communication skills

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…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Heal Emotional Trauma

Sumelevate Life Coach Sume Chatz recently interviewed me for his video podcast about how I work with my coaching clients to help them heal emotional trauma from the past so they can move on to a happier future.

The interview packs a heap of information into a half hour, covering topics like:

  • How family of origin issues can set you up for emotional problems down the track
  • The impact of poor communication skills on our world view as children
  • How to heal overwhelming anxiety
  • The role of the subconscious and how to work with it
  • Mindfulness and the importance of living in the present
  • What I actually do in Skype sessions with my clients
  • How to coach someone in emotional trauma
  • How to get motivated towards your goals

That’s a lot of valuable information for one half hour! I recommend you check it out.

emotional traumaThe one thing I didn’t mention explicitly was what exactly emotional trauma is: the emotional residue left in our brains and nervous system attached to memories of any emotionally overwhelming past event that we weren’t able to fully express and release at the time.

Healing trauma is important because emotionally charged memories from the past restrict our ability to be freely self-expressed and get on with life in the present.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Nonviolent Communication: Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg

Hey, it’s Graham here again and if you were to ask me the question, “What’s one book that you could read that would help you to improve your communication skills, get on better with women and men, help you deal with conflict better, make you a better person, just make your life flow more easily and generally improve the quality of life here on the planet?”, one book every human should read is this one.

It’s called Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall Rosenberg. Let me try to hold it straight. And I highly, highly, highly recommend this book. In fact, I would say if you are only able to read one book on personal development or self-help or whatever, how to live a better life, anything, how to self-actualize, this would be the book to read.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How to Start Conversations with Strangers

Hey, it’s Graham here, and I want to talk about starting conversations with strangers. And there’s a little trick here that I’ve worked out that I want to share with you which I think is kind of important. So the reason why starting conversations with strangers is important is that it’s in conversations and our social skills that our confidence is most important and is most obvious to other people.

Now, there’s no magic silver bullet to starting conversations with strangers. The reason for that is that it doesn’t really matter what you say to people when you first meet them. Everything that’s really important is in the attitude that you have. If you’re nervous and insecure or edgy when you meet somebody, particularly a woman, they’re going to sense that and they’re going to feel like, “I’m bit uncomfortable about talking to this person.” You’re not going to come across as very confident.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How to Overcome Low Self-Esteem

Life is difficult when you don’t feel good about yourself. Low self-esteem can lead to a lack of self-confidence, difficulty in relationships, social anxiety, depression, and a general sense of unhappiness and disillusionment with life.

Self-confidence is the antidote to low self-esteem.
Image courtesy Pixabay

But you don’t have to suffer from low self-esteem. Here are some steps you can take to build high self-esteem and greater self-confidence:

Work Out What Is Important To You

When we know what we stand for and what our basic values are, we’re much less susceptible to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Even when things don’t go our way, we’ve still got our core values to fall back on. Values that are important to us also act as a guiding light to help us make decisions, and recognize when we’re acting out of integrity. The more we act in integrity with our basic values, the more self-esteem we tend to generate.

Spend some time writing down a list of values that are important to you, like happiness, love, respect, success, relationships, family, friends, etc etc. Prioritize the list by asking yourself “Would I give X up for Y?” as you work your way down it.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago