Changing old patterns
The intense love you feel with a narcissist or when you are in a trauma bond, isn’t actually love. It’s infatuation. It’s addiction. And it is because you are revisiting/reenacting something you went through in childhood from your primary care giver/s. Subconsciously, we keep revisiting what we know, what is familiar. No matter how painful …
How do you cope with whatever life throws at you? Coping is the ability to deal with difficult situations. Coping skills are the skills that we use to achieve this. It is, therefore, possible to describe a wide range of skills and activities as ‘coping skills’. It is also clear that some coping skills may …
Abandonment trauma can stem from being left alone or neglected as a child either physically or emotionally. It can relate to the death of a parent, having your parents divorce, the loss of a partner or close friend, or finding out a partner has been unfaithful. Whether you experienced painful abandonment during your childhood or …
Growing up, I could always make friends easily. I was funny, popular, a fabulous raconteur, and the life and soul of every party. At school, I had girl friends arguing over who was going to sit next to me in class. I was one of the ‘cool’ kids who all the boys wanted to date. …
Continue reading “How Your Attachment Style (and trauma) Shows Up In Friendships”
“A felt sense is not a mental experience but a physical one. A bodily awareness of a situation or person or event. An internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about the given subject at a given time—encompasses it and communicates it to you all at once rather than detail by detail. Think …
Learned Helplessness is a phenomenon that occurs when a series of negative outcomes or stressors causes someone to believe that the outcomes of life are out of one’s control. While learned helplessness can affect anyone, it often takes root in early childhood. However, trauma experienced in adulthood can also leave you feeling helpless. Martin Seligman …
The word ‘trauma‘ comes from the Greek word for ‘wound’. So trauma is literally a wound in our mental state. Like any physical wound. Post-Traumatic Stress means anything that leaves an emotional residue in the system and interferes with its normal function. The various facets of Post-Traumatic Stress are innumerable; however, we can categorize them …
The vagus nerve is the longest nerve in our body, running from the brain stem to part of the colon, supplying both our organs and our brain with vital information. The word “vagus” means wandering in Latin, and the vagus nerve is a wandering cranial nerve that communicates to every organ in our body, especially …
My daughter asked me recently where the term ‘bunny boiler’ comes from. I laughed, as I recalled Glenn Close’s psychotic character in ‘Fatal Attraction‘ and how, after the huge success of the film in the 80s, any female who demonstrated a glimmer of insecure behaviour was labelled a bunny boiler, relating to the scene where …
Continue reading “When Trauma And Pain Show Up As Crazy In Relationships”
I remember a few years ago, a friend persuaded me to attend a meditation class with her. I couldn’t concentrate or focus, it was boring, and I was just desperate to get down the pub after. This is just one example of how I typically lived for most of my life. If I did ever …