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

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

It is so hard to look around and not be dismayed at the state we are in as humans and the state of our home, this one planet. Because it is hard, we tend not to allow ourselves to drop into the heartbreak. We react by refusing to slow down and be where we are, feeling the feelings that we are feeling. We go quickly though our days and try to blind ourselves with distractions: coffee, food, drugs, internet, dieting, exercise, etc. All of these distractions take energy from the