How To Heal Intergenerational Unworthiness Trauma

Intergenerational Unworthiness Trauma is a term I coined this morning to describe feelings of unworthiness and insecurity that are passed from parents to their children down successive generations.

Parents who feel fundamentally unworthy create a lack of secure attachment with their infants, leading to children with insecure, avoidant or disorganized attachment styles. When these children grow into adults, they pass the trauma on to their own children through their inability to bond emotionally with them. Everyone in the family ends up with emotional abandonment trauma manifesting as core feelings of unworthiness.

In other words, parents who feel fundamentally unworthy, insecure or broken are unable to raise children with deep feelings of worthiness themselves.

The cycle repeats down the generations until someone recognises and breaks it by doing the emotional healing work to deal with their own traumatic attachment wound, so they can create a secure attachment to the children in the next generation.

I have experienced this personally, and believe it is the underlying issue that undermined my own self-confidence for so long, ultimately leading me to create this website. (more…)

7 Fun Things to Do On Valentine’s Day as a Single Person

This is a guest post by Michelle Peterson from RecoveryPride.org

Valentine’s Day creates a huge market for advertisers and big companies. It can be pretty commercial, but that doesn’t mean you can’t spread the love around. If you’re single, you can spread the love to your friends, family, but perhaps most importantly, yourself. Here are some great ways to enjoy Valentine’s Day as a single. (more…)

How To Find And Keep True Love

With Valentine’s Day coming up I thought I’d review David DeAngelo’s program Love The Final Chapter, which could otherwise be titled How To Find And Keep True Love.

Love Is Real

David had a series of realizations as he evolved over time which for me boil down to worthiness. When you don’t feel worthy, you need a lot of tools and techniques to attract women. Learning these tools can help develop a sense of worthiness but ultimately they need to be dispensed with to create a truly loving relationship. (more…)

How To Deal With Generalized Anxiety

Anxiety sucks, especially when we don’t know what’s causing it and what to do about it. When we feel anxious all the time for no obvious reason, it’s called generalized anxiety. However there are often things we can do to reduce, eliminate or manage generalized anxiety so that it doesn’t ruin our life.

There are many reasons why we may feel anxious. Solving this problem can sometimes involve trying a number of different approaches until we find one or more that work for us. Based on my experience of what works for me and my clients when feeling anxious, here are some strategies to try: (more…)

How To Release Resentment Towards Your Parents

Unhealed childhood resentment is like a cancer that can destroy your adult life. We unconsciously project resentment towards our parents that we continue to carry from our childhood, onto other people. Especially people of the same gender as the parent we still resent.

If deep down you are still angry with your mother, you’ll tend to resent any woman who acts even remotely like her. If you still have resentment towards your father, it’s likely to negatively effect the way you relate to other men and authority figures in general. This operates unconsciously so you may not even be consciously aware of it.

If you grew up in an environment where anger wasn’t handled well and you learned to suppress your own anger, you could have a truckload of resentment simmering away beneath the surface that you’re not even consciously aware of. Symptoms of this are feeling rage when other people violate your boundaries, either exploding out of proportion to what’s actually happening or seething internally instead of standing up for yourself.

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How To Resolve Anger About Childhood Christian Indoctrination

It’s Sunday morning. When I was a child, Sunday morning meant getting up unreasonably early (for a Sunday), getting dressed and heading to our local church with my parents to learn about God, Jesus and The Bible.

The church services felt long and boring with dull music, but fortunately I didn’t have to stay in them very long as us kids could leave part-way through to head downstairs to Sunday School in the basement of the church. Compared to the church service, Sunday School was much more fun. I ran riot a lot of the time, running around the building whenever possible and playing with the other kids. Mind you, compared to Sunday School, I imagined that staying home or playing with my non-church friends was probably even more fun.

In Sunday School I heard stories like Jonah being swallowed by a whale for disobeying God. God’s plan involved Jonah going to Nineveh to tell the people there how evil they were. Didn’t sound like such a great plan to me; who would want to do that?

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What’s So Good About Feeling Bad?

In the last few days I’ve had a couple of people close to me tell me that they didn’t want to talk about painful experiences that they have had. They said things like “I don’t want to dwell on it” or “I really want a cigarette”, rather than talking about something that made them feel bad.

We’re not always in an appropriate social context to heal emotional pain and it’s wise to be discerning about when and with whom we choose to share vulnerable feelings. Nobody really wants to feel bad; we all naturally want to feel happy and generally speaking we tend to get more of whatever we focus on in life.

However we live in a society which tends to glorify intellect over feelings. Many of us have been taught to suppress emotions while growing up; especially those that our family and friends were uncomfortable with. Few people really understand what emotional trauma is, how it operates or how to heal it.

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How To Manage Anger Using Music & Comedy

I did A Show About Anger at the Sydney Fringe Festival in 2018. The show explored the topic of anger using music and comedy. It included songs and stories about childhood trauma, assertiveness, blind rage, people who complain too much, boundary issues with strangers, my epic list of things that annoy me, and various ways to manage anger constructively rather than destructively.

If you like a laugh, enjoy music and would like to learn how to manage anger better, this show is for you:

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Bravery Is Not The Absence Of Fear

I have a good friend who is in the process of working through her childhood emotional abandonment trauma and renegotiating fairer adult relationships with the people in her life.

This kind of work can be heavy going at times and during a recent heart-to-heart conversation about her experience, she said:
“People keep telling me I’m brave. I don’t feel very brave.”

I was curious about this so I asked: “Well what do you think bravery is?”

She thought for a moment and replied: “Bravery is superheroes rescuing defenceless people.”

“I have a different perspective”, I said:

“Bravery isn’t the absence of fear:
Bravery is taking action in the face of fear; even when you don’t know if you will succeed.”

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