WE NEED TO BE CAREFUL WHEN WE SPEAK TO TRAUMA IN OVERLY SIMPLISTIC WAYS

When we say….. when I’m harsh to myself I can’t expect others to be kind to me

or

when I don’t know how to meet my own needs how can I expect others to meet them.

This overly simplistic languaging actually keeps trauma stuck in place and prevents change from happening

Of course we know know when healing happens, the end result is being caring and compassionate to ourselves and knowing how to meet our own needs. However, the journey to this place is not by doing something differently and rather by being with the complexity that has resulted in the original patterning.

When we say you are the reason something does’t work, we shame rather than support our clients.

When we say instead, you have experienced pain at the hands of another and younger you adapted in some way, or made meaning from the experience that was profoundly wise at the time. We stop making our younger self wrong and as a result open the door to change.

When we place sole responsibility for our lived experience on the individual, we miss the relational parts, that are critical to supporting healing and change.

Individualistic languaging around healing is imbedded and influenced by a disconnected, materialistic and capitalistic orientated paradigm that places the individual at the centre at the expense and loss of the whole and the community.

We need to be very careful when we start using languaging that looks like

self responsibility ….

lead yourself,

heal yourself,

be self sufficient

…because it places us in an isolated and alone place, as well as ignoring the impact of collective and lineage trauma held in each of us.

We not only need each other, the other is pivotal to healing, because hurt happens in relation, and so needs to be healed in relationship.

When we feel unlovable …the combination of holding the pain of not being loved and receiving unconditional love and acceptance enables us to finally heal.

We need one another, and the critical part is we cannot give to ourselves something we have never received.

This is why therapy is so profoundly important because when I work with people along with many other elements I stand in a place that enables enoughness to be restored, internalised safety to develop and a care and softness towards self to emerge because it is received from the outside first.

Healing is relational, it’s is never an alone journey, and it is a being with rather than doing. If you feel called to start or further your healing journey, I’m here.