We, as small people, learn what it is to be a part of the family that we were born into. We don’t question their rightness or wrongness. As said in the previous post, these are simply the water you are swimming in or the air that you breathe. You learn to uphold the family ways. We learn are about physical and emotional safety. Some of us learn that we have little or none of these things. We make ways of coping with the degree of safety that we have. Sometimes these coping me

We have the parents that we have. And their parents. And theirs. It matters deeply what happened to those people who came before us. We carry personal, familial and collective trauma. As a descendant of a family that came from various places in Europe to Canada, I inherit the collective trauma of World Wars I and II, rationing in England, bombs, fear of Jews, fear of Nazis, the impact of colonialism on my sense of privilege, the twisted logic of slavery and Residential School

I often find myself saying to people: “These are the actual details of your life. They are yours. Here they are. You must make some relationship to them since they’re yours.” This is, of course, from the position of an adult reflecting back on those experiences. You were different at the time that you were experiencing them, even if they’re relatively recent. All those interactions with people and the things that you witnessed and the things that happened to you as a child we

Expressing joy is not actually generally accepted in our culture of careful public expression of feeling. How many times do we mechanically respond “Fine,” to the question, “How are you?” Imagine if you responded honestly when you were in a state of abject misery? Or when you were in a state of elation? Neither would be the usual, expected response. I wrote about “Fine,” in my blog (https://www.yarrowhealingarts.com) and someone commented on how a stranger had once said of fi

When we get too full of undigested feelings, our consciousness shrinks us down to something smaller, tighter - constrained, contained, manageable - and joyless. Here I understand joy as the simple pleasure of being here on Earth in a human body. Joy is not giant. Joy does not need to shout. Joy rides under the surface of the stormier emotions. It says: This anger will pass. This sadness will pass. Even this happiness will pass, and should pass. This is your life. Take pleasur

The cycle of not feeling and stashing and moving on takes hold of us. Since we rarely get to come back and feel the feelings that we stuffed, we begin to feel stuffed. Things start to happen in our lives that we can’t control - our health declines, pain arises, arthritis sets in, we get chronic bronchitis from a cold. Yes, of course we could take the view that we just got a cold and it got stuck. We can make all sorts of reasons for it - we were worn out by pushing hard to co

When my kids were tiny, I was struggling hugely with depression and didn’t know it. This manifested as rage and the rage got directed at everyone in my life, and especially at my husband and my older child. I hated myself for this, but also couldn’t find the magic key to make it stop. So I enrolled in Non Violent Communication classes because I thought it would fix this aspect of myself that I was struggling with and hating. But the NVC classes missed the essential piece for

We have forgotten how to feel deeply. And, it’s likely even worse than that, since it’s not just a matter of forgetting. We have created systems to live within, and have family histories of behaviour, that actively squash the feelings out of us. It is okay to feel your feelings. It makes you human to feel your feelings. It makes you human to be in a body, feeling feelings. My belief here is that underneath almost everything that people are struggling with, whether it looks em

Humans are soft-bodied, feeling creatures. We have guts on our insides and we know they’re really vulnerable. Our skeletons do not cover us all over. We learn to protect our insides - physically and emotionally - at an early age. It doesn’t take too many experiences of rejection or dismissal or other hard-to-process physical/emotional experiences for us to begin behaving as though we had a tough exoskeleton all around, fending off the world if we think it’s going to hurt us,

People come to me in pain, struggle, stuckness, beginning to wonder if there’s some emotional component underneath the struggle, but still unable to see what it is. Why can’t you see it? It is your life, after all, and you were there… People have a hard time seeing life events clearly when there is unprocessed trauma. I paraphrase Gabor Mate here when I say that there is only one story, really, underneath all trauma: you had a need that wasn’t met. We can flesh this out somew