abandonment

In recent months I’ve been binge-watching the BBC’s long-running heirloom restoration show, The Repair Shop. “What’s in the box?” asks impresario Jay Blades as each new—well, old and badly damaged—item arrives at the Weald and Downland Living Museum. In The Repair Shop today… I’m as eager as Jay to find out. I’m fascinated by the […]

What is the impact of generational trauma? How do we count the emotional cost of generational trauma? This photograph from Sydney Sims says it all. We spend our lives trying to paste on a smile to cover up the hole at the heart of our existence—a hole that has no obvious source. And because it […]

What is abandonment? The question seems simple enough. Some people are unfortunate enough to lose the support of a parent or significant other, often during childhood, creating feelings of abandonment. What is abandonment? The Wikipedia definition supports this view: Emotional abandonment is a subjective emotional state in which people feel undesired, left behind, insecure, or […]

The first time I encountered generational trauma* I had no idea what I had hit. Put simply, generational traumas are unresolved traumas that are passed from one generation to the next, where they surface as disempowering feelings and behaviours that make no sense to the person experiencing them. They are passed through a mechanism known […]

I’ve blogged a lot about unconscious shame, and also written a little about generational trauma. This is inherited trauma, like a superficially mild case of PTSD that comes from scandals and traumatic events in recent family history. Whoever experienced the traumatic event was never able to process it, which meant that the unprocessed pain and […]

There is a common belief that viewing porn conditions men to objectify women, turning them into emotionless sex objects. This is a fallacy. The objectification of women happened at the dawn of patriarchy. This conditioning has been handed down from one generation to another via epigenetic inheritance. The formation of patriarchy As I wrote in […]

In What is ancestral trauma? I describe the key psychological wounds that humanity suffered as a result of the drought, desertification and famine that gave rise to patriarchy. Here I want to focus on the first of these wounds: separation from nature and nurture. The drought, desertification and famine that created patriarchy created a core […]

In Saharasia, geographer James DeMeo demonstrates that patriarchy arose between 6000 and 2000 BC when desertification of the Sahara, Arabia and Central Asia created competition for food sources between previously peaceful hunter-gatherer and early agricultural communities. Capacity to trust The effect on the human psyche was catastrophic. In addition to the rise of masculine-dominant warrior […]

I recently attended a grass roots environmental meeting at which an older lady, a staunch activist, spelled out various things we should be doing to protect the environment. A young man, owner of an eco-something start-up, argued that none of her suggestions would be effective because they were inconvenient. Who was right? They both were. […]

Last Friday, the eve of Valentine’s Day, red roses spontaneously appeared in the windows of many of the shops lining the Chiswick High Street. The roses marked the passing of a local vagrant, 77-year-old Anne Naysmith, who notably lived for over two decades in a clapped-out black Ford Consul. What marked Naysmith out from a […]