for being seen and not heard and do as I say not as I do have been predominant tenets of parenting for a long long time. Thus, as Teal also points out, dysfunctional relationships are the norm, not the exception.

One of the most helpful things she says that has really stuck with me is “when our parents were not attuned to us, we went one of two ways to cope with the terror of the experience:

1. We learned that our survival depended on disconnecting from them and retreating into a narcissistic bubble where all that was real and all that mattered was our individual experience. Or
2. We learned that our survival depended on 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.”

So I was thrilled to read Daniel Shaw’s explanation of these two typical responses in a slightly different way that gave me an even greater understanding of this dynamic. In his book Traumatic Narcissism he says “a child who is trapped in a narcissistic relationship system can either externalise or internalise the traumatising behaviour of the adult:

1. The child who externalises their experience perpetuates the pattern by projecting onto others the shame, guilt, humiliation and fear she experienced and cannot tolerate herself.
Whereas

2. The child who internalises their experience first develops a protector identity, usually dissociative, whose aim is to reduce harm by anticipating the narcissist behaviour of the adult. Later, as the child develops, this part that arose out of protection begins to function as a persecutor, a replica of the abusive adult that now lives inside the growing child’s mind.”

A narcissistic relationship system is one in which one or both of the parents are more focused on their own feelings than those of their children.

In hindsight I can see I became hyper vigilant to others’ feelings, internalising everything, and co-dependent in my relationships.

It’s probably no surprise that each of these coping styles tend to attract its opposite and – while one is good at taking care of everyone else’s needs, neither is actually good at recognising and taking care of their own in a healthy way.

So when my partner, the kids, or someone else comes along sweeping me into something with no regard to my free will, it is easy to see why I get triggered.

Even as a child I inherently knew my sovereignty, and I can see – in retrospect that any anger I felt was a sure sign that my boundaries had been violated. But I had nothing I could do with that anger except suppress it, creating trauma, or express it from a defensive standpoint – usually resulting in such an unwelcome reaction that I eventually had to choke down how I felt regardless – also creating trauma.

Bessel Van Der Kolk says “Trauma robs you of the feeling that you are in charge of yourself, of what I will call self-leadership. The challenge of recovery is to reestablish ownership of your body and mind – of your self. This means feeling free to know what you know and to feel what you feel without becoming overwhelmed, enraged, ashamed or collapsed.”

Bert Hellinger, the psychotherapist best known for his Family Constellations therapy, said that belonging is the most important need of children. As such, a child will make incredible sacrifices to belong to her family system.

Daniel Shaw puts it this way “Children will go to great lengths to keep their parent’s good. Even if this means becoming the bad one in relation to the parents.”

Jane Peterson, Director of the Human System’s Institute points out that a healthy relational system is quite different:

“In a healthy dyad, both members are seen as selves, or subjects, with thoughts, feelings and needs. Healthy relationships are marked by a mutuality of relations and reciprocal interactions. Giving and taking is a dynamic flow with the contributions of each member valued by the others. These systems are marked by fluidity, the ability of members to tolerate and even appreciate points of view that are different from their own.”

She goes on to say “for the person wounded by the narcissistic behaviour of a similarly wounded adult, this can sound like a fairy tale. The way back to self-love, mutual interactions, a flow of giving and taking seems far away. It is possible and it takes work to repattern the brain and nervous system to learn what safety is, and to be able to receive love and appreciation.”

I see this played out beautifully in Lisa Romano’s story. Lisa Romano developed people pleasing tendencies through her hyper attunement as I did, and has shared her story in The Road Back to Me and My Road Beyond the Codependent Divorce. Both books are an easy read and give excellent insight into these complex dynamics through the everyday insidious examples that I have seen crop up time and again in my own relationships.

She shares:

“I had to learn to let go of my fear of displeasing my father, and accept that in living my own life, it was quite possible my father would in fact abandon me. In so many ways however, he already had…In all of my fear, I could never have known, that ultimately I had been taught to abandon and reject my self.”
In trying to figure out why she felt so angry as she started to become aware of and reclaim her sense of self she shares a conversation with her therapist:

“When my mother was angry she would rant and rave and sing her long list of complaints about me, or my sister or my brother….If she was really mad she’d clench her teeth and get in our faces and yell until she turned cherry red.”

I recognised this pattern from my own childhood and – one day – found myself starting to repeat it with my small children and knew then and there I had to take action.

Her therapist enquires:

“Did she hit you when she got angry?”

“Yes sometimes” Lisa answers

“Did she curse you?”

“Yes” Lisa says

“Did she ever label you as bad, or selfish, or call you any other mean names?”

“Yes. She said I was bad a lot. She called me selfish all the time….”

“…Lisa, I know why you are angry. Depression is anger that has been turned inward. You are angry now, because for the first time in your life you are taking you seriously.”

“…Lisa, you cannot heal what you do not allow yourself to feel. The more you feel, the deeper you heal, and the better you feel.”

She reflects in a later chapter “Although I was aware that my family was a codependent dynamic unit that operated under the veils of denial and, as I recovered from codependency in my life, I would inevitably need to confront my familial dysfunction in the process, I was not prepared for the enormous fortitude it would take to do so, or the avalanches of grief that were becoming as familiar as breath itself.”

“Only when I am asked to explain how it was that I made it through those early years after my marriage ended, do I stop to realise just how far I’ve come, and how many mountains I have climbed.
From the time I was a child, within my chest was a beating heart that beat the drum of desire, a desire for peace. My heart would not rest until, within my being, I found peace.

If I have learned anything in this life it is this – all love starts with self love…and self love comes only by way of embracing the courage to tell the truth, even if that topples over a few apple carts along the way.”

Beautifully put.

But where to begin? I had a friend ask this week whether I used The Completion Process after reading the book, or whether I used a practitioner. As I responded, I just do it myself, among many other approaches I use to heal the internal wounds I find. That’s me all over, someone very self driven and independent, both edges sharpened by the experiences of trying to stay one step (or ten) ahead of any criticism that might come my way and, again, reinforce the notion that I had no right to a self.

I was reminded though of a powerful question from Tony Robbins’ documentary I Am Not Your Guru:
“Who did you crave love from the most, as a child, and who did you have to be to get it?”

I reread this in an article by Kathy Caprino, who eloquently stated “once you can feel and recognise what triggers you to feel unsafe, unloved and unacceptable, you can then explore the root behind it.”

For me, the first step though was to recognise that was how I was feeling. Because on the surface it manifested more as an ongoing knot of anger and exhaustion from trying to stay one step ahead of everyone and everything.

I simply didn’t see how deeply rooted my fear of rejection was, and I was angry because I was rejecting my self, fooling myself into believing I had to be accepted as someone other than who I actually am in order to survive.

I thought I was trapped in many situations, that I had no free will and certainly no way to exercise it gracefully. I have learned that is simply not true, and I am still learning how to exercise it with grace, but it’s getting easier.

In what ways are you abandoning your own free will? And are you willing to take the journey that will allow you to reclaim it, and allow us to see you and accept you for who you truly are?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Overcome the Greatest Human Fear – Be the True You, What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances, Risk Your Friendships More in Order to Be Fully Loved and How to Stop Being Triggered by What Other People Think. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

My mother-in-law and I went to see Yesterday (a 1970s tribute show) at the theatre and I was immediately transported back to my childhood in a good way. One song took me back to a moment on a Sunday night in 1975, I was only a pre-schooler then, and Sunday was a bath night but it was also the night the Top 40 tunes were revealed on the radio.

I’d forgotten just how big a part in my life music played as I was growing up. The popular music of the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s was a constant in my life, with Top of the Pops a much-loved weekly TV show on our screen. One of my favourite activities on holiday with my family as a young teenager was going to the Bournemouth Pavilion in the evenings, where the ballroom was repurposed to serve drinks to hundreds of people sitting around tables listening to the live music. 

While doing healing work on the deliberate journey to uncover authentic me, by necessity I find myself remembering and observing parts of my childhood that are not always so happy, and not useful to my encumbered adult psyche. But there is another side to this work, and it’s the rediscovery of the parts of me that either haven’t seen the light of day in a long time or, in some cases, ever felt safe enough to express themselves.

I was having a conversation with one of my nieces about one of her favourite film series, Divergent. I like the constant reminder in the movies – to paraphrase some of the best quotes from them - we should always, under all circumstances, make decisions ourselves rather than letting society make decisions on our behalf. So she and I then got into a conversation about how much society influences our thinking.

This led to some observations about how much we each suppress our true selves in a bid to try to fit in. But the thing I personally find more difficult is to define that real self, so the music show I went to with my mother-in-law was a great reminder about that aspect of authentic me.

While in recent years my career and children have filled my headspace, making silence preferable to noise when I do have a moment to myself, it was wonderful to experience enjoying listening to, singing along and dancing to music. It also moves me emotionally, and I feel a deep connection with much of what I listen to.

I was watching a Tedx Talk by JP Sears Say YES! To Your Weirdness. I love JP’s humour, and I love the way he uses it to deliver more serious messages like “in seeking others’ approval we reject ourselves” and “a willingness to embrace discomfort is essential”. That makes perfect sense, when I’ve rejected parts of myself in order to fit in, rediscovering those parts and revealing them is sure to be uncomfortable at first.

He also makes the point well that approval (from others) is not acceptance. As a living example of his own work, JP has successfully relaunched his career from Life Coach to Spiritual Comedian in the last few years. Many of his recent videos are full of political satire in the face of current world events and yet amid a backdrop of evolving consciousness. By saying yes to his weirdness, he is now well placed to voice things others may be feeling but aren’t able to put words to.

This reminds me of another article of Teal Swan’s I read recently on How to Receive Love. She makes the point that, while I might think it should be easy to receive love, many people struggle with receiving it. This could be because of conditions placed on receiving it, such as my good behaviour, or feelings of unworthiness, or undeserving, or a fear of losing someone, or even an addiction to reciprocity.

If I take this alongside JP’s point, it is hard for others to love and accept me when I’ve rejected myself. So rediscovering, accepting and loving that real me is of vital importance to my happiness.

A good friend of mine, who is also on this journey, was telling me about some art sessions she is setting up for local kids. In her typical self-deprecating fashion, she said “It’s nothing earth-shattering, just me hosting a small get-together each week, we will discover and talk about a different style of art and (materials provided thanks to a local grant) the kids can have a go at creating whatever painting they want in that style”.

I think that freedom of expression is earth-shattering. My daughter complains bitterly about the painting and drawing at school all being highly dictated, she relishes having that kind of artistic freedom. And for families where art supplies are beyond their means or not on their radar, this gives those kids a place in which to come home to a little bit of themselves, I think it’s beautiful.

I also heard from a fellow seeker this week, who calls his website Inside-Out Mastery. He’s written an article giving ten easy tips to finding happiness when feeling trapped. It is fantastic to discover and connect with others who are on their own journey to self-discovery and sharing what they are learning.

For my niece, she has reclaimed a little piece of herself in sporting some new Doc Martins that speak to the rambunctious, rebellious kid inside.

Every little piece of the real us that we can shine a light on and reclaim is a triumph for our authenticity, a stake in the ground of our own sovereignty. What are the parts of you that have been sitting on a dusty shelf or were long since buried that you might now have the courage to reach for and reclaim? These are the parts that will allow us to love the real you, as truly strange as that might once have seemed.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How to Respect Your Own Value, Are You Getting Distracted From Who You Came to Be This Life?, Risk Your Friendships More in Order to Be Fully Loved and How to Stop Being Triggered by What Other People Think. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I’m going to go for the short answer upfront: no. However, I will admit there have been times in my life I’ve found it hard to really hear what someone has to say when I’ve known they hold a different set of beliefs or opinions than I do. Why is that? Honestly it’s a question of safety.

To take an extreme, could I bring myself to listen to one of Hitler’s speeches or read Mein Kampf without any kind of a veil or judgement? I’ll admit I could not, I’d find it repugnant. Yet when I read one of his quotes “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed” it feels like a truth; I can think of many examples beyond his where people have been (and continue to be) manipulated like this.

In my own case, it did not feel psychologically or emotionally safe for me to have my own beliefs and opinions (that were divergent to the pack) as I was growing up. It seems to me it was (and still is) the norm. I certainly wanted to fit in, be accepted and feel validated.

Despite being well-intentioned by my parents, teachers and other key influencers in my life, it was damaging enough that I no longer recognised my own inner voice; I would often feel fear, guilt or shame and was inadvertently trained to look outside myself for answers. This is where my strong sense of calling comes from, to help others hear and trust their inner voice.

The irony is, by not living life from my own authentic standpoint and not even really knowing I had one of those (it was more just that life could often seem heavy or off), I attracted all sorts of painful circumstances into my life.

Now I’m an adult with curiosity and critical thinking, and I’ve figured out all those circumstances were pointing me somewhere – back to the real me. And it has taken a while to really figure out who that is, and what I actually believe about life.

So it was interesting to me that, when I wrote ” a central theme of my authentic paradigm is that there’s no one truth, we each hold within us our own truth” in How to Find the Courage to Let Us Hear Your Heart’s Voice someone I know felt really challenged by that.

The context of my sharing that belief was not a teaching, it was a vulnerable disclosure of a desire that I had felt on my journey, a desire to feel validated by those who had brought me into the world, to validate my inherent right to my own worldview.

Having someone feel challenged by that view was a wonderful opportunity for me to check in on how I’m travelling. The key benefit was the triumphal recognition of the old defence patterns that momentarily kicked in, and then drifted away on the tide as I dropped out of flight-or-fight mode, and into the space of the adult who has done some healing, and has the experience and wisdom to now deal with this kind of questioning.

I was intrigued by what these questions would awaken within me. I realised I’m feeling quite secure in my paradigm and I liked the answers that came forth in response to questions about absolutes, right and wrong, good and evil and so on.

For me, it is all a matter of perspective. I am aware of myself as a consciousness inhabiting a human body, but I am simultaneously aware of myself as a far more expansive consciousness – as I am aware of all others in just the same way.

Now that, right there, would challenge many people’s paradigms. I am okay with that; it’s my own experiences of this that have led me to my views.

Do I think in terms of absolutes? Not generally. I find absolutes constricting. But if there is an absolute, and people are able to learn again how to hear and trust their authentic inner voice, I trust this absolute will reveal itself within the sovereignty of their soul.

I see right and wrong as judgements, and wonder “who is the judge?” There are many sides to each story, many hurts, many intentions. For example, how many believe it was right to execute Saddam Hussein? Can killing someone ever be called right? I suspect many people have differing views on the matter.

The same could be said of Al Qaeda’s attacks on the West. I remember wondering as I watched in shock at the twin towers falling, feeling the horror and desperation of the situation and wondering “what drives people to do this?”, yet some part of me understanding that there must be another side to this story.

As to good and evil, was Hitler evil, or were many of his acts evil? Some see no difference in the two. But I can’t help but wonder from what place of inner pain does someone incite such heinous acts?
If you are a child growing up right now in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Yemen or any of the other conflict-torn places in our world today, who seems good and who seems evil, who is right and who is wrong?

And how to do we respond? With revenge, retaliation, punishment?

Now these examples are all what I’d call big-T trauma, they are the kinds of examples commonly recognised as life threatening and harmful in physical, psychological and emotional ways. These are acts that affect whole generations of collective peoples. I see polarisation around who is condemned and why, depending on the perspective.

To me, acts of harm, harm all. If I hurt you, I hurt myself. If I hurt a creature, I hurt myself. If I hurt this planet, I hurt myself. It is all connected. All I see is that pain begets pain until the light of conscious awareness is shone upon it. So where is the compassion, the rehabilitation?

And how does all of this link into the life I am living, with a partner, children, a family, a community, colleagues and so many other versions of relationships, with whom I can disagree vehemently in what they believe and in how they conduct themselves and in what harm I feel within me in these interactions?

And why do I feel harm? Why do I get so upset? Usually because that person has accidentally tripped over my paradigm, my view of myself and the world and what is right and what is wrong.

As Teal Swan says “When we fight from two different perceptual realities, we only end up strengthening the current beliefs and values of the other, causing further polarisation. Instead we must shift our focus to the vulnerability that the other side may be feeling.”

I see answers to reducing harm by creating awareness, understanding and education in how we indoctrinate our newborns into this human experience. When I think, for example, of Gabor Mate’s insightful descriptions of the first year of an infant’s life in his book Scattered Minds, and how they link to our neurobiology and behaviours, there is much pain created in this world from an inadvertent lack of attunement.  

And I see answers in how we help those who have misguidedly learned that their power comes from taking it from others, they will never be able to take enough to satisfy themselves; the power is within. As an adult I see it as my responsibility to re-parent myself, to create a sense of secure attachment and attunement and learn to interact with the world from that standpoint.

Which brings me back to becoming aware of the unhelpful thought and behavioural patterns that exist within, and cause harm. I am talking about the often subconscious beliefs I might have about feeling invisible, or powerless, or not enough, or too much, or unworthy, or being unwanted, or not important, or different, or inferior, or wrong, or alone, or bad, or deprived, or worthless, or a failure,or a burden, or crazy, or that I don’t belong, or I’m not important, or I don’t matter, or I’m not safe.

The journey to me has involved – and continues to involve – questioning the validity of these subtle little suckers that can create so much misery. These thoughts got planted there from the earliest moments and they simply do not serve who I am today.

As I have become more conscious of these, I have observed myself and others living in very unique, self-created and self-centred webs of protection that out-served their use long ago.  As I confront these and integrate past experiences with the person I am today, I become less defensive, more open, more able to really see and hear others.

I believe a more conscious world is a kinder and wiser world (to borrow a Sounds True tag line), I believe that we can evolve beyond the kind of atrocities that I have talked about in here, and beyond the insidious day to day reactions to the petty disagreements or comments or actions of other people around us.

Do you need to have unified beliefs to be able to really listen? No, but I believe you do need to have clear sight of your authentic self and feel safe and comfortable in your own skin in order to truly see the perspective of another.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Want to Make the World a Better Place? Tune In, You See What Happens When You Learn to Speak Your Truth, Let Us Hear Your Unique Perspective – But Be Kind and Be Wise, How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight and Be an Evolutionary (Rather Than a Revolutionary). To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I have been contemplating a question that someone asked me this week “How can I trust myself enough to put away my doubts and share what I’ve learned?” because I can relate to it deeply. Particularly when she went on to say “I do share, but I hold back. I know things, but don’t want to look like a know it all.”

I have read so many good quotes about using my voice, here is a link to just a few, but I would sum up the overriding message as your voice is important. This rings true. Just listening to the voices in the last year about white privilege, and the swathe of new language that has become more commonplace as a result, talking about acts of micro aggression, subtle acts of exclusion and psychological safety has opened up huge growth potential inside me.

The factor that is of most importance to me when I start thinking about how to share, is that it’s my authentic voice I’m putting out there. And, when I’m listening to someone else, it’s an authentic voice I want to hear. I use the word heart in the title interchangeably with authentic in this case.

About a year ago someone said “you talk too much” and I felt badly wounded, right in my chest, it was heavy, and my throat constricted. Context is everything of course; this was an experienced person trying to mediate a conversation between me and a loved one.

They were right though, I did some introspective, exploratory and healing work around it at the time and when I heard it again a few weeks ago – instead of feeling wounded – it was a reminder “ah, yes, I do talk too much from my head”. It is usually in defense, I need instead to intentionally focus my awareness into my heart space.

For example, last weekend was our kids’ school fair, it was not a comfortable day for me, and I had all sorts of stories in my head about why this was the case.

While how I hear my authentic voice isn’t the focus of this week’s musing, I do cover it in some of the article links I’ve included at the bottom. As Michael Beckwith sums up nicely “Ask the right questions. Instead of What’s wrong and who is to blame? ask What is trying to emerge? What gift is trying to be born in my life?”

When I did some introspective and exploratory enquiry, it took me to a different place entirely than my head’s stories. I went back to some unhelpful thought and behavioural patterns that stemmed from the place in my childhood when a sibling was born and I adopted all sorts of unhelpful beliefs about responsibility and putting the needs of others before my own.

It was a good reminder to me to share from my authentic heart space and not my (usually) defensive head space. This is the first step to overcoming any doubt about what I am sharing.

The next step is whether the person I’m sharing with is actually open to hearing what I have to share. I’ll be honest, as I started to really redefine my own world view, or paradigm about life, the very people I wanted to understand and accept it were the very people who were largely responsible for shaping my behaviours as I grew up.

It’s not that I necessarily wanted them to accept my view as their own (especially since a central theme of my authentic paradigm is that there’s no one truth, we each hold within us our own truth), it was more that I wanted to feel validated in having my own worldview that was different to theirs.

There was some wonderful advice that speaks to this, again given by Michael Beckwith when I was listening to him being interviewed a while back:

“If you have a loved one who is ill and resistant to thoughts you have about their wellbeing, all you can do is love them. Until they ask you a question you’re trespassing on their paradigm.”

While the question obviously related to someone being ill, I felt the answer was very universal. I’ve learned it’s worth asking first whether people are open to hearing my thoughts. And if they are not, and I’m still very attached to them, well that’s an indication that I have something to work on.

A final Michael quote from the same interview, same topic, that I love is “People would rather hear a vision than a rant”. That is good advice that also helps me re-tune from my head to my heart.

I can’t remember where I’ve heard it, and it would be from several sources, but there is also another  great piece of advice about changing the pack I run with if my friends and family chronically frustrate me, or make me sad, or depressed because of our differences in opinion.

As a general statement, most of my family aren’t into diving in the depths like me. I still love them and I haven’t abandoned them – nor will I intentionally abandon myself again. I have a set of friends with whom I can happily explore depths together, which has come about from being brave enough to share with people my authentic ideas and emerging beliefs, like attracts like.

As I publish the lessons I learn on the journey to me, an act of vulnerability in itself, I don’t have any expectations about what happens as a result. I do feel if what I have gone through and have learned from it can help others, I have an obligation to share it, which is where I found the courage to begin. But again, like attracts like, and it’s an indication to me that there are many others in the world who explore the same depths I do.

I love to hear people’s comments and get emails with other’s stories, or asking my opinion, it all adds depth and new dimension to my own journey, as well as a sense of belonging and being seen. All of that gives me more confidence to be me while around family or others that I’m not so attuned with.

After six years of publishing these articles, I’m now realising I’m very comfortable writing and sharing my innermost thoughts and feelings. And it is no surprise that a small challenge arose from the lips of another who questioned how comfortable I felt using my voice.

At first I was thinking “well I publish my innermost thoughts ever week so I think I’m pretty comfortable”, then I let my energy sit and sink to my heart space and I heard another thought “yes, but are you as comfortable with actually speaking in a physical sense?”

That led to two separate pieces of advice that have all serendipitously come about. One was to regularly sing in front of the mirror to have fun and start to feel safe using my voice. The other was a variation on the theme, stretching the comfort zone somewhat, and to start a podcast.

While I haven’t decided where I am going in that sense, something a good friend of mine said a while back has stuck “I wish other people could hear you speak. When I read your articles I can hear your voice, I know your self depreciating humour, and wonder if others might read the articles as more serious in tone.”

At this stage, it’s all sitting there as a seed of an idea, but the point is that there are many ways to share. I listened to a podcast this week with LaRayla Gaston talking about the ways in which she shares the lessons life had taught her, which is through showing love in action – buying homeless people a coffee or a meal.

LaRayla did not have an easy upbringing, but her grandmother lavished so much love and kindness on her, she wanted to share that, because that is what had sustained her heart. When her grandmother died it was a catalyst to share her legacy.

And, as with the earlier discussion about sharing my opinions with others, LaRayla’s advice was not to be attached to the outcome. She offers things to people, they don’t always accept, and she accepts that with grace, or in her uniquely LaRayla style says “I’ll catch you next time Boo”.

When I contemplate the ways in which the heart’s voice can be shared, though words and actions, it’s really obvious to me that there is not just something for everyone but something I can learn from everyone, in many wonderful ways.

For those who have felt at times invisible, or powerless, or not enough, or too much, or unworthy, or not wanted, or not important, or different, or inferior, or wrong, or alone, or bad, or deprived, or worthless, or a failure, or a burden, or crazy, or that you don’t belong, or you’re not important, or you don’t matter, or you’re not safe – we need to hear your heart’s voice so that we can all heal and grow together.
 
If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Kneel at the Doorway of Your Heart to Usher the Dawn of a New Era, You See What Happens When You Learn to Speak Your Truth, Let Us Hear Your Unique Perspective – But Be Kind and Be Wise, How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight and Be an Evolutionary (Rather Than a Revolutionary). To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

When the kids and I first met the character Reyna Avila Ramirez Arellano in Rick Riordan’s Heroes of Olympus series, it was the observation of her by another character that really struck me, because it could have been someone describing me for most of my life:

“Annabeth recognised something else in her face too – in the hard set of her mouth and the deliberate way she raised her chin like she was ready to accept any challenge. Reyna was forcing a look of courage while holding back a mixture of hopefulness and worry and fear that she couldn’t show in public.”

Later, in the Trials of Apollo series, she reflects, as I have reflected in recent years:

“My whole life I’ve been living with other people’s expectations of who and what I‘m supposed to be...But you showed me how ridiculous the whole situation was. That’s what healed my heart, being able to laugh at myself again, at my stupid ideas about destiny and fate...That allowed me to break free. I don’t need to wear anybody else’s label. I need time to just be me, to find out who I am.”

As I have been on this journey to me, I have uncovered quite a few self destructive beliefs that have been lurking in the shadows of my mind, driving my thoughts and actions like a hidden force,

When I get triggered about something in my life, I take this as a signal to explore those hidden beliefs and bring them into the light of day for a good shake down.

This week I retuned to do some work using Brandon’s Bays Emotional Journey process when I could feel myself getting irritated by a sense of giving too much to others.

What I discovered in the process is that giving too much stems, for me, from this subconscious idea I’m not enough. My true state is actually receptivity, openness and warmth and the guidance (that came from a deeper part of myself) was to remember I am not the personality or the experiences, but the benefactor of the growth that arises out of those.

In fact, the wisest part of me said “You are love itself and there’s always enough love, in fact that’s all there is.”

Another aspect of my hidden belief structure that I had been experiencing lately was a sense of feeling under-valued, unseen and under-used in my gifts and capacities. What I uncovered in the process is my true nature, which is radiance, standing in my own power. I can choose to combat and play small, or compassion to play big; to see others as comrades not combatants.

In this scenario the wisest part of me said “Be expansive. There are many things that you know you know, live those.” I understood that I must have compassion for myself and others to grow beyond this unhelpful belief pattern.

I have also been reading another beautiful (fictional) book by Anthony Doerr called All the Light We Cannot See that weaves together the backdrop of the lives of a young orphaned German boy who was eventually drafted into the Hitler Youth at the age of twelve or thirteen, and a young blind girl who lives in France with her widowed father.

The story slowly wraps its way towards a point in which they briefly meet in occupied France just before liberation. It then continues to unfold into the years following the war into the present day, demonstrating how those events became so interwoven into the lives of the sister of the German soldier (who did not survive) and the French girl (who lived to a ripe old age) and her family.

It was nothing sort of tragic, as I am sure it must truly be for anyone directly touched by the ravages of war, regardless of side there appears to emerge only tortured souls. In this I felt the utmost compassion and the sense that these two enemies were kindred spirits who had found themselves wrapped up in circumstances beyond their control.

While I’m not wading in that extreme of life, I certainly find myself unconsciously creating us and them scenarios, both in my personal life and as I look out into the world.

For a completely different kind of example, I’ll use the recent Harry and Meghan interview with Oprah. This sort of hyped razzmatazz is not my usual fodder, I don’t tend to actively follow any kind of current affairs or news, but I'm like a little meerkat who pops my head above ground every now and then to get a gauge on what's going on out in the magical mist called the media.

Growing up in the UK in the 1970’s and 1980’s, Charles and Diana's wedding, the births of their sons and Diana's death, were all moments I remember well because of the vast media storm that accompanied them. Not least I recall the haunted faces of the two young boys made to walk behind their mother’s casket in the funeral procession.

All I know of Harry and Meghan is what the media lines have fed us for last few years, which my dad aptly summed up after he exclaimed “You watched the interview!” by words like self serving, egotistical and manipulative.

That's exactly why I listened to it, I like to hear and see people speak directly because it gives me a much better gauge on what is going on than a third party account.

I had also read a book by one of my favourite fictional authors, Lucinda Riley, a year or so ago that was based around the British royal family and a huge cover up that stemmed back decades to the early part of the twentieth century. It was all about the 'old firm' and the security services that surround the family.

While it was a captivating story, the most interesting aspect lay not in the fiction but the facts around the book finally reaching print.  

As a young author she had much interest in the book when it was first written. It even had a publishing deal but the deal got withdrawn and all doors were closed. It is only several decades later and after the successful publication of later books, it finally reached print.  I'm guessing the fiction was too close to the truth.

This idea of the velvet curtain has always intrigued me. So I found Harry in particular interesting in the interview, although Meghan I think was better able to explain how it works.

It gave me pause as I thought about what it must be like to be born into that machine, to not know a world any different.

Now what is their agenda? Well that's an all-sided question. Certainly I start with the media who have had some very strong opinions on Ms Markle. I don't know her from Adam, and she could be a sociopathic narcissist for all I know, but I wanted to hear her voice. And she made some very interesting points.

As for Oprah, I like her. Does she have her own agenda? Sure. Don't we all? The only thing I felt about Oprah's interviewing was that it missed something quite key. While she fully explored the racist component about why little Archie wouldn't become a Prince, it missed completely exploring the idea that it could be because she was a divorcee, something that has caused so many issues within the royals.

That said, does it serve the needs of our society to dismantle white supremacy and white privilege, absolutely.

While talking about it with family and friends afterwards reminded me of the kind of polarisation I looked at in The Internal Shift You Need to Help Solve the Social Dilemma, it was, I felt, probably one of the most true-to-life looks behind the velvet curtain that I've ever had, even if (like everything in life) it was serving multiple agendas. I understand my call to watch it was an extra layer of my learning around compassion at the moment.

In every crevice I am finding compassion; from the echoes of the ravages of war, through to something as distant to me as the media swirl surrounding royals, and as personal as those deep shadows etched on my own soul. The message is clear, embrace compassion over combat and step into your true power.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Be Compassionate and Curious to Live Your Best Life, What Do You Want The Prevailing Global Culture to Look Like?, How You Are Complicit in the Oppression of Others, Let Us Hear Your Unique Perspective – But Be Kind and Be Wise and Be an Evolutionary (Rather Than a Revolutionary). To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Heck no!

I remember being struck by a conversation I had with one of my nieces a couple of years ago when we were talking about what she saw herself doing with her life. She wasn’t particularly inspired by the lives of adults in our society, whom she viewed as quite stressed and harried most of the time.

It was a fair point, one that gave me pause. It reminded me of a little plaque I bought years ago when visiting the California Redwoods, it says “We don’t inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” While that is an obvious reference to our ecosystem, as a mother it also makes sense to me in the context of our emotional ecosystem.

I decided I am going to be an example either way, good or bad; I can either be an example to aspire to, or one to run from.

This came up again when I asked another of my beautiful nieces what she would give if she could gift one thing to every person in the world. Happiness was her answer. I then started to think about what happiness is.

What immediately came to my mind were the things that keep me from feeling happy - the stories in my head, the meaning I assign to everything that happens in my life.

What I did inherit from my ancestors are a lot of those stories, and they are not stories I necessarily want to gift my children.

I saw an advert yesterday for a course that was about helping kids and teenagers look at their inner critic. One of the exercises involves filling in the thought bubbles above a monster’s head about all the things I think I’m no good at. Where do those voices come from?

Mostly those voices in my head are ones both deliberately and inadvertently planted there by my parents and other influential adults as I grew up, no doubt echoing the voices of their parents and so on. There were certainly things they wanted to teach me about life, what they deemed good values and behaviours, but what I actually took to heart about those might not be the same as the intention behind them.

To give an obvious example, a friend of mine recalled an incident this week that happened when she was a little girl, when she (and a little boy she was playing with) were being naturally curious about body parts. Her grandmother’s reaction created shame by the bucketful and she was reflecting on the magnitude of how that had contributed to how she felt about herself.

I also recall my mum sharing with me (many times) the story of overhearing her older brother’s friends talking about girls in a derogatory way. The key messages I took out of that story were multilayered, from the obvious intent “do not open yourself to be the topic of that kind of conversation” to the many others about having sex out of wedlock, and the general disgust towards the male sexual psyche.

But aside of these examples that shape body image and attitudes towards sex, there are many more examples of the ways in which my attitudes towards myself and other people have been shaped. In every minute of every day there are thoughts running through my head that have probably coursed through the minds of my ancestors for generations.

What I have found though is that the feelings I have about those thoughts, when I bring them into conscious awareness, are usually a good litmus test as to whether they represent my truth, are these thoughts a fit for my authentic self? Do these thoughts make me happy?

To stick with the example I gave about beliefs around sexual relationships, and then put that with my own life experiences of going on to have multiple failed relationships, marriages and pregnancies. I can see just how much the swathe of inherited beliefs about myself and the world actually played into those so called failures.

What is more true to say is that each led me towards more authenticity, and when my inner world is not at odds with itself, the chance for happiness is so much greater.

When I asked my niece how the gift of happiness could be achieved she talked about looking beyond ourselves and others, and being kind to ourselves. Beyond those stories, that’s the work right there, the goal to pursue to attain the (not so) impossible dream.

Of course it’s not as simple as just deciding not to buy into those stories. I can’t just tell myself I don’t believe the story in my mind because it has a lot of supporting evidence accumulated over a number of years.  But if it’s a story that is making me miserable in some way, it’s an indication that my mind and heart are not in alignment.

Recently I was asking my homeopath whether there was a remedy concoction she could recommend for headaches. She made the point there is no one cure-all as headaches carry a message, and the remedy would depend on the cause. But once I pause to listen to the message that in itself will usually sort out the headache.

She did go on to say that there is nothing I need to do/sort out, just come into my heart space. It is no coincidence my chiropractor also recommended coming into my heart space to feel the love within myself rather than pinging all over the place intellectually seeking solutions to satisfy my inner critic.
I’m often in my head. To set my mind at ease and tune into my heart’s voice, this is a practice that can be achieved in many ways, but it is a practice, it requires – well – practice.

One of the best ways I find to tune into my heart space is getting out in nature; I particularly like walking along the ocean shore, whereas my partner is more a fan of the forest. Just sitting listening to the chirruping cicadas and birds in our garden can be enough to bring me into the present moment, or even just looking around the room I’m in through fresh eyes.

Certainly I would be far less present if I also hadn’t learned to practise daily meditation. Presence is the core point of Eckhart Tolle’s teachings, some of my favourite quotes of his are:

• “People don’t realise that now is all there ever is. There is no past or future except as memory or anticipation in your mind.”
• “Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.”
• “The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.”
• “Anything you resent and react to strongly in another is also in you.”

I’ve come to recognise that when the same themes emerge in my negative stories about life and people, these are old patterns there that are no longer serving me and need to be brought into the light of more conscious awareness and deactivated. Some of my favourite techniques for that deep work are Brandon Bay’s Journey Work and Teal Swan’s Completion Process and Part’s Work, among others.

But there are also many more moments when it’s less about doing anything and just being in appreciation, learning to tune into my heart and the love that dwells within me for me, my life and all life in general. A quick fix is often the soothing tones of a Sarah Blondin meditation, Loving and Listening to Yourself is a great one.

So coming back to this idea of happiness as an impossible dream, no, I know happiness is always there beyond the “triggered and distracted” pattern of life. In the quiet of a moment when I allow myself to be still and be present and open my heart to all that is good in my world, and even to love those things that don’t always feel so good, they are all pointing the way, that is where happiness lies.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Are You Getting Distracted From Who You Came to Be This Life?, What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances, How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.