Category: Health and Wellbeing (divinediva)

G’day Gorgeous…

Welcome to Part Six in the ‘Trouble With Trauma’ series…

So vibration, or the energy around a particular emotion, will impact.  So, if you stop and think about those low-level emotions, if you have a lot of those in your childhood, it’s going to change the cellular makeup of your body.  The low vibrations will impact the cellular functioning of all of your cells that sit inside your body at that point in time.  If there is too much low or heavy vibrational energy, it makes sense that it is going to have an impact for you later on in life.

It makes sense then, that you would be more prone to developing inflammatory diseases, chronic diseases or cancer – right?  Of course, it also makes sense this potentially means that life expectancy could be reduced. 

This is why is it SO important that we keep the vibrational energy flow around us as positive as we can, most of the time…

Little things are important to recognise about how this impact us in society.  Research tells us that people who don’t watch the news are less depressed.  This makes sense because the vibrational energy that is created by looking at all of the bad news in the world drags our vibration level down, so by NOT watching it we can maintain our levels higher.

When I work with clients, because I work with complex trauma, if I work with too many clients my vibrational energy reduces too much.  I have to be really careful about balancing my client workload, because if I work with too much really heavy stuff then I absorb that vibrational energy.  Why?  Well shame is actually the lowest vibrating emotion, shame is extremely heavy.  If I’m working with people with lots of shame, that’s like a yoke.  It’s like a big heavy weight that I have to carry and I then have to also manage how I get that off.

So, why am I telling you all of this?  Because I want you to understand that it’s really important not to just pretend that your childhood had no impact.  If you had difficulties in childhood, I’m not saying it has to ruin your life – it doesn’t!  We can fix all of these things, but we need to recognise and validate that our experiences as children, our experiences within our family, impacted us.  These experiences also impact our relationships going forward.  We can resolve the impact of these experiences but we can’t fix them unless we have some self-awareness around them.

Now society tries to make us believe that it was so long ago, that there is no need to focus on it – it doesn’t matter now.

However, it changed your cellular makeup.  If I could just get people to understand that they can do things to change that impact, how that vibration feels in their body.  Later on in life, you can correct it.  There are many enlightened people in the world, like Deepak Chopra, who will talk about how you can change your cellular function.  You see, the cells in your body completely regenerate every seven years.  Deepak Chopra says that mentally you can actually change the way that you look and feel, and I get where he’s coming from.

That concept will be a little bit too far ‘out there’ for most people, but if you could understand that you can resolve the issues that you carry with you and that there is a good reason why you should – that is an absolute game changer!

I’m here to tell you that you can live in absolute gratitude…  You can live your most luscious life… It’s not hard and it’s not difficult, but we need to be self-aware enough to know that we can do something about it. 

I hope that this series has spoken to you and that you find it useful 😀

See you soon Gorgeous…

G’day Gorgeous…

G’day Gorgeous

Welcome to Part Five in the ‘Trouble With Trauma’ series…

In our last episode, I talked about our inner child and protector parts of self.  That our ultimate need is for ‘connection’ and the fact that we are all seeking to be loved unconditionally….

The best that we can do is understand ourselves, understand how we react in our fear of rejection. We need to communicate that to our partner and understand how they react. Communicate that with our girlfriends and understand how they react. We need to recognise it in our workplaces and understand how the people who we work closest with react. This is important, because if I’m going to go into ‘Xena Warrior Princess’ and push people away and I have staff in my office, who all have little children parts who then feel rejected…  We’re gonna have a problem!

If I have a partner and I get triggered into ‘Xena Warrior Princess’ and I haven’t prepared them, they also have their own protector part that will decide ‘See you later!’.  Well, guess what? That relationship isn’t going to last very long. If we don’t understand each other, recognise each others protector and child parts and be able to take a step back and think – ‘Okay…  So I know what’s going on here’. We can’t work out what I need to do, how I need to communicate what it is that I really need from this other person. How is it that I can be honest about what I’m actually feeling?  

We need to be able to say to our partner – ‘I feel like I’m being rejected’, ‘I’m feeling like you don’t love me enough, to give me what I truly want…  Which is a connection with you’. So then, I’ll either pretend that I don’t want the connection, or I’ll become miserable in my little space. I really am desperate for that connection, but I’m feeling too vulnerable to ever ask for it, because then you have the power to reject me again.

I feel like I’ve been in my soapbox, but this is the premise of the new book. I’ve been trying to put an ‘explainer video’ together as well, to just help people to understand where I’m coming from.  Some people think that I shouldn’t be normalising trauma, but there are varying degrees of trauma. What I’m trying to help everybody understand is that… Trauma is a part of everyone’s life and we need to resolve our trauma.  Early childhood trauma is particularly difficult and it has an impact on our health.

Our early childhood experiences, the trauma that we experience before the age of 12 (but really up until we are young adults) has an incredibly profound impact on our health.  It’s been really interesting – I don’t expect you all to understand quantum physics, I don’t really understand quantum physics! However, Harvard University (and other major universities) came up with a way of measuring energy – this is part of quantum physics. Now you know I have talked about energy quite a bit, but I never quite understood why it was that I was talking about energy in this way, until I came across research that measured the vibration of emotion.

What is amazing about what they’ve done, and I know they did it a while ago so it’s not that new, but I’m just pulling these pieces of the jigsaw together, because it helps explain what I’ve been saying for years!  I’ve been talking about the impact of trauma, just from an emotional level, but now I’ve got physiological evidence. The measurement of our energetic vibrational level, is absolutely pure quantum physics science – From Harvard! Nobody argues with Harvard.

The vibrational level of really negative emotions, like those that cause depression – shame, closely followed by guilt, fear and anger – they are really right down the lowest end of the vibrational chain.  There’s a whole bunch of other emotions in between, such as courage. What’s at the top? Love. Compassion. Gratitude, at the very top is Enlightenment.

Now there’s an argument, feel free to read Dennis Genpo Merzel’s book ‘Big Mind, Big Heart’. You’ll see he talks about the concept of connecting to our ‘Big Mind and Big Heart’ and that is really enlightenment.  It is that awareness point, where you realise that your energy is connected to all the other energy in the planet and that what you do has a little ripple effect – out into your community, into your state, your country, the world.

G’day Gorgeous…

Welcome to Part Four in the ‘Trouble With Trauma’ series…

So in the last post I talked about whether you grew up in an enmeshed or a neglected environment – or some point in between.

Added to the enmeshed/neglected upbringing is whether or not you tend to be an externaliser or an internaliser.  When things go wrong – do you externalise the blame onto everyone else, or do you internalise it onto yourself. This approach tends to be based on personality and attitude.

If I am the sort of person who is an externaliser and I’ve grown up in that enmeshed environment from childhood, then I’m going to respond to a disconnection by reverting to child mode first – fearful of the abandonment.  “Please don’t leave me, I’m really sorry I’ll do anything!”, but then if that doesn’t get me what I want, which is essentially a reconnection, I’m going to do an absolute flip and start yelling and screaming “You’re the worst in the world, I don’t ever want to see you again!  Get out of my life!”  Ranting.  

That’s what an externaliser does – that’s throwing the feeling of rejection off self and onto others because they can’t handle how it feels inside.  Often externaliser’s have grown up in that enmeshed space and when they feel that they can’t get what they want, they lose the plot.  They end up feeling like they have to throw ‘molotov cocktails’ onto everybody else because they don’t like how it makes them feel inside, the shame that they feel from being abandoned.

On the opposite end of the scale, if you are more inclined to go into protector mode first, then you will internalise.  You tell the other person what they did wrong, but then push them away. “Here is your ‘charge sheet’, there are all the things you did wrong!  See you later, don’t let the door hit you in the arse on the way out!”  At that point, most internalisers are quite in control actually, but they usually use an issue to decide that the other person is not going to give them what they want and will eventually reject them, so they push first.  Ghosted!

Internaliser’s decide that it’s a done deal, they close the door and send people away – mainly because they don’t believe the other person is actually willing to give them what they want.  However, when the other person has actually gone and they haven’t come crawling back, begging and pleading “Please, please – let me sort it out!” – this is when the internaliser will flip into child mode.  For an internaliser – child mode is withdrawn, alone and isolated – curled up in a foetal position in bed and not answering the phone.  A strong sense of being rejected, despite being the one who usually did the ‘eject’ to feel more in control of being abandoned.

An externaliser goes into child mode first ‘Two year old Tantrums’ and then into protective ‘Screaming Banshee’.  An internaliser goes into protector mode first ‘Judge, Jury and Executioner’ and then into child mode ‘PJ’s and Alone’.

The clingy, enmeshed side is where that child part lives, so it’s our inner child who’s throwing the tantrum – it’s your four year old.  You trigger into the part of you that first experienced abandonment at the hands of your parents and felt responsible for the rejection.

Your protector, neglected side is where your older teenage part lives.  It is our inner protector that is feeling rejected already and decides to push first.  You trigger into that part of you that is usually at least a teenage part, but often an adult.  It is the part of you that developed in response to the feelings of neglect and unimportance and it is modelled off the adults you had around you in your childhood.

Why is it important to understand that we all have both child and protector.  Depending on our upbringing, but we go to one as a go-to and then we flip into the other one.  We need to understand that our protector part is the internalised protector of our child.

Your inner child is vulnerable and wants to be given unconditional love.  I will let you in on a little secret – it is not possible in this world to receive unconditional love… From anybody!  The only living being that will give you unconditional love is a dog.

As a parent, you might believe that love your child unconditionally…  It’s not true – impossible for humans actually. You love them an awful lot, and you accept a lot of things from them, but you don’t truly love them unconditionally.  Yes, I know that’s hard for you to hear, but it’s essential to understand it is a part of being human – not a personal failing.

It is critical that we understand this though, we crave connection as human beings and we fail each other in being able to provide it… Even when we really want to!

In all of our relationships and our connections with other human beings, we have to understand ourselves and where we are coming from in that relationship.

If we are reacting to someone close to us in hurt or anger, we have usually perceived a potential rejection, we feel that we are going to be abandoned.  Our clarity and understanding of ourselves and our own feelings is fundamentally important because in any relationship that we have with another human being you have to understand yourself how you react, so that you can communicate to the other person why you reacted the way that you have.  When we understand ourselves, we can own the feelings and manage our behaviour better through more effective and honest communication about our needs.

In my own life, I know I’m a protector first – I call her my ‘Xena Warrior Princess’ and she is very good at protecting my feelings by pushing people away before they can reject me.  I disconnect from people ‘after’ I have read them the charges against them, but if I didn’t get something that was satisfactory, or it was just the same justification for the same unacceptable behaviour – I would just walk away.

Over the course of my life, I got more adept at this and I reached a point where I wouldn’t really give them much opportunity to explain themselves, I saw a familiar pattern and I would walk away from it rather than work through it to see if it was really the same issue.  When I was younger, I expected that they would eventually come running after me, begging me to let them fix the problem – this was reinforced in my marriage due to the co-dependent nature of it. As I have matured, I didn’t give them much of a chance – as it happened more over my life, my tendency was to cut and run as I had decided that the other person would never give me what I truly wanted – which is unconditional love.

What is interesting is how my own internal system works.  I make the decision to protect myself by disconnecting, but then I flip into my inner child who is feeling vulnerable.  It’s important to understand our ‘parts of self’ and if you are not so familiar with this concept you should go and review one of my other videos about it (HERE).  

My inner child is vulnerable and feels rejected and then becomes angry at my protector (Xena) part – think about how your critical internal voice works.  In essence the child blames the protector for always making everybody go away and leave me – abandon me.  The child believes that nobody is ever going to love me because Xena is such a horrible nasty person who makes everyone reject me.  Yet the protector is actually the protector of the child, they coexist in a symbiotic relationship, remember that the protector develops in our own psyche in early childhood to help protect you from the feelings of abandonment and rejection that you feel but can’t control.  The protector seeks to give you some control over the situation but often ends up doing that by becoming very critical of the child’s need for unconditional love as it is perceived as weakness and leaves you vulnerable.

Our ultimate need is for connection.  I want somebody to love me unconditionally…. This is the basis of our human emotional driver.  However, we need to recognise that we are never going to get unconditional love – not truly.

G’day Gorgeous…

Welcome to Part Three in the ‘Trouble With Trauma’ series…

We were discussion adolescence.  Why is it that some kids will end up with depression? It is often because the family life has not given them the sense of security that they needed and then they have not been able to get that good peer-to-peer social connection either, so then they think “I don’t fit with the family, I don’t fit with my peers or in the community – I’m really disconnected!”  So then I am more likely to become depressed.

Adolescence is a time when we develop a lot of our negative beliefs – things like ‘I’m different’, ‘I don’t belong’ and many of those thoughts and feelings.  Why is that really important? I talk about life cycles, the seven year cycles we have in our life.  We get the second half of our third development cycle and we decide “I’m just going to be ‘this’ thing” and when I am this ‘thing’ – insert career choice here – then everybody will think I’m awesome!

In this way, you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps coming out of that ‘mediocre’ adolescence, off the back of a reasonably disconnected family life in your primary years and you just decide that you are going to prove yourself by being good in a particular occupation.  

Often your feelings of being rejected by your family and being unable to connect with your peers means that you’ll end up on one side or the other – I want to really please my family so then I’ll go on and I’ll be whatever it is the family want me to be…  I need to be this perfect human being.   Just be aware you may fit into different parts along this continuum of how we look at life.

Why is it important?  When we get into depressed space, depression is very much shame-based.  With anxiety, it is very much fear-based.  Depression is looking back over the events of our life, in our past.  We look back and we think “If only this didn’t happen, if only that didn’t happen!”  However, anxiety is looking to the future. We contemplate the future in fear thinking “What if this happens, what if that happens!”  There are very clear distinctions about what the difference between depression and anxiety actually is.

It is essential that we understand the difference because in all of our future connections that we make, from friendships to intimate relationships and our family connections, it is our ability to make secure connections with other people has a lot to do with how we experience life and how much of our time we spend feeling anxious or depressed.

The ability to connect has an awful lot to do with how we were raised.  So, if you were raised in a family in which your connection to your parents was what I would call ‘enmeshed’, and this happens in a lot of cultures like European and Asian cultures, where the expectations placed on children by their parents are huge.  The obligations children from these cultures feel to their parents, in terms of making sure they get a really good outcome from their education because the parents have invested all this time and energy into them and the child ‘owes’ them. This places a large emotional responsibility onto the child.  Children in these situations actually feel obligated to give the parent what the parent wants.  This obligation is problematic for a range of other reasons but it happens.

Alternatively, for reasons other than culture there can be lots of other emotional stuff going on in a family.  Sometimes we grow up with highly critical Mother’s or Father’s and they make their child emotionally responsible for them, rather than the parent being emotionally responsible for the child – and this creates big issues for children in these situations.

On the other side we can grow up in an environment of ‘neglect’.  In a really extreme family environment it could be really severe neglect, but it can just be more a case of feeling neglected in a family environment that was focussed elsewhere.  Think about a situation where you might be a member of a really big family and Mum and Dad were working or busy caring for others.  In this situation your presence in the household was just taken for granted – if you were around great, if you weren’t  it didn’t really matter that much. In these families, it was not like your presence or involvement in your parents life was really that important.  For some people, this situation can feel like a total rejection where they feel that their parents wish that they weren’t there – like they’re a hindrance.

All of us fit in that continuum somewhere – it’s a bit like a bell curve.  You have the really enmeshed ones at one end and the really neglected ones down the other and then for 80% of us, we fit somewhere in between.  Understanding you place in that bell curve is important, because whenever you go into any relationship (intimate partners, friends, work relationships or family connections) how you react or respond to any potential rejection within that relationship is going to be determined by your parental relationships and then this is mediated by how many times you have experienced rejection over the course of your life.

So, if you have gone through your adolescence and you have been able to have good peer connections, then your tendency to behave in more extreme ways when you feel a sense of rejection is probably going to be a bit less.  However, if you’ve gone through your adolescence and not been able to get good connections (so you would usually come out of it depressed because you didn’t have good family connections either) you are going to have more experiences of rejection, a much stronger sense that you’re really not valuable or ‘worth it’.  

Why is that important?  Because it sets us up for how we behave whenever we perceive a rejection is going to happen between us and another human being.  So, whenever we perceive a disconnection, whenever we experience a trauma because trauma creates a disconnection, we are going to react in one of two ways and then we’re going to flip.

If you grew up in a household where you were ‘enmeshed’ your first emotional reaction to any perceived withdrawal or rejection of the other person you are in ‘relationship’ with is actually going to be quite clingy and child like.  It often involves pleading and begging and is grounded in fear “Please, please don’t leave me.  Is there anything I can do?  I’m sorry, I don’t know what I’ve done but just please let me fix it.  I’ll do whatever you want to work it out!”  The basis of that relationship can be anything – friends, family, partners or employers.

On the total other side is a sense of absolute protective rejection.  If you grew up in a household where you were ‘neglected’ your first emotional reaction to any perceived withdrawal or rejection of the other person you are in ‘relationship’ with is actually going to be quite self-protective, disconnected and strong.  In this situation your response can be more openly rejecting of the other person – get them before they get you!  “If you don’t want to hang out with me fine! Back off – you’re crowding me. If you don’t like it, don’t let the door hit you in the arse on your way out!”  Then all is quiet. It’s crickets – right? Ghosted! All of a sudden I’ve disappeared.

Sound familiar?  Why is there distinction between the two?  

Some of you will be thinking…  I have done both! Most of us have – because we go to our ‘primary’ approach and then we usually flip to the other when the primary approach still doesn’t produce the result that we are looking for – which is a reconnection.

G’day Gorgeous…

G’day Gorgeous

Welcome to Part Two in the ‘Trouble With Trauma’ series…

In moving forward from the awareness that around the age of four is your first experience of an abandonment, we need to understand that you then spend your time trying to ensure that you don’t have that experience again.  You are trying to avoid the rejection. We know that when we are children, in terms of when we have that sense of abandonment, our primary emotional response is shame.  Shame is the heaviest emotion that we experience as human beings.  We decide we don’t like how that feels, especially as children and we don’t want to feel that again so we seek to avoid being rejected in the future.  As such, we start to become anxious because anxiety is fear based.

As such, it is important to note that most children experience anxiety as fear is the most common emotion in our early childhood – so most children in primary school experience anxiety as their primary negative emotion.  

I talked about the movie ‘Resilience’ that came out in 2016 and has recently made a resurgence in Australia.  This documentary that is actually research-based and highlights the fact that if we have a high number of ‘adverse childhood experiences’ (ACEs), in particular if you have more than four out of ten ACEs in your early childhood, then you are more than twice as likely to develop a chronic disease and your life expectancy can be reduced by up to 20 years.  

Now, why is that?

Researchers in the USA actually found that it was because within the people who were getting ill at younger ages, they reported high levels of adverse childhood experiences.  In my interpretation of their research, I’m saying high levels of trauma.

I believe that it is due to the trauma in their childhood, the negative environments that they grow up in, it is due to this experience that they spend the rest of their time through their early primary school years trying to control their environment because they’re quite fearful about what might happen and they can become quite anxious.  I believe that it is this level of constant fear, that causes their body to vibrate at a very low level – constantly.  They live their lives between fear and shame – the vibrational impact of their environment would have an negative impact on their cellular functioning.  I believe it is this affect that alters their cells and this is what makes them more susceptible to chronic disease later in their lives.

Anxiety in a child in primary school can be managed reasonably well, depending upon what the family situation is like.  At that age, or up until about the age of 12, children look to their family connections to give them that sense of security and support.  If they’ve got a good solid family base, even if they’ve experienced an abandonment, they can usually cope better.  It is important to note here that every single person on the planet actually has this experience around that point in time (pre-school) from something that happens between them and their primary caregivers.  For some people it’s a huge thing, for other people it’s only a little thing, but it’s enough to make that child fearful of a future abandonment.  

If the rest of the family situation is reasonably secure, as in Mum and Dad, the household is not volatile and it’s all pretty stable, then that situation works out not too bad.  From this space of security, the child can get through life without being terribly anxious during primary school.  However, if the home life is really unstable or volatile, then those kids are lining themselves up for some problems.  As a society, we really need to understand this as a community based problem.  

If we wait to intervene until a child is in their adolescence, we have left it too late!  We actually need to intervene in primary school and start addressing these high levels of fear because their anxiety is usually triggered by something in their environment, but often they don’t even know what it is and they are not able to communicate it.

This is really important – for all of you going through a divorce, what is crucial to understand is that if you have children in your household, even though it looks like they’re coping okay, you need to spend time communicating with them that it’s not their fault.  That the relationship broke down, that Mummy and Daddy still love them just as much as they did before, but they just don’t want to live in the same house together anymore. It is really important that those kids understand it’s not their fault – I can’t stress how important that is.

Moving on into adolescence, the key learning about our progress through adolescence is in understanding that as an adolescent, your job is to separate yourself from your parents.  At this point you think your parents are the most ‘deadbeat’ people on the planet!  You really don’t want to be anything like them – they embarrass you.  This is perfectly normal. In your adolescence, your job is to differentiate yourself from your parents and actually try and link yourself very strongly to your peers.

So why do adolescents experience depression at such high rates?  I’ve done research around this and around 40% of adolescents experience depression at some point.  In our society, we often talk about what comes first?  Depression or anxiety?  There is an argument that says chicken-or-egg – who knows?  

I’m actually going to put my hand on my heart and tell you that it’s anxiety first.  Our first cognitive emotional experience is shame, but the experience of shame actually leads you to a point where you start to think “I don’t want to experience shame again!”  So, we become fearful of experiencing it and become anxious to avoid it.  

However, when we hit adolescence we are trying to differentiate ourselves from our parents and connect with our peers.  So, if our connection to our parents is secure and we don’t get a very good connection to our peers then it’s usually not too bad, we can manage our adolescence.  It won’t be perfect, but it will be okay.  Alternatively, if you’ve had a really revolting parental relationship, or your home life is very unstable, then sometimes you can get really good connection to peers.  Often this happens because you connect with all the other kids that have got big problems because their home life is rubbish.  These kids often end up grouping together and rebonding into a family of other teens just like them.  These kids will usually survive adolescence without getting super depressed either – it’s interesting that juvenile delinquents can manage a little better by connecting with each other.  They often manage better as a group, not necessarily getting depressed about it as such, until they hit the alcohol and other drugs to ‘numb’ themselves and their feelings of rejection…  Then that’s a whole different ball game.

G’day Gorgeous…

I thought I might talk to you about this little thing I’ve been working on with regards to my new book.  I am writing a new book called “The Trouble With Trauma”.  I’m doing a lot of writing in my head no yet getting it actually down on paper, but what’s interesting is that I’ve been formulating and working through the premise of the book, which ultimately is around what is ‘trauma’ and why trauma is such a big problem for all of us.  

In essence,  our primary emotional need as human beings is for ‘connection’ – me to you and you to everybody around you. The connection is what we all need it as human beings, in fact, it’s absolutely essential to our survival.  

The basis of trauma is, in essence, a disconnection. So why do we have traumatic events in our lives?  It is because we have a disconnect.  My primary explanation for why all of this comes together, why trauma is so important to understand, is because of our very first experience of a trauma, the first that we actually recall and remember and we can make an attribution and blame ourselves for, is usually from when you are about four years old.  Your first experience is actually an abandonment and our first experience of it is before we start primary school.

How do I know that it’s at four?  Well, as human beings we have a really interesting experience from when we are born.  When you are born your primary emotional needs are met by your primary caregiver, so your Mm or whoever was looked after you as a baby.  Your needs are always met, you’re fed, you’re clothed, you’ve got a roof over your head.  Then at around the 18-month mark, when the kids start to say ‘No!’, they are starting to learn about language and what’s important, and they notice the reaction that they get when they say ‘No!’ but then at around 2 we develop ‘desire’ – very different to ‘need’ – so what’s the big deal about desire?

The importance of desire is that as a two-year-old, I’m throwing a tantrum and it’s because instead of having a need for food that I want met, I’ve suddenly now got a desire for something else, but I don’t have language so I can’t communicate that desire to my Mum just in my brain.  Yet, I think that my primary caregiver knows exactly what I’m thinking because everything up until that point the mother intuitively ‘knows’ what the child needs. When ‘need’ changes to ‘desire’, I’m looking to my parent to give me what I want and I don’t necessarily get it!

Now, there is a range of reasons why I don’t get it, but why do I throw tantrums?  It’s because I don’t have a language to communicate what I desire, and I’m usually not getting what it is that I want, so in frustration, I throw a tantrum!

From there, we kind of get on with it. As we develop more language, we get more awareness, but we still think that our parent can understand what’s going on in our head.  In fact, we think that all of the adults around us can read our minds!

What I really love is that moment when we know that children get full individuation.  Children will usually be able to look in the mirror and say their name, like maybe at age one or two.  They can point in the mirror and say “Kerry” (in my case) they know that’s the name that they give that baby or that person that they see in the mirror.  However, there’s an argument that says they don’t actually realise that that baby is themselves, that they understand that they are an individual because at that point, they still see themselves as an extension of the parent…  Until age four.  

At four, they work out that they can know things, or that little voice inside their head knows things, that their parent doesn’t know.  When they’ve reached that point of true individuation,  that’s the point when you recognise that they actually know that they are an individual and that what they think inside their head, their parent cannot know unless they express it.  You know that it happens because a four-year-old will come to you and say “I’ve got a secret!”  They are truly and individual from this point on, and with individuation comes responsibility.

What’s funny is, soon after that they learn to tell lies.  Why is that important?  Because from that point you understand that the things that happen to you, happen because you impact them.  So, what do we know about children up until about the age of 10 or 12?  They have concrete thinking…  Good things happen to you because you are good and bad things because you are bad – simple as that, black and white!  

You may be aware of when it happened to you at four.  You will have had a moment after you recognised that you were an individual, where you felt an abandonment or a disconnection from your primary caregivers.  At this point, you reasoned to yourself that it was your fault.  Why is that important?  Because this is the child part that,  later on, you will tap back into when you are feeling rejected.

I’ll explain that in the coming few videos as I’m going to have to make this into a series to fully explain the overall concept.  It becomes six parts 😀

G’day Gorgeous…

Daylight savings has finished and I always get a little sad about the cooler weather coming, but we’re having this beautiful extended Indian Summer, so I’m not complaining.  I’ve only got eight weeks until I go to Europe anyway, so I’m just going to enjoy it while I can, before it starts really getting cold around here.

I recently went to see a documentary called “Resilience” and I am really excited by the fact that it talks about a study that was done using an assessment called the Adverse Childhood Experience Questionnaire (ACE).  In essence, several doctors in the US recognised that people who were having major health issues came from particular demographic areas that were associated with a lower socio-economic status.

These doctors believed that there appears to be a strong link between mental health and physical health and they wanted to understand about the causality of that link.  What they have discovered is that if people have adverse childhood experiences, this results in excessive stress in children and, in turn, these negative mental health impacts affect the child’s physical health outcomes over their life course.

Now for those of you who have read my book ‘Define Your Inner Diva’ (if you haven’t read it then you might want to grab a copy here), you know that I talk about how we need to repair the ‘self’.  In the first Chapter ‘Delightful Diva’, I outline why negative experiences from childhood affect the development of our sense of self and this impacts many areas of our life – how we approach relationships, our career and the impacts on our health and wellbeing.

If we can focus on health and wellbeing briefly, in my book I focus on excess weight and how it is directly related to our emotional overeating.  We believe our problem is our weight and we try and control our food intake by dieting or increasing our exercise to resolve the problem. However, we need to resolve the issues with ‘self’ before we can get our best health outcomes, in terms of our weight management and a focus on exercise.

Looking after ourselves has always been about the awareness of the psychological side of health and wellbeing and I have anecdotally observed that some people, who have quite serious mental health issues, also seem to have significant physical health issues.  This study has demonstrated amazing outcomes in consideration of the link between adverse childhood experiences (which requires a score of four or more, out of the ten, for you to have a ‘significant’ increase in the negative health outcomes in your overall general health) and the link to chronic disease development – cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity and many other major physical health issues.

This research has uncovered the link between adverse childhood experiences and trauma.  In essence, what they are talking about is trauma, as it is in our early childhood, and this comes from being exposed to acutely stressful situations, mostly abandonment in our childhood.  

As a society, we do not acknowledge the pain that our children experience from this sense of abandonment, because we think that they are young and they will just ‘get over it’.  

Alternatively, considering they are not talking about it very much, we don’t actually choose to address the issue as we believe it does not impact them.

I was just astonished, but really excited in some bizarre way, that they finally found something that clearly shows the link between adversity in childhood experiences and the impact that these experiences have on our mental health as children and young people.  

We then carry that experience with us through our lives and the impact that it has on our physical health and wellbeing is so profound that I just believe that we are edging on the precipice of a really amazing time in medical research history, when we can finally start to see that as ‘human beings’ we are holistic – that our mind and our body are 100% connected, and the way that we think about things is going to impact what happens in our physical body.

Even though this was something that we knew intuitively and we have talked about, we keep it at that level!  I couldn’t believe that finally, a doctor had chosen to investigate this phenomenon from a doctor’s perspective and found that there is a link.

So, I hope that you found that interesting as well as I did…  I am going to put a link below to the resilience movie because I think it is an astonishing documentary and I am so excited that we are finally getting some evidence together that helps to support the ideas that I have been talking about for a really long time.  ?

All right….  See you later Gorgeous