abandonment
BBC’s The Repair Shop – the trauma also needs repairing 1 September 2022 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Arts , Generational trauma , 1 Comment 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 […]
Not measuring up 29 May 2021 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Generational trauma , No Comments I grew up in the shadow of World War 2, in the Channel Islands—the only part of the British Empire occupied by the Nazis. My mother’s family buried their valuables in a potato pot and evacuated to the […]
Trauma is pain frozen in time 21 May 2021 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Generational trauma , No Comments The pain, the trauma, had been frozen inside me for half a century. Yet I had no idea. I knew that my family was splintered and disconnected. I had a lifelong sense of abandonment, a […]
Steve Jobs – “You can’t connect the dots looking forward” 19 March 2021 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Emotional principles , Generational trauma , 1 Comment Apple guru Steve Jobs famously observed that “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” Jobs stated this in his commencement speech […]
Does generational trauma attract us to genealogy? 9 October 2020 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Generational trauma , No Comments We like to think that reason rules our lives, that every choice we make is conscious. What about our choice of interests? When something interests us, is that a choice, is it random—or is […]
The emotional cost of generational trauma 25 September 2020 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Generational trauma , No Comments 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 […]
What is emotional unavailability? 13 July 2020 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Cornerstones , 2 Comments I first began to write about emotional unavailability in the post Is there a hole at the heart of your relationship? In it, I wrote: I’ve been having the same conversation over and over with people who are […]
What is abandonment? 3 July 2020 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Cornerstones , 1 Comment 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: […]
Living with ghosts – confronting generational trauma 16 March 2020 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Generational trauma , No Comments The first time I encountered generational trauma* I had no idea what I had hit. I had no idea I was living with ghosts. Put simply, generational traumas are unresolved traumas that are passed […]
Measuring wellbeing – the Family Stability Index 16 February 2020 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Generational trauma , No Comments 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 […]