It’s only in the past 2 years that I have started sharing my work online, a world I am most unfamiliar with. Putting forty years of clinical work into a format designed for a scroll, and wondering, genuinely, whether anyone on the other side of the screen would even care or find it useful, has been more exposing than I ever anticipated.
Along this rather bumpy road, one particular Instagram post about one of the pillars of my work in family trauma exploded into a lively but extremely polarizing discussion in the comments and left me feeling a call to share more.
It was clear that people did “care” about what I have to say, particularly on this topic, so I have decided to go deeper. I’ll explain below, but I want to clarify that I recognise how triggering this post may be, especially for those who’ve experienced abuse, neglect, or absence from their parents. But there is much more to the story.
Here’s the clip for reference. It was cut from a back and forth conversation I was having with my son about advice I would have on choosing a partner.
Bert Hellinger, the founder of Family Constellations therapy, a significant tool I use in my practice, believed that love within families follows certain “Orders of Love.” He argued that accepting parents as they are, without judgment, was essential for personal healing. Instead of focusing on blame, rejection or even hate, Hellinger emphasised acknowledging the parent’s place in the family system, the fact that they gave you life and recognizing the deeper dynamics at play.
Very often, when examined, traits or behaviours exhibited in one person in the family, may be “systemic,” going back many generations. Very often parents who give very little to their children received very little from their parents and/or grandparents. The entanglements in the family are “systemic” i.e in the generational family system.
In the essay that follows, I lay out the diagnostic map I use when early trauma is a contributing factor in complex chronic illness, including:
The neurobiology of attachment and why a mother’s right prefrontal cortex is, quite literally, the child’s first regulator
Why Bessel van der Kolk’s four steps for trauma treatment are necessary but not sufficient, and what the diagnostic map needs to include before those steps can work
How the 7 Stages Model identifies how trauma takes shape across the body, the family system, and the clinical encounter, and the specific diagnostic questions I ask and the layers I investigate
A case study of a patient who spent three years working through every biological layer; mold, Lyme, MCAS, methylation defects, hormonal insufficiency, before the piece that had been missing finally surfaced, and what happened when it did
What ancestral trauma looks like at the biochemical level, and how to investigate it clinically
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you’ll know this is the kind of clinical territory I find most compelling, and most underserved in both conventional and integrative medicine. Rather than offering answers, this piece offers a new way of seeing. It’s drawn from my years of practice using the 7 Stages for Health and Transformation Model, and from listening closely to patterns that emerge when we begin to ask deeper questions about illness, identity, and the work of healing.
I hope it’s of use to you.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.