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“My libido is strong. I have a high sex drive.” How often are such phrases used to justify inappropriate, disrespectful, and unhealthy sexual behaviour? How often do politicians, actors and other celebrities make the news for unwanted sexual advances? And how often does it happen and not make the news? What is the libido? We […]

In What is the mother wound? and other blogs, I describe humanity’s single point of failure—collective arrested development of the mother-child bond (and the resulting psychic growth process) that leaves us in an emotionally immature and irresponsible state. This wound destroys our inner compass, creating humans who are psychologically oriented to seeking validation and direction […]

I have written extensively about ancestral trauma—the deep-seated, many-generations old traumas that we all carry a distant memory of from the dawn of patriarchy. I’ve also written about the inevitable consequences of clearing trauma—experiencing rage at having had to endure that traumatic experience. This week I encountered the nexus of the two: the rage that […]

Just as there is a life cycle, an ascending cycle that nurtures, develops, and raises us to new heights, there is a contra-rotating cycle. A downward, descending, dead-end cycle: the cycle of abandonment. It’s why we litter the planet’s oceans with fishing tackle, its deserts with rusty cars, its city streets with the detritus of […]

I’ve likened generational trauma to the white spaces on old maps marked ‘Here be dragons’. We suspect something’s out there but we’re not exactly sure what. My experience is that when you consciously understand a trauma it can no longer remain unconscious. It must surface for healing—for the simple reason that you’ve brought it into consciousness. This […]

Many years ago, I was a jet-setting IT consultant. New Zealand, America, Hong Kong. I was billed out at $300/hour in the pre-Y2K mania. Hotels, rental cars, lavish meals. Success? Tick. Yet I didn’t know I was about to run face-first into one of humanity’s immovable principles. That which brings you success is that which […]

In May 2019 I published a blog titled The Alien inside us – the lower masculine victimizer. In it, I used Ridley Scott’s mandible and tentacle armed creature as a metaphor for patriarchy’s structural dynamic where everyone becomes both victim and victimizer. I recently learned Japan has an entire comic genre devoted to this: ‘tentacle […]

In his award-winning documentary Parts Unknown, Anthony Bourdain visited Koreatown in Los Angeles and spoke to several self-confessed ‘bad Koreans’ who had defied family expectations about their lifestyles. All of them referred to the han (or haan) as a family or communal pressure to meet expectations, such as becoming doctors, lawyers, or accountants. Korea’s supposedly […]

Genealogy is big business. We all know that family member constantly immersed in online research or rushing off to visit old battlegrounds or musty parish records. Over the years, the facts pile up in old ring-binders or sprawling digital archives. Few of these researchers are aware of the difference between thinking about the past and […]

One of the pitfalls of a society characterised, as ours is, by emotional immaturity and irresponsibility, is a blurring of boundaries between ourselves and others. As we bring our unconscious to light, excavating programming that undermines us, we gradually expose these inappropriate boundaries. We learn to stay in our lane. Staying in your lane is […]