Marina O'Connor/Trauma-informed therapy

28/07/2025

26/07/2025

First thing I say when we start another “what do we pass on?” group is: “remember, when you start working on your intergenerational patterns you are not only doing this work for yourself. You are doing it for your partners, for your friends, for your children, for your parents, for all generations prior to you and all generations that will follow you”.

By focusing on healing our own unresolved wounds, unprocessed trauma and relational patterns, you are creating life changes you always envisioned for yourself. You are able to act from the place of clarity, presence and empowerment, to step out of past templates, repetitions and re-enactments.

I call this process “embodiment of loving power”.

By doing intergenerational work we are able to become a safe space - for ourselves, especially our younger parts, and everyone who is close to us. We feel safe enough in the world to take risks and to speak up.

We are able to give to ourselves what we haven’t received. We are able to grow in whatever ways we choose.

23/07/2025

Very often people come into therapy holding this deep rooted belief that something is wrong with them. They say “I should be fixed”.

Something is wrong with their feelings, something is wrong with their needs, maybe they are too much or maybe the opposite, they aren’t trying hard enough?

From this place of “not okayness” they are trying to change their lives or relationships with the same strategies that they used when they were little

They might repress their feelings just as they did they they were children, they might act out or play the “victim” to get their needs met, they might be stuck in “blaming everyone else” stance.

Because those strategies aren’t working for adults it re-confirms that they are not okay. The world and people are hostile, perhaps no one wants them to succeed. No one is able to help or understand.

Sometimes the goal of therapy is to come to realisation that you have never been broken, thus don’t need fixing. That you’ve always been okay.

From that place you can start taking accountability, have potency and agency to change.

17/07/2025

How boundary violations can look like in adult relationships

One of the major aspects of trauma work is helping clients to re-claim or simply find their boundaries. To recognise boundary violations. To build new system of protection.

Boundaries is our breaks system. Relationship without boundaries is similar to driving a car without breaks. Would you get into the car without breaks? This is what boundaryless relationships are.

The issue is that many people who carry unresolved childhood trauma, grew up in families where their breaks were constantly disregarded, dismissed and even attacked. Perhaps their parents didn’t understand their own breaks, so the whole relational modelling is based on these violations - emotional enmeshment and co-dependence. Controlling or avoidant behaviours. Love addiction or love avoidance.

This is the modelling we will bring into all adult relationships. Until we learn about boundaries and start protecting them, we might be stuck in ongoing cycles of painful repetitions and re-enactments.

Unconsciously, we enter adult relationships to finish childhood, to create familiar pressures, frustrations and pain we grew up with. Until we learn differently. Until we start the process of re-decision

The purpose of boundaries is both to protect ourselves from being violated by other people and also to protect other people from our own violating, dismissive or abusive behaviours. It goes both ways and intimacy isn’t possible without boundaries.

What would you add to this list?

14/07/2025