emotional healing

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 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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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Get A Controlling Mother Out Of Your Head

One of the challenges in growing up with a controlling mother is that they tend to implant their own insecurities into our heads. Controlling mothers are fundamentally driven by fear and the way that they assuage their own anxieties about their growing children is often by passing their insecurities onto us. If we’re too insecure to take any risks in life or to violate our parent’s absurd “rules”, then they don’t have to worry about us hurting ourselves, scaring them or ultimately leaving them.

The obvious problem with this is that all children inevitably grow up, leave their parents and form intimate relationships with other people. This can cause a lot of jealousy to an insecure and emotionally immature parent. Controlling mothers often try to manipulate their children into staying as long as possible in order to forestall the inevitable pain of separation. It’s ultimately a futile strategy since children growing up and leaving home is the natural order of things. Trying to stop us living our own lives just makes us want to get away even faster and really it’s just a consequence of the parent’s wounded inner child and unwillingness to grow up.

All this craziness can really mess with our heads and leave us feeling insecure as an adult. We can’t do much about our controlling mother’s behavior since trying to control her in return would just be using the same losing strategy that she’s been using on us all our lives. Manipulating other people doesn’t lead to true freedom or a deep sense of inner security.

A Controlling Mother Can Really Mess With Our Head and Undermine Our Self-Confidence

Instead, we need to learn to get our controlling mother out of our head. Here’s how to do it: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How I Healed My Boys High School Choir Bullying Trauma

I went to an all-boys high school where the first grade rugby team enjoyed the highest social status. Anyone who wasn’t into aggressive body-contact sports got their head kicked in other ways, and boys on each level of the social hierarchy boosted their flagging self-esteem by bullying the boys on the level below. Any innate sensitivity in a boy was crushed both in the classroom and in the play/battle-ground.

Although I was highly intelligent and generally got good grades, this wasn’t valued as highly as sporting prowess at my high school and being a thin, nerdy kid who was the youngest in my year, I didn’t do so well at school socially.

I spent my lunch times singing in the school choir or hanging out in the computer room learning to use the new machines that the teachers didn’t know what to do with. This was a couple of years before the computer revolution went mainstream and decades before Big Bang Theory made nerds hot prime-time-viewing commodities.

Childhood bullying can leave our adult selves feeling self-conscious and hyper-vigilant to criticism from others.

Since I was a late developer my voice didn’t break until well after high school. It was embarrassing still being in the alto section of the all-boy choir as I headed into Year 11 so I quit and joined the lighting crew in the hall instead where I could feel good about solving technical problems backstage and wouldn’t have to perform in front of people and end up feeling so self-conscious.

Fast-forward 30 years to 2017 and I’m studying music full-time at a local tertiary college. My dream is to use a combination of music and comedy to teach the principles of trauma awareness and emotional intelligence to the masses. I think that would be great fun for me because along the way I’ll get to overcome my remaining insecurities in terms of freedom of self-expression, and it would also give an extra dimension of meaning and purpose to what I’m doing. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

What To Look For In A Therapist

Effective therapy heals emotional trauma in your brain and central nervous system by providing a safe environment for you to express your true feelings, with the support of an empathic non-judgmental connection between you and the therapist.

The three main things to look for in a therapist are:

  1. You feel emotionally safe to share your feelings with them
  2. They communicate empathically so you feel understood
  3. Ability to handle strong unpleasant feelings without criticism or judgement

It’s normal to feel nervous when seeing a new therapist for the first time, but trust your instincts to tell you whether these three things are present. If not, look elsewhere.

Here’s a video explaining this in more detail: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

Why I Got Upset In Guitar Class

I’m a full time music student at the moment, and I’m loving learning how to write songs, perform in front of people and express myself through music. Music is great because it deals with both the analytical and emotional side of our brain.

Becoming a rock star isn’t all riffs and distortion. There’s conflict with other musicians to navigate too.

However, the irrational nature of emotions means that they don’t always arise just when we want them to. Most of us are still carrying unhealed emotional baggage from our past which can get triggered in what might otherwise seem fairly innocuous situations. This can make dealing with unexpected upsets challenging both in ourselves and in other people.

In yesterday’s guitar class, I got triggered by my teacher’s response to what I though was a fairly intelligent question about whether the best way to improvise over a chord sequence in a major key would be by using the associated relative minor scale. My engineering brain thought that this would lead to less potential dissonance; but for any other budding musicians out there the answer turns out to be No: you use the minor pentatonic scale of the same key.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Ten Signs That You Had A Narcissistic Mother

I had a narcissistic mother and it was a complete disaster for my boyhood sense of self-confidence and the way I saw myself as I grew into a man. A narcissistic mother can leave deep emotional and psychological wounds that get triggered in our daily adult lives, undermining our self-confidence and making life extremely stressful. The impact is most pronounced in our relationships with women, leaving us feeling disempowered and emasculated around women until we get our narcissistic mother wound healed.

Narcissistic Mothers Are Emotionally Unavailable

Narcissists carry a lot of internalized shame and project their own unhealed emotional wounds onto everyone around them, especially their children. As a boy we were powerless to deal with our narcissistic mother and may still carry this sense of powerlessness along with her paranoid world view unconsciously into adulthood.

It’s easy to recognize a narcissistic mother because they typically: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

Is My Therapy Going Right?

I got a question via email last week about how to tell when therapy is working. Here it is, along with my answer:

I have been in psychoanalysis to treat emotional abuse for 4 years now, and am still in a really bad place. I exploded in anger and stopped talking to my mother, father, family and friends only writing to them to wish them dead in horrible ways. Then I burst into tears a few times realizing my friends do care and love me. But I am still feeling bad despite having been crying a lot in the past year and having a much better relationship with friends and family. I feel confused and lost. I wonder whether I should change therapists as after 4 years I still feel “like shit” and cannot work properly. Many thanks.

Thanks for your question; I’ll do my best to give you an answer based just on the little bit that you’ve told me. I get that at the moment you feel “like shit” as you’ve had 4 years of psychoanalysis and still cannot work properly, so you’re wondering if your therapy is going right or whether you should change therapists.

How do you know if therapy is really working?

How do you know if therapy is really working?

The first thing I’d say is it sounds as if you’ve made a lot of progress over those 4 years: You got in touch with your inner rage when you exploded in anger; then you set a no-contact boundary when you stopped talking to your mother, father and family; then you communicated to them honestly how you felt as best you could; then you released some grief when you burst into tears a few times realizing that your friends do care and love you. You healed more grief about your family too, so you have been crying a lot in the past year. After all of that you have a much better relationship with your friends and family.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Recover From Childhood Bullying

I was bullied mercilessly at my all boys high school. Turning up to Year 8 English class was a routine nightmare: Often one boy in the class would stake out the door waiting for the teacher while another group would hoist me up on top of a high cupboard against my will. As the teacher arrived, the scout at the door would give the signal for everyone to return to their desks so that at the precise moment that the teacher walked into the room everything looked normal in the class; except that Graham was up on top of the cupboard. The teacher was too stupid to work out what was going on, and I’d end up getting sent to the principal for more even punishment.

Childhood bullying is insidious because it can leave long-lasting scars on your mental psyche. This is a critical time of development of our brains, and if your experience of childhood or adolescence is one of powerlessness and victimization, it can program deep unconscious patterns into our minds that set us up for debilitating anxiety and depression later in life.

Childhood bullying can affect you long into your adult life.

Childhood bullying can leave mental scars that affect you long into your adult life.

Fortunately though we can recover. There’s enough neural plasticity in our brains to undo the damage that bullying does, provided we’re willing to face the emotions that we were forced to suppress when the bullying occurred. Here’s how to recover from childhood bullying: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago