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Trauma-Worlds and their Transformation: Moving beyond a life built around fear, dissociation and shame

When we suffer emotional wounds, survival systems are activated in our minds and bodies. Built around fear, dissociation, and shame, these systems change how we feel, think and behave. In the short term the changes are protective, but in the long term they distort our internal reality and create terrible suffering. I call the distorted inner reality a ‘trauma-world’.  

In this presentation I describe trauma-worlds, the protection they offer and the suffering they create. I then explore how we can transform trauma-worlds, and move into a more conscious, vibrant and self-compassionate life.

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Fear Created by Trauma Often Operates Unconsciously

Fear grabs our attention, taking over our bodies and minds. This is because fear evolved to warn us of potential threats and to spur us into protecting ourselves from those threats.

However, not all fear enters consciousness. Sometimes fear keeps us safe by operating in the background.

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Persephone’s Tor

Persephone’s Tor (in Women on Nature)

I am on a retreat in the middle of Dartmoor. The week offers an opportunity to drop into the shadowlands of our unconscious minds and bodies, and to explore this inner terrain. This essay recounts an archetypal encounter with shadow, fear, and transformation, which was inspired by the outer terrain of the moors themselves. It is published in the anthology, ‘Women on Nature’ edited by Katherine Norbury.

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Maternal negativity and the Archetypal Death Mother: Evolutionary and psychodynamic approaches

In this conversation I discuss various factors which can contribute to a mother feeling negatively about her child. In particular, I describe some of the challenges that ancestral mothers faced throughout human evolution and how these impact us today. I also explore ideas about the archetypal Death Mother, inspired by the late Jungian analyst, Marion Woodman. I found it a rich and rewarding conversation and am grateful to John Wilks and Our Birth Journey Professionals for the opportunity.

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Meeting ‘The Death Mother Archetype’

Meeting ‘The Death Mother Archetype’

In a wide-ranging conversation, Sara Avant Stover and I explored Death Mother from several perspectives. Sara’s own insights prompted me to move between different areas of my research, and our exchange encompassed trauma psychology, Jungian analysis, anthropology, evolution and personal experience

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Being Human - Podcast

Being Human Podcast

Discussion of how to define trauma, the trade-offs that come into play in the wake of traumatising events (and their roots in evolution), the difference between healing and curing trauma.

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‘What makes emotional trauma? Fear, disconnect and shame.’

When we experience overwhelming pain and fear, we develop an unconscious conviction that our life is at risk. As a result, survival systems are activated in our minds and bodies and we move onto a different developmental path to the one we would have followed had we not been traumatised. We begin to live our lives from within a ‘trauma-world’.

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Confronting Death Mother – An Interview with Marion Woodman

Marion Woodman was pivotal in forging an awareness of the Death Mother, and the life-denying impact this force has on both bodies and minds. In this powerful interview, Woodman shares her understanding, drawing on Jungian thought, literature, and also her personal experience both as an analyst and as a woman facing her own internalised Death Mother.

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Being Animal

I knew that I was an animal. I had studied ecology and understood that I was part of the web of life. I had studied evolution and understood the processes that had forged humankind. But my understanding came from books, and it was not until I lived in Tanzania that it became real to my own body and mind.

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My animal body

How my understanding of the world and my place in it, was forever changed by moonlight and mosquitoes.

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Authenticity – are you going to be real?

Precious opportunities for my healing and growth came from Marion Woodman/ BodySoul Rhythms® workshops. In these workshops we called on myths, masks, movement, voice, art and dreams to discover aspects of what we held in our unconscious minds and bodies. This chapter recounts my experience of those workshops. It is published in ‘Love Matters for Psychic Transformation’ by Jungian analyst, Maja Reinau.

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