The hidden cost of being the strong one

Did you grow up being the good child, the strong child or the one who kept it all together?

Some people learn very early in life how to carry more than others can see. On the outside, they look fine they are capable, reliable, calm under pressure. They are the ones everyone turns to.  They are often the strong one and the responsible one and the one who holds it all together.

But what most people don’t see is the cost because people who learned to over-give and over-function rarely fall apart in obvious ways. They just keep going, showing up, they keep caring for others and they keep managing what everyone else is feeling.

Who is looking out for this person?

Slowly and quietly, the cost accumulates.  It can look like exhaustion, burnout and loneliness.  Not because they don’t have people in their lives but because very few people actually see them.

People who carry this pattern often recognise themselves here:

• They overthink everything they say or do
• They feel responsible for other people’s emotions
• They struggle to ask for help
• They rarely talk about what’s really hurting inside
• They smile even when they feel overwhelmed
• They put everyone else’s needs before their own

From the outside, it looks like strength however on the inside, it often feels like survival. Over time, they may find themselves disconnected from their own needs, unsure who they are underneath the roles they’ve learned to carry.

Many of them quietly wonder when was the last time that they felt truly understood and seen for who they really are.

For most, this pattern didn’t begin in adulthood but rather in childhood. These children grew up in an environment where the adults around them did’t have the emotional capacity to hold their feelings. So they adapted and became the good child or the strong child. The responsible child, the one who had to maintain the energy in the family to keep the peace. They learned to read everyone in the room by developing a finely attuned radar and so now we might know them as an empath or call them hypervigilant.

Their nervous system learned that staying safe means managing the emotional environment around them. So they become quiet, easy, helpful. They learned how to keep themselves small and shapeshift into the environment around them so they never caused any trouble.

Their emotions weren’t mirrored back to them, so they become the child who understands everyone else but who isn’t truly understood themselves.

Another of their clever adaptive strategies was to learn never to rely on anyone else. They became magnificently independent to protect themselves. This is because when they asked for help in childhood that lead to being dismissed, misunderstood, or blamed. In time, the nervous system learns something important, that it’s safer to rely on yourself.

So these children grow up to become adults who are extraordinarily capable. They become their own parent, protector and stabiliser.

People admire them for their strength.

Underneath all that strength is often a quiet exhaustion, because no one was meant to carry everything on their own.

At its core, this pattern often carries a deep wound of abandonment. Of self-abandonment. They learned to stop listening to their own body, to their own needs, to put everyone else first to stay safe, to receive love and to feel a deep sense of belonging.

However they have a very deep sense of longing not to actually give less but to be seen, known and to be able to be themselves. To be able to receive all of this without having to earn love through caretaking, perfection, or responsibility.

All this requires them to be vulnerable however when someone gets close fear often appears because in the past being vulnerable has not been safe. So connection is longed for and at the same time it is also frightening.

We can heal this pattern when we start to include ourselves in our circle of care. When we find and reconnect with the protective part of ourselves that learned to over-function in order to survive, the wounded inner child who learned if you keep it all together you will be loved. You begin offering that part of yourself something new.

You might say to this child part of you, “I'm safe now. It's safe to rest. You don't have to carry everything anymore’.

Healing might also means choosing relationships that feel different. It might look like choosing people who can meet and hold all of your emotions and feelings. It might mean finding people who can actually see you.

When you focus on healing these wounded child parts, you will find that not everyone will respond the way people did in the past. As you learn that, slowly through experience, you will notice how trust begins to rebuild. One tiny step at a time.

Over time, the same things you once gave endlessly to others, begin to return to you. Care, kindness, patience, compassion and understanding will come your way.

This time it will be different because you have learned to give them to yourself too, not because you have stopped caring about others, but because you are no longer abandoning yourself in order to belong. Slowly, something new begins to grow. A sense of home inside yourself, a place deep in your heart where all your parts are allowed to exist, simply because you are here.

When our inner child is leading the fight

Our relationships can be the most fantastic containers for healing our inner child wounding. When we argue with our partners it is not our wise adult self having the argument it is almost always one of our adaptive childhood parts. These are the parts of us that learned very early how to survive emotionally in our families of origin.

When I work with couples through a systemic lens, I can see the recurring patterns that keep looping and generating conflict, alongside each partner’s adaptive child strategies. Once these patterns become visible, they’re impossible to unsee.

We think our fights are about the dishes, about a shutdown after a small comment, about tension around sex. Or maybe it is someone always needing to be right, or to be in control. Maybe it about someone who withdraws in the middle of tension, they clam up and say nothing. There is always something deeper there.

Artist unknown, From Burning Man

Once you see it, it makes a different kind of sense. The fight isn’t about the housework or the small irritations, those are just the signs. What’s really happening is that an adaptive child has taken the lead. The adaptive children are in the house.

It is our adaptive child that runs the fight. The problem with this is our adaptive child has no place running our adult relationships. It doesn’t have the discernment or capacity to make adult decisions.

The adaptive child is the part of us that learned how to stay connected, safe, or invisible in childhood. This is a very intelligent survival strategy that helped us survive when we were a child to stay safe. The only problem is that when this part is running the show in adult relationships, we don’t respond we react.

So when two adaptive children collide, the relationship quickly becomes a battleground rather than a place of safety.

In Terry Real’s framework, there are three common adaptive child imprints that often show up in adult intimacy. These are:

The Hero Child. This is the person who '“holds it all together.” They learned early that love came through competence, responsibility, or emotional caretaking. They took up a particular role in their family system and it was often either, the good one, the achiever, the surrogate spouse, the family therapist or they calmed things down.

They are often very competent, loyal and responsible people in their adult life. They show up, do their job and they do it well. They are often seen by others as competent, logical and good people.

When they are not good, what does that look like?

Well they can be passive sometimes and they are not particuarly good at being vulnerable because they have had to be good and responsible for a very long time. This means surrender, being open and receiving can be really challenging for them.

In adult relationships, this can look like:

• Over-functioning

• Carrying the emotional load for both partners

• Resentment building beneath “being fine”

• Struggling to ask for help or show vulnerability

When the Hero Child is activated, they often feel: “If I don’t manage this, everything will fall apart.” When they do eventually explode or withdraw, it often shocks their partner because their exhaustion has been invisible for a long time. The Hero child has had to hold a lot in the family system; in fact, they have probably been given more power than a child should have but it has not been based on them as an individual. It has been based on what the parents needed them to do to regulate the family system.

The Scapegoat Child. The scapegoat is the classic rebel or problem child. They learned that conflict, intensity, or acting out was the only way to stay seen. They often have very big feelings and express all that is not being expressed in the family system. They might be the person who fights with one of the parents all the time. Maybe the overbearing parent. They are often overtly or covertly shamed, being seen as the source of all the problems in the family.

In adult relationships, this can show up as:

• Anger that feels bigger and disproportionate to the moment

• Defensiveness or blaming

• A sense of being misunderstood or unfairly criticised

• Feeling chronically “wrong” or rejected

Underneath the reactivity is often a deep fear; fear that they are going to be shamed again. Often the whole family system can be organised around keeping this child in line. So they seem to carry a lot of power because everyone is walking around on egg shells around them. In some ways, they are the truth teller of what is not being expressed.

This child fights not to win but to protect against collapse. They are very emotional and often have big hearts. They are the rebels and the creatives of the world. Sometimes the bad boys. Why do we love the bad boys; because they have big hearts.

The Lost Child. The lost child runs their own race. Behind it is the belief, “If I disappear, I’ll be safe.”

The Lost Child adapted by minimising needs, emotions, and presence. The core wound here is often abandonment and that was learned early when this child went to their parent for co-regulation and they learned quickly that that was not available so they become independent and walled off as they have had to regulate themselves. They went and hid in their bedroom.

In adult relationships, this often looks like:

• Withdrawal or emotional shutdown

• Avoidance of conflict

• Difficulty expressing wants or desires

• A partner feeling shut out or alone

The Lost Child’s strategy isn’t disinterest, it’s self-protection. Their nervous system learned very early that connection is overwhelming or unsafe. There are lots of repressed emotions here because growing up there was no one they felt safe enough to be with to express how they were feeling.

When we eventually find a partner, the person we want to commit to, we often pick a partner that enables us to predictably repeat our role. Hence they saying ‘we marry our unfinished business’. We pair off with people who mirror the experience we received from our parents/caregivers so we can finally heal that pattern.

Why do fights often escalate so fast?

Here’s the key piece, when we are fighting from our adaptive child, we cannot access our Wise Adult self because our pre-frontal cortex, the part of our brain responsible for logical and rational thought, goes offline. We go into a survival response, our limbic system comes online and all our early adaptive patterns are alive and ready to go.

When we can stay in the Wise Adult part of ourselves we;

• Can stay present

• Can hold complexity

• Can self-soothe

• Can take responsibility without collapsing or attacking

But the adaptive child doesn’t have that capacity. Instead, the nervous system is organised around threat, survival and attachment loss. So the fight isn’t about the content. It is about our old unmet needs colliding in the present.

Two children are trying to feel safe, using strategies that once worked, but now damage intimacy. Our adaptive child strategies rarely serve us well in our adult relationships.

From Fighting to Repair

The work of adult relationship healing isn’t about erasing these parts. It’s about learning to:

• Recognise when your adaptive child is running the interaction

• Learning how to self soothe so that you can pause before responding

• Build the capacity to come back online as your Wise Adult

• Speak from the present rather than the past

This is deep nervous-system work. Because you can’t “think” your way out of an adaptive state.
You have to feel your way back into safety first. Only then can true repair happen.

The Quiet Shift That Changes Everything

When couples can see that this isn’t you versus me, but younger parts trying to keep us safe, the nervous system settles. Defensiveness eases, blame falls away, and curiosity makes space for compassion, for ourselves and for one another.

Very slowly, the relationship becomes less about winning or withdrawing and more about learning how to stay connected, even when it’s hard.

Here are some reflection questions for you to sit with.

• When conflict arises in my relationship, what do I notice happening in my body first?

• Do I tend to move toward fixing, fighting, or disappearing when things feel tense?

• Which adaptive child strategy do you recognise most easily in yourself; the Hero, the Scapegoat, or the Lost Child? Do you see see a combination of two or maybe that you as you have matured you have moved from one to another?

• What familiar loop do my partner and I seem to fall into when we’re under stress?

• If this pattern had a job, what might it be trying to protect?

• What old story or fear might be getting activated beneath the surface of our current conflict?

How Stress experienced as a child can impact our midlife journey

Stress is not our friend in our midlife journey.

Did you know that the stress you experienced in utero can impact on your perimenopause transition?

When we experience stress hormones from our mothers, our little body gets the message that when we arrive earthside, we need to have a pretty quick off the mark stress response because the world is not safe. Fast forward to the baby becoming a woman and what this means is that her body will go into a stress response more easily.

Amazing thought. The science of epigenetics is showing us that our cells actually store memory in their DNA and that it is possible for non genetic information to be passed down mother to baby. So it's possible for your mother's trauma as well as your own affecting your body.

When our adrenal glands (which make stress hormones) are tired, our body will literally steal the sex hormones we have and turn them into stress hormones. Guess what we will become deficient in? You guessed it sex hormones. This can translate into PMS in our menstruating years, and more physical symptoms of perimenopause, like hot flashes, anxiety, depression, in our menopause transition.

We are made to survive. Our body will prioritise our safety first every time. Let's think of all the ways this impacts on our relationships in our life.

A woman who is sensitised to high stress (which given they way we work now is most women) as a developing baby or young child, will tend to perceive her environment as unsafe or stressful where others may not. This pattern continues throughout life and by the time we arrive at perimenopause we are burned out and might have adrenal fatigue.

In our second half of life, our adrenal glands and fat cells take over our sex hormone production from our ovaries when they wind down at menopause. If the adrenals are tired when we start this journey and our body is giving them another new job, to produce not only stress hormones but also now sex hormones, they are not going to cope too well are they.

Remember it is all connected.

Learning to work with our emotions and feel safe to experience the emotions we have been told are 'bad' all our lives is so critical at this time in our lives. When we have been repressing an emotion for years and then all of a sudden we start experience it at midlife because our body can't keep the lid on the repression anymore, it is going to make us feel unsafe. Most of us will shut it down, this takes up even more energy or it will come in an outburst. This has a negative impact on our relationships also.

What is the best way to deal with this?

It is not a thinking exercise, you can't think your way out of trauma. It is learning to feel sensation and create safety in your body that that feeling is OK and may be even pleasurable. So we call that feeling approach a somatic approach.

Learning to feel the sensations in your body somatically and connect with them will bring you into a deeper level of emotional intimacy with yourself. It will create more capacity in your nervous system to feel. When you start to learn and practice this skill, you get more comfortable with the sensations and feelings and you get better at talking about it to others.

In my experience coaching women to do this, it has an unbelievably positive experience on all their relationships but most often it is their primary intimate relationship that benefits the most. This is because they are able to have a deeper level of communication with their partner about what is going on in their inner world. This deepens intimacy in the relationship; the crux of intimacy is communication. When we can talk about our inner world with honesty, it is appreciated so much by our partners, they learn from it too and can mirror us, and in my observation this is what leads to better sex.

As I say to everyone I coach, intimacy means 'into me you see'.

So when you are looking at your physical symptoms in your midlife journey remember everything is connected. It is not just about physical changes alone or dietary changes. Learning to actually be in your body and feel the sensations, to make your emotions your allies, is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself.

I currently have space to coach two new people. So whether you would like to reclaim your emotions, enhance your leadership skills, create more ease in your life with a big transition, you can contact me to book a clarity call to see if we are a good fit to work together.

Growing all the parts of us

In every system on earth, one pattern you see is the pattern of contraction an expansion. It is the natural ebb and flow of any system. When they are growing in complexity they expand out, and then they contract back in, before they find their new rhythm.

What does that look like in a human? Well I am glad that you asked. Ever shared a really vulnerable comment in a group or online and then wanted to go and hide in a cupboard in the dark? Yes that is when you have really pushed on your edges. Whilst it may feel incredibly uncomfortable you should celebrate yourself because you have just stretched yourself a little bit. Doing it in little titrated bursts is a good thing for your nervous system too. Then the expansion doesn’t feel so overwhelming.

We often see this other systems too. Our natural environment has swings and natural patterns and rhythms to it. Fire, flood, drought, cyclones they are all natural occurrences that some might say are over corrections. However when I look at indigenous Australians and the way the work the land, the use of fire in a controlled way is a natural part of the healthy growth of the natural environment.

One thing that I find super disturbing is the increase in mental health issues in society. It seems a big swing out don’t you think? At the moment, in the pandemic context it is understandable because it is hard to be isolated from our friends and family. Our nervous systems co-regulate each other. The ventral vagal part of our nervous system which is predominantly in our face and upper chest and shoulders and neck is all about connection. Being curious. When we are in our ventral vagal state we are curious and connected. Wearing masks at the moment is necessary, but that can be challenging because when we look at people, at their faces, it’s the ventral vagal part of our nervous system that is sussing that person out. Feeling into their system and asking, can I trust them, are they safe? Combine that with not being able to be around each other too much, so missing out on that co-regulation, it makes sense that people are suffering. In particular, women like to be around each other and tell stories, that is soothing to us. I think men like it too, the like to tell yarns and have a laugh with each other.

Current context aside, the mental health issues have been around for a while. I think one of the reasons is we have been encouraged for a really long time to disconnect from our bodies as a source of wisdom and intuition in favour of rational and logical thought. The part of our brain that controls the logic and rational stuff is the neo cortex. From an evolutionary perspective this is a newer part. We have two other parts that we are really not hanging out with so much, the primal part of our brain and the limbic part. The latter runs our nervous system and the limbic, emotions, feelings, orientation toward pleasure and pain, reward. There is so much benefit from inhabiting those other two parts. When we ignore them we are cutting ourselves off from the message from our emotions and the intelligence of the nervous system.

To access these parts of your self, your inner world, you need to practice focusing in on them, feeling sensations in your body and describing them. There is so much to be gained from doing this. This is our unconscious, it is very clever. Steph Biddulph in his new book Fully Human describes it so well. “When you listen to your insides, they inform you how to change, where the answer might lie. And when you have really ‘got the message, even just wordlessly, making space for it, it very often shifts. You feel a change in your body that is positive, releasing, enlivening, and you know that something has moved and you are different now”.

“If you don’t practice going inside yourself, pretty soon you forget you even have an inside. And this is a problem”

Steph Biddulph, “Fully Human”

I use tools in my coaching to bring people into these parts of their brain and this is what I find; when people focus on their inner world, their unconscious, they realise that they have a wealth of information in there that can help them find the answers they are seeking. This improves their sense of self-confidence and efficacy. They feel a sense. of coming home to themselves. They learn to love their emotions and to be with them and listen to their messages, they stop pushing them away. They stop getting stuck in stories about what happened to them in their lives to explain the way they are. They are able to move on from them and are able to step into their personal power. They learn to trust their bodies as a source of wisdom. They start listening to their body, talking to it and giving it love and attention. They realise that their mind and body are not separated but one. They realise they are multi-dimensional beings with different parts and stop being at war with themselves. They learn to love all the different parts of themselves. When we love and accept ourselves, we start to accept and love others for being just the way they are.

I want everyone to have these skills, so people stop suffering so much. I want people to thrive because given the level of comfort we live in we should be. I want adults to have adult conversations with each other, that are rich, rewarding and vulnerable. I want adults to step into their leadership roles and be able to make tough decisions. I want children to have hope. I want children to be able to be children and have fun and play. I want humans to stop looking outside of themselves for answers, giving their power away to materialism and consumerism and realise they have the answers within. I want the planet to thrive. I want to deal with climate change. My desires are big but I think achievable.

What do you think?

Maiden to Mother Transition

When a young girl goes through Menarche, she is asked to let go of her childish ways so as to accept her maturing as a menstruating woman. In many indigenous cultures she is welcomed through ceremony and accepted into a circle of adult women in her tribe. This has been largely forgotten in western culture. Menstruation is still shrouded in mystery, shame and secrecy. Cultural norms mean women have to hide what is a massive part of their life.

During pregnancy and childbirth a new mother is asked to let go of egoic behaviour that will prevent her from giving selflessly, gently and open heartedly to her new baby. She is forced to face her shadow or perceived negative attributes that she has buried deep underground. This requires us to get extremely vulnerable. It can be a long and painfull transition. Through this transition you birth your own Inner Mother.

It requires us to get familiar with all the different parts of us - those we like and those parts we don't. It takes a lot of conscious exertion of energy to keep those parts we don't like in our unconscious. This plays out in our conscious life. These are child parts of us that were not loved or acknowledged when we were children, so we fragmented them off into our unconscious to stay safe. To survive we adopted behaviours used as strategies to make our way in the world many of them focused at keeping us in control. When we can really embrace those dark parts and learn to love them we emerge from this transition more whole.

Finding these underworld parts asks something different of us. We cannot access our unconscious through our rational and logical part of our brain. We need to go into our primal and limbic parts of our brain to feel for them in our body. So this work requires us to learn to be in our body; to experience all of our emotions in a grounded way. When we learn to love and accept our dark parts we stop projecting them onto other women. We start to heal our sisterhood wounds which in turn, helps us naturally support other women. We can see and own the messy side of ourselves and not get sabotaged by it.

Why is this transition so important? When we don't accept our dark parts we project them onto others. When we can't be with our own emotions in a grounded way and learn to self-soothe, we cannot soothe the new baby in our arms who comes into this world with an unregulated nervous system. For the development of healthy attachment patterns with our babies, we have to co-regulate their nervous systems to help them learn and grow. We teach them slowly how to self soothe and provide that sense of safety in their nervous system through our attunement to them, when they cry from hunger, tiredness or needing a nappy change. Learning to feel safe to be vulnerable aids in our personal development because we start to ask questions and seek to understand what is going on. When we heal our sisterhood wounds we learn to support other women in community and be able to hold space for them. When we heal our sisterhood wounds we open the door for our sexual empowerment.

Our journey through rites of passage is different to that of men. Women go into a dark place, the underworld. The vulnerability they experience in their descent is challenging and in the stripping back of parts of themselves they don’t need anymore, they plant the seeds for their new expanded self to grow. It is like a tree that sparks from a seed and first it grows roots down in the dark of the earth so that when it grows taller and its branches spread wider, it has a good base to support its growth. Every time we go through a transition in life we go to this place, the time it takes to transition and the degree of transformation is different every time.

When many women go back to work after parental leave many feel quite disconnected because they know they have changed, yet very few workplaces acknowledge that change or provide transition support for them to go back. Often many women experience a huge degree of cognitive dissonance because of this; they have to pretend they don’t have children at work. It can be a very confusing time for many women, they cannot just turn off the mother part of themselves. Why should they?

There is so little support for women post partum to work on all of this. Most of the support is physical and maybe looking for signs of depression. When we support our mothers in society we foster a healthy community and society. Our children are our future.

Well good news. Dr Nic Pawley and I will be launching our online course next year to help you create your inner mother. This course will focus on the bio/psycho/social aspects of your personal development. You will learn embodied practices to develop a healthy grounded relationship with your emotions; you will learn about post-partum health from a TCM perspective; the changing rythms of womens sexuality throughout their life; how to work on your unconscious childhood patterning that may be holding you back and how to create your inner mother.

If you are interested let us know. If you know someone who may be interested forward this email onto them.

The healing power of Breathwork

I recently returned from 8 days of Breathwork facilitator training. It was a fantastic week where I got to learn and hang out with 19 other very engaged students learning to teach and facilitate Breathwork. By the end of our time together we had all developed extremely close bonds with each other, which is not surprising given we had spent all of that time breathing together and taking care of each other whilst processing lots of latent trauma.

Breathwork has been around for some time. You may have heard of it or know it as rebirthing, holotropic breathwork, alchemy of breath, BBTRS Breathwork, Breath of Bliss. These are all different teaching methods. Similar but different. There is no branding or copyright around Breathwork because it’s Breath.

So why is Breathwork so effective at moving old stuck energy, tension or trauma out of our body? Well the idea is that you charge up your body with oxygen through a connected breath, in and out, no pause in between. This brings you 100% into presence in your body, bypassing cortical control into an altered state of consciousness. In BBTRS breathwork, which is the modality I am learning, the idea is to bring the body into presence with this old energy and release it by triggering the flight or fight response to give the trauma the opportunity to complete its cycle.

What is the trauma I am speaking about? Well the best way to explain it is to use an example from Peter Levine’s book, “Waking the Tiger”. Imagine you see a Lion chasing a Zebra. The Zebra in an attempt to save itself falls to the ground and plays dead. It is frozen. The Lion, realising the chase is over, gets bored and runs away. Some moments later, knowing that danger has gone, the Zebra jumps up. It immediately starts running around, tremoring and shaking its body. It is discharging the frozen energy from its body. In his book Levine says the Freeze offers two benefits. Firstly, it saves the Zebra because the freeze allows it to run for its life, when danger has dissipated. Second, If the Zebra was eaten by the Lion, when frozen and numb it would not feel anything. Nature has built in compassion into a natural cycle. Humans and animals can both access the freeze response. However, for humans, our body doesn’t naturally do the discharge. We have to give it some help to do that. (for the sake of the article I’m just talking about latent general trauma, there are many different types of trauma the principle is the same).

Every day we experience the fight, flight or freeze response in our body in our autonomic nervous system. The danger coming our way may not be a lion chasing us but maybe it is an angry boss or spouse, or a lack of emotional or psychological safety in our work environment, angry drivers on the road yelling at us or a train stuck on the tracks doing nothing whilst we are stuck inside, worrying about getting to work on time. We have these scenarios happening all the time and because they have become normalised instances in our life, we don’t realise that constantly moving into these states of flight, fight or freeze is putting a lot of stress on our bodies. This is because we don’t have any opportunity to release that energy.

Trauma is the result of the freeze energy getting stuck in our body and not having the chance to complete its cycle. Trauma is not the result of what happened to us. Trauma is the result of how effective our nervous system was able to deal with that energy that was triggered in the traumatic situation. Two people can go through the exact same event, one feeling traumatised, the other being completely fine post the adverse event. It depends on whether the person went into freeze and stayed there or whether they went into flight or flight and were able to ‘save’ themselves. The good news is there are many different ways of releasing trauma frozen in our body. Breathwork is just one.

So how can Breathwork help?

As mentioned above, breathwork allows our body to release this stuck energy. Through charging the body with oxygen, the flight or fight kicks in and the body completes the cycle through discharge. This may be shaking, tremoring, crying, laughing, shouting, myofascial unwinding which is the body moving itself. Emotions that were never acknowledged at the time come back up, muscular tension releases. It creates a lot of space in the body.

People report feeling softer in their body, postural changes, feeling more ‘in’ their body, better at reinforcing their boundaries, feeling their emotions and actually enjoying that. A stronger sense of their own presence and feeling others’ presence.

For me personally, I have released really old tension, lots of trauma, I feel softer in my body, my skeleton actually feels quite different, aches and pains have disappeared. I am present with the sensations and emotions within my body and able to witness and observe them and I have noticed my capacity to be emotionally triggered has significantly decreased.

Breathwork is something you would do with a trained facilitator who can safely hold space for you. However it is your own body doing all the work, releasing all on its own, unwinding, your own breath healing you. You being your own healer. All the answers deep inside of you, all there waiting for you. Your body and its own innate ability to heal working its magic.

There are certain health conditions where Breathwork is contraindicated. These include pregnancy, severe asthma, heart disease, severe mental illness, epilepsy, diabetes, acute physical injuries. If you are unsure if you should try Breathwork, please consult your medical professional for advice.

Healing our Inner Child

One of the biggest challenges we face in our growth and development as adults is healing our childhood wounding.  That is, the traumatic impact of both emotional and psychological wounds we incur in childhood.  

This wounding is most often the result of our needs not being met by our parents.  Everyone that I work with has experienced this, as I have too. It is not because our parents were terrible parents, although some people’s parents were horrible.  It is that many of our parents are not perfect, they are people who were trying to work, raise children and have a life. They cannot focus all their attention on us 100% of the time.  They also had their own inner child wounds and at times they were parenting from that part of themselves, not their adult parts. The trauma I am talking about that we experienced as a result of this ranges from being criticised for not getting a great test score on a test at school, to being ignored, to in some cases, emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

Trauma expert, Dr Bessel van der Kolk, whom I have had the pleasure of being taught by, says in his book “The Body Keeps the Score”, ‘Trauma causes people to remain stuck in interpreting the present in light of an unchanging past’.

We develop strategies, habits and patterns of behaviour, that are often very reactive and they become our dominant approaches to cope and live our life.  Thus often repeated patterns of feedback are given, repeated incidences of relationships dynamics occurring are often a sign that you are operating from your inner child self.  Anything that gets you a bit fired up or ‘triggered’ is often a good sign that old programs maybe of shame, inadequacy, abandonment, betrayal or feeling unsafe are operating. These programs always have stories attached to them that allow us to feel in control of what is actually going on.  So much so, that we attract the same situations and act them out on a daily basis.

When we are unaware of these child parts of ourselves running our life we are actually walking around projecting a shadow part of ourselves onto others. Our inner narrative might be ‘the bad person who did that to me’, ‘the bad luck responsible for our suffering’.  In some cases we get feedback in the workplace, giving us a sign of how others are experiencing this shadow part of ourselves - that we don’t see - and how it impacts on them. However, it can, when left unattended for a long period of time turn into symptoms, illness or disease; often in the case of repressed emotions that were not accepted as part of us as children.  For example, many people have an unhealthy relationship with their own anger and struggle to express it in a grounded way as it was deemed unacceptable when they were a small child. How many toddlers having a tantrum at two years old are sent to the ‘naughty corner’? What they are actually doing when they shake their body on the floor is trying to discharge the energetic charge of anger running through them.

Why do we need to do this inner child work?  I hear you ask. Well, often we don’t get a choice because we hit rock bottom.  Either in terms of poor health or relationship rupture. Often in midlife, our psyche gives us a chance to heal this wounding and face our pain to prepare ourselves for a vibrant ‘third act’ after we turn 50.  In her famous essay on Midlife, Brene Brown says it like this. ‘Midlife is when the Universe puts its hands on your shoulders and says “I’m not screwing around. All of this pretending and performing – these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt – has to go. Your armour is preventing you from growing into your gifts. I understand that you needed these protections when you were small. I understand that you believed your armour could help you secure all of the things you needed to feel worthy and loveable, but you’re still searching and you’re more lost than ever. Time is growing short....”

“Facing childhood wounding and working with relationships that will help you heal your relationship with your inner child might be some of the most challenging personal development work that you do but it will also be the most freeing and empowering.  ”

To heal your inner child, you need to bring that part of yourself to consciousness.  You do this by witnessing your inner world. That is, be able to observe when you are acting out one of your habits or patterns of behaviour.  Once you can do that, you work out what that behaviour is trying to gain for you; often love, safety and belonging. The next step is being able to parent yourself. This enables individuation and clear separation from the sensitive child part of you within you.  The third step is learning to put some strategies in place for self care so you can regulate your nervous system and then develop new strategies to cope and thrive in the world.

This work is freeing both to you and your family system.  It breaks cycles of family patterning that you have been carrying.  It creates the capacity for you to witness and observe your emotions and understand in an embodied way that you are not your emotions - you are just the experiencer of them.  It makes baring your emotions so much easier and gives you the ability to listen to them when they arise.

Doing the inner child work is tough.  You want to do it supported by a coach or therapist and with the support of those you love around you.  It will improve the quality of your relationships. It will open you up to different types of relationships and experiences in your life as you stop reacting and start creating the outcomes you want.  It will allow you to have a close relationship with your body and really learn to listen to it and the innate wisdom it has within it, by listening to your emotions and learning to be with them. You will learn to appreciate your shadow and move towards self-love and self- acceptance as you learn to love all the different parts of you, good and not so good.  Hopefully you learn to listen to your nervous system and really learn the meaning of ‘take care of yourself’; how to give yourself permission to rest, how to regulate yourself at a pace that is supportive of your need to recover. But most importantly, you will learn to love all the different child and adult parts of you that you discover and that you are a glorious, multi-dimensional being who is capable of living their best life and thriving in the world. 

I do inner child work in my coaching - if this is something would like to explore, come have a chat with me.