Marina O'Connor/Trauma-informed therapy

28/11/2025

A question I hear often in my work with relational trauma:
“Can I outgrow my childhood wounds? Can I outgrow what I internalised from those early years?”

My answer is this:
We don’t outgrow our wounds. We outgrow our adaptations.

Early experiences shape our nervous system, our neurobiology, our beliefs, our expectations of others, of relationships, and the stories we tell ourselves about what is possible. These patterns were built to keep us safe.

But what once protected us can quietly become the very thing that limits us:

the hyper-independence that hides exhaustion and emotional deprivation,

the people pleasing that masks abandonment wounds, resentment and anger,

the self criticism that once kept us motivated but now leaves us depleted and unable to move forward or feel successes,

the compulsive or addictive behaviours that “almost work” but keep us disconnected from ourselves

Healing doesn’t erase the past pain.
It expands the capacity of the present.
It changes how we hold and protect our wounds with more kindness, compassion and accountability.

Through trauma informed work, we build nervous system capacity that allows new relational experiences in: safety, vulnerability, intimacy, attunement, repair. We learn to notice old survival strategies and choose differently. We grow into a self that no longer needs to shrink, perfect, control or over function.

So yes, you can outgrow the parts of you shaped by a childhood you no longer live in.

Not by fighting your past, or rejecting “old” versions of yourself, but by cultivating the inner safety that makes new patterns possible.

That is the real work of healing.
Deeply human. Lifelong. And possible

25/11/2025

As a therapist working with transgenerational trauma, I often see how our relationship with success isn’t shaped only by ambition, it’s shaped by early relationship patterns, especially with a father figure.

Both parents offer essential messages for healthy development, but the paternal function plays a particular role: it helps the child internalise the belief that desire is allowed and that pursuing what you want is possible.

When a father figure is emotionally present, steady, and responsive, the child absorbs a quiet, foundational message: the world will meet me halfway; I can move toward what I want and something will hold.

But when the father is absent, unpredictable, overwhelmed, or harsh, children often grow up with very different internal landscapes: doubting their potential, overworking to earn approval, or feeling a chronic sense of “almost” when it comes to success.

These patterns don’t disappear with age.
They echo into adulthood:
in how we take risks, tolerate expansion, handle recognition, and allow ourselves to want more.

Healing this isn’t about blaming parents; it’s about recognising how early relational experiences shaped our capacity to believe in our own potential.

When we work through these inherited patterns, something shifts.
Success stops being a fight.
Desire stops feeling dangerous.
And we finally get to move toward what we want with a sense of inner permission.

22/11/2025

This year taught me both as a relationship therapist and personally that couples who can grieve together, stay together.

In intimate partnerships, grief isn’t just an emotion. It is a test of our capacity to stay connected while staying true to ourselves. Many couples struggle here and become isolated in their grief. One partner shuts down, the other carries the emotional load alone, and the distance quietly grows.

But real intimacy asks for something braver.
It asks us to let our partner see the parts of us that feel broken, uncertain, or afraid.
It asks us to stay present when our partner is in pain without fixing, avoiding, or turning away.

Life brings many losses: the loss of parents or children, the loss of the future we imagined, pregnancy loss, the grief of missed opportunities, the loss of meaningful relationships, the loss of pets. And eventually, everything we love we lose one day.

What matters is whether we can turn toward each other in these moments.

When a relationship becomes a place where loss can be spoken, held, and witnessed without collapsing, rescuing, or withdrawing, two people can truly meet each other.

20/11/2025

We don’t talk enough about a very specific and often misunderstood stage of trauma healing. It is the phase where your old adaptive strategies no longer work but your new ways of coping have not fully formed yet. A psychological in-between space.

Clinically, this is the moment when the nervous system stops relying on familiar survival patterns such as hypervigilance, overfunctioning, shutting down, perfectionism or people pleasing, yet has not internalised new, regulated pathways. The system is reorganising itself and reorganisation is rarely comfortable.

This is why this stage can feel like more anxiety, more uncertainty, more emotional rawness, less clarity and less control. Many people believe they are regressing or not coping well, when in reality they are moving out of trauma adaptations and into something much healthier. In trauma therapy, this is a liminal phase, a transitional zone where old neural networks loosen before new and more integrated patterns take hold.

Paradoxically, this uncomfortable place is often the most potent part of the work. It is where the system becomes malleable, where rigidity softens and where new relational experiences can finally be absorbed rather than defended against.

And in this phase, willpower alone is not enough. What you need is a system of resources that can hold you while your internal world reorganises. This includes supportive relationships that help you co-regulate, regulating activities that anchor the body, grounding techniques that bring you back into the present and a therapeutic relationship where old adaptations are understood rather than pathologised and where new patterns are practised in real time.

Healing trauma is not a linear journey. It is a series of reconnections that reshape how your system relates to safety, connection and yourself.

If you are in this phase, you are not failing. Your system is learning a new way of being.

11/11/2025

The Most Neurotic Fear

People often talk about fear of failure as something to hack, overcome, or manage.
But psychologically, fear of failure might be one of the most neurotic fears we’ve developed as humans.

Why?
Because failure is our oldest companion.

Every developmental task we’ve ever mastered , take walking, speaking, reading as an example, began in failure.
We fell, stumbled, mumbled, and got it wrong countless times before we got it right.
Our nervous system was built to learn through trial, error, repair, and repetition.

There’s nothing pathological about failing.
It’s how we grow.
It’s how we become.

What becomes painful is how we relate to it.
When our early experiences were filled with criticism, shame, or conditional love, failure stopped being a place of learning and became a threat to belonging.
It’s no longer “I didn’t get it right this time,” but “I am a failure.”

That shift from behaviour to identity is where the wound lives.
The fear of failure becomes the fear of losing love, approval, or worth when we get it wrong.

Growth always requires rupture,
moments when what we know no longer works.
And that rupture can stir deep anxiety, even the fear of rejection that might truly come with it.

But healing begins when failure stops being proof of unworthiness
and becomes part of how we return to ourselves.

Avoiding failure is how we abandon our potential.

02/11/2025

We often crave deeper connection, but depth requires capacity.
The more we’re able to meet ourselves, the more space we create for real intimacy.

Working with couples, I often see that it’s not lack of love but lack of emotional capacity that limits connection.

When each partner expands their ability to stay present with themselves, the relationship expands too.

02/11/2025

31/10/2025

Emotional regulation is one of those phrases that gets thrown around a lot, especially in the self-development space, but it’s often misunderstood.

Let’s start with what it’s not:
• Emotional regulation is not staying calm all the time. That’s emotional suppression.
• Emotional regulation is not avoiding anger. Anger is a natural, protective and essential to life energy.
• Emotional regulation is not about not feeling. It’s about recognising when your emotional response belongs to the here and now and when it’s a trigger linked to the unprocessed past material.
• It’s not being endlessly “positive.”
• It’s not intellectualising or rationalising your emotions.
• And emotional regulation is not about expecting other people to be responsible for how you feel. Others can support your process through co-regulation, but as an adult no one else can regulate your nervous system for you.

Emotional regulation means you can recognise what you feel, understand what it’s telling you, and respond rather than react.

It also means knowing when you need to up-regulate (to reconnect and bring more presence when you’re in the state of collapse, shut down or withdrawal) and when to down-regulate (soothe your system when you’re overactivated, hyper stimulated or anxious).

In other words, it’s about knowing your window of tolerance and learning how to bring yourself back within it, safely and gently.

Emotional regulation is a relational process and something we often learn (or don’t learn) as children through the presence of another regulated nervous system.

29/10/2025

Have you ever felt that the life you are living isn’t really yours? As if you were meant for something else?

Maybe you are not using your potential.

Maybe you keep yourself small to feel safe.

Maybe you don’t like how you show up in relationships and wish you could change the patterns that keep repeating.

Maybe you find yourself in unfulfilling dynamics, or stuck in cycles of debt, scarcity, or fear. Even when part of you knows that there is more to life than this.

All of that often don’t start with you.

Those experiences are shaped by emotional inheritance you carry. The unspoken stories of your families, survival strategies passed down through generations, the patterns you once needed to stay safe and to belong.

Even though it didn’t start with you, you are the once who can transform what was passed on.

When we begin to recognise the echoes of the past within our present, we create space for new ways of being and relating.

To ourselves, to others, and to life.

Join us for in-person, 8 week therapeutic group programme starting on November 10th in Lisbon.

“What do we pass on?” is an invitation and powerful vehicle to explore inherited emotional scenarios and update them.

Healing isn’t personal. It’s generational.

24/10/2025

Join in-person “What do we pass on” therapeutic group starting on November 10th at .mentalhealth and let’s together re-decide what do we pass on

21/10/2025

When my older son was born seven years ago, I began to see something I’d only ever understood in theory: how much of what we haven’t healed quietly becomes what we pass on.

Unresolved trauma doesn’t vanish with time, it travels. Through generations. Through our nervous systems. Through how we connect and disconnect. Through what we fear, avoid, or overcompensate for.

Children don’t learn from what we say.
They learn from what we do and how we live:
how we manage closeness and distance, how we manage our own anxieties, how we express love, how we repair, how we relate to others. How we self-express and self-actualise.

When parents carry unprocessed trauma, children internalise it. Not in direct way. But as
hyper-independence, perfectionism, people-pleasing, emotional distance, co-dependence, fear of intimacy, addictive behaviours, control, patterns around self-neglect or self-abandonment, and other ways. Those patterns become emotional language for next generations.

Every belief about ourselves is relational and transgenerational. It was learned somewhere, in relationship, often long before we had a language to name it explicitly. Implicitly we remember.

Healing, then, isn’t only personal.
It’s generational.
It’s an act of repair that ripples forward.

That’s why I created What Do We Pass On: a therapeutic programme for parents and individuals who want to understand and transform what travels through their family system.