arresteddevelopment

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 […]

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 […]

In We have no language for pre-verbal trauma, I wrote how difficult it is to articulate the experience of trauma when it occurred before we developed the capacity for language. The acquisition of language doesn’t extend to language around pre-existing trauma. Perhaps the first place such trauma can manifest is in the communication between mother […]

I have long wondered why some people talk about their issues while others don’t. I’ve often mistaken ‘can’t talk’ for ‘don’t want to talk’. More recently I’ve started to explore the realm of pre-verbal trauma. The fog is lifting. Pre-verbal trauma is trauma that occurred before we developed the capacity for language. The talking cure Before […]

In What is the mother wound? I describe the way that the wound at the core of humanity causes six key separations (or fragmentations). Of these, however, there is only one that ensures the mother wound passes from one generation to the next: lack of emotional nurturing. Note that I specifically reference a lack of […]

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 […]

On this site I’ve written extensively about unconscious shame. Here I want to connect shame to arrested development. Arrested development is a colloquial term, popularised by the TV show of the same name, for what is technically known as ‘developmental disorder’, where crucial developmental tasks in a child’s life don’t unfold correctly. Arrested development is […]

One of the less appealing features of the healing journey (not that it has many to begin with) is that the further you go, the more deeply our unprocessed emotional trauma is lodged in our unconscious. Simply meditating or doing a bit of personal development work no longer suffices to bring this damaged emotional material […]

Shifting Sands, an exhibition at the British Civil War Centre in Newark, examines the perennially fascinating story of T. E. Lawrence—a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia—from multiple perspectives: historical, archaeological and personal. Pursuing clues in Lawrence’s brilliant work on the Arab Revolt, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, archaeologists have discovered places like Tooth Hill—a Lawrence campsite—and the remains […]

“You’re staring straight ahead. Somehow your awareness peels away from you, in slow motion. It’s like you’ve cracked in two, and one half is facing the wrong way. Are you in your physical body, which you know must still be there? Before you know it, you’re up on the ceiling somewhere, watching yourself down below.” […]