For all the times you have cried and shamed yourself! Here is some permission. Crying is a natural response to many situations. It relieves stress, it effectively self-soothes and brings the parasympathetic nervous system online. It releases oxytocin and endorphins, …
To My Daughter
If children are first conceived in the mind of a parent, then I dreamed you into being at around 5 years old. Holding my toy doll with knitted purple clothing and pretending to feed it a bottle. I felt you …
Complex Trauma and Dysregulation
When you have been raised by parents whose nervous systems are activated and in fight or flight all of the time, you will not have learned co-regulation. Co-regulation happens when one nervous system calms another nervous system down. This would …
The Separation of the Body and the Mind
BOOM! And herein lies a fundamental problem. Enter Descartes in the 17th Century and the idea of the mind and the body being separate, providing the foundation for the biomedical model for the next three centuries. I feel we are …
The Power of the Parent-Child Connection
As a parent, there are two ways to view this: With hopelessness. With the thought that you have already made too many mistakes. With hope. With the belief that the changes I make today CAN make a difference. Some questions …
PTSD and Dysregulation
If you have been following me for a while, then you know I talk about this a LOT. Gone are the days when we can think it’s okay for children to be raised in homes where there is violence, abuse, …
Connection
How do you let your children know you love them? I ask! I ask if they feel loved. I say, “if you were to feel a little bit more loved by me today, what would happen, or what would I …
The Faint Response
Faint is the action of last resort. It is the result of total shut down and para-sympathetic activation. If this is a response you have that seems to come about at random times, you might think about when you first …
The SUBMIT Response
We can only begin to heal from the ‘submit’ response when we are out of the abusive environment that caused it. Safety is the main priority, and if we are not safe, our nervous system is not safe to relax …
Healing a Fawn Response
As adults, it can evoke a lot of shame as we witness ourselves becoming dependent on our partners and accepting more and more bad behaviour, or when we find ourselves burnt out because it is too difficult to put boundaries …