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.

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.

A few times in the last week I’ve been triggered by communications I’ve received and my mind has gone into overdrive compiling responses.

I know enough now, and generally have enough restraint, not to react when I’m triggered. This is eloquently summed up by Teal Swan in her article on criticism when she says “Be aware that the reactivity that spirals us into criticism is always a by-product of trauma we have suffered. It is indicative of the ways that we have been hurt. If we tend to that hurt, we will be less reactive and become less critical. Our opinions will then be wanted and received well by others.”

Tending to that hurt is the bigger part, as I talked through in How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight. I think of it like doing the groundwork before a new construction project can take place.

By the same token, I want to express my perspective and to hear that of others. As Teal says “We need feedback, our growth and awareness depends on it…

But feedback falls into two distinct camps:

• Criticism
• Your individual and honest perspective or experience

Criticism is often done in a state of reactivity when we are in a state of defense, it has no regard for whether the person on the other end is receptive”.

She makes the point that there is really no such thing as constructive criticism “The more the person you are criticizing feels compelled to defend their value, the less capable they are of absorbing what they are hearing.”

Then she goes on to say “We have to be aware of why we feel the need to share our opinion. And even if we have good intentions, we must still ask ourselves if - despite the good intentions- we are harming the other person with our critique.”

I thought these were really good questions as I worked my way through the fire consuming me, not wishing to leave my relationships in the burnt ashes of my reactions.

Relationships are important to me, but I also often have a tendency to put other people’s needs before my own, and to rush in quickly to prove my worth, which I covered in How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns. So I have to look with real curiosity at what’s actually going on in each situation.

What was triggering me this time were some communications from the kids’ school that opened up an old wound. A wise person once gave me an analogy of putting our hurts into the manure pile versus the freezer, the manure pile being preferable as it fades to nothing over time. But this wound had obviously been bunged in the freezer, unattended, since it stung just as sharply as if it were fresh.

Anything that requires or encourages extracurricular activity throws me into a spin, since my kids have well and truly had enough in the process of just attending school each day. By the same token, I’m a person who attended school without any real issues while also managing a few extracurricular things and, later, an all-encompassing training program as a competitive swimmer.

I prided myself on my resilience and strength (part of perfectionist tendencies designed to prove my self worth and avoid the harsh criticism and punishment), and still laugh/cry at the memory of me pulling my daughter’s dummy out of my bra in the middle of a corporate meeting, wondering what it was that kept itching my skin.

So when receiving various communications this week contradicting the school’s own philosophies (zealously encouraging our kids into extracurricular sports activities and daily violin practice), on top of extensive requests for my personal participation in fundraising activities, meanwhile hearing a comment made to the whole parent group that was clearly criticising my individual decision on pursue external remedial support for my kids to help them work with their brain instead of against it, triggered me in gasket-blowing ways.

It created a surge of feelings comprising being overwhelmed by contradictions, criticised, disregarded and undermined. The little girl inside me whose thoughts and feelings were unimportant to the adults making decisions, who had to strategise to canvass and rationalise my opinions, and get my needs and desires met, swung into full counter attack and defense mode.

I observed all this. I struggled between the part of me that that wanted to lash out at those whose words poked at all my old wounds, and the part of me that wanted those people to simply understand the unintentional ways in which their words have landed.

I want people to understand what it feels like when your kids have different wiring, unseen and yet overwhelming. I especially want those who are charged with the care of my children during their time at school to know this. If I go further with this, what I deeply desire is an educational approach that caters to the neurodiversity and differing talents of all children.

But I also know that, while those who educate my children during school hours care about them, there are another twenty five or more other unique kids in the class to cater to – quite aside of the teachers they report to, the school board, the Education department and the many other stakeholders involved. I know that those who educate my kids also have their own rich perspectives, and most likely their own wounds. I know that in order to be truly heard, I will have to be kind, to tread softly.

I recognise people don’t make me feel a certain way, I simply feel what I feel in reaction to what they are saying because of my own unique circumstances, experiences and disposition.

So, while tending to that wounded part of me - the groundwork that has to happen before I share anything - I have asked myself many times:

• Why do I want to share my perspective?
• How can I share it in a way that is not going to harm? In a way that is not likely to invoke a defense response?

I have reworked my response many times in my head; continually refocusing within myself to hand the talking stick to my heart; the warrior self versus the infinite self. Early in the week, in a more peaceful moment, my inner voice spoke its truth plainly. It took another few days to get my mind aligned in order to proceed without the criticisms that wanted to work their way in there.

All along the way I kept asking myself whether any response was required at all.

In the end, I did send one because – as I’ve said - I deeply desire an educational approach that caters to the neurodiversity and differing talents of all children. So I believe it is important to voice our perspective in the current environment to create the seeds of awareness that may one day spout into positive changes.

I received a response thanking me for my insights and also for seeing what the teachers are contending with, and with – I felt – a genuinely hopeful interest in seeing where the approach I’m taking with my kids leads.

I have a perspective that is different and valuable and so do you. But be kind to yourself and to others, and be wise in your ways of sharing. Tell us your story in a way we can hear it, so it can benefit the growth of the whole.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Change Unhealthy Reactions, How to Stop Being Triggered by What Other People Think and Honour Your Story but Free Yourself of Its Shackles. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Image by CJ from Pixabay

Eckhart Tolle, a master teacher on the concept of presence, said “Stress is caused by being here but wanting to be there”. I can relate to this.

When I was at the chiropractor, I asked her what she had noticed in my body this week and she said “It was twisted, it easily untwisted but it was twisted none the less (in my usual left hip to right shoulder pattern) – like you are being pulled in this direction and that direction”.

As soon as she said it I pictured a tug-of-war, rather like Dr Dolittle’s fictional Pushmi-Pullyu animal being pulled in different directions. It made absolute sense to me because it’s how I feel when the family are all at home and I have things I need to do, yet they are clamouring for my attention.

Of course, here in the southern hemisphere, it is school summer holidays, but this year – with so many lockdowns in process – I am sure there are many parents around the world contending with the same issues and on more intense levels.

For my kids I’ve found there is balance needed between planned activities and having enough downtime in order for boredom to kick in.

School takes care of much (often unwanted) planned activity during term time, but during holidays that falls more to me. Though as the kids get older they obviously have more of their own ideas and plans, which can bring about a whole other level of conflict and logistics to manage.

Another of my favourite Eckhart quotes is “Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found”, it has also always been the place in which I am most in touch with my own thoughts and feelings, my sense of self, which is something I desire for my kids also.

When boredom kicks in for the kids, though, I both relish and dread it.

I dread it because it is a temporarily painful experience for me, they start to complain and pick fights with each other, looking towards me as a beacon of hope to solve their boredom and their conflicts. However, I have found that it is often wiser if I avoid doing either, and simply give them each some positive attention before turning my own attention back to whatever I was doing.

But I also relish their boredom because, once they get over this hump – which they do (and they do a lot quicker without devices on the scene), I see the magic of their creativity come to life.

This used to create other issues as, when they were younger, it often involved turning our lounge into some fantastical kingdom, which could look like someone had taken the contents of our cupboards, strewn them over the floor and then stirred with a big spoon. However, as they get older, they get better at tidying up with less intervention.

Then, of course, there are the other things that need to happen, like clothes being washed, food purchased, meals prepared, alongside the support I provide to my partner in his business. And because none of this really floats my boat I heed Annette Noontil’s advice:

“It is best not to do more than 50% for people because it takes away their opportunity to learn and grow. If you have to do 100% for someone make sure you are learning something for yourself from this opportunity.”

Which is why I make it a priority to type these posts each week, it’s my time to really sit down and take in what lessons are presenting themselves.

So when I ponder on what I really need to know when I feel pulled in these different directions, here is my take out:

• I have a tendency towards people pleasing, and the fact I feel pulled in different directions is a signpost to relook at the lessons I’ve learned about what being hyper attuned to others’ needs and feelings has taught me, including defining and asserting my personal boundaries.
• No one will respect my needs and desires unless I prioritise them; I teach others how to treat me.
• In my situation, no one is going to die if I don’t get the balance right between doing too much or too little. But the fact I’m feeling so torn probably means I would more likely benefit from doing less; my expectations of myself are too high.
• Nothing needs to be perfect, whether I get it right or wrong for me, the kids and/or my partner, there are always going to be things I can learn and grow from, so either way I’ll get where I want to go. As my gran always said “What’s for you won’t go by you.”
• Be present to whatever is happening in the moment. Even in the process of typing this up, I’ve had to press pause a number of times and switch my attention to conversations with the kids and with my partner and each interruption provided an opportunity for connection with people I love.

With humanity experiencing so much turmoil right now, I imagine many people feel pulled in different directions. What is your life trying to teach you? What do you need to know right now to feel less torn and more present?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, When the Thing That Binds You is the Road to Freedom, How to Stop Being Triggered by What Other People Think, 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.

I’ve discovered that, like everything else in my life from the way my kids behave, to the things that happen, sex is yet another thing that reflects back to me parts of myself that may be about old thought patterns and feelings.

When I was reading about Pavan Amara’s Take Back Your Body project, although I’ve never experienced sexual abuse directly, I could relate to the concept that taking back the narrative of sex is a crucial part of healing.

Amara says “After any sort of sexual violence, the way you think about sex and your body changes, so you think it’s not under your control, or you have to go with someone else’s likes and dislikes and you lose that connection to yourself. We look at ways of taking that back.”

Whether a person has been abused or not, I believe an unhealthy narrative about sex prevails among the collective conscious, and feelings of fear and shame still too often dominate the landscape in both sexes.
I recall listening to Teal Swan sharing that each time she runs a workshop and asks participants to raise their hands if they have felt fear for their life, all the women and many men raise their hands. When she starts to narrow that down to a shorter and shorter timeframe, the men are often gobsmacked that most women in the room still have their hands up when she asks who has felt that fear in the last week.

History tells us that females (and many males) have suffered at the hands of power-hungry men for centuries and, while life in the twenty-first century is changing in many places, oppression still exists both in the world around us and reverberates in the world within us. This is something I am mindful of in relation to my own experiences and those of my children.

My eldest daughter was inadvertently exposed to the topic of sex in a fictional story she had listened to recently that had been miscategorised under children’s books rather than for young adults. The main thread of the story was about time travelling back to Arthurian times to save the future. However, the plot apparently also included two teenage girls having sex and a baby being born.

This brought up questions for her about what sex is and, while I did not mind having the conversation, I hadn’t anticipated having to answer quite so many questions for another year or two. I had to explain to a somewhat bewildered young girl, who finds the whole concept rather abstract, that a whole new view of the world opens up when hormones start flooding our bodies in the teenage years; sex becomes desirable (when allowed to unfold naturally) and is just nature’s way of making sure we humans survive.

It made me reflect on my own experiences emerging into young adulthood, recalling the perplexing question of what a French kiss might be and what exactly was I to do with my tongue? And just how embarrassing everything seemed at that age, even asking that question of anyone was too much.

When I think of my first kiss in that genre, with an eleven year old boy in my class using his swanky digital watch to time it to two minutes, his tongue like a slab of meat sitting unchewed in my mouth, and his eyes focused sideward to the timer on his wrist, it was clear I wasn’t the only one clueless and uniformed. Of course, that was just the overhang of Victorian virtuosity in our upbringing.

Here, on the opposite side of the world, my partner was brought up in a different culture entirely; Kiwi male bravado reflects an archetype of patriarchal male entitlement to female flesh, like a set of untrained puppies that grow old having learned no tricks at all except the art of enthusiastic and instant gratification. 

Both those examples are clearly not everyone’s experience, especially those that have been exposed to sex or experienced sexual abuse at a young age, but it demonstrates how we all view sex through a filter of our own experiences; and there does seem a lack of examples around what healthy sexuality might look like.

Being the digital age there is no lack of material available on the topic of sex, but how much of it is actually helpful? I’ve noticed in this era of Coronavirus lockdown, on social media there seems an increase of bored blokes sharing weird videos and material designed for shock and titillation.

My youngest daughter, unbeknown to my partner, was looking over his shoulder when his phone pinged and there was one such video that popped up – sent via a social media app by an aforementioned archetype of the bored Kiwi bloke. “Mummy” she cried “someone has sent daddy a video of a man bouncing an exercise ball, like the one you used to have, on his willy.”

She thought this was hilarious, and thankfully didn’t see enough to have absorbed the sexual component of it. Needless to say, my partner has since taken a much more mindful approach to his device.

To me, of the prudish upbringing, this type of media automatically gets categorized in my psyche as smut and makes me view the man in the video (and anyone sharing it) as sad. In my partner’s psyche, it’s just funny, something to send on as a bit of bravado and one-upmanship in the shocking humour stakes.

Being a mother of daughters and someone who deeply understands how even things that are seemingly benign in intent can shape a person’s psyche, I am inclined to err on the side of caution when it comes to exposing my kids to life beyond their current point of development, a hard task in today’s world.

As I said in From Desires of the Flesh to Deep Connection our sexuality is deeply connected to all our other interactions. When I listen to the demeaning lyrics of a rap song, it creates images in my head, the same happens when watching a video, reading news, playing games… on and on. The question we each have to ask ourselves – and for our children as they emerge into young adulthood - is whether these images are pathways to love and connectedness or quite the opposite?

Science has shown us that the more exposed to something we are, the more desensitized to it we become and this is especially so when we have been indoctrinated into a way of being since early childhood, we have no conscious memory of our true feelings. I believe that many males simply don’t understand the female perspective and, what they see as harmless can often be disrespectful or even harmful.

I get that to most of the people out there sharing the videos I mentioned, it is all just a bit of fun. But there was a time – likely in childhood and before their conscious memory -  that it would have created a bad feeling within them.

Having read the work of Dr Gabor Maté, a Hungarian-born Canadian physician with a background in family practice and a special interest in childhood development and trauma, and in their potential lifelong impacts, I know the harm that comes from children being exposed too early and too insensitively to everything from noise to the thoughts and emotions of those around us.

This is where the collective consciousness on the topic of sex and sexuality gets perpetuated; where insensitivity arises.

For one friend of mine, this is a huge trigger and I understand why. Our sexuality, like everything else in our lives, develops through the filter of our experiences. Her experiences include bearing witness to a wide range of sexual abuse. As a healer, she knows the damage to our psyche when abuse occurs.

For me, as a female who has not been subject to what we would term abuse, I still bear witness to the thoughts and feelings and mistreatment of females and have my entire life. Everything from the lewd wolf whistling that accompanied any passing of a work site from a young age, to frightening moments at the hands of testosterone charged males fuelled with alcohol or even just at a football match.

There is definitely a sense in my psyche that these things are the manifestation of a collective experience that views females as objects rather than with reverence. So when it comes to the realm of my own body and my own relationships, this collective sense of my female heritage creates part of the lens through which I view sex.

I suspect the reason this plays out so emotively for me is because my soul knows reverence for both the masculine and feminine and can sense that neither is being truly honoured in much of what I’ve discussed here.

Sex is to be enjoyed, of that there is no doubt, but what are the blocks in the pathways to mutual joy that exist in your life? What are the fundamental ideas and beliefs you have that stand in the way of honouring this? What experiences do you need to heal? And what messages do we want to send to our collective sons and daughters?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Be at Ease With the World Around You, Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation, Do You Really Know the Different Parts of You? and Womanhood: A Story of Our Time. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

The only way to be at ease with the world around me, is to be at ease with the world within me; which feels like a big job at times. It never ceases to amaze me how I might face the same circumstances as hundreds – thousands, or even millions – of other people and yet the range of responses to those circumstances is as varied as the people involved or even just observing.

Right now there is an excellent example of this globally with around a billion kids on the planet, who usually attend school, finding themselves at home with parents like me who are suddenly expected to home school on top of everything else. Or are we?

As I contemplated this whole arena of my kids learning at home during lock down, knowing I have actively considered and rejected the idea of home schooling for my family many times, my mind wandered to what my legal obligations actually are at this time.

After a few Google searches, I could find no answers. It reminded me of when my curiosity led me to investigate what our legal obligations are around attendance, how it is recorded and what actually constitutes a red flag. I like transparency and, instead, what I seemed to find is smoke and mirrors.

If I feel there is an expectation set around me delivering something, I get triggered. As a recovering perfectionist and people pleaser, this homeschooling stuff It is right on target to test me. This is the crux of what I mean about becoming at ease with my inner world, the felt expectation is a narrative I created about the outer world.

And while it is likely there are people in political power and the educational arena that have their own agenda and are indeed driving those expectations, I also recognise the opportunity that home schooling gives me at this time.

The fact is, my kids need some sort of attention, many times in each day; for my youngest it is a great deal of the day. I have choices: I can determinedly plough on with what I’m trying to achieve for myself, I can sweep aside all of that and just focus on my children, or I can manage some of both those things. The key for me is the word manage.

I need a plan; I had one in fact before we ever went into lockdown. I knew it was a prime opportunity to teach my kids how to get involved more in looking after themselves and the home they live in, there is also quite a number of card games and board games that largely get ignored in our house that I could see would be useful additions to managing the family dynamic.

Device time is a non starter for us, we already conducted that human experiment and came out the other side as I talked about in What Addiction Has to Teach Us on the Pathway to Joy. We certainly did not want to be cooped up with two frazzled kids, but I could see this was an opportunity for us to connect more as a family and cultivate respectful communication and compassion for one another.

What about school work? In its doses. There are things my kids are drawn to, and things they hate, this feels like the time to focus on what they are drawn to.

A good friend shared with me the words her child’s school had sent about accessing online learning materials throughout the lockdown; they were salve to my soul:

“The work on the Distance Learning site are suggestions only. It is up to individuals families to decide how much of the work their children complete. They are not intended to place undue stress on your family at this time.”

It was as if a weight lifted from my shoulders and my heart had space to breathe. I needed to hear that.

While it wasn’t directly from my own kids’ school, with the flight or fight response within me now set at ease, common sense and rational thought did manage to kick in. If that had come from a school in our country, it is the answer I had been seeking.

The communication went on like an enchanting, deeply resonant song drawing me in:

“Don't worry about your child regressing in school. Every single child is in this boat and they all will be okay. When we are back in the classroom, we will focus on their learning and meet their educational needs. Teachers are experts at this!

Don't pick fights with your children because they don't want to do any activities. Don't scream at your children for not following the timetable. Don't insist on 2 hours of learning time if they are resisting it. See if you can make learning fun through their play.

Over the coming weeks, you may see an increase in behaviour issues with your children. Whether it's anxiety, or anger, or protests that they can't do normal things - it will happen. You will potentially see more meltdowns, tantrums, and oppositional behaviour. This is normal and expected under these circumstances.

What children need right now is to feel comforted and loved. To feel like it is all going to be okay.”

In short, this kind of heart-felt communication set the perfectionist and people pleaser in me at ease. I felt understood, I felt my children were understood; I felt validated. I recognised that this is exactly the kind of communication I need to write to myself more often.

While this is a deep process of conscious learning for me, I also recognise there are many parents who don’t have these same triggers. They may be adopting the home school curriculum and that works well for them and their family, or they may wholeheartedly take an entirely different direction without even a thought or a care for what anyone thinks or expects.

My triggers are not necessarily your triggers, but you can be sure if you are feeling ill at ease in the world right now you are being triggered by something. Become aware of the narratives in your head, this is your opportunity to do something about them, it does not serve you to be in a chronic flight or fight state.

Yes, there is a new virus out there. Someone you know or someone you care about may even have died, and this – like all death – is hard for those left trying to figure out who they are in the world without that loved one. However, most people will not catch nor die from the virus; I know the more robust my immune system, the more likely I am to remain healthy. Nothing compromises a human immune system quicker than fear (check out Want Better Health? Be Shrewd About Stress for more information on that).

The chances are that you, like me, are faced with the challenges, and therefore opportunities, these movement restrictions have created. This is life calling you to become unencumbered of ideas and beliefs that may have served you once, but no longer do. Dive into the narratives, and really challenge yourself on whether those narratives help or hinder you.

Becoming at ease with our inner world is the key to being at ease in the world around us.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Is This the Opportunity of a Lifetime?, Are You Overlooking the Obvious Opportunities in Your Life? and What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I can see that loving me for who I am, today, not what I can be tomorrow, and loving my life for what it is today, is a worthy goal in every respect. But if I can’t do it today, if I can’t love myself, will I beat myself up? Or will I allow in enough love, enough understanding, to be gentle with myself and simply try again tomorrow, knowing I am doing the best I can?

I don’t find it easy to be kind to myself. Growing up I learned I often had to be something else, someone else, than who I was being in that moment, to be loveable. This was inadvertent, through a combination of messages about acceptable behaviours and my parents’ reactions to my thoughts, desires and requests; it was certainly not intentional on their part.

Then, in early adulthood, I fell totally and utterly in love. Finally, I felt I had someone who could love me for me, someone who brought out something more light-hearted in me. But less than two years later, he left me.

As I was swallowed by a gaping chasm of pain, loneliness and grief, I blamed myself for being too needy and too serious.  Maybe I was those things, but I can see now I was still loveable; the only person who didn’t understand that was me.

I beat myself up about that for decades, decades, and kept playing out some version of needing to be more in my life in order to be happy. And did it make me happy? No, according to an amazing lady I met recently who has the capacity to reflect back to me exactly who I am being in that moment, formidable is what I have become.

This is not gentle; it is not kind; it is not loving; it is harsh.

With my partner incapacitated at the moment, having broken his leg, this is probably the most time we have had together since our children were born. It has led to some interesting and introspective conversations about the things our children are reflecting back to us, things that we might want to change about ourselves and our habits.  

I’ve always known how different my partner and I are, but what these conversations have crystallised for me is just how self satisfied my partner is versus my opposite sense of self dissatisfaction.  He has a self satisfied light that beams from him; it was one of the first things that attracted me to him.

In truth, I believe that light is within us all, it is just that it’s often obscured.

In our parenting, while my partner and I each recognise aspects of ourselves that are less than desirable, our reactions to that are quite different. I am hard on myself, feeling less than, and driven to change. He is far gentler with himself and, while wanting and committing to change, still remains essentially self satisfied.

It is not that I haven’t felt the satisfaction of the expansive and joyful feeling of connecting with the source of who I am, it is more that many of my thoughts and beliefs disconnect me. The sense of self worth I have was not built from the inside out; it was built on trying to please others outside myself.

This is something I have sought to fix on the journey to me, and I have spent the last few years getting to know many of the parts of me that I have denied, rejected or disowned. But my reaction to these recent conversations with my partner has given me another lens through which to look. I can consider that the path to enlightenment is also, paradoxically, another path upon which I can opt to beat myself up.

Spiritual growth is something I thrive on, and there is no doubt it is a good thing. However, if I see the growth as necessary for me to be somehow more worthy than I am today, then I know that is not serving me. It is, in fact, contradicting the very growth I seek.

Being gentle with myself, while learning to love all the parts of me, is something I am yearning and learning, slowly. It takes vulnerability and willingness to set strong boundaries around my own needs and desires.

Meanwhile, I know that every day of my life I’ve done the best I could, with what I knew, felt and believed at the time. I can’t change the past, but I can change how I view it, and I can certainly change how I view things in the present.

What about you, how hard are you on yourself? Do you fear that going easier on yourself will lead to more disappointment or not meeting other people’s expectations? Do you feel worthy of love? I like to look at it this way, would you benefit from more love? And if you are not able to give it to yourself, do you think others will be able to love you enough to make up for that?

I pray that we each find ways to let the love in, because I don’t have to use much imagination to picture this world full of people who are withholding themselves from love. But a world full of self loving people?  Now, that would be quite something.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Why Resenting Your Parents is Healthy, You Are the Gift Your Ancestors Gave to the World, The People Who Hurt Us Are Vehicles for Our Growth, Whose Energy Is This Anyway? Stop Taking on Board How Others Are Feeling and You Are Not as Important to Your Parents as You (or They) Think. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog. Heal Your Past Hurts To Help You Fulfill Your Potential.

I want to acknowledge the many awful moments that my children have experienced the worst of who I am. Moments where I’ve dropped into flight or fight mode and spewed forth the worst of who my parents were to me in those same moments.

You know the moments, the ones where you suddenly realise how much you sound like your mother or father?

I also acknowledge the many awful moments in my life where my partners have experienced the worst of who I am. These were the moments I also dropped into flight or fight mode, or the sympathetic nervous system response, reacting to something that reminded me of the way I was treated as a child, only this time I wasn’t powerless to hold back my fury at such treatment.

You know the moments, the ones where you feel criticized, undervalued, blamed, or the many myriad of emotions that our parents used elicit in us as we were growing up?

I am not perfect, and I am not always right, if there is such a thing. But I do observe most of us walking around as our child selves dressed in adult skin. The real test is under stress, which is when we revert to old patterns.

I know that it would have helped me a lot growing up to have heard “it is not you; it is my stuff that I am dealing with”. Instead I heard “it is you, it is your bad behaviour that is making me act like this towards you.”

As a child, I had no context of the family history, I had no concept of what either of my parents had suffered themselves growing up, but I saw it written in their behaviours, and I thought I was to blame.
This is not about the atrocities that happen, though it applies to those things too, it is about the far more pervasive emotional abuse that occurs unknowingly in most households.

If I interact with others outside the home and have friends and colleagues who think I’m a nice person, it is lovely. But if I then walk through the door of my home each day and become someone less than lovely, it is a huge warning sign that I’m being inauthentic. 

The exhausting pretense of going out into the world and acting in ways I was taught and learned were appropriate means I then come home and am too tired, perhaps too hurt even, to keep that all up.
How I interact with my children, the example I show them in terms of my own emotional equilibrium and how I maintain it, is everything.

I can yell at them from the kitchen like a director shooting a movie and expecting absolute compliance, or I can walk over to where they are and look them in the eyes while talking to them. I mean, if I had a guest in my house, I wouldn’t just yell at them would I?

I can carry on yelling at them to hurry up while I myself am barely making it to the car on time, distracted by a message on my phone. Or I can ignore my phone and be more present with my kids and help get them to the car on time with much less fuss. Heck, we could even make a game out of it.

All of this seems so ridiculous and yet it is normal. Generation after generation unintentionally and unwittingly repeating wounds and hurts; until someone says “no more”.

For me personally, I have to be that person. I can’t accept behaviour from myself that perpetuates constant pain and mediocrity. If I am to fulfill my potential, if my kids have any hope of fulfilling theirs, we must unburden ourselves of these patterns.

​From all I have been able to ascertain, although many people tend to spend many hours in therapists offices around the world delving into their childhood, it takes more than just recognising where these behaviours and patterns come from. I have known many people able to recite quite aptly exactly why they are the way they are, and yet feel powerless to change.

Despite the best of intentions, without actual healing taking place, each time I get triggered, my sympathetic nervous system is turned on and, boom, I am back in child mode. That takes a huge amount of willpower and persistence to overcome.

True healing only ever seems to take place if the memories of the relevant events are refocused while in an open and relaxed state. As I mentioned at the outset, it would have helped me a lot growing up to have heard “it is not you; it is my stuff that I am dealing with”. Instead I heard “it is you, it is your bad behaviour that is making me act like this towards you.” That creates a shame state which is totally destructive.

Instead, if I can go back into some of those early memories in a relaxed state, preferably guided by someone who is experienced in this type of work, I can acknowledge that child-me deserved better. I can then refocus the memories away from an attachment to me being somehow bad, by recognising the real culprit; my parents’ own childhood traumas.

In Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation I talk about The Completion Process by Teal Swan, one of the most powerful techniques for healing I’ve used (and continue to use). Here is a link to an enlightening video of her doing this process with a client, it is certainly excellent at demonstrating just how early in our life these traumas occur and the patterns begin, and how to heal them.

There is also this other article that gives a great overview of trauma recognition and releasing techniques. Marisa Peers is another good self help source. Family Constellations is a possible way to go; there are many ways to conquer our shortcomings and suffering, it is just a question of finding something and someone who works for you.

As I said to someone else this week, you are never too old to heal. If there is breath still in us, I believe it is in fact our duty. I truly hope that you will make the quest to give yourself the love you deserve a priority in your life. It really will be a huge gift to you, but also an amazing legacy for your family. I will be cheering you on and celebrating as you step into your best life, giving us all hope and inspiration.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy You Are the Gift Your Ancestors Gave to the World, The People Who Hurt Us Are Vehicles for Our Growth, Whose Energy Is This Anyway? Stop Taking on Board How Others Are Feeling and Want Better Health? Be Shrewd About Stress. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

As a parent, two issues that I have really struggled with, and been out of synch with my partner on, are TV and processed foods. From early on I noticed my kids seemed to exhibit addictive behaviour around these two things.

What does addictive behaviour look like? There is never enough TV or so called treats, there are long drawn and often violent reactions to the withdrawal of these things, a constant longing for them to the exclusion of other, healthier, alternatives (like a trip to the park, or a good meal), and frankly there is a lack of motivation and connection to life. 

But I don’t think the issue is the TV or processed foods; I believe the issue is why they are drawn to them. The same could be said of any addiction. As a society, it seems that certain things (take drugs as an example) are vilified and criminalized even, while other potentially (more) harmful and addictive things (like cigarettes, alcohol, TV, social media etc) are legal and commonplace.

This week I was talking to someone who is in the process of firmly drawing some boundaries around the behaviours she will accept from an alcoholic partner. She understands where the desire to numb likely comes from; it is a result of a family history and trauma most of us would agree was horrific.

However, Dr Gabor Maté, a Hungarian-born Canadian physician (and Jewish survivor of the Holocaust) says of childhood trauma “yes this includes terrible events such as sexual exploitation, violence etc, but it also refers to any set of events that, over time, impose more pain on the child than his or her sensitive organism can process and discharge.

Trauma can occur when parents are too stressed, too distracted, too depressed, too beset by economic worry, too isolated etc to respond to a sensitive child’s need to be seen, emotionally held, heard, validated, made to feel secure. Thus, this is the kind of pain that also occurs in normal, happy, childhoods.”

I can easily see why my kids would have felt the need to soothe themselves using TV or treats, in a world where I – as a normal parent in this day and age – went to work and they spent most of their days in another person’s home with someone who (albeit lovely and loving) was not their mother. And when I was around them I was certainly stressed and distracted a lot of the time.

In Beyond Drugs: The Universal Experience of Addiction, Dr Gabor Maté says “addiction is neither a choice nor an inherited disease, but a psychological and physiological response to painful life experiences.”

Most addicted people use no drugs at all… Addiction is manifested in any behaviour a person craves,  finds temporary relief or pleasure in but suffers negative consequences as a result of and yet has difficulty giving up…It can encompass any human behaviour from work to shopping, sex to eating, extreme sports to TV to compulsive internet use, the list is endless.”

When Maté asks his patients what their addictive focus gives them, universally the answers are about coping with stress, escaping emotional pain, giving peace of mind, a sense of control or connection with others.

As I said in Our Sensitive Souls, “For those of us that are sensitive in our temperament, Maté’s work may lend some interesting insights to assist in healing the scars that run deep in our psyche. In an increasingly frenetic world, where overstimulation abounds, we have a job to do in helping ourselves and our children understand and nurture our strengths”.

To do this job well, I also have to understand the coping mechanisms, soothers or addictions, which have nestled into the cracks. Becoming aware of what I do, what my partner does and what the kids do in order to tune out/zone out/escape reality is a vitally important step in being able to meet life head on and find emotional balance.

Talking with someone else this week, who has a grandchild diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder), I can see how it has served me to give in to my children’s desire for more screen time because, honestly, dealing with the constant emotional tantrums and outbursts is exhausting and screen time provides a welcome reprieve.

However, it does not help my kids to be present, nor happy, in the world around them. It doesn’t help them to find ways to regulate their emotions, build resilience, connect with other people and build relationships and patience, As Simon Sinek says in this clip about the Millennial Generation, where will they find real joy?

The same is true of any addiction. If I can’t find my way through pain without tuning out or numbing myself against it, what chance do I have of finding real joy in my life? And what does that mean for the people around me?

These words came to me “I love all your broken pieces, but I can't live with you treating me like I'm the one who broke you. When you learn to recognise and love those jagged edges the way I do, then we can live in love.” Addiction causes pain to those around us, the ones we supposedly love.

Any addiction points to pain, which points to childhood coping mechanisms that require healing. Recognising and dealing with the consequences of our childhood trauma seems to me to be the most important thing we can collectively do to open the pathway to more joy.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy The People Who Hurt Us Are Vehicles for Our Growth, Learn to See What Is in Plain Sight and Leverage Your Feelings to Find Your Authentic Self. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

“Humans are the most violent and the most compassionate creatures on Earth, the most destructive and the most creative” the commentator said. I was watching a short video about what animals think and feel and it concluded that all animals do think and feel to an extent; it’s just that humans are more extreme.

If I dwell on the atrocities that have and still do occur among humans, it pierces my heart and makes me feel small and helpless. But if I spend time focusing on compassion and creativity; I feel that the whole world within me opens up to a brighter and better future, because it helps me be more present in the world instead of enslaved to my past.

Shauna Shapiro talked about this very issue in a podcast I was listening to this week, about having an attitude of kindness and curiosity to allow the parts of the brain, that increase our motivation to learn and create more of an open perspective, to function freely.

In contrast, she pointed out that when we get stressed we shuttle resources from learning and being open and receptive to survival pathways (the fight, flight, freeze, faint responses) and we are unable to learn. Here are the words that resonated for me:

“Really, when it comes down to this basic understanding of how we learn, I think this is why our educational systems, parenting systems and many others have failed, we learn when we feel safe and interested, and that is the kind of internal environment I want to help people create for themselves.”

This, I believe, is the very way to make a positive difference in the world today. And it is no more obvious than in our closest relationships. Shauna Shapiro mentions parenting and, as a parent of two young children, that certainly rings true. As I’ve often quoted, in the words of Dr Gabor Maté:

“It is often not our children’s behaviour, but our inability to tolerate their negative responses that creates difficulties. The only thing the parent needs to gain control over is our own anxiety and lack of self control.”

In Reclaim the Sovereignty of Your Soul I conclude “The anxiety we feel as parents in response to our children’s negative reactions, is the same anxiety we felt as a result our own parent’s reactions.”

But the same is true in our other relationships. James Redfield’s model of the control strategies that we each develop in order to stop others draining our energy is summarised in Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation.

For example, I noticed how defensive I got this week when my partner tried to talk to me about how he was feeling. Rather than feeling safe and open to really hearing him, I automatically sprang into a mode that felt nothing short of pull up the drawbridge, secure the perimeter and ready the cannons.

I then noticed how this pattern, rather like a blame game of tennis going back and forth, was reinforcing the patterns from our respective childhoods. To use James Redfield’s Interrogator archetype, he says if a child is constantly questioned, criticized, nagged and faults found, it makes the child self conscious and erodes their confidence.

As I grew, I learned how not to let my energy be drained in this way and, instead, refuted each criticism admirably, tussling to maintain an even field or win the upper hand. However, on the inside, the criticism ate me up, which is why I became such an approval seeker (see I Am a Recovering Approval Seeker and Control Freak).

My partner has his own demons, but none of these are really the fault of our parents, these patterns have been repeating subconsciously for generations. I think it is highly unlikely there is a person alive today who is not dealing with some version of this. In fact, I would bet that beneath the mask of history’s most vile monsters and egotistical maniacs is a small boy or girl who is hurt.

What makes this time in history different, I believe, is that many people are becoming aware of the roots of our shame and insecurities. This is a time in which I am free to explore taking different roads of action in my closest relationships.

Learning to feel safe and curious is a process. Certainly my kids don’t shy away from blaming me for everything in their life they are unhappy about, and I often feel my partner is not far behind them. At what point did I become an emotional dumping ground I wonder? This too is an unhealthy pattern pointing to a need for healing within me.

While I’ve discovered The People Who Hurt Us Are Vehicles for Our Growth, I also find that most people are still quick to blame others if they are unhappy; few seem to take responsibility for their own growth. It does seem a tad unfair that I’m taking responsibility for my own thoughts and feelings, rather than blaming others, and at the same time having others blame me for their woes.

However, playing boo hoo is not going to serve me nor help me move forwards. As I wrote about in Whose Energy Is This Anyway? Stop Taking on Board How Others Are Feeling I am learning to notice when I’m taking on others’ negative energy, and ways in which to deflect their own feelings back to them. My old patterns won’t die overnight, but they are getting more recognizable.

Knowing these for what they are gives me a greater sense of safety, and being interested in what others are thinking and how they are feeling, creates a sense of compassion for them as I gain more clarity on their deeper issues and realise we’re all tussling with the same things.

That does not mean I have to accept blame from others. As Buddha said, if you give me a gift and I don’t accept it, it is still yours. Therefore, if you are angry, resentful or frustrated at me, it really is up to me to decide whether or not to get insulted and angry in return.

In fact the gift I recognise is that on some level I am still blaming myself as I did when I was a child, creating this constant need to be perfect and not elicit any criticism. I am quick to defend externally and quick to accept internally.

So I have to look at each thing directed at me and be curious about whether this is something I need to take accountability for, or is this something that is about me learning to love myself more, to have self compassion.

If we can each begin to recognise our patterns of thought and behaviour and regard them with curiosity and self compassion, we will slowly start to change the patterns of behaviour we reflect into the world. Won’t it be fabulous to hear far more compelling tales of compassion from our species than violence, and see many more examples of creativity than destruction? Now that is a world we can thrive in.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy What Do You Want The Prevailing Global Culture to Look Like?, We Can Live in Harmony. How Can I Create a Better World?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 had been watching a video on the topic of people pleasing last week, and having healthy boundaries, and was thinking I was less of a people pleaser (in the sense of saying yes to them when I really want to say no) and more of an approval seeker.

Although I will make the decision to say yes to me, I often explain my rationale, I want people to approve my right to make my own decision, whether they agree with the actual decision or not is unimportant. I’m like a dog with a bone. In fact I recall someone describing my use of words as both a gift and curse. She likened me using explanations like using a drug, and feeding others on that drug. 

I have a clear understanding of where this comes from. As a child I, like most people, was taught that what I wanted was less important than what others wanted for or from me. There were punishments for disobeying or misbehaving, and so – being strong willed and persistent - the coping mechanism I developed was to try to persuade (generally my parents, then later teachers, coaches, employers and partners) through logical argument.

This need for approval could also be called a need for validation. After pondering this I serendipitously got sent a short video called Validation. It’s quite cool, a great little pick me up and reminder that we each have amazing and unique qualities that we would do well to focus on. It does, however, perpetuate this idea of other people validating us before we can be happy.

As I said in The Magic of Those Who Believe in You, those people who have and do lift me up in life are truly magical; I need the cheerleaders for sure. But what about those others, the ones I love and who love me, who may want the best for me, but are limited by their own horizons?

Marlena Tillhon-Haslam says “The way you treat yourself and how you let others treat you shows how much or how little you really value yourself. So notice the standards you set. Notice what you tolerate. This will tell you whether or not you value yourself.”

I notice. As someone who firmly believes that there is no one right way for everyone, that we all have our own opinions and priorities, I long to have my own beliefs and priorities respected. But I have tolerated too much.

From those closest to me, I have tolerated my beliefs about healthcare being derided; I have tolerated my prioritised spending on self care appointments being resented and vilified; I have tolerated my parenting being heavily criticized; I have tolerated demeaning (so called) jokes. I could go on. These are the things that send me into approval seeking mode.

The initial phases of recognition and recovery are clunky. I blurt things out, I talk too much, I feel tears coming and I feel totally vulnerable. But I reclaim the ground my soul is calling me to stand upon.

I have not been perfect either. Dorothy Law Nolte said a child who is constantly criticised learns to condemn, and it’s a habit I notice I step into when I’m feeling resentful, underappreciated and/or overwhelmed; I want to step away from doing it.  I have also done a lot of work on learning from my anger as I wrote about Let Anger Be Your Teacher While Learning to Become Its Master.

But one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced is in trying to save others from themselves. Even though I know I can’t, and should not, I’m adept at seeing ten steps ahead and emotionally attuned to others.
As a result I often try to smooth the way as much as possible, which can backfire, leaving those I’m trying to help feel resentful and me feeling underappreciated for my effort when I should have left well alone in the first place.

While I’ve generally backed away from doing this with other people, certainly around my kids I’m still in that mode. Their tired, emotional meltdowns feel emotionally unsafe because they reverberate with the meltdowns I experienced from adults around me growing up.

Just this morning my youngest daughter, who hasn’t been sleeping well (she is a bit anxious about returning to school), told me she didn’t want to go anywhere today because she is too tired. Ten minutes later she had a big meltdown because I said she couldn’t go on a long bike ride with her dad in a forest that is quite some distance from here.

I knew my partner could really do with a big ride on his own to relax which she is not capable of doing at her age. Based on my experience, I imagined by the time they arrived at the forest after the long drive she wouldn’t even want to actually ride, which would frustrate the heck out of her dad.

Anyway, he had said yes to her, so I wondered why I was even standing in the way of this valuable experience for both of them.  Sure, tomorrow when I’m trying to get her back to school after the long summer break, her tired state will undoubtedly add to the intensity, but tomorrow is another day. She is better being in the forest riding with her dad than here fighting with her sister.

Rather than anticipating others’ needs and trying to smooth the way, I know it is better for me to step the heck out of the way and allow them to learn from their own experience.

But I also honour and recognise the child in me who, as one friend says, needed to ensure they weren’t swallowed up by a world that pressed in on them too much. There is a deep need to belong and be seen and yet a deep fear of belonging and being seen also.

I started to write these articles almost five years age in an attempt to gain clarity and confidence about who I am, and it has given me that. But there was also a part of me using them initially as a way to seek approval for the things I believe in.

Over time it has made it easier to speak my truth, because I now have more clarity and confidence in what that actually is rather than just feeling muddled. Nowadays writing these has become a disciplined way for me to reflect on what life is teaching me in the moment.

As Eckhart Tolle says, “For presence to become deeply rooted, it must be tested in the fire of relationships.” As I continue I create stronger boundaries and slowly start to see changes in how those around me treat me, and how I treat them, I know how perfectly on point these lessons are.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy What Happens When You Accept Yourself And Stop Seeking Approval? And My Needs versus Yours. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Earlier this year, when listening to a talk by Carol Look, I did a simple exercise to define what success would look like for me. Being a mum of two school age children, top of my list was the ability to centre myself and find calm amid the storms. More than anything, I wanted my words and behaviours to uplift and inspire rather than cut and criticize.

I have found that one of the hardest things to shake, though, is old patterns of behaviour. It’s been relatively easy to understand intellectually why I might react to someone (or a situation) in a certain way given my entry, upbringing and indoctrination into society; even achieving conscious awareness of my reactions in the moment has been possible with regular meditation and practice.

However, the desire to change only took me so far; willpower and patience oftentimes ran out and old patterns kicked in. Conscious awareness of the often incongruence between my reactions and behaviours and the desire I hold within me for something different only increased my pain.

What has really taken me across the final stretch to lasting change is accountability. In my case, I’m doing this work for my kids and myself, but it benefits every other relationship I have and will have.
In her book Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids Dr Laura Markham says “How can you expect a child to learn to control his own emotions if you don’t control yours? … If you were yelled at, it takes tremendous work not to yell…it’s not rocket science, it takes about three months.”

I followed her recommendation and created a tick sheet for myself that was titled “I will speak respectfully to my children”. They get to decide each day if I get a tick or a cross, and I’m glad to say the result so far is overwhelmingly ticks. That said, I am human and expect there will no doubt be occasions where I’m not a model of emotional regulation.

By declaring my intention and following through with the daily check in, it’s given the kids both the comfort of knowing that their mum at least means well and the permission to pick me up on any reactions that don’t match with the intention I set.

What I’ve noticed, is that the years of practicing meditation and becoming consciously aware of my thoughts and feelings in the moment have paid dividends. I am able to catch myself when I’m becoming exasperated and losing patience.

I remember that my body is starting to kick into flight or flight mode only because of its association with the fears of my childhood. Being late, for example, is not akin to a tiger rushing at me, even though it rendered punishments in my early years and thus created this pattern of anxiety. This is the science and biology of entraining emotional regulation and new reactions; I have to create new pathways of response.

I find my best course of action is to stay connected to the kids rather than spin off into the reactions that long since became automated. I get involved if we are late, calmly helping them to get ready, reminding myself the world will not collapse and I will suffer no serious consequence if we do, in fact, end up being late on that particular occasion.

Accountability has helped me to clarify my intentions in my relationship with the children, and it has helped me to achieve success in that as the new norm. In going through this process day in and day out with my kids, it’s inevitably helped me in all my other relationships too, because I’m now practicing a pause before reacting.

And the silver lining? Because it was top of my list in terms of what success would look like in my life, it’s brought me both a sense of meaningful achievement and a sweet, blissful peace.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy 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 few weeks ago I was listening to an extremely moving TEDx talk by Mataio Brown whose own childhood had been less than idyllic. He said “Your childhood trauma is not your fault, but your healing is your responsibility” and my heart sang loudly in response; I feel this speaks to the very core of what is needed to evolve individually and collectively right now.

I deliberated for quite a while about including the word trauma after childhood in the title but decided to leave it out. In my experience, people tend to associate the word trauma with things like physical and sexual abuse, warfare and life threatening illnesses to name a few. While these are unarguably traumatic and horrendous, most of us experience emotional and psychological trauma on some level that comes as part of a normal childhood. 

This is often caused completely subconsciously by well meaning parents, who themselves have grown in a form reflecting their own childhood. However, I feel this is an era where are becoming aware of these cycles and have a responsibility to break them.

Trauma can arise from any event or situation that overwhelms a person’s ability to cope. This can range from issues with the way a parents interacts, to childhood illnesses, injuries and accidents, developmental trauma, exposure to violence and chronic stress to name a few.

A trauma is a deeply distressing or disturbing experience, so it makes sense to me that –  especially as helpless babies and young infants beginning to interact with the world – it would be traumatizing to feel rejected in any way. For example, Dr Gabor Mate talks about certain disruptions in the attachment process leading to developmental trauma.

To put that in plain English, I am talking about the job I might have to go to, which places my attention elsewhere, not on my infant seeking far more connection than I am able to give him or her. Or the constant distraction of a device and countless other things in this day and age when there is far more screaming for my attention than I am capable of giving.

Then there are the inherited patterns of behaviour in our parents that we react to, and unwittingly develop patterns in response to. These are essential for our survival in childhood but become unhealthy patterns later in life, and will certainly pass on unless we take action.

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

• Intimidator’s 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.
• Interrogator’s constantly question, criticize, nag and find fault, making others self conscious and eroding their confidence.
• Aloof’s 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 or 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.

To break the cycle I have to become aware of the strategies I employ, and those being used by others around me. As James Redfield’s characters say, a person cannot play these strategies unless we play the matching drama. While the answer lies in becoming a more detached observer of our own interactions, rather than getting pulled into the drama, and calling out what is actually happening, this is something that requires learning and practicing new skills that I will talk about later.

While I found these archetypes of how humans interact exceptionally useful, Jen Peters points out the many ways in which unhealed childhood trauma manifests:

• Fixing others
• People pleasing
• Co-dependency
• External validation
• Living on high alert
• Fear of abandonment
• De-prioritising one’s own needs
• Need to prove one’s self
• Tolerating abusive behaviour
• Attracting narcissistic partners
• Difficulty setting boundaries

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it gives an indication of the common types of ways in which childhood trauma can limit us in adulthood if we let it.

Yet when I take responsibility for my shortcomings and seek to heal them, I break a cycle that has been repeating uninterrupted for thousands of years. I become less encumbered, more connected, happier and more able to fulfill my potential. I become the very best version of me, and the best partner, best mum, best friend, best sister, the best of me reflects into all my relationships.

Circling back to the inspirational Mataio Brown telling his story in the TEDx talk, whose first memory of Christmas was as a three year old witnessing his father beat his mother half to death with the Christmas tree, he now says this of his father "That man who was my childhood monster, I now see his pain and loving him releases me to be the father for my children that I wanted".

This is an excellent example of what Tony Robbins means when he says “Heal the boy and the man will appear”. Mataio could have become another generation of monster, or he could have played the Poor Me drama his whole life, instead he now campaigns with the slogan "She is not your rehab” and advocates for awareness and a healthier approach to childhood trauma.

I agree wholeheartedly, and I also think you could easily widen the scope in the broader sense of trauma and say “your partner/your children are not your rehabilitation centre". As I’ve said before, whether psychologically, emotionally or physically The People Who Hurt Us Are Vehicles for Our Growth.

There are many things in this world that need to change: poverty, having access to education for all and the way we treat the planet to name a few of the big ones. But I am swimming upstream until I take responsibility for my own healing.

I realised life is not about having, life is about being, being who I truly am; not the misshapen version I’d become. Like most people, I would go to work to just exist, albeit it in a nicer lifestyle than that which I’d grown up in. It is easy to get distracted by the glittery baubles of day to day living, but they soon lose their sparkle yet require the money wheel to keep spinning anyway.

Becoming the observer of my own life, consciously aware of what is really tripping me up, is one of the most fundamental skills I have learned; and that is a whole lot easier when I take regular time out to meditate. The other skill that helps me take ownership of my part in all of it, is building my energy through appreciation of the beauty and awe of intelligent design that abounds on this planet; in people, animals and our environment.

The alternative, the default setting we have developed, is to steal energy from others, winning points in rounds of interactions.  It is some time since Newton told us that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Well, here it is, this is what our actions and reactions among each other have come to look like after generations of just living on the wheel, acting and reacting subconsciously.

There are many ways to heal childhood trauma, but the common thread between most that are successful is to recognise and learn from the emotions we have locked inside us. My own approach has been to deal with one issue at a time, starting with whatever is my biggest block or trigger in the moment, including what’s happening on a physical level with my body.

I sometimes self heal using techniques and practices I’ve learned like The Completion Process, other times I use healthcare practitioners to help. I have some trusted confidantes that willingly dive into issues with me when they are raw and we keep each other honest, looking for the lessons rather than to blame, and I have a mentor that keeps me focused on the big picture.

This is not easy, it is not quick work, but it is everything.

Be the you that you are destined to become, you are not just destined to take from this Earth and provide for your family, get off that wheel. Until you feel connected to yourself you are cut off from your connection to everything else. You are here to be somebody, so wake up and be that person, this world needs you.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy some of my other articles like: Embody Your Spirituality – a Healing Journey, Learn to See What Is in Plain Sight, Leverage Your Feelings to Find Your Authentic Self, Be an Evolutionary (Rather Than a Revolutionary). To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

Anger, I’ve found, is a double edged sword. On one side it has the ability to damage and destroy relationships, on the other it has the ability to open wounds and allow deep healing and understanding to take place.

Behind this sits the other important double aspect of anger. There is the part that demands action as the feeling of it flows through the body, triggering it into flight of fight mode; it is this aspect that can destroy lives and, to avoid this, I must master my response to its call.

Then there is the other aspect that is pointing to deeper learning. “The emotion arises in direct response to a perception that a personal (often subconscious) boundary is being challenged” says Teal Swan, “whether it’s physical, mental or emotional”. Anger is essentially the fear of pain, which is why it triggers our flight or fight response.

Uncovering and challenging both my fears and boundaries has much to teach in the quest for self awareness, growth and authenticity. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Gary Zukov relates “Authentic power is the ability to distinguish within you the difference between love and fear, and choose love no matter what it happening inside of you or outside of you.”

I find this can be pretty challenging when it comes to anger, because that adrenaline coursing through my veins wants me to act in defense of my fears. To enable me to act with authentic power, I think there are three steps:

• Set myself up for success
• Use the urge to act in my favour
• Look for the lessons

 
Set Myself up for Success

Anger is an emotion that has cropped up in all aspects of my life, particularly in relationships and the workplace, but nothing has made things clearer to me than becoming a parent because nothing has confronted me as much.

I’m with Alfie Kohn when he says “Even before I had children, I knew that being a parent was going to be challenging as well as rewarding. But I didn’t really know. I didn’t know how exhausted it was possible to become, or how clueless it was possible to feel, or how, each time I reached the end of my rope, I would somehow have to find more rope”.

I was sharing with some friends one of those moments where I ran out of rope and started yelling at my daughter for her refusal to get in the car this week. We started talking about the things that trigger us into yelling at our kids. One said straight away: sibling fighting, having to repeat herself endlessly to get simple tasks done, and people (not just the kids) not tidying up after themselves. That seemed like a pretty familiar list to me.

But as I thought about it, I was also aware that I generally only lose it if I’m not putting my whole attention on what is happening in front of me. So to Eckhart Tolle’s point, presence helps calm the emotional seas, stopping these situations of overwhelm building to start with.

Then I realised it’s not always possible to be fully present when I’m looking after the kids. Food needs prepared, clothes need washed and there are a whole host of other tasks that need to be attended to aside of the “mum, can you just…” demands.

A practice that I have used before, that helps tremendously though, is to give my unadulterated presence to each of my kids for ten to fifteen minutes each day, in the same way I do for myself when I do my daily meditation. I figure if I make this a regular thing it should have the same cumulative effect as meditation and help me to become more mindful in the difficult moments.

But while I can set myself up for success more often, there will be moments of anger in my life because my personal boundaries are still likely to get triggered or overstepped; both by little people who have limited awareness that others also have needs and wants and by adults who, frankly, have a somewhat traumatic relationship with their own.

Use the Urge to Act in My Favour
 
So how best to deal with that anger in the moment so as not to damage my relationships? Strategies I’ve tried - like counting to ten, screaming to let go of the energy, pounding a pillow - were ineffective. I’d always revert to yelling – and often it would get misdirected to those in the home if I’d had to suppress it elsewhere.
 
Recently, watching the docu-series Transcendence I was reminded about the mechanics of our flight or fight system, and how amazing it is when we are actually in mortal danger. But by constantly triggering it when the threat is not imminent or mortal, it stands in the way of my ability to look objectively at what is happening and live my best life.
 
Dr Libby Weaver’s advice is, as soon as we become aware of being in flight or fight mode, start to focus on our breathing. Slow it down, take belly breaths in and extend our exhalation. This is an effective way to calm our system and invoke the parasympathetic nervous system, from where we can operate more effectively. Here are some other methods that also work to soothe the nervous system.

Look for the Lessons

Once I’ve done that, I can take a real look at the anger and what it has to teach.

The first thing to notice is my own relationship with anger itself. I acknowledge that, despite my own disgust at the way I’ve expressed it on many an occasion, it did once serve a purpose. As a little girl taunted by classmates all the way home one day, when ignoring them hadn’t worked, exploding in verbal response and shoving a girl out of my personal space brokered no further issues.

Hearing my mother yelling in our house was a daily occurrence when I was growing up, and talking back a punishable offence. Finally, at fifteen, the dam broke and I retaliated after being slapped on my face and called a name. It served me to slap her right back and correct her, it stopped any further physical punishment (normal in those days) but there were many years of yelling and arguments that followed.

Having never really learned a more healthy way to express my anger, I have often felt disgusted at myself for not being able to express it better. And yet I also feel resistance within me to letting go of the part of me that expresses my anger in this way because the only experience I have of that is to accept powerlessness and let others walk all over me, something the child within vowed would never be an option again.

If you’ve ever heard the phrase “it’s always darkest just before dawn”, my dawning has arrived with the new awareness that I am not that child any more, and if I don’t want to perpetuate the same cycle with my own kids (which I don’t), it’s time to adopt a new strategy.

And aside of my awareness about the relationship with anger itself, this has also given me a fresh perspective on any issues that trigger my anger. There is always a lesson within that helps to understand and get to know the more authentic me.

So what is your relationship with anger? How do you express it and could you use it to fuel you towards a more authentic life?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may also enjoy Base Your Actions on Love Not Fear and What Can Your Anger Teach You About Your Gifts? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

Let’s start with something more normal, here is an example of a scenario that demonstrates the opposite of unencumbered and work on how to release it…

It’s Sunday morning here, a beautiful sunny (but cold) Winter’s day in the Southern Hemisphere.

Having been at home for ten days straight with sick kids, who are now recovering from a nasty flu virus (and as any parent knows the only thing worse than sick kids are kids on the mend but not back to full strength), I headed out to the pool for a swim this morning before my partner left for work.

As the sun was coming up, it was four degrees and the (outdoor) pool looked very atmospheric with steam coming off the top. I chuckled as I noticed two ladies doing aqua jogging were both wearing big matching woolly hats as they chatted and waded.

Swimming up and down I found my bliss, and returned home feeling refreshed and ready for the day.

My six-year-old was laid on the couch and immediately started asking if she could watch TV. In our house, device time is limited to late afternoon/early evening on a weekend. But with having been sick the kids have watched a lot of TV this last week. “Later” I said and tried to distract her by focusing on what she might want for breakfast.

This was an ineffective strategy, my daughter – who her teacher had just described as “a ray of radiant sunshine” in her end of term report – looked like an incoming storm that quickly whipped up into a tornado.

Soon that tornado was hurling abuse and objects in my direction. And as Dr Gabor Maté reminds us “it is not our children’s behaviour but our inability to tolerate their negative responses that creates the greatest difficulties.” Indeed.

My response wasn’t pretty, what was already in play was somewhere in the region of a category two (extremely dangerous) hurricane, my inner child was more than a match for that storm, she was whipping up that scale and turning this thing into a category three or four.

Here’s the thing, being on the journey to me – the reclamation of my soul –means recognizing all the junk in my trunk so to speak.

This junk identified itself very clearly as I heard myself scream “I had to put up with being yelled at and hit my whole childhood, I will not put up with the same aggression as a parent, it’s not going to happen.”

Simultaneously I’m recognizing that in reaction to my trauma, I’m now traumatising my daughter, so immediately remorse set in. The thing I could find instant gratitude for however is that I recognise it, I’m not unconsciously repeating a pattern, I’m aware of it – I am aware of something that is weighing me down.

As I often say, there was nothing particularly remarkable about my childhood, as a child of the seventies in western Scotland, it was a normal thing to be yelled at, to be smacked if I did something bad and to be punished in the same way in the school system. It was normal so I don’t think of it as abuse and I don’t blame my parents for the way they acted as they were doing what they thought was best.

What I do remember from my childhood was suppressing my anger, I used to often stomp up to my room (after being told what to do or told off) and I’d be saying under my breath all the things I really wanted to say to my parents. Then I’d look around for things to throw but, after quickly determining that anything broken would cause me even more pain, I’d often just punch the concrete wall.

And even though I don’t remember feeling traumatized (though I probably did when this pattern began as infant me started to fiddle with the buttons on the washing machine and get my knuckles rapped), there is absolutely no doubt trauma occurred.

Do you know how I know? The force of my reaction to my daughter is how I know, I could literally feel the force of the sound and shock waves moving through me and hurtling towards her. The trauma I can feel from that reaction is still reverberating in my body, so how do I get rid of it?

It’s got nothing to do with the other person, my daughter has already forgiven me and moved on, she knows violence towards me triggers me and she knows why, she also knows that I want and encourage her to express (rather than suppress) her feelings, but it’s not okay to express them violently.

Getting rid of an activated emotion that has years of momentum probably requires a multipronged approach. As I said in Change Unhealthy Reactions there is a moment, it is fleeting but it’s pivotal, it’s my choice point. If I can catch myself in the act, I can change my response. Equally there has to be compassion for myself.

I understand why my patience was worn thin; it’s been a stressful week. I’m not proud of my reaction, but it’s not going to serve me to beat myself up either – that is like further beating the inner child who wanted to be heard in that moment.

There are lots of approaches to inner child work, and its’ become so clichéd over the years. It made me laugh when social scientist Brené Brown was talking about her own journey in being vulnerable and brave, and telling her counselor that she was there to do the work but “can we skip all that childhood stuff”.

There is no skipping it; it’s been hardwired in there. In the docu-series Transcendence Josh Axe talks about how most people aren’t aware certain emotions cause disease in specific organs. For example, emotions of fear affect the reproductive organs, the kidneys and adrenals. Think about a child getting really scared and they wet themselves. Why? Fear directly affects the bladder and the kidneys.

As I could feel those emotions ripping through my system this morning, I am left in no doubt there decades of junk still in the trunk to clear out. Inner child work is essential in order to give my inner child her time to speak her truth, to be heard, understood and held. Then it’s time to speak my now truth, as an adult that does not need to tolerate violence of any kind towards me, nor to project it back to others in defence. I deserve kindness and so do you.

What is also interesting is the amount of blockages in my system that relates to old stuff that is not even mine any more. My chiropractor/applied kinesiologist/nutritionalist/emotional therapist (she is even more holistic than all of that), in pursuit of the cause of my shoulder pain, uncovered that my lymph system wasn’t functioning well due to a blockage in my ileocecal value in the digestive system.

The emotions that were creating this blockage were feelings of powerlessness: lacking strength, resigned to fate, no longer caring, expecting to fail, feeling alone, misunderstood and distant. These are not emotions currently activated within me, in fact I’d say based on the location (where my mum had a tumour) they are not even my emotions as I have never resigned myself to fate in anything other than a positive way, but I recognise the feelings from the year mum slipped away from us.

All I can tell you is that, after releasing these emotions with some Bach remedies and physical work on that area around my colon, my shoulder now feels freer than it has in a long time.

It’s also like the example I mentioned in Value Your Uniqueness of becoming aware of all the judgmental thoughts in my head and recognizing them as belonging to my mum when I was a child.

One of my enduring memories was the mortification I used to feel taking public transport with mum who used to loudly disapprove of various people’s behaviour without actually addressing them directly. What I used to do was think of all the reasons why they may, in fact, be behaving like that. That is my true voice, the one who sees a broader picture and understands that what I perceive may not be the truth. In fairness, it wasn’t even my mum’s voice as she matured; it was a moment in time that has gotten stuck in a loop in my head.

​Releasing these thoughts and emotions and finding kinder thoughts is really the route to becoming unencumbered. It’s an active process that requires awareness and persistence.

Imagine the feeling of being free of all fear, anger, anxiety, grief and worries? That is the sovereignty of your soul. Imagine a world of people who are in the pursuit of that? I believe that is where we are headed, and it starts with the likes of you and I setting a goal to be unencumbered and live our best life.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Build a Healthy Self Concept. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

A friend reintroduced me to this word sovereignty recently, something I hadn’t really associated with much aside of the Royal Family as I was growing up. However she was using it in the context of our self-rule, our freedom to make our own choices.
I really like this because for too long I gave away my choices to others, making the necessary choices I had to make as a young child dependent on the adults around me for support and survival, instead of honoring the choices that felt right for me. This, as it does for most of us, become the way I operated in the world. Rules became something I automatically adhered to; deference to authority was a mark of respect.

Even those around me that I saw rebel in many ways, still carried far more deference to the power outside themselves than the power within than they recognised. Those early years of punishment and reward for desirable and undesirable behaviour leave their marks subconsciously on our sense of self acceptance.

As I commented to someone yesterday, we all swim in a soup of early trauma, whether consciously or unconsciously. There are very few people in this world who operate in clear line of sight and complete connection to their authentic selves. 

However, that decision to clear the clutter from the path, to regain sight of who we truly are, is completely within our control and it’s been my driving mission now for a good few years. When I birthed my children, I thought about what kind of parent I wanted to be and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I passionately want them to be free to be who they are.

Note that passion does not translate to being free to run amok and do as they like. I’m talking about freedom of expression, and freedom to become consciously aware of the authentic self, rather than one swathed in the shroud of everyone else’s beliefs and desires.

That passion was something I recognised when I was listening to a podcast of Tami Simon interviewing Dr Tererai Trent last week. Dr Trent has an amazing story, having been born into an oppressive colonial society in rural Zimbabwe only a few years before I was born. The oppression that she endured in her circumstances separated us by more than just distance, but the passion she felt united us.

Tererai came from generations of women silenced because of their gender. Held back from even the most basic education, which was her greatest desire, she was instead married off young in exchange for a cow. Yet her remarkable story about how she chased (and claimed) her dream is among the most moving I have heard in a while.

In the process of pursuing her dreams there were desperate times, times when she wasn’t even able to feed her children, times when she wanted to give up and go home. When asked why she didn’t she said simply “I didn’t want to pass on the baton (of women silenced because of their gender) to my daughters.” It brought tears to my eyes.

Her journey and her baton are quite different to mine, but the burning desire for oppression to end is the same.My journey is also one of liberation, reclaiming the sovereignty of my true self and preserving that of my children, at least within their own home.  The baton is painful to hold onto because, having embarked on the journey to authenticity, I can attest that all the while the same neurons still fire as they learned to in childhood, so the same thought patterns play out.

The anxiety we feel as parents in response to our children’s negative reactions, is the same anxiety we felt as a result our own parent’s reactions. We therefore feel a pull to react as our parent’s reacted “obey me or else”. But I will keep a hold of that baton until it turns to dust as each fragmented part of me becomes integrated.

It’s a challenge being confronted by children who have all these big feelings and are learning to express them in a world that is still controlled by the adults around them. Like last weekend my daughter was asked to sit up at the kitchen bench to eat her cornflakes. But it was the straw that broke the camel’s back after a tiring week at school, her reaction was nothing short of instant and unadulterated rage.

She screamed, roared and yelled so sincerely any passerby would be forgiven for thinking this was a life and death play for the sovereignty of her soul, which she obviously felt it was, rather than a request to sit at the kitchen bench while eating. Any attempt at saying anything was like adding fuel to the raging inferno, her rational mind gone as she looked around for things to destroy, including the source of her throttle, me.

As I stood there in that impossible moment between past and future, every fibre within me wanting to react strongly to this little girl’s fury, matching fire with fire, I did not. Instead I let out the energy of my frustration with a guttural scream and withdrew.In that instant, Dr Gabor Maté’s words were never so true. “It is often not our children’s behaviour, but our inability to tolerate their negative responses that creates difficulties. The only thing the parent needs to gain control over is our own anxiety and lack of self control.”

In frustration I inwardly wished I had never embarked on this journey with my kids, I wished the kids just did as they were darn well told. The thoughts that accompanied it were the same thoughts I heard my own mother express, a jabbering chunter about ungrateful kids who were acting maliciously.

Then Dr Tererai Trent came to my mind “I did not want to pass on the baton to my daughters” and gave me the strength and clarity I needed in that moment to not react to fire with fire, instead I held still and observed as that fire, bereft of fuel, burned out.My purpose in life could not be clearer. Just as Dr Trent is now building schools in Zimbabwe that allow all the local children to attend, giving girls access to education, I am on a mission to reclaim the sovereignty of my soul, and my children’s and help others do the same.

Regardless of the constraints we find upon us, allow them to fuel your passion towards your own authenticity,
the reclaiming of your true self. For it is that person who came to live in this world, and that person we need to create a more authentic world to live in.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Looking Back to See the Clues to Your Destiny and  Build a Healthy Self Concept. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Would your kids, niece or nephew, or anyone else look at you and think you were happy? Would they aspire to a life like yours? Are you happy?

I recently asked an older teenager whether there was anything she was particularly looking forward to in her future years. Her response was – since she doesn’t want kids – she can’t really see past forty (as in, nothing appealed beyond that age).

It made me think about whether those of us past forty make it look attractive in any way. I don’t mean whether we think we are happy, that was my first (and likely defensive) thought pattern. I started to think about my life, the things I’m grateful for and found that I was almost going through this process of persuasion to an extent, feeling I ought to be happy because my life is pretty great.

What I mean is whether I actually feel happy most of the time and therefore project happiness to those around me? If I could hook up a mood-o-meter that took a pulse check on how I was feeling every few minutes throughout the day, I thought about where I’d sit on the scales:

• Mostly stressed or relaxed?
• Mostly distracted or present?
• Mostly negative or positive?
• Mostly unhappy or happy?

And is happy or unhappy a combination of the first three? Certainly they seem like fairly good indicators. There are lots of other categories I could probably name, but these ones provide enough contrast to help me see that – while I still have room for growth - I’ve made a definite shift towards the descriptions on the right these last few years.

What has created the shift for me is tuning into what I’m thinking and feeling more often.
When I think of my life before conscious awareness of my thoughts and feelings, ouch, it was ugly and I was most definitely not happy. I can totally see why someone like me, just running on default, wasn’t radiating anything anyone else would have aspired to.

Like most people, I was all wadded up with thoughts and beliefs that I had inherited from my childhood. Over the years these thoughts and beliefs that had once served a purpose (usually they were keeping me in the good books of adults around me) were no longer serving me at all. The true gift of my adulthood has been the space and freedom to explore who I am, and what I truly think and feel about things.

Just fifteen minutes a day meditating has given me an increasingly conscious awareness of my thoughts and feelings in many given moments, so it’s created a lot of positive change in my life. That said, while it would be great to be relaxed, present, positive, and radiate peace and contentment all the time, I do still get tripped up.

For example, with chores to be done around the house, especially at breakfast or dinner time, there is no doubt my kids get little attention as I juggle between their chatter or requests and preparing food or clearing up, while also often managing other communication with the adults in my life at the same time.

Making it through the period between school pick up and the kids’ bedtime in a relaxed mood can be challenging to say the least. I often find myself saying to the kids “I can only focus on one thing at a time” or “how many pairs of hands do I have?”

It is often said women can multitask, but I find if I’m trying to split my attention is creates tension. And, although I am an optimistic person, my kids certainly hear the word “no” on an all too frequent basis.

So as I contemplate this outside-in view of whether I am any kind of a role model for happiness, it is a bit of wake up call. Even though my life has changed considerably, my kids still get the best and worst of me. It’s obvious that there are still pinch points in my day that don’t feel so great because I get overwhelmed.

This is never truer than when I am mulling over something that happened and dwelling on what I should have done (or what I wished someone else would have done) or I’m thinking about something like imminent chores and their delicately balanced sequence in order to meet some deadline like getting the kids to school or to bed.

Regurgitating the past and obsessing about the future are hard habits to break I find, despite knowing that things always work out and – most often – in ways I could never have planned. Today is yesterday’s dreams, like the beautiful family that I dreamed of – striven for – for many years. It wasn’t the obsessing and planning and worrying that got me there, instead it was a series of unplanned moments that I would call serendipities or coincidences that finally brought it all about.

I have a lifetime full of examples like that, the unforeseen things that happened in the lead up to landing jobs, or meeting partners, or other opportunities. In spite of these examples I often forget all about them and  obsess, worrying about what I should be doing in order to make things happen; noticing things aren’t where I’d like them to be, rather than just trusting a dream will work out when I take inspired steps as they arise.

The answer, then, seems to lie in continuing to practice conscious awareness of my thoughts so I can:

• remind myself to let go of the need to do just for the sake of activity rather than inspired progress, recalling the examples of the things that have taken care of themselves in the past.
• focus on honouring what I say to my kids “do one thing at a time” and give that thing my full attention.

I know a lot of people feel like they’ve tried and failed at meditation because they keep thinking. But I have discovered that noticing my thoughts is actually the point. I have become increasingly aware of how unlikely I am to be either stressed or negative if I can truly bring myself into the present. 

There are a whole host of apps out there to help if you don’t know where to start. Just a quick Google search on the topic immediately brings up suggestions like Headspace, Calm and Smiling Mind, but there are also an abundance of guided meditations on You Tube.

Personally I just sit with my eyes closed in a quiet space for fifteen minutes each day and listen to the sound of nature, constantly refocusing on the sounds as I notice thoughts creeping in that I then let go of.

​Whatever the method, I figure the way to be more happy, and radiate that happiness, is to live more of my life in the moment.

If you can connect more with the present, it will help you become less detracted, more relaxed and more positive – in short, happier. The happier you are within, the more you’ll radiate it outward, and the more infectious that happiness will become. A world infected with happiness, now that does sound attractive!

​If you feel stuck in the weeds and would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

Many years ago now I heard someone recount words of Mother Teresa’s that really stuck with me “I was once asked why I don’t participate in anti-war demonstrations, I said that I will never do that. But as soon as you have a pro-peace rally I’ll be there.”

I was reminded of this as I was reading something similar to my kids this week. They are learning that it is much more powerful to talk about what they do want rather than what they don’t want, yet it is much more common for people to generally focus on the latter.

For example, when we were having people over at New Year’s, I talked to the kids beforehand about a few ground rules as we were expecting to have nine excited children in the house as well as all their parents. My eldest daughter wanted to write the rules down so we could read them to everyone, and the first draft was a no list.

• No playing in the bedrooms
• No leaving the property/garden
• No more than a two or three kids on the trampoline or in the pool at a time

That didn’t sound like much fun to me, so I asked her how we could write a more positive list. We took each one in turn and ended up with:

• Everyone is welcome to play in the lounge and garden areas
• Let’s stay within the property so we know where everyone is
• Let’s take turns to play on the tramp or in the pool with just a few people at a time so everyone can enjoy themselves

I don’t think we came up with the best alternatives possible, but we did manage to turn the action verbs around to create more positive mental pictures of what we did want rather than what we did not want.

That is, of course, the crux of the issue. Words create images in our mind; we can’t help but visualize a green elephant when we read or hear the words “green elephant”.  If I talk about not leaving the property, I can immediately see myself walking away from it.

This imagery makes it harder for us to do the right thing. Our body becomes geared for the action we have created a mental image of, so then we have to work harder to actually do the right things.

It is an eye opening exercise to simply start to noticing this phenomenon in society, it’s pervasive. Becoming aware of my own language is also an interesting experience.

I first really tried to focus on this when the kids just started becoming mobile, so you would think I’d be pretty adept at it now. Yet just this morning when my daughter woke up early I told her “do not get out of bed again please”, instead of just saying “stay in bed please.”

The other aspect of this is – in saying things from a negative standpoint – the receivers constantly feel their sense of freedom being eroded and become more resistant. Whereas when we focus on the more positive language, this is less of an issue.

Like any habit though, awareness is key. I catch myself doing it more and make a conscious effort to change it; especially since I know positive language is far more effective and keeps things flowing.

But it’s not just about positive and negative language in terms of things we should or should not do. My partner is a shocker when it comes to choosing his words. If taken on face value, he is the kind of guy you might peg as chauvinistic, and perhaps a bigot. Yet much of what he says comes more from a compulsion to push people’s buttons.

That said, while he may never have initially had any reason for his prejudices, over the years those words have found their evidence as all words do. If, for example, I think dogs are dirty animals, I will notice those examples around me that support this which is how we develop beliefs. Most of us never stop to question the initial premise as we are often unaware of where it comes from.

As with all of our thinking, it begins in our early childhood. And without any conscious intervention it continues on throughout our life gathering more and more evidence to support it. In my partner’s case I don’t have to look far to see where he inherited his enjoyment of winding people up and his prejudices.

Thankfully though my partner is consciously aware of his prejudices and, on the rare occasions he entertains a more serious conversation on the topic, he displays much more objectivity than his annoying wind-up statements would lead anyone to believe.   

This compulsion to wind people up arose from a frustration in expressing himself, which in recent years was diagnosed as ADHD and possible dyslexia. Often feeling invisible in a social setting because of this struggle to express himself verbally, he took the route of wind up merchant instead.

That said, even though his motivation is to provoke and push people’s buttons, just as in the examples I gave about our New Year’s get together, the words create imagery that is then hard for his brain to get past. So it is really only when the line of thinking is challenged in a non-confrontational way that his thinking opens up.

It is something that is becoming increasing important to him having brought two daughters into the world. He doesn’t want his deliberately provoking and inflammatory comments about females to become their reality.

The kids’ rhyme that says “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me” does not ring true for me. Words can and do have great power. It’s better to offer a gift with kind words than a criticism. Another great quote of Mother Teresa’s is “Kind words can be short and easy to speak but their echoes are truly endless.” The opposite is also true.

So let’s choose our words wisely and have them work for us, rather than against us, supporting us in our best lives.

​With thanks to my partner for letting me share some of his story to help others. If you feel stuck in the weeds and would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Many times I have felt a twinge of failure in this journey we are on together, now is another of those times.
Ideally I would love you to be able to learn what you want, when you want and in the way you want. In truth, you will anyway as it is only experience that teaches. But I’d like to have given you a freedom of scope beyond that which you have.

I know you would not choose to go to school if you had the option. I know one of the options open to us is homeschooling. But then, instead of teaching you to be who you are, I would be sacrificing who I am – and that is not the lesson I intend.

​Like all parents I would like to give you the perfect childhood. But what does that even mean?

Each parent, I think, has some driving force that influences the way they parent. For me it’s about allowing you to be who you are. For others it is about other things, like raising independent children. We are all different.

Allowing you the freedom to unfold as you want to, yet figuring out what that means in a society with many others who feel they have a right to impose their opinion – or worse, control – upon you, is an ongoing process.

I often say that if we lived cut off from society, you would be able to unfold unhindered. Consequences would naturally arise and you would learn and grow. We, however, live in a society of imposed consequences that remove your thinking from the true nature of things.

Like the time I talked to your daycare about the meals they made that you did not want. If we refuse food, it has a natural consequence – hunger. But the daycare chose to impose further consequences designed to make you comply. If you did not eat your meal, they re-presented it at afternoon tea and prohibited you from eating the cakes the others ate.

In this same way, we live in a society that creates parents as upholders of the millions of rules set by others. It creates more reliance on the parenting relationship than you would otherwise have naturally.

The government says you have to attend school between the ages of six and sixteen. The other option is to apply for an exemption and to home school. I have said you can do this when the time comes for college. At that point you will be able to drive your own curriculum and self-learn in a way that will satisfy our government.

In the meantime, you have to go to school. We have chosen the one that is most closely aligned to our values from the options available, but still, it is a square peg in a round hole.

This leaves a hole in my heart, especially when this pathway – that seemed to offer much – does not entirely deliver what I was expecting.

This is life sometimes; we take two steps forwards and one step backward. But what I have learned about holes and backward steps is that I must welcome them.

There is nothing in my past that has not turned out well in the longer run, for the best even.

I think I cannot give you the things I’d like to, but in truth I trust you are being given all that you need.

My own pathway was not one of having freedom to unfold. It was very decidedly of an era that ensured I walked the narrow pathway it prescribed, ‘or else’.

I ate the food I was given. I went to the school I was told to. I learned what I was told to. I treated people the way I was told to… the list is endless.  Yet still, I found the way back to me.

Society has changed a lot since I was young; more people have more freedom by comparison.

The biggest change though, I believe, is in the numbers who are becoming increasingly aware of the opportunities for an evolution of our society today.

Imagine health care that pays attention to the whole being, education that caters for individual expression and growth, governments operating with transparency and open communication or science that embraces the metaphysical.  The list and the opportunities are endless.

Most exciting of all, you are the generation born into a society becoming aware of its opportunities and failings. This puts you in the creative driving seat when it comes to solutions.

So life is not perfect my little ones, I don’t think we ever intended it to be or this journey would be fairly dull by comparison.

I, for my part, will always do my best to do whatever I feel is right in each moment; for that is all I can do, all any of us can do.

I love you always; keep following your joy.

If what you read here resonates and you’d like a fresh perspective (and only that, it’s not advice you have to take or act upon) on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me or click here for further information. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.
​

Don’t Let a Label Be a Limitation – Use it as a Jumping off Point

A quick scan tells me that there is a whole host of online communities and self help groups out there for highly sensitive people, which, in itself is not a bad thing. But when I pick up words like “protecting yourself” and “fragile”, I want to scream from the roof tops.

I have to admit, I’ve always been pretty sensitive about being called sensitive. The term implies weakness, yet I’ve survived this world and - determined to prove people wrong - have even thrived to outside eyes.
 
Sadly that required building a hard shell around me in a bid to ‘protect’ myself. While it didn’t succeed in obliterating the essence of who I am, it completely obscured it even to my eyes; to the point of not knowing me.
 
Over the last few years I’ve set about quite deliberately dismantling the protective armour to discover what lay beneath. Layer after layer unveiled, I am now rebuilding my relationship with the world from my internal core and am truly starting to see how authentic thriving is possible.

I have discovered my body is like a finely tuned instrument, apparently more so than most, every sense I have is sensitive to all that is around it and reverberates within.

I have a deep and rich inner world that I explore asking myself all sorts of questions about life and purpose. I sense other people’s emotions and can tell if someone says “I’m alright” when they are not, I viscerally feel others’ pain and passion – even if it’s only watched on a TV screen, and I sense the same through music and art. When I spend time in nature I appreciate the intricate intelligent design of it all, and marvel at all creation.

I wouldn’t swap any of that because it is the essence of who I am and, frankly, the only experience of the world I would relish. But it does come with another side. With every sense heightened, sensory overload needs to be managed.

For example, the first thing I was aware of this morning was my partner’s rhythmical breathing as I lay contentedly amid that state between dreaming and waking up. This instantly changed as he awakened. Just as my cat’s ears prick up, my body is also on high alert, quickly tuning in to more of the sounds around; a car starting up and our neighbours putting out their bins. I’m awaiting the loud and insistent “mum!” requiring a more hastened arising than I would like.

It is mid-winter here in the southern hemisphere and the days are short, so getting up in the dark is par for the course at the moment. My ideal entry back into consciousness each day would be a gradual and steady awakening of the senses.

I like to open the curtains to slowly let in natural light and let my eyes adjust, instead I open the door to the lounge where my partner had already turned on every electrical light in the place and my world is suddenly ablaze with bright lights, my eyes scrunch in defence; it makes my insides churn and creates a viselike grip between my temples.

That is before I even talk about the smell of coffee or the mood of the other people around me or the list of tasks that require completion before we can get out the door. And because it is winter, my partner had started up the van to heat it up before setting off, so I could smell exhaust.

Suffice to say, by the time I drop off the kids each morning, I feel like I’ve survived something. Just the very fact of living with other people creates sensory overload. It wasn’t so bad when I was growing up, my parents liked things low key too, and we didn’t have 55” TV screens and 24 hours a day of streaming content to contend with.

Yet there were some highlights this morning. In taking the garbage out for collection, I stopped to smell the White Michaela blossoms on the scratty tree at the top of our driveway. I forgive that tree all it’s scratty looks with its half shed leaves, because the scent of the blossoms are just so blissful and were a welcome escape from the exhaust fumes.

Then there was the beautiful conversation with my younger daughter who, in the absence of her older sibling (who is visiting nana) was rather more grounded and calm than can be the case with her sister around. I had this lovely swell of appreciation and deep sense of love flood over me.

Funnily enough I didn’t realise there was a label for the way I am wired and some of the things I’ve found difficult until recently. While I hate labels, this one may serve a purpose, if only to have those I love understand how I experience the world and, hopefully, help others who are wired this way begin to thrive rather than just survive. 

Back in the 1990’s a psychologist called Elaine Aaron coined the terms Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) and Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS). Personally I’d rather embrace the trait than label my persona, I feel we are all a bit too multidimensional for that.

“Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS) is characterized by a high level of sensitivity to stimuli and reflects an increased sensitivity of the central nervous system” says Botenburg et al. “It also correlates with a deeper cognitive processing of physical, social and emotional stimuli.”

Elaine Aaron says “Inevitably HSPs are more easily overwhelmed. When the noise or stuff going on is about right and interesting for others, it’s too much for HSPs. And keeping an optimal level of stimulation – not too much, not too little – is very, very important to every creature. The sensitive ones just need ‘less’ to be comfortable.”

It’s the ‘less’ that is often not accepted or appreciated in a world that is increasingly vying for our attention though, with an acceleration of information and stimulus available. And it’s that social unacceptability that often creates low self esteem and self doubt, or even depression, anxiety, symptoms of autism, sleep problems and more physical health problems.

While sensory overload wasn’t generally an issue for me in my early home life, as soon as I entered the realms of dealing with other people and of the working world, it was often hard to feel good about myself. I remember starting a job in a recruitment office, and being seated right next to the owner of the place who was a chain smoker and sat there puffing away at his cigarettes all day. It made me feel so wretched that the first thing I did was buy a rather large extractor fan and sat it on the desk between us.

Being called things like too sensitive, whiny, anxious, unhappy and even neurotic, and having people tell me to “toughen up” or “just relax, you’re making a big deal out of nothing” was devastating. In fact it led to a whole period in my early twenties where I was diagnosed with “general anxiety and panic attacks.”

This was a defining moment in my life, and one that lies at the root of my distaste for words like fragile and protection. It taught me how my reality was controlled by my reactions. Now, while I can’t readily control the involuntary reactions of my senses, just having an awareness of what is happening makes all the difference, it helps me to control how my body is responding.

While I did not know about SPS back then, there have been moments along the way that have helped me understand that what I was experiencing was not a result of some neurosis.

For example, blue eyes are more sensitive to light than other eye colours. This helped me made sense of the migraines that – since the age of twelve – have often been triggered by bright lights. Yet, without  awareness of sensory sensitivity,  it can come across to others as whiny when I complain about all the lights getting turned on in the morning rather than the curtains being opened.

I also know my body is sensitive to all the popular stimulants like caffeine and alcohol and does not appreciate any medication stronger than Panadol, it can feel awkward to refuse such things on social occasions, especially in the face of people saying “you just need to lighten up”.

Living with others has taught me that some people need noise to drown out their thoughts so they can concentrate, but I know I need quiet so I can hear my thoughts before I can concentrate. So having music on in the house or car can be a point of contention.

Open plan office areas taught me about the perils of horrid fluorescent lighting, uncomfortable chairs, and the soup of human emotions that I was required to swim in just to say I had turned up. That is before we even talk about the endless meetings and having to look in one direction (and look interested) for long, boring sustained periods.

Literally every sense is more finely tuned. I can even get touched-out (I learned that is ‘a thing’) especially when I have kids haranguing me and wanting to cuddle up or have ‘one more hug’ at bedtime after a day of constantly giving my attention out.

Scary or violent movies and documentaries are too visceral to contemplate, and I get overwhelmed at parties, conferences (I have a strong aversion for the superficial) and at shopping malls and definitely kids indoor playgrounds.

These are all things I have known from the inside are not a result of my imagination, yet without being able to educate people more objectively about Sensory Processing Sensitvity, it has often invited many unwelcome comments and been the basis of arguments. It is true to say I was pretty defensive about the issues.

Feeling pain more acutely is another common symptom of SPS. I hesitated when I had to answer a question about that, as dealing with pain is just another part of the armour I’ve worn. I do feel pain but, just as I determinedly focused on not reacting to being tickled when I was younger, I also focused on not reacting to pain.

The reality was that I used to absorb the shock in order to not react to it, internalize it, which is just setting myself up for sickness. When I birthed my second child, I learned how to work with my body in order to feel into and release the pain.  

I just feel so much, on so many levels, and it can be draining. The world we live in can feel like a smorgasbord of stimuli set to frazzle the nerves.

Arguments that others might consider a spat or insignificant, or even just a differing of opinion, are often huge for me. When I left home my mum said “I’ll even miss our arguments”. Not me, I like things to be peaceful.

Yet I was determined not to become a victim so was always asserting my needs, and am quick to stand guard if I sense an injustice.

Then there is the dynamic in relationship with my partner who has Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) which, while sharing some similarities with SPS, also has some diametrically opposite issues to contend with. Each of those has the potential to be the source of the others’ stress, and requires us to each have understanding and respect the others needs in order for us to make the relationship work.

And, of course, there is the grand slam of challenges for someone with any kind of sensory sensitivity: parenting.

With the constant over stimulation involved, sensory overload abounds. I heard another say “I don’t like surprises and I don’t like change, and since parenting is largely comprised of just that many times in each day I get overwhelmed”. While I relate to that, just having to give my attention constantly outward rather than nurturing my inner life is the key factor in energy drain for me.

That said, when I turn back to the amazingly positive aspects of having SPS, I know it also makes me a better parent as I am more aware of my children’s needs. My ability to empathise, my intuition, my creativity, my deep appreciation of little things, and even my visceral awareness of others’ pain and passion. All of it – and more – are the essence of who I am and the key to joy in my life.

I understand why there is a lot of advice out there about protecting our energy, as overwhelm surely drains it. But it is really more about asserting our needs than protecting ourselves. It’s subtle, but it is different. One is about operating from a strong centre core, an inner knowing and honouring of your true self, the other is about defense and armour.

My desire to help others can mean I have often put others needs before my own. But learning to put my needs first gives me more energy to give to others, using the special talents and gifts that being sensitive gives, which makes me happier and healthier.

I read that our authenticity and desire for deep, meaningful relationships, also makes those of us with sensory sensitivity more attractive to others. But the key thing to remember is that good relationships are not about giving more to others, it is about giving more to ourselves. A healthy relationship is one where both people value themselves enough to make sure their own needs are met, just as I wrote about recently in Great Relationships Happen When You Put You First.

Since writing about this journey to me I’ve been on, most of my articles speak to this issue on some level. Some of the relevant ones that spring to mind are Taking Your Own Space, Taking a Break from all that Mental Activity (which talks about strategies for dealing with stress), Step out to reach in, Meditation – the Cornerstone to Your Success, Life is in the Little Things – Finding the Extra in the Ordinary, among many more.

My daughter also has Sensory Processing Sensitivity, and I have learned it is wise to manage her activities carefully. In her first year at school her teacher wrote “she appears to move between being a very young wisp of a child to a rather demanding princess.” Even now at 7 years old, she is not capable of having play dates or doing any extracurricular activity on school days without getting completely overwhelmed and tuning out or melting down (spectacularly).

But I would hate for her to see herself as fragile, despite all that I have written in here about what it feels like to have SPS.

I’d rather she embraced her sensitivities, anchor herself from within and thrive from her centre core rather than create armour on the outside to deal with it. Just as I too now embrace it as I rise from the ashes of my previously burnt out life.

Having a strong sense of who you are, and embracing and honouring that, gives you that inner anchor. Once you have this, you don’t need the hard shell on the outside anymore, you can let it go. You don’t have to protect yourself from the world. Just prioritize your own needs and you will flourish.

If you want to find out more about SPS there’s a whole raft of information available online. Here’s a great introductory video, an overview and a test. If what you read here resonates and you’d like a fresh perspective (and only that, it’s not advice you have to take or act upon) on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me or click here for further information. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

So often we focus on what’s lacking, or what didn’t meet our expectations, but we’re a lot happier when we appreciate the little things and recognize the beauty in the ordinary. Read here on Tiny Buddha.

“Resenting one or both of your parents for suffering (caused) is a completely normal and human reaction.” As I read these powerful words written by Lise Bourbeau, written in the context of repressed suffering that eats way like a cancer, literally manifesting decades later as a cancer, I wondered two things:

The first was why the role emotions play in our wellbeing is still so widely looked upon as psychobabble. The realization that our emotions don’t just sometimes play a role in our physical state, but rather our physical state is always a result of our emotional state was – for me – both obvious and potent as I recounted in What is Your Body Telling You.

The second thing I wondered is why there is such a stigma attached to this issue of resenting our parents in adulthood. In society we accept it as normal in teenagers, but if this resentment is such a normal and human reaction, yet it causes such unseen damage in later life, why is it not accepted as a rite of passage that people accept and openly talk about?

Looking at it from a child’s point of view, whether your parents are absent or present in your life, either way there is a high likelihood you will resent some aspect of that. If they are absent, particularly if they died, you may feel guilt for your pain and resentment. If they were very much alive and present in your life, there is also a very good chance that you will resent some aspect of who they were to you.

Parents are – in effect – the gateway to a somewhat more limited form of existence than these young ones want to lead. Learning to live in a human body requires focus, and that requires making their world small enough at each stage to gain confidence and simultaneously making it large enough to allow them to fully express who they are in that moment. That is a tricky task for anyone to facilitate.

Often we are driven in our own parenting by the things we resented (and the things we admired) about the way we were brought up, in an attempt to avoid having our children resent us. We want to be loved unconditionally yet often hold back our love in disapproval of our children's reactions at some point or another, if not as part of an adopted regime of discipline.

Seeing resentment as the thanks you get for all your hard years of parenting isn’t attractive, but if instead we were to accept it as a natural and inevitable part of our child’s development into adulthood, helping them figure out who they are and what they do and don’t want in life, it would be more palatable.   

Then, who you are (in terms of the sum of your experiences and the resentments, ideas and beliefs you hold) can cause countless arguments between those co-parenting. And with your children’s unique blend of who they are, and an ever evolving social context, you are bound to trip up somewhere.

Great teachers are emerging, like Mary Willow, but an average parent may only be vaguely aware (if at all) of the various stages of development their child is going through in the years up to young adulthood, never mind have a good grasp of their role each step of the way.

As adults we either continue to carry our resentment around consciously, still berating our parent/s for who they are/what they did, or we just accept it as part of who we and they are and, every now and again, those emotions surface triggered by patterns playing out in our adult lives.

The reason Lise Bourbeau’s words were so powerful, was the dawning of a realization of the damage it causes to stuff these emotions down. I remembered the story I recounted in an article last year, about forgiveness.

The story was of a teacher who got her students to bring in potatoes. The task was to etch on each the name of the person or people who had wronged them and the hurt it had caused. Each student was then asked to put all their potatoes in a sack and carry it around for a week, it could sit beside them when they were eating or sleeping, but they had to carry it everywhere it went.

This was simply an exercise in demonstrating the sheer burden of carrying all those negative emotions. The act of forgiveness does not mean you condone what took place; it is an act of kindness towards yourself, an act of self love.

Certainly most people have emotional baggage of some sort about their upbringing.  The reality is that our ‘sack’ is already pretty heavy by the time we are 8, and yet it’s a period in our life where we have the least amount of conscious memories. None the less, you will have an idea of the emotions in there as they will have attracted many many more examples to reinforce them throughout your life, accompanied by self-limiting thoughts that become beliefs.

It seems that it would be useful to consider that is normal and healthy to face resentment from your children at some point. And, conversely, somewhere in your own emotional baggage are some things you might want to really look at rather than just carrying them around.

So what do you resent your parents for? Once you bring things out into the light of the present day, the process of forgiveness can begin, your load will lighten and you will be free to live a life of wellbeing.

Knowing I’ve helped in some way through my writing means a lot - I’d love for you to like, comment on, or  share these thoughts with others, or contact me directly at shona@shonakeachie.com, I’m always happy to help if I can. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also subscribe to my newsletter and, as a special thank you, you will receive the link to my video 3 Steps to Becoming You.  
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“What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say” has long since been a favourite quote of mine, credited to Emerson. Lately, in dealing with young children, it has taken on a deeper meaning but I’m also now reconsidering the way I communicate in a much broader sense.

Have you ever noticed how reliant we are on verbal communication?

“You have a way with words” said a mentor of mine, “a real gift, but it is also your biggest challenge”.

It gave me pause, she had made me rethink the way in which I communicate with the children, but as I’ve digested those words I’ve started to observe how pervasive this issue is for us as a society. On the face of it we are incredibly dependent upon – and distracted by - words.

Yet, as we know from the study and discussion about body language in recent decades, we are subconsciously picking up on a lot more than words. Many of us have become adept at reading body language more consciously and, certainly in situations like job interviews, most attempt to control what their body is revealing.

It is interesting that it’s only from about the age of 14 that we start to really develop our ability to digest things verbally, yet it so totally takes over from then on that we lose sight of our most primal and universal form of communication. So much so we often talk and yell endlessly at kids in complete ignorance that they are simply not able to digest what they are being 'told'.

When we arrive on the planet, we spend the early years learning predominantly through our experiences. For example, when you step on a sharp stone, it talks to you, you learn something about sharp stones (they are hard, they hurt, they are best avoided etc).

Every second of every minute of every day your body is talking to your brain, it’s helpful for our children if we can talk less, that way they ‘hear’ more. I think the same applies to adults, the words are just a distraction, and we are often fooled by them, too busy to take due note of what our own body or anyone else’s is actually telling us.

I have to admit the times when I am mostly aware of body talk is when either I, or someone around me is agitated or angry. Having young children, that can happen frequently (both ways). The natural response is for people to withdraw.

Punishment is the withdrawal of love

My own experience of boundaries being enforced as a child and into adulthood has been based on punishment, common to most and still pervasive in our society. This is an act of retaliation, entrenched in varying scales of negative emotion (from mildly irritated to outright fury) and all involve the withdrawal of love.

You cannot punish someone out of love, so if your mind tells you punishment is a necessary and appropriate response, you have to withdraw your love in order to enforce it. Equally, as a response, our children withdraw, hearing not the verbal words used, but the way in which they are delivered and enforced. It’s part of how we begin to lose sight of who we really are, fearing that ‘the real us’ is not safe to show itself in the world.

The big ‘ah ha’ moment for me has been the kids’ bedtime, the time of day guaranteed to tip even the most patient of parents over the edge. There was a point about a year ago when I thought about setting myself a challenge to not let a single word pass my lips for 3 days.

Aware that, in the heat of the moment, words come tumbling out like a crazy runaway train. Even as I become consciously aware of the whine or rant, that train has gathered momentum and isn’t easily brought under control. It’s far easier to derail it and zip up. Not such a bad idea after all.

My instinct was to stay with my kids as they fell asleep. This stemmed from a fear I had had of being on my own (resulting from a rife imagination combined with a creak here and a strange sound there), which I only conquered in my thirties. As the kids are growing, it’s resulted in most evenings being a complete write off. Then my mentor points out that we are born from a dark womb, we come into the world trusting the dark, and it represented safety and comfort for us. Mm, further pause.

My constant presence, while stemming from my parental instinct to protect (an instinct I now recognise as born of fear, thus not an instinct of higher good), is body talk for “yes, you are right, you are not safe without me here”. When considered in this way, I realised it was the opposite of what I want to teach them, that they are safe.

Yet how? This is the part I’d tussled with. I have been brought up in a punitive society, one that continues to show itself that way even when  governments of countries engage with each other, tit for tat “we must show them”, “there must be retribution” responses.

It’s not the way I wish to live, and certainly not the body talk I want my kids to enduringly recall. My natural instinct is for harmony, to remain tuned into the love that flows and connects us all. Suggestions of shutting them in a room when they are fearful and I am frustrated (because they aren’t settling down to sleep when they are clearly tired) didn’t resonate at all.

Not wishing to threaten my children, you could guarantee that was exactly what would end up happening each evening (I’d threaten to walk out if they didn’t settle), yet my body (despite the odd impatient move towards the door) would remain out of love.

You can be loving and enforce your boundaries

So the crux of my ‘ah ha’ was the realization that I could be kind and loving, and teach them how to feel safe, using body talk in a positive way. That begins with me being attuned to the patient teacher within, who has a plan, rather than the frazzled parent who just wants them to fall asleep so I can get out of there.

Then, instead of lying on the bed beside them, I started with sitting on the chair next to the beds, then I moved away from the beds towards the door, where I now sit and do my meditation.

Just that one move has been huge for the kids, no longer in arms reach of mum, although with initial protests, has taught them how to settle themselves to sleep, and they do that a lot quicker than with me lying next to them.

Inevitably my younger daughter springs out of bed a couple of times, but (aware of my body talk) I just gently pick her up – silently – and place her back in bed. Eventually she realises it’s a fruitless exercise, producing no reaction and quickly settles towards sleep.

As we progress I will eventually leave the room, at first for a quick visit to the loo and return, then longer visits until they are more and more comfortable with falling asleep on their own. In hindsight, this training could have begun once I was no longer feeding them through the night, but hindsight is a wonderful thing.

So I am learning that, most often, words are unnecessary; ignoring the irony of course of the number of words it has taken me to express all of this to you! The realization that our body talk is far more powerful than anything we say, and consciously harnessing it from a point of love, is key to more peaceful and powerful communication.

Knowing I’ve helped in some way through my writing means a lot - I’d love for you to like, comment on, or  share these thoughts with others, or contact me directly at shona@shonakeachie.com, I’m always happy to help if I can. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also subscribe to my newsletter and, as a special thank you, you will receive the link to my video 3 Steps to Becoming You.  
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