4 Keys to Building a Happy Relationship

How to Build a Healthy Relationship

A happy relationship is one that supports life, infusing it with a sense of adventure while also providing refuge and safety. It’s an invitation to engage in a creative process, one that both challenges and comforts you. There is no perfect relationship but there is a way to be in communion that is nourishing and reveals greater truths to you and your partner. The following four keys to a happy relationship are meant to serve as maps to guide you on your journey of deepening and expanding your intimate relationships. I believe true intimacy is a place–a field–where you and your partner meet to discover the sacred and meaningful that make life worth living.  

1. Be in a loving relationship with Your Self

Many of my clients come to me after years of talk therapy having an acute awareness of all that plagues them. As it turns out, awareness is not enough. They may know what they want, need, or desire. They may know what it feels like to be in their mind and body. They may know their traumas, their patterns, what keeps them up at night, why they wake up in the morning. They may know what makes them come alive and burst into bloom. Yet they still feel depleted, dissociated, dull, and disconnected from themselves and others. 

These inner experiences do not exist in a vacuum. Everything exists in relationship. The most foundational relationship you have is the relationship you have with yourself. And the relationship you have with yourself largely depends on how you were held, mirrored, and witnessed as a child. Were you held with a sense of reverence by a cherishing and adoring presence? Were your wants, needs, desires reflected back to you? Was your experience of reality validated, honored, and guided by a wise, compassionate other?

If this was lacking and you were met with psychological abuse, interpersonal violations, and a degradation and invalidation of your inner experience, then it can become hard to know where you end and the other begins. Or where the other ends and you begin. You can feel like there is no YOU there without those defining lines that outline a shape, a self, an identity worthy of love and adoration. This is the primal wound of non-being. Boundary setting becomes a baffling, bewildering, or daunting exercise when there is no sense of coherent self. Unresolved trauma makes it impossible to have an embodied sense of what is okay and what is not okay. What is tolerable, acceptable, fulfilling, or meaningful to you–or not. Doubting or gaslighting yourself becomes all too easy while relationships devolve into combative, power struggles. 

The solution is to be in a loving relationship with yourself. Not to just know yourself. You turn insight into action by taking the knowledge and awareness you have acquired and becoming curious. Below are some questions that can help you discover the quality of your relationship to your own woundedness. After all, the relationship you have with your own woundedness determines the quality of your life after all.  

Questions for exploration 

• What is your relationship to your own inner experience? How do you feel toward all that resides within you? How do you feel toward those “fault-finding, falling apart, unfinished parts” of yourself as poet Julia Fehrenbacher writes. How do you feel toward those parts that should have been held, mirrored, and witnessed? 

• What is your relationship with the parts of you that have to fight for what should have been received willingly with love? How do you feel toward the parts of you that carry the wants, the needs, the dreams, the nightmares, the drives of your inner world? 

2. Embrace the paradox of security versus freedom 

A fundamental polarity exists within us and within society at large that reflects an existential complexity we’re faced with as human beings. We want safety, security, stability, and commitment while also wanting freedom, spontaneity, adventure, and autonomy. Some parts of you may have made it their mission to get you to a stable, secure place. Their ultimate goal is finding and loving a safe, trustworthy other to experience true intimacy and commitment with. Some parts of you may have made it their mission to free you up for the adventure of your lifetime. Their ultimate goal is to experience the passion, thrill, and adventure of being in relationship (or not being in relationship).

If you have unresolved trauma, there is a tension between the two poles that can lead to more fragmentation, disorientation, and confusion. The result of existential internal conflicts is paralysis, dullness, a drainage of joy and life force–a stalemate with our own Being. Your relationship suffers from a loss of desire, a stuckness in old patterns, boredom, restlessness, and a sense of being trapped on a merry go round of familiar conflicts and hurts. You may not know what’s yours and what’s theirs, where is up and where is down, you may not know when to stay or when to go. 

If we dive deeper and take a closer look getting to know these parts of us straddling the divide between security and freedom, we come to realize there is no divide. What appears as a polarity or conflict on the surface is actually a complementary relationship. Try this exercise by Barry Johnson…Breathe in and hold your breath for as long as you can. The oxygen that once felt so nourishing begins to become suffocating as carbon dioxide builds up. Your body is forced to exhale. There is a great sense of relief for a bit before the need for fresh oxygen arises yet again. The inhale and exhale are complementary. One cannot exist without the other. Both are necessary for the health of the body and to avoid suffocation. 

You cannot venture out freely if there is no safety, no trust. True passion requires a merging, an intimacy that reveals and makes manifest our innermost desires. Commitment in long-term relationships leads to adventure because of time. Time becomes a vehicle for exploring and transcending preconceived notions of the self or other. The relationship becomes a living organism that must evolve, get rid of waste, and absorb nutrients for renewal as time progresses. How will the relationship unfold and what will it become is a mystery. It’s embracing this mystery that can lead to a sense of aliveness and meaning within the relationship and beyond.

Questions for exploration 

• Notice which you feel most drawn to–security or freedom? Intimacy or passion? Are you geared more toward commitment or adventure? Which of the two feels more familiar in your present relationship or historically in previous relationships? Which feels more applicable to this season of your life? 

• What are you hoping to achieve or avoid through a sense of security? 

• What are you hoping to be free from or free to do as a result of freedom? 

• Is it possible that security and freedom can coexist and play complementary roles in your relationship and life? What would that look like and feel like to you? 

3. Recognize Your Redeemer Narrative 

When you are living with unresolved trauma, you play out a role (or multiple roles) you were forced into by others. This role becomes unbearable because it was never yours to begin with. Chances are you had to contort yourself into all kinds of shapes to fit into a preconceived mold. Parts of you are driven by the need to break free from this role, this mold. Unfortunately, these parts often look outward for a person–a partner in crime–to help free you from this imprisonment and get the redemption you are seeking. Someone to finally see you, know you, love you the way you are so you can be free to be you, find peace, and experience joy and aliveness at last. We may yearn for someone strong enough to bear our woundedness and remain unfazed by our rough edges. We put them on a pedestal because the more superior, whole, and powerful they appear to us, the more capable they are of withstanding our inferiority, brokenness, and powerlessness. 

The problem with this plan is that the drive for redemption leads to reenactment. In an attempt to recruit a redeemer or rescuer, you are placing an immense burden on the other–forcing them into a preconceived role. You are imprisoned and your partner also becomes imprisoned. They become stuck–if they act beyond the confines of their role or contradict the given terms they risk losing you or the relationship. They are robbed of their freedom to be authentically themselves. The problem gets more complicated because chances are that your partner is returning the favor by doing the exact same thing to you. You are both each other's prisoners. Recruiting each other to be rescuers or redeemers lands you both into the heart of the abyss. Sooner or later one or both of you will present the other with the four horsemen: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling as described by Dr. John and Julie Gottman, founders of The Gottman Institute. You may attempt to: (1) radically change yourself so your partner doesn’t leave you, (2) radically change your partner so they can be who you need them to be, or (3) give up by abandoning the relationship physically, emotionally, or spiritually. 

I’m inviting you to recognize the possibility that the woundedness or vulnerability inside you that has contorted itself, been locked away, and now seeks redemption is your responsibility. As IFS Founder, Dick Schwartz, Phd writes, “You are the one you’ve been waiting for.” The only way to free yourself is to become aware of the multitudes within you. You are the prisoner, the prison guard, and the rescuer. You hold the lock and the key. Using the key to unlock your cell can look like getting curious about who you could be if you let go of the role that was forced upon you? Who could your partner be if they could let go of the roles forced upon them? 

When you shine a light on these dynamics and see the wounded parts of yourself and your partner, it becomes much easier to hold space. As poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust.” When you try to rescue or force the other to play the role of redeemer, you are tearing down the boundaries that make you you and your partner them. Without any boundaries there is chaos. When you guard each other’s solitude, you honor the divine order and sacred space that resides within each of you.

There is an essence inside us all. You are much more than meets the eye. You have a Self, a core Self, that cannot be contorted to fit any mold. It remains undamaged and unbroken. It cannot be imprisoned, only hidden from view like the sun on a cloudy day. Perhaps the aim of any relationship is to guard, cherish, and witness the sacred space that resides within us so that we can each embody more of our essence and become more of who we were meant to be.

Questions for exploration

• What are the roles you were given to play as a child? Here are some options: lost child, golden child, parentified child, scapegoat, truth-teller, mascot, caretaker. How do you play out these roles in the relationship? Are parts of you that try to do the opposite of these roles? 

• In your ultimate fantasy, what role would you give up and what role would your partner play? What are some expectations you have for your partner that may make them feel limited, trapped, confined, or suffocated? What are some expectations your partner may have that make you feel limited, trapped, confined, or suffocated? 

• What would it look like or feel like in your relationship if both partners were responsible for their own inner woundedness? How would that free you or them up? What would it look like or feel like if your partner guarded your solitude and you theirs?

4. Create a contract based on communion 

When you are in a relationship you are tacitly agreeing to a contract. Most of these contracts are unspoken, unseen, or unknown. The more invisible these contracts are the more chaotic and  confusing the relationship may be. If you have unresolved complex trauma, you are likely to find yourself stuck in a relationship that is not only not nourishing but also an extension of past trauma. Your love life becomes a merry go round of various iterations of the same wound, the same pain. The stuckness represents a greater stuckness rooted in learned helplessness. 

Chances are there is a part of you that feels powerless or believes you don’t have a choice when it comes to the relationship you want to have. You should accept the crumbs you are given. You should not trust your perception of the relationship–it’s not as bad as you think. Or you may believe it’s too good to be true, not trusting any relationship that does not resemble chaos itself. Perhaps you sabotage what good there is to feel more in control–it’s not safe to get attached, some inner voice says.

Without a conscious contract, your unresolved trauma creates the terms of the relationship. You build the foundation of your relationship on sand instead of rock. The wounded parts of you that are looking to be redeemed or freed are in the driver’s seat and in charge of the negotiations. The relationship becomes a reaction to the past instead of a proactive, creative activity manifesting the future. When you engage in a relationship, you are in the midst of a creative process. You are co-creating a life worthy of living together.

Unfortunately, in today’s world the function of the relationship has been stripped of meaning. Instead of co-creators, our society has turned us into reactors, enablers, and consumers who experience relationships on the basis of transaction as opposed to communion. The relationship becomes a means to an end without having any inherent value in and of itself. To be in relationship–to be in communion–is to be awake together to the nature of reality, truth, and love. What comes to mind is sitting under a night sky staring up at the stars in awe and experiencing a beauty that cannot be articulated into words. I invite you to grab a seat under the stars, see yourself and your partner as co-creators, recognize the sand in the foundation, and identify what rocks you can use to rebuild. 

Questions for exploration

• What is the nature of a relationship to you? How do you define the ideal or highest order of goodness in a relationship? 

• How can you each advocate for the best iteration of the relationship? Do your ideals map onto one another? Where do they overlap? Where do they diverge from one another? How can you learn from your differences?

• What if you were to stop sweeping things under the rug and make the invisible agreements visible? The unspoken spoken? What are the conflicts that shake up the relationship and how can they become tools to better understand the other and create a contract based on communion?

• How would it feel to share this with your partner? What concerns arise? What hopes arise? 

---

Ready to heal from trauma and find your aliveness?

How to Get Clarity with Almost Anything

How to Gain Clarity In Your Life

The number one reason we lack clarity is because we don’t trust our own judgment or our capacity to discern—to separate the wheat from the chaff. We don’t trust ourselves enough to be able to see clearly what is. We don’t trust ourselves to handle or withstand what we see when we open our eyes, that is—the truth. We may believe we don’t deserve the truth or we may think. if we reveal our truth to others, we will be undeserving of love and rejected. A part of us may believe it’s better to seek false refuge in the lie (as short-term as it may be) than to face the real, bewildering pain of a shattered self-concept or worldview. In our post-modern world, we may even believe there is no truth or objective reality—for example, all truth is subjective and, therefore, permissible and malleable to the whims of the moment or the eye of the beholder.

“The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves,” writes world-renowned trauma expert Dr. Bessel van der Kolk Greatest in his book, “The Body Keeps the Score.” Lying to ourselves is a survival strategy a part of us took on to shield us from pain and suffering. One of the biggest lies we tell ourselves is that we can move away from the inner pain the way we draw back our finger from a hot stove. The biology and physics of the outer world do not apply to our inner world. We recoil at emotional pain thinking we’re protecting ourselves. But what we are actually doing is recoiling from the truth, leaving ourselves vulnerable to the real dangers or threats that may be lurking in the dark. We have blindfolded ourselves and, in the process, blocked our innate clarity as conscious, spiritual Beings from shining through. We are effectively retraumatizing our own selves without even realizing it.

If you’ve experienced childhood complex trauma especially in the forms of psychological and/or narcissistic abuse, a part of you may have taken on the role of gaslighting your own self into adulthood. This was a noble attempt to adapt to extreme abuse and survive. Your disconnection from the truth and lack of clarity may show up as a deep and profound confusion, dissociation, a sense of boundary-less-ness, a feeling of being lost, untethered, and groundless. You may feel at times that you don’t know who you are at your core. You may feel like there is no core—that under the hood of your Being is pure nothingness or emptiness.

The way out is to PIVOT, or move toward the source of the pain. It may sound counterintuitive but the more you can hold space for and be with the inner wound, the easier it will be to reconnect to your truth and restore your sense of clarity. We PIVOT to turn back toward ourselves, toward the truth when our natural inclination is to move away or against our own vulnerability. You can practice PIVOT in the following 5 ways: (1) Pause for perspective, (2) Invite in what is, (3) Value your Self, (4) Open up to Life, (5) Trust the truth. It is my hope that PIVOT will act as a tool to help you map a greater sense of meaning, aliveness, and wholeness onto your experiences. As you will see, it is challenging, if not impossible, to live with clarity when there is no connection to a deeper meaning and existential foundation of Being. We will be looking at how to get clarity through the lens of the Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy.

5 WAYS TO GET CLARITY

1. Pause for Perspective

When you get triggered, activated, or overwhelmed, pause and note there is something coming to the surface. Words like “triggers,” “activation,” or “overwhelm” come from parts of us that have labeled what has arisen in our conscious experience as something negative. This makes sense because historically when we’ve been triggered or activated, the effect or outcome is negative, oftentimes leading to a downward spiral of increased pain and suffering. What we are offering here is another possibility. Another way to respond or be in the moment, that is to say to live. After all life arises in our consciousness as a series of unfolding moments.

In nature when something comes to the surface it does so because it needs to. A whale needs to come to the surface for air. A seedling must push through the surface of the soil to receive nutrients from the sun and air. What has come to the surface, even (or especially) in the most challenging of moments, is in need of nourishment. Something is arising from a dark depth or deep darkness, from our personal Underworld or Shadow world. It is emerging from the unknown, unseen world and towards the known, seen world, where the light of consciousness can shine on it. The question then becomes, how will you greet what has arisen? How will you meet this new arrival, this unexpected guest, as described by the the Sufi poet Rumi? Is it okay for this new arrival or unexpected guest to be here?

Affirmation

I pause for perspective, notice what is coming to the surface, and recognize its need to be seen, known, and nourished just like the whale surfacing for air or the seedling pushing through the topsoil.

2. Invite In What Is

You have a choice. You can stand in the light, see the unseen, and know the dragon. Or you can stumble around in the darkness, bumping up against a tail or wing when you least expect it and becoming terrorized all over again. If you can voluntarily choose to know the dragon, you can do something about it. I don’t mean doing something in the traditional sense. We often talk about slaying the dragon, overcoming our demons, or confronting {fill in the blank}. What if instead of confronting “it,” you voluntarily invited it in? Invite it to be here, stand in the light, and take a break from the dungeons of the psychic Underworld.

You may have concerns like can you handle being with this? What if you get pulled into the psychic Underworld along with it? What if you get overwhelmed and flooded by its grief, rage, despair, or shame? These are concerned parts of you surfacing. They are more arrivals, unexpected guests. Can you also welcome them to stand in the light with you? You can stay with those concerned parts and allow them to share their worries or fears. This is new territory and it takes time to become acquainted with the unfamiliar.

This is the paradox of healing that offers a profound paradigm shift. The more we invite in the pain, the less pain and more at peace we feel. The more we invite in the fear, the less fear and more courage we feel. The more we invite in the shame, the less shame and more confident in our worth we feel. When we have access to our inner light and can stand firmly in it, we can experience the benefits of not only accepting but also embracing the paradox.

We begin to discover that the triggered or activated parts of us are not what they appear. Just like Dorothy we can go all the way to Oz to discover that the all-powerful wizard is a little old man hiding behind a curtain. We discover that an inner critic is a young, bullied child who had to be harsh to keep you in line so real bullies stopped targeting you. “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love,” writes poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

As we invite in more of these new arrivals, we learn overtime that the psychic Underworld is also not what it appears to be. Through the lens of our true Self we do not see our personal Underworld as something to fear. We see it as a womb, where gestation of our hidden, unseen potential lives. We see it as home to an unlocked vitality that is waiting to be brought into the light, that is to say, healed and loved. We begin to see the obstacles or tor-mentors of our lives as midwives beckoning forth from the womb that hidden potential. Even “the inner wound can be seen as the womb,” Michael Meade writes. The question then becomes can you give birth to yourself—the you that is yet unborn? The you you are meant to be? Can you be reborn on a moment-to-moment basis as the inevitable tragedy strikes and the world initiates you into a more transcendent state of Being?

Affirmation

I invite in what is here knowing that it is a guest bearing gifts, the inner wound is a womb carrying unlocked potential, and the world is initiating me to overcome past limitations and live with more aliveness, wholeness, and transcendence.

3. Value Your Self

If each wound can be seen as a womb, then what you once wanted to get rid of, you can begin to value, even treasure. You can invite in the parts of you that live in the recesses of your psyche and treat them as guests until their true nature and potential is revealed to you. You can treat each guest with honor because of its inherent value.

The question then may arise, if there is inherent value in our experiences and the parts of us who carry these experience, then where does this value come from? For that matter, where does your inner light come from? Where do you and I come from? I believe we cannot heal our traumas or recover from our pasts without grappling with the existential questions that have followed us since time immemorial.

Does our value come form God, a Higher Power, the Universe, Nature, Love? Is it a spirit guide, a Divine Mother, an angel, a wise ancestor, or pure consciousness? Whatever you choose to believe, just as your parts are connected to you, your Self—Your Self is also connected to something greater accessible to each and every one of us. Like spokes on a wheel if we each travel far enough into our inner landscapes we discover the center, the Source, within our collective unconscious. Everything and everyone emanates from a singular place. You are made up of the very specks of energy that were once confined to a single point before the Big Bang explosion. You come from and are comprised of that same potential capable of creating billions of galaxies. How could you be insignificant? How can your experience not matter? You are worthy just for existing. After all, you are a human Being, coming down from a lineage of ancestors who have survived the unspeakable and unknowable.

This may come as a surprise to parts of us that feel the need to strive, to achieve, to perform, to become someone worth mattering in the world. These parts of us may even refute these claims. And that’s okay. Can you get curious about where that comes from? That message that you have to prove you’re worthy or do something to become enough? You can become much more effective in the world and in carrying out your responsibilities when your actions are fueled by an inner knowing and recognition of your worth. We can only go so far acting out from a place of misalignment and disconnection from our inherent value. When we value who we are at our core, baggage and all, we choose to live in alignment with honor and in service of the highest good as it manifests through us. Striving, achieving, and performing are still tasks we undertake—but they become lighter, less effortful, and sacred processes without the burdens of shame and worthlessness weighing us down.

Affirmation

I see the inherent value in myself and others, my innate connection to the divine (however I define it), and, as a result, I live in alignment with the highest good as it manifests through me.

4. Open Up to Life

When we begin to consider the possibility of our inherent value, we are able to experience more confidence, freedom, and openness to life and its offerings. The renowned Italian filmmaker Federiko Fellini shared, “You have to live spherically – in many directions. Never lose your childish enthusiasm – and things will come your way.” Jesus said, "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:2-4). Zen Buddhists speak of Shoshin, beginner’s mind, which is to look at every situation you’re placed in as if it’s the first time you are seeing it, like a child. Practicing a beginner’s mind or becoming like a child gives us a chance to connect to our innate clarity. We can see the unseen and know the unknown of any ordinary or extraordinary situation, from the most mundane to the most mystical.

The veil is lifted, the mists part, the spell is lifted, and we are open to possibility and limitless potentials that reside within the kingdom of heaven. We can experience the pull upward to ascend to our Psychic Heavens. We can envision through the power of our imagination a better future, one reflective of the highest good. We can access and exercise our free will and agency over our lives with grace. We have the power to transform ourselves, give birth to our unborn selves, and renew our Being without the constraints of our past burdens which have obstructed our view of the truth.

Affirmation

I am open to awakening and seeing the ocean of possibility before me and within me, and with childlike wonder I choose to live spherically, giving myself permission to take up space and expand in many directions.

5. Trust in Truth

Being open to possibility and to life does not mean being completely care-free and bumbling about in bliss. We cannot disconnect from that which grounds us, from that which beckons us downward to face the harsh hand life may deal us. We need solid ground to land on. We need a foundation to build upon and use as a launching pad for upward ascent into healing, growth, and transformation. That solid ground is truth. That foundation is truth.

No matter how far out there you are, regardless of how lost you may be, your truth is always there. Your truth is an inner north star guiding you out of the forest if you only look. Looking can feel like a daunting task. Parts of us may feel we aren’t worthy of the truth or that ignorance truly is bliss. Parts of us may hope that postponing the inevitable may actually prevent the inevitable from happening. But more often than not parts of us feel we can’t handle the truth. Seeing it will blind us. It will lead to total collapse. We can honor those parts that have felt the need up until now to shield us from the truth. We can gently reassure them and witness what it has been like for them to protect us in this way. Perhaps we can update them that preventing us from seeing the truth or moving away from what is has only made us more vulnerable and exposed to getting hurt. It will take time to build that trust in the truth and trust in our capacity to not only withstand it but also be set free by it.

Yes, the truth will set you free. This is not an overstatement or exaggeration. Seeing, accepting, and speaking the truth, especially to our own selves is the greatest act of love. We may need to sacrifice short-term comfort to grapple with it but we also get to truly know ourselves, who we are, and what we are made of. “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell,” writes Carl Jung. Looking for truth leads us down a path that may feel like Hell but, now we know, that even (or especially) in our unique personal Underworld, rebirth is possible (if not essential). Perhaps we are being guided and rooted down so we can grow to heaven. So we can gain access to our Psychic Heavens, “a sacred space where we can find ourselves again and again,” as Joseph Campbell says. Perhaps then we will know what it feels like to be at home in our minds, bodies, relationships, and the world at large.

Affirmation:

I trust I can move towards my inner wounds, and see the truth that sets me free, reconnecting me to the sacred within and beyond my Being.

---

Ready to heal from trauma and find your aliveness?

How to Silence Your Inner Critic

How to Silence Your Inner Critic

Our collective conscience is saturated with this question (and its multiple variations): How do you overcome, get rid of, lose, manage, conquer, tame, control, quiet, or banish your inner critic? A simple google search reveals the inner critic is the monster with a thousand faces that must be banished. It's the demon that must be exorcised, the villain that must be conquered, the monkey mind that must be tamed, the vicious superego that won't stop. "You can be your own worst enemy," refers to this aspect of our Being.

The avatars appear infinite but the theme remains the same: the inner critic stands in the way between you and your inner peace, joy, and ability to live in the moment. You want to show up with love and compassion for yourself and others but your inner critic (which has been known on occasion to unleash its wrath outwardly) won't let you.

Perhaps there is no other part of us more universally maligned, abused, rejected, excommunicated as our inner critic. And for good reason. This is the part of you that says you're not enough, you don't matter, you'll never be loved, you don't belong, you don't measure up, you don't deserve your success, you're bad, you can't handle this, you're weak, you're an imposter and you will be figured out. Sound familiar?

The best way to overcome your inner critic is to start listening.

The external laws of physics apply to the internal world: for every action there is an equal in size and opposite in direction reaction force. The more you fight to overcome, the stronger, louder, and more intense the internal jabs become. Your inner critic carries a message and it needs to be heard. When doing this work with clients, I often share the scene from the Wizard of Oz when the curtains are pulled back and there is a little old man orchestrating the whole nine yeards. In your inner world, it’s usually a lonely, lost, exhausted child doing its best to keep you going. At one point in time, chances are your survival depended on it.

4 Steps to Overcome Your Inner Critic

1. Love the questions themselves.

As poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes, "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves." Love the questions themselves because they most often arise from something inside you that yearns to be loved. Take a moment to sit with the question, "How can I overcome, silence, get rid of (choose your flavor or insert your favorite variation here) my inner critic?" This question is emanating from a deep woundedness in your Being.

Who inside wants to get rid of your inner critic? Who has been hurt by the war raging inside? Who has been the target of the attacks? Who has been caught in the crossfires? Who is most scared of the inner critic? Who has been on the receiving end of the criticism? What happens to this vulnerable one inside when the inner critic is activated? These are important questions to love. They are leading questions of the best kind—leading you back inside to the inner child parts of you that long to be rescued, held, and cherished. Perhaps they picked up messages early on that you are bad, shameful, not enough, unloveable, undeserving, an outsider. These young vulnerable parts are not the ones that have to face with the inner critic. There's a greater you here that transcends these messages, that has the clarity to see the bigger picture and hold space for both the one doing the shaming and the one carrying the scars of shame. This greater you has access to other messages from beyond—ones that align much closer to the truth of your Being.

2. Create a home inside your Self.

Rumi writes, "This being human is a guest house." I would say this being human is a home. Perhaps the greatest task of becoming human, or owning our humanity, is coming home to ourselves. The guests belong here. They are you. They are us. The inner critic is a part of you. It's a wave within the vast ocean of You. The ocean cannot fear the wave. And yes, sometimes it can feel like a tsunami but there is an expansiveness within you that cannot fear it. The ocean can look at the tsunami and say, "Hey, that's me. I can be big and powerful. I can harness that energy. I can play, express, Be." The question here becomes can you open your mind and your heart enough to dip your toe in the ocean of your vastness? What would it be like if you could look at your inner critic not through the lens of your wounded inner child but through the inner eye of the expansive you, your core Self as we say in Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy?

3. Invite the inner critic in.

See if you can be curious about this stranger—this inner critic. Can you open your home and heart? Gather around the fireplace of your soul. Sit at the round table of your heart. Give cookies. Give tea or coffee. Welcome in the stranger who was forgotten outside in the cold.

Share your curiosity. Allow the light from your open heart to shine through to this guest before you. Invite this one to share with you what has it been doing all along? What has it been hoping to achieve for you? How did it come to do what it does? What is its origin story? What would have happened to you if it didn't play this role? How does it feel doing its job? If it could be freed up to return home to the ocean of You, what would it prefer to do? How would it like to harness its energy, play, express, or be?

From my experience the inner critic is a type of inner hero that has been forced to take on the role of the "monster." It's both the hero and monster with a thousand faces. It is often tasked with taking on great feats. It may be trying to keep you in line so you can "fit in" and receive the sense of belonging and love never given to you. It may be trying to make you small and invisible to keep you safe and secure because when being seen was dangerous there was no other place to hide but inside. It may be trying to help you measure up, "should-ing" all over you, so that you can become the ideal you, a person of worth who matters. There are endless possibilities here. There is no one answer. It's about loving the questions and seeing what's there for you when the curtain gets pulled back. Who is the inner critic without its armor? What hero lies behind the monster? This is your story and it can be one of redemption, transformation, and transcendence.

4. Be grateful for it is a guide from beyond.

When the curtain gets pulled back, it's easy to feel a sense of appreciation and gratitude for the inner critic who has been driven by a positive intention. Perhaps it's been wanting you to belong, be safe and secure in the world, and feel worthy and loved. Are there any nobler intentions? The truth is that it has played an important role to get you to where you are today. You have the choice to honor it and thank it for its devotion and commitment to service despite how exhausted, depleted, and desperate it was for change. You can help it to heal and be free from the past using various protocols and resources, including psychospiritual healing modalities like IFS Therapy.

As an adult, healing is not only about having the choice to be free from the past but also seeing more clearly with precision. The mists part, the veil lifts, the curse is broken and we become awake—seeing the hero within the monster (or inner critic) and witnessing the primal wounds it has been protecting. We are able to hold the paradoxes that make life imbued with contradictions, possibilities, and untapped potential. The wounds of the past become vehicles for transcendence. Wounds are initiations that demand of you to embark on a hero's journey, returning home to yourself with elixirs of wisdom, resilience, and mystical, mythical, and magical ways of living. You don't have to just recover from the past. You can create your future by harnessing the energy within your ocean of vastness. This is a sacred space where synchronicities arise seemingly out of nowhere and flow becomes effortless. You can realize your dreams and manifest realities into being.

Far too often our traumas are being medicalized, clinicalized, and weaponized against us as a means to disempower or force us to find solace and even virtue in victimhood. The opposite is true: if you have the courage to voluntarily face your traumas, or wounds, they become sources of empowerment for within them lie hidden treasures from beyond. We must own our wounds and reclaim their power as both the hero and monsters we are, as both the victims and perpetrators, as both the dragon and the princess, as both the wave and ocean, and, ultimately, as the divine beings we are having a human experience. I leave you with this wish from Danielle LaPorte, May you seek to know the vastness of your light. Because it is vast.

---

Ready to heal from trauma and find your aliveness?

Why Therapy Doesn't Work and What to Do to Heal Your Trauma

Why therapy doesn’t work

"I have the awareness, the insight so to speak, and it's not enough. Nothing is changing for me. If anything, my awareness makes me feel more frustrated and disconnected from my self and my life. If I know why I am the way I am, shouldn't I be able to do something about it? And if I can't, does that make me insane?"

This is what I commonly hear from my clients when we first meet. Change for them often means getting to a point where they can let go of trying to control everything, surrender enough to allow themselves to be—just be. It sounds so simple theoretically yet this is the peak of their individual mountain. They yearn to pause, rest, take in the view, and experience the joy of their lives. On the peak they don't have to do anything else or be anyone else. On the peak they are enough. Being is enough. They are already complete.

What gets in the way between them and their Peaks of Being? What weighs down on them as they attempt to make the climb? They are like Sisyphus, condemned to carry a boulder up a steep hill only to find that just as they are about to reach the peak the boulder rolls down hopelessly forcing them to begin again. This is what traditional therapy, especially talk therapy, often feels like.

Traditional therapy is not for everyone. I would go so far as to say, the more intellectual, analytical, and hyperaware you already are, the less effective it will be for you. Chances are you have a strong critical thinking mind, you can shift between perspectives easily, you can relate to many sides of an argument, and you can focus your attention so inwardly you drown out the noise of life altogether. You may have a special knack for dissociating from the present and disconnecting from what matters to you most. And what matters most is showing up for yourself and others authentically and wholeheartedly with a sense of purpose, belonging, and aliveness.

Traditional therapy can pull you in the opposite direction. It can throw your boulder back down the mountain and force you to begin again regardless of how hard you try. That's because it reinforces the already hardworking intellectual parts of you that believe knowing more and knowing better will make you feel better and feel whole at last. You may seek to gain an understanding of what plagues you as a means to get rid of vulnerability and never again feel the same pain. Knowledge and information can become a type of armor, shielding us from the deeper wounded parts of our psyche that don't need to know more. They need to be known by us and communed with. The more they are ignored, silenced, or exiled, the louder and more intense they will become to get our attention and be seen, heard, and loved by us.

Traditional therapy can leave you feeling more stuck, traumatized, and desperate for change than ever. I can relate because I've been there. I've made it my life's mission to help other trauma survivors not have to go through what I went through, especially since I now know there IS another way.

4 reasons why therapy doesn’t work:

1. It’s unsafe and re-traumatizing.

Traditional types of therapy, especially talk therapy, either focus on symptom management without addressing the underlying root cause of trauma or go straight to the deepest pain point bypassing, invalidating, or challenging defenses and coping mechanisms that have been essential for the client’s survival. These survival strategies need our acknowledgment, gratitude, and compassion in order for true transformation to occur. If they are not given the respect they deserve, the result is no change and/or backlash leading to a worsening of symptoms, re-traumatization, and a downward spiral of hopelessness and helplessness. In other words, therapy can not work in the best case and make clients worse in the worst case.

2. It’s pathologizing and stigmatizing.

As a culture we have focused all our efforts on squelching or turning away from pain and suffering while moving toward “positive” experiences. We have lost touch with the Yin-Yang nature of Being. We want the impossible—the ascent to our Psychic Heavens without the descent into the Shadow Underworld. Everything in our Shadow Underworld has become medicalized or clinicalized to the point of being devoid of meaning that resonates on a soul level in deep primal, ancestral, and mystical ways. The misguided world of traditional psychotherapy has helped vilify and exile the vulnerable parts of our selves dwelling in the shadow realms. These are the very parts of us that hold hidden treasures and powers buried within them. Trauma at its most fundamental level is a vehicle for transcendence and traditional therapy misses the mark.

3. It’s one-dimensional and outdated.

Transformation is not linear and we are not monolithic minds driving around in flesh vehicles. We contain multitudes. There are entire worlds within us that carry personal, universal, spiritual, and biological truths. The parts of ourselves that we experience in our everyday life are more than meets the eye. We are divine beings having a human experience. At our very core, there is a Self that remains intact, undamaged, and a source of unimaginable wisdom and healing regardless of our wounding. Our bodies are sacred living, breathing organisms that shape and are shaped by our experiences. We now know more than ever what trauma does to our bodies and how healing interventions can target different pathways or structures in the brain and nervous system to bring about real change. Modern day psychotherapy still has not integrated this cutting-edge, evidence-based knowledge.

4. It overlooks the high-functioning trauma survivor who has coped with their woundedness by performing and achieving.

In traditional psychotherapy and psychiatry, there is a huge emphasis on functionality. For example, a patient meets the criteria for a diagnosis based on the degree to which the symptoms impair functioning in personal, social, and/or work domains. What about those amongst us who are the walking wounded? We look like we are thriving yet we are struggling to survive in the psycho-spiritual dimension of life. Perhaps our traumas have propelled us upward on an ascent from which great feats of success have been attained in the visible world. All the while we suffer an invisible spiraling descent into the Shadow Underworld. The walking wounded are masters of their hyper-functioning, orderly, busy, external lives and slaves to their chaotic, unknown, mystical yet mystifying internal lives. These individuals need specialized trauma therapy and a customized healing process that honors their outward journey of achievement and their inward journey toward deep healing and transformation.

What can you do now? How can you heal your trauma?

1. Envision your healing journey.

Visualize, journal, reflect or meditate on what your ideal healing journey would look like and feel like. What do you wish therapists could get about you and your experience? What frustrates you about the current booming culture of therapy, healing, self-help, or self-care? How would you like to feel as a result of embarking on your own unique healing journey?

2. Open your eyes and look beyond your current horizons.

There are so many types of therapy today that are cutting-edge, evidence-based, and trauma-focused. Do your own research, read the books, attend the workshops or retreats, and expose yourself to diverse ways of deepening and expanding your healing. You can start by reading books like "The Body Keeps the Score” by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. You may want to look into Internal Family Systems therapy, Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. You can stay up to date on the latest through the Trauma Research Foundation.

3. Widen your circle and play.

You can widen your circle of healing to include other types of therapy and a spirit of play. You get to define what therapy is for YOU. Therapy can be contributing to your community, expressing through art, moving your body, finding a mentor, becoming a mentor, learning a new skill, providing a service for others, reconnecting to the divine or your higher power through spiritual practices. The beauty of the wound, trauma, or whatever calamity has befallen you is that it becomes a door, a passageway, an initiation leading you back home to your Self. Sometimes finding your home, your center, means widening your circle to welcome the vulnerability and woundedness of others. Sometimes healing means withdrawing into the caves of safety nursing your shadows and sometimes it means venturing out into the seas of freedom riding the waves as they come. You get to experiment and play with it. There is no one solution for everyone and there is no one solution for every season of your life.

Therapy becomes another way to fight or flee from our vulnerability that is desperate to be known, loved, and healed.

It's human nature to move away from discomfort or reel from pain. It's also within our human capacity to move towards our pain and suffering. We can become intimate with our own vulnerability and gather around our own and each other's woundedness with love and compassion. Our body knows what to do—white blood cells migrate toward the infected, vulnerable part of our body to help us heal without us having to thinking about or understand the mechanism behind "leukocyte extravasation." Similarly, our core Self, who we are at our core as divine beings, knows what to do.

And I hope by now I've made it clear, no—you are not insane for being aware and not being able to change or transform in the way you want to. Yet. You are awake and present to the fact that healing happens at a deeper, primal level that calls you to brave the inner wilderness of your psyche and befriend your vulnerability. You know deep down that there's a missing piece here and there's some divine wisdom that can lead you back to wholeness and inner peace. I'm here to tell you that yes, you can climb your Peak of Being, release your boulder, and ascend to your Psychic Heavens to experience your joy, peace, love, and aliveness. But first, let’s get to know who in there is stuck carrying the boulder of your woundedness. Let’s honor and celebrate all the parts of you that got you to where you are today. If you’re a survivor of complex trauma, you showing up at all for your healing is a miracle.

---

Ready to heal from trauma and find your aliveness?

What are the root causes of trauma? | How to Recover from Childhood Trauma Series, part 1/3

Ever had someone or something save your life, literally, metaphorically, spiritually, or all of the above? 

The 12-step program of Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families (ACA) and its supportive community was that for me. It saved me in all the ways. I swear this isn’t an exaggeration. 

You may be wondering, Saved you from what exactly? 

That’s easy. From falling into the black hole abyss of childhood complex trauma. From living a life out of fear, squandering any and all potential for real love, joy, freedom, peace, connection, empowerment, creative expression...the list goes on. 

I’m on the other side of that black hole today. That’s not to say that I don’t struggle. I promise you I do but it’s worlds apart from where I started. My mission now as a fellow traveler and an Internal Family Systems (IFS) trained psychotherapist is to serve high achieving, passionate professionals, and big-hearted creatives who are ALSO adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families. Or adults who experienced childhood complex trauma. 

Hey you, I’m speaking to you.

Yes, you. The one reading this who’s on the edge of that black hole abyss. I see you.

The one who’s burned out from putting on a brave face while living a secret life of fear. I see you. 

I’ve made it my life’s work to show up for you so you don’t have to go through what I went through. 

Here’s the truth—you deserve more than that. 

You’re worth having your own insides match your outsides. 

You’re worth being and feeling in alignment with the innate power within you. 

You’re worth belonging to yourself, to people that genuinely love you for YOU, and to something greater than yourself however you define that. 

You’re worth becoming the hero of your own story. 

This is why I’ve created a 12-step Self-Hero program that looks at your particular flavor of trauma and past baggage through the lens of Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy, a holistic, non-pathologizing, evidence-based psychotherapeutic approach developed by Richard C. Schwartz, Phd. This program can be used alongside your personal therapy, the ACA program, or on its own depending on where you’re at and what works for you. 

This blog post is Part 1 of a 3-part Self-Hero series that will be your introductory road map to the journey of becoming the loving hero of your own story.

I’m going to be tackling questions like:

• Who are adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families (ACAs)?

• How do you become an adult child?

• How to know if you’re an adult living with childhood trauma?

• What are the underlying root causes of childhood trauma impacting you right now? 

If you’re already an ACA fellow traveler, I’m writing this for you. I’m dedicated to giving back to all the adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families out there committing one step at a time (if you’re anything like me one breath at a time) to healing your traumas, emerging out of your secret life of fear and into a life rooted in your self-care and self-love. 

If you’re just learning about adult children or wondering if you’re an adult child, I’m writing this for you too. I’m dedicated to guiding you. You, my friend, are at the brink of discovering that there’s a whole other safe, loving world out there and inside of you waiting to be seen, heard, known, and felt by you. 

I’d like to start with a confession. 

When I was 16 years old, my cousin who was 10 years older than me was in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). And I was so jealous of him. Let me explain. We spent a summer together in our tiny mountaintop village in Southern Greece near Sparta (yes, that Sparta) where there were more olive trees than people. There we would lose all concept of time as we sipped our beachside iced coffee or ate our mountaintop lamb chops talking about life, suffering, purpose, and what it really means to change. I couldn’t name it at the time but in retrospect we were also talking about our traumas. 

I can’t say that “trauma” was on my radar as a 16-year-old teen but I was definitely on trauma’s radar. She followed me wherever I went (even in places that looked like paradise) and sucked the color out of my world leaving me in a grey, muted version of reality. I was using whatever strategy I had to escape her. Dissociation, numbing, and obsessive compulsive strategies were top of the list. But she would wait for me at the pit of my belly reminding me through a stinging, burning, piercing sensation that she was still there. A relentless, stalker poltergeist stabbing me from the inside. I’ve got to admire her persistence. 

Did anyone else feel like this? Or was it just me? 

My cousin was like me only that he used to drink to escape. Now he was fighting his battle with his trauma poltergeist with a newfound perspective, a community, a mission, the structure of 12 steps, and a spiritual lens through which to navigate the world. Everything I wanted to escape from, the shame, the vulnerability, the pain of being so lost I couldn’t pick my own self out of a police lineup, he was facing alongside other brave souls and survivors of trauma. He shared the Serenity Prayer with me and my jaw dropped. I fell to my knees gasping. I wasn’t even religious but I wanted that. All of it. Maybe (or most definitely) not the alcoholism part. But everything else. 

Ok here it goes. I’m embarrassed to admit this….

But for the sake of being real—a small part of me actually wished I was an alcoholic so that I could belong to this AA world. Or at the very least I wished there was a program for people like me that I could work. I didn’t even know what that would look like or be like.

Something inside me deeply resonated with people showing up for themselves and one another as they traveled a clearly defined path with guideposts (as any good Type A personality would dream of). I wanted to climb out of my rock bottom—also known as exorcise the trauma poltergeist from the pit of my belly—and come to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to my sanity. 

Restore me to feeling safe. 

Restore me to not feeling lost. 

Restore me to not being in pain. 

Restore the color in my world. 

Restore me. Period. Full Stop. 

Fast forward 12 years later. It’s winter in Athens. 

It’s Tuesday night. I’m sitting alone at the corner cafe drinking my cappuccino showered in my preferred inordinate amount of cinnamon while a Coldplay song plays in the background. I’m on the phone with my dear friend and soul sister Kristina. I’m writhing in pain like someone took my soul, froze it, and shattered it into a million pieces with a pickaxe. I’m having what can only be described as an “emotion seizure'' although I’m pretty sure I could feel every cell of my body physically shaking. I’m in a public place of course so I’ve got to keep it all under wraps. Fortunately for me, the lighting was dim and I was seated at a back table.

I’d just had another falling out with my family in New York. 

One that had me leave NY yet again and move back to Athens. One that had me feeling stupid for trusting them again or trusting that things could be different. One that triggered the abandoned, neglected, abused inner child parts of me that I lovingly refer to as emotional orphans. As if that wasn’t enough, my family thought I was “crazy” (disclaimer: their word, not mine). If I was at a different place in my life, chances are there would be a big, loud part of me doubting my own sanity. 

Gaslighting, anyone? Not here. Not now. Mercifully. 

So I’m on the phone with Kristina. To be fair, she’s more on the phone with me as I vent and purge all my insides onto her. Then the seven words come out of her mouth that would change my life, “Maybe you should look into this website?”

It’s the official website for Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families. Before she could say another word, my laptop’s open and I’m scanning the entire website and literature of the program. 

I fall into what’s referred to as the pink cloud. 

I feel the trauma poltergeist at the pit of my belly loosen up her grip just enough for me to experience a real sense of hope and possibility. 

Maybe there IS another way to live. 

Maybe, like my cousin in AA, I too can have a newfound perspective, community, mission, 12 step program, and spiritual lens through which to navigate the world.

Maybe I don’t need to become an alcoholic to belong to the AA world (or any world for that matter). 

Maybe I AM an adult child and this program is for people like me. 

Maybe, and just maybe for this once, I got what I wished for. A real way out of my pain and back to myself. Not escaping. Not numbing. True freedom. Power. Belonging. Self-love. 

Sign me up yesterday, please. 

As I sit here now writing this at 6 in the morning, a part of me wants to send a shoutout to Kristina, my loving, fierce, supportive fellow traveler who’s witnessed me at my worst and best with equal kindness and her signature no bullshit attitude. None of this would be possible without her.

So Who Are Adult Children Of Alcoholics And Dysfunctional Families?

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to time travel? I have. And then I realized I don’t have to wonder. I’m time traveling all the time! And you probably are too. I noticed throughout my healing journey that whenever I was “triggered” or overwhelmed by someone or something, I was mentally, emotionally and physically time traveling to the past. Similar to a flashback. 

Case in point. I had to make an important business decision a few years ago. I became so overwhelmed by a little voice that said, Who am I to make this decision? I don’t want to have to do this. I can’t do this. What voice was that? 

I went inside and recognized it as the voice of 5-year-old me. 

She was in the driver’s seat and thought she had to navigate this situation. I’m sorry to say but I don’t think 5-year-olds should have that level of responsibility when it comes to making business decisions. Or any decision for that matter. No matter how bright or lovely they are. 

The same is true for when I’m time traveling to the future. When I'm projecting myself into the future playing out the worst case scenarios (sound familiar?), I'm still time traveling to the past. 

You may be thinking, What kind of crazy, mind-bending inner physics is this? I know I would.

I was troubleshooting all the ways any business decision I made could go horribly wrong leaving me poor, desperate, and homeless. I went inside and again recognized that 5-year-old in me. I was seeing my future worst case scenarios through her anxious eyes. Past me was in the driver’s seat again. As an adult with clarity and calm, I could see that the numbers in any scenario just didn’t add up to “poor, desperate, and homeless.” 

Numbers don’t mean anything to an anxious 5-year-old of course. I get where my 5-year-old was coming from. It was an important business decision that would have long-term consequences. But it wasn’t a life-or-death situation even though to her it felt like it. Because let’s face it—poor thing has been through a lot. 

This is the textbook definition of an adult child. 

When confronted with a situation that makes us feel vulnerable, we time travel to a stage in our childhood. According to the ACA Big Book: 

The term “adult child” means that we respond to adult interactions with the fear and self-doubt learned as children. This undercurrent of hidden fear can sabotage our choices and relationships. We can appear outwardly confident while living with a constant question of our worth. 

In the Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy world, we say that a part “blends,” which means it takes over the driver’s seat just like my 5-year-old self did. We’re traumatized and these parts of us are effectively stuck or frozen at the time and place the childhood wounding occurred. We end up using the survival strategies they learned back then and there. 

I can’t tell you the number of times my clients have been overwhelmed and, after doing some inner work, we come to realize that my clients are in fact NOT overwhelmed. Inner child parts of them are stuck in the past blending, making them time travel to a time and place where survival strategies were limited to say the least. 

This happened with a client who argued with her partner constantly. She came to realize her 10-year-old self was defending the needs of a 38-year-old grown woman to her 40-year-old husband. Can you imagine how strange, disorienting, and hopeless it must’ve felt for a 10-year-old to advocate for a 38-year old woman’s need to be heard for god’s sake? 

Another client of mine was trying to make a decision about whether or not she wanted to have a baby. She later discovered that her 12-year-old self was in the driver’s seat. Can you imagine how confusing and scary it must’ve been for a 12-year-old to decide “to baby or to not baby” on behalf of a 34-year-old woman? 

If you’ve had a childhood where abuse, neglect, or emotionally absent caregiving were present, then chances are you have a constellation of parts stuck in the past that to this day are working overtime to help you survive. We can acknowledge, appreciate, and honor these parts because back then and there it worked. We survived after all. 

Here I’d like to circle back to my trauma poltergeist.

Remember the one that was sucking the color out of my world, stalking me, living in the pit of my belly, and stabbing me from the inside? 

SPOILER ALERT: Plot twist ahead!

What appeared all along to be a “villain” or “inner demon” that needed to be confronted and vanquished ASAP was not that at all. The trauma poltergeist is a young part of me carrying my trauma or childhood wounds around. 

She’s a wounded inner child who was stuck like a bug in amber. I know her now. She lived in the pit of my belly screaming out for a chance to release all the hurt she’s been carrying for years and even decades. Her blending with me and making me time travel to the past was my default state. 

That’s the hard truth about being an adult child. Blending with parts, time traveling to the past, experiencing flashbacks, using survival strategies learned as a child--however you want to call it--this is our autopilot. Our norm. 

I’m here to tell you that there is another way to live. You CAN heal your childhood wounds. You CAN help these parts of you go from using survival strategies to thriving strategies. Trauma is not a life sentence. Trauma resolved can be a gift.

“Trauma is hell on earth. Trauma resolved is a gift from the gods,” as founder of Somatic Experiencing and Trauma Expert Peter Levine, Phd. says.

More on that in Part 3 of this Self-Hero Series where I’ll lay out the 12 steps to heal from childhood trauma. First you have to understand a bit more about how this all happens. 

How Do We Become Adult Children Of Alcoholics Or Dysfunctional Families?

Well we have to have an alcoholic or otherwise dysfunctional family, for one thing. “Dysfunction” exists along a continuum and can range from experiencing physical, emotional, sexual abuse and/or extreme neglect on one end to inadequate or insufficient caregiving marked by emotionally absent or overwhelmed parents on the other. When I say “parent” I’m referring to any caregiver who took on the role of parenting. 

Your parents could land somewhere on this continuum and struggle with extreme addiction or compulsions. Or not. Chances are belittling, threatening, shaming, hateful, critical, and/or indifferent behavior by your parents was part of your everyday life as a child. Perhaps your parents served you up a combination platter of physical, verbal, and emotional abuse on a bed of perfectionism sprinkled with controlling and all-or-nothing thinking, and a side of criticism with extra harshness. You probably received the message, “Don’t talk. Don’t trust. Don’t feel.” 

I’m not very comfortable with the word “dysfunction” and neither are many of my clients. The prefix dys- stems from the ancient Greek word for ill, bad, diseased, abnormal, or faulty. This is not a compassionate or accurate view of our own struggles or those of others. Your parents are also adult children after all. 

They too were time traveling to the past while raising you as a result of their unresolved trauma. They too must’ve felt like a 10-year-old responsible for the physical and emotional well-being of a toddler having a full-on meltdown between the cereal and cleaning detergent aisles at the supermarket with all eyes on them. This in no way is meant to excuse, minimize, or rationalize away the abuse or neglect that you experienced. My intention is to offer a greater context that overtime can be clarifying and shed a forgiving light on yourself, especially the parts of you that have had less than stellar moments as an adult in the process of trying to survive. 

The bottom line is that we become adult children because our parents were adult children whose lives were driven by fear. 

That’s why I firmly believe that one aspect of our purpose as adult children is to become chain breakers. To become one more healed person in the world and to model for future generations (whether you have kids or not) what it means to be born in the belly of the beast, claw your way out by the skin of your teeth, and move on to have a thriving life not in spite of but because of your childhood wounds.

One of the ACA mantras is “Keep It Simple.” 

And I always have to ask myself, “What if I could make this easy for myself and others? What would that look like?” To find the real way out we have to understand how we got here in the first place. For simplicity’s sake here, I’d like to dig a little deeper and talk about what all of our childhoods have in common. The common denominator of childhood trauma so to speak.

The childhood of an adult child is marked by wounds of abandonment, powerlessness, and worthlessness. I call these three primal wounds because they strike at the heart of our Being-ness, our right to Be as human as they come. Our right to Be and feel alive and aligned with our life force.  

The Two Dilemmas Of Adult Children Of Alcoholics And Dysfunctional Families 

Two dilemmas appeared to us as children like forks in the road that would lead us to our childhood wounding. 

The first dilemma of connection: “To belong or be me?” 

The first dilemma you faced was having to choose between yourself and others. Between your connection to yourself and your connection to others to be more exact. You got these messages early on:

• You couldn’t be yourself and be accepted and loved. You have to abandon yourself or be abandoned by others. This is the abandonment wound. 

• You’re not worthy of attachment, or love and connection to others if you’re being you (and all that is you). This is the worthlessness wound. 

• Your authenticity, or connection to yourself, an evolutionary need in its own right would risk your attachment to your caregivers. Your authenticity is inextricably linked to your power. When you’re authentic it means you have access to the parts of you that hold the gifts of your intuition, gut feeling, inner knowing, or inner compass. Our ancestors needed these internal resources to survive in the wild. When you sacrifice your authenticity, you lose access to your power gifts. This is the powerlessness wound. 

• You couldn’t belong as your authentic self to the people who held your life in their hands. That’s registered in your nervous system as an existential threat. When what should’ve been sources of love and connection that reflect back to us our own belonging, worth, and power as human beings become sources of threat, we experience childhood trauma. 

Here’s the first dilemma in its various reincarnations. Be yourself and sacrifice acceptance, love, and belonging. Or in an attempt to receive all of the above, sacrifice yourself. Honor all parts of yourself to preserve your authenticity OR exile parts of yourself that threaten connection. Access your power to become self-sufficient OR deny your power to receive love and protection from powerful others. Abandon yourself OR be abandoned by others. Betray yourself OR betray others. Disconnect from yourself OR disconnect from others. Choose authenticity OR attachment.  

Can you guess which one your young brain chose? 

The solution to this dilemma that most of us “choose” is to exile parts of ourselves that risk the tenuous attachment to our caregivers. I say “choose” in quotes because it’s not a conscious decision after all. And let’s be honest. It’s a false choice. Can you really choose otherwise?  You were a child whose life depended upon your parents. You developed strategies that helped you fit into what’s expected of you for the sake of survival. “Fitting in is the opposite of belonging,” as shame and vulnerability researcher Brene Brown says. 

When faced with this false choice between authenticity and attachment, you suffered a tremendous loss. You lost access to your sense of true belonging, worthiness, and power. You lost access to your ability to accept and love yourself as you are. You lost access to your capacity to trust yourself. You lost access to the belief that you could have a loving relationship with yourself and safe others. I say lost access instead of lost. Nothing was ever lost, damaged, or broken within you no matter what hell you’ve been through. Contrary to popular belief. I believe this with every cell in my body as a fellow traveler and therapist on this healing journey with you. 

Belonging, worthiness, and power are all innate qualities of being human. They are your birthright. You never lose them. You just temporarily disconnect from them because you got bogged down or burdened by messages that contradicted who you are at your core. That violated your Being. And guess what? Whatever you picked up you can let go of. It’s a memory issue in the end. And you can recover. You CAN have a full remembrance of your right to be in loving connection with yourself and others. 

The second dilemma of responsibility, “To blame me or them?”

The second dilemma is related to how you go about solving the first dilemma. Regardless of how young you were at the time of your trauma, your sense of inner knowing registers the wounding and absorbs its impact. Your inner system is wired to minimize the impact as much as possible as part of your survival strategy. You intuitively try to make sense of what’s happening to you and regain a sense of power and control. Here it is: Blame yourself or blame others. Am I really that bad that I deserve this or do I deserve better and it’s, therefore, my parents who are bad and treat me unfairly?

The second option of “bad” parents leaves you on shaky ground in terms of your survival (which depends on unsafe others). It also violates your sense of power and control over your own life. If the people you’re supposed to depend on to experience a sense of belonging and worthiness treat you unfairly and unpredictably even when you’re “good,” then how can you believe that you can affect outcomes with your behavior? How can you believe that you have the power to change your behavior and therefore control your environment?

Your turn again. Can you guess which option your young, tender brain chose this time around?

It’s much easier to believe that you’re bad and deserve to be treated poorly.

Are you surprised by this answer? Think about it.

If you’re bad and deserve this (whatever “this” is in your case), then you still have power and control. It means you can get better and change how others treat you. It means you’re still an agent in your own life. And it means that your parents are safe so it’s also safe to belong. It’s just you who needs to change. In a genius yet twisted way it’s a hopeful escape route out of this dilemma. Your little brain back then and there was trying to protect you by preserving your power and belonging. Even if it meant temporarily losing access to your worthiness by taking on the belief that you’re bad or deserving of neglect or abuse. Chances are you also took on the belief that worthiness was something you had to achieve, be given, earn, buy, or be deemed by something or someone outside of you. 

As a member of the Walking Wounded Club (aka high achievers, perfectionists, brave-face wearers who are ALSO survivors of childhood trauma), you may have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility for others’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. You may have a hard time knowing where someone else ends and you begin. Striving and perfectionism can feel like recurring yeast infections that don’t go away regardless of how many probiotics you take. You may have boundaries that shape shift between loose, slimy floating jello and rock solid, sky-high fortresses. You may be a people pleaser on the one hand and an angry, ruthless fire-breathing dragon on the other. Work may consume you to the point of burnout.   

You have strong, dedicated protective parts that took on survival strategies focused on controlling and manipulating the external world. Their intention was to minimize the impact of the abuse and neglect and maximize the chances of experiencing belonging, worthiness, and power. Together they developed layers of high tech, AI-level protective armor undetectable to the human eye. This armor can be so impenetrable even YOU are unaware of your primal wounds. In the meantime, your inner child parts are suffering the injuries of abandonment, unworthiness, and powerlessness deep in the abyss.

I’m going to be putting oour protective armor as adult children under the microscope to help you unlock and understand the survival strategies, core fears, and primal wounds your inner system developed in Part 2 of this Self-Hero series. The more you understand about your internal family system and childhood trauma, the more you can embrace your capacity for loving connection and authenticity. The more you can claim your power and become the loving hero of your own story. 

In Part 3 of this Self-Hero series, I’m going to deep dive into the 12 Self-Hero steps that you can take to heal your wounds, recover your innate belonging, worthiness, and powerfulness, let go of fear that keeps you stuck in survival mode, and discover your thriving strategies. These steps will be informed by the evidence-based, Internal Family Systems Therapy approach.

Take a deep breath to check in. If it feels right for you, invite your attention inside. Does this resonate with you? What’s going on inside your body? Is there a sense of lightness, softness, tingling, expansiveness, upward movement? If it does, your next step is to book a free consultation with me. 

I believe in my bones that you already are the hero of your own story and all you need to do is uncover the innate healing potential within you. You CAN heal from your past and achieve the life deep down you know you’re worthy of. And I’m here to tell you it doesn’t have to be painful or uncomfortable. You CAN feel joy, peace, freedom, and love along the way. 

Now, I’d love to hear from you in the comments section below. Here’s some food for thought: 

• Which of the three primal wounds (abandonment, worthlessness, powerlessness) applies most to you? And which do you feel needs the most healing and attention for you to move forward in your life? 

• What are your thoughts, feelings, reactions to the dilemmas you had to face as a child?  Do some parts of you prioritize authenticity whereas others prioritize belonging, or “fitting in”? Do some parts of you blame yourself while other parts of you blame others?

• If you’re new to the Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families (ACA) world and the Walking Wounded Club, what’s it like to learn that there are other high achievers, perfectionists, brave-face wearers who are ALSO survivors of childhood trauma out there just like you?  

• If you’ve had experience with ACA, what’s it been like to hear a new perspective on what it means to be an adult child, especially one that’s also a member of the Walking Wounded Club? What do you wish you had known at the start of your healing journey? 

This is Part 1 of my 3-part How to Recover from Childhood Trauma Series and I can’t wait to hear from you. This is just the beginning of our conversation and hopefully many more to come. I look forward to seeing you around sofiavasi.com. 

With love xx,