So welcome everyone.
And thank you.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you for listening.
So I want to begin with something I hear.
Almost every week.
So someone will be in the middle of describing something that happened to them.
A way they were spoken to?
A moment they were not met.
A pattern in the house that they grew up in.
And right in the middle of saying it,
They'll stop.
And then they'll say,
My parents did their best.
But my parents did their best.
And they say it in a particular way.
Not as a complete sentence in itself,
As a kind of a guardrail.
As something they are putting up between themselves and the wound they just started to describe.
So the sentence isn't a statement of generosity.
It's a way of stopping themselves from feeling something.
And what I usually say to them very gently.
Is something like this.
They probably did.
Your parents probably did do their best.
And you were also hurt.
But both of those can be true.
They are not in competition.
So you don't have to choose between them.
So this talk is about that moment.
About the two voices that live inside most of us.
The adult voice that wants to be fair to her parents,
That has perspective,
That understands their limitations.
And the wounded voice that didn't get what it needed and is still often without our noticing,
Carrying that.
And the work.
The actual work is not to make the two voices agree.
The actual work is not for one voice to challenge the other voice.
The work is to let them both speak,
To let them both be true,
To stop using the adult voice to silence the wound and to stop using the wound to indict the adult understanding.
To allow yourself finally to be bought.
Now,
Let me describe what I mean by these two voices more precisely,
Because they are not metaphors,
They are not poetic devices.
They are real layers of how the psyche works.
And they show up in the body differently.
So the first voice is the one you've spent decades building.
The added voice.
The one who has read the books,
Who knows about intergenerational trauma,
Who can hold context,
Who has been to therapy,
Who can see that your parents were once children too.
That they were carrying their own unhealed material.
But they were doing what they could with what they had.
The adult voice has perspective,
It has wisdom,
It is generous.
And it is in many ways the result of all the work you've done on yourself.
And it deserves credit for being there.
The second voice is older.
It was there before the adult voice was.
It is the part of you that has lived through the actual events,
Not the version that has processed and contextualized,
But the version that has experienced things in the body in real time at that age.
You were when they happened.
So this voice doesn't have perspective.
It doesn't have context and it doesn't know that anyone was doing their best.
It only knows what happened to it.
What was said?
What wasn't said.
The moments of breathing.
The times nobody came.
So a two-year-old will not understand if you go to it and say this is your parents doing your best.
So think of it from that frame.
And here is the part that matters.
Both voices are accurate.
Both are reporting truthfully from their own vantage point.
The adult is very right about context.
And the wound is right about experience.
So they are not contradicting each other.
They are just describing different things.
And the mistake most of us make.
Most of us make it for years,
Is treating them as if they were in conflict.
As if the adult voice has to win.
As if maturity means letting the adult speak.
And quietening the wound.
But that's not majority.
That's just another version.
Of what was happening when you were small,
A more articulate voice overriding a less articulate one.
So the wound doesn't get any healthier.
From being talked over by your own internal grown-up.
I want to put this in a slightly different language.
Because this framing I use with clients sometimes helps.
The person listening to this voice right now.
Are the conscious adult.
The wise part.
The vanu can hold a cup of coffee.
The one who can choose to listen.
Do a meditation.
The one who can decide what to do with a Saturday afternoon.
This is you.
In your fully functioning computer.
And in you at the same time live something else.
And it's not necessarily a memory.
It's not just a thought.
It's an energy.
Or an unprocessed emotion.
Or a feeling that has been waiting,
Sometimes for decades,
To be acknowledged.
This is the wound.
It is alive.
It is present.
It is doing things,
Whether you notice it or not.
And the wound was hurt by an adult?
Or the conditions around adults.
A long,
Long time ago.
Not necessarily by anything dramatic.
Sometimes just by what wasn't there.
So the wound in it's own way?
Knows exactly what happened.
The wound present need to be informed.
What the wound does need is to be allowed to feel exactly what it feels.
Not corrected,
Not contextualized,
And not given the perspective talk,
Just allowed.
And here is something I think a lot of healing work has gotten subtly wrong.
The wound is allowed to have parents.
The wound is allowed to be hurt by them.
And to feel that hurt.
Even while the adult you of today can also love them.
Forgive them or simply hold them in some kind of peace.
So these two stances are not mutually exclusive.
They just live at different layers of you.
The wound has its own clock also.
And I want to talk for a moment about time.
About how the wound experiences time differently from the adult.
The adult self runs on chronological time.
You're 40,
50,
60,
20,
I don't know.
You've had decades to process.
You can read a book about attachment and understand it cognitively in an afternoon.
So the adder itself can update its model relatively quickly.
But the wound runs on a different clock.
The wound is the age it was when it got stuck.
So if you got stuck at 6,
It is still 6.
If it got stuck at 12,
It is still 12.
Not in the sense that you are arrested at that age,
In the sense that the wound,
As a piece of unmetabolized experience,
Is still operating from the timeline of when it happened.
And here is what that means practically.
Taking away all the jargon.
You cannot rush a six-year-old.
You cannot explain to a six-year-old that they should be more compassionate to their tired old parents.
You cannot show a six-year-old the research on intergenerational trauma and expect them to feel better.
The six-year-old doesn't operate on those terms.
The six-year-old needs what the six-year-old has always needed.
To be heard,
To be believed,
And to be sat with.
So when you try to rush past your own wound,
When you tell yourself you should be over this by now.
When you tell yourself that you're old enough to know better,
Or when your best friend says,
Just let it go.
You are essentially being the impatient parent.
The wound never got.
You are the adult.
Who doesn't have time.
You are telling the small part of you to please grow up and get over with it.
Which is exactly the move that in childhood,
Often created that wound in the first place.
So the work is to give the wound the time it actually needs.
Which is rarely the time adults would prefer.
The patterns,
The behaviours,
The reactions that the adult self often finds embarrassing or frustrating.
I always do this.
I always do that.
I always people please.
I always say yes to people.
I do this.
I do that.
The bracing,
The over-explaining,
The shutting down,
The disproportionate reaction to small things,
The inability to take a compliment,
The compulsive checking that people are okay with you.
The collapsing into silence when something difficult comes up.
These are not malfunctions.
These are not bugs.
They are strategies that at some point in your history were the best available solution to a situation you couldn't solve otherwise.
The people-pleasing might be 20,
30,
40 years of accumulated experience that if you didn't keep the adults around you happy,
The household became dangerous.
That is real expertise.
That is hard-won knowledge.
The fact that today you're not in danger.
Does not retroactively erase the data the wound is operating from.
So if you try to tell the part of you to just stop people pleasing,
Which we all do or have done at some point.
You are essentially asking it to drop the only surviving mechanism it knows worked.
And from the point of view of that child,
Of that wound,
That's a threat.
So it will resist.
And then the adult self gets frustrated that the wound won't change.
And the cycle continues.
I know that I people please but I do it anyways.
I know everything about boundaries.
I have done 50 workshops on how to set boundaries.
I know all about manifestation.
I'm a master of affirmations.
But put me in that situation and that same part will come up and do the same thing again.
Something like that.
So the wound is not stupid.
The wound is in fact very intelligent.
So it has been protecting you quite skillfully for decades.
And the fact that it is using strategies that are now outdated is not a sign of weakness.
It is a sign that no one has updated its information.
No one has shown to it slowly and repeatedly that conditions have changed.
And updating the information is not a one conversation job.
The wound learnt its lessons in the body in repeated experience over years.
It will only update its lessons the same way,
Slowly,
In the body,
Repeated experience.
Over time.
Here I think is the most important sentence in this whole talk.
So I'm going to say it slowly and twice.
Your wound is allowed to be and to feel exactly as it is.
And your adult self is also allowed to hold whatever perspective it holds.
And those two things can co-exist in you today without one having to defeat the other.
Your wound is allowed to be and to feel exactly as it is.
And your adult self is also allowed to hold whatever perspective it holds.
And those two things can coexist.
In you.
Today.
Without one having to defeat the other.
Most of us,
When we approach our own healing,
We try to force these two voices into agreement.
Either we let the adult voice win,
We suppress the wound,
We keep saying they did their best,
They did their best,
When your whole body disagrees.
We minimize our own experience until we feel nothing about it.
Or we let the wound win.
We collapse into the pain and we make our parents into villains.
We lose perspective.
The adult voice took years to develop.
Both moves are a kind of impatience.
A kind of needing to resolve.
The actual book The work that actually holds is to stop forcing a resolution.
To allow both voices to stay in the room,
To let them speak at different times,
Different registers,
Different layers of the same experience.
Yes,
Your parents did their best.
And yes,
You were also hurt.
Both.
Without one cancelling the other.
Without one needing to apologize to the other.
Without resolution.
And the strange thing is.
.
.
When you stop forcing the two voices to agree.
They actually start to relax around each other.
The wound no longer being talked over.
Stop shouting.
The adult,
No longer being asked to manage the wound,
Stops trying to fix it.
So they start to share space.
They become over time less like adversaries and more like a long marriage.
Two voices that don't always agree.
But that I've learned to live alongside each other.
Without needing the other to disappear.
Now I want to redefine the role of the idle voice for a moment because I think this is where a lot of people get stuck.
Most of us,
When we discover we have a wounded inner child,
Maybe you read some book by John Bradshaw,
I don't know,
Immediately turn the arrogant self into a project manager.
The adult is going into fixing mode.
I'm going to fix my inner child.
I'm going to re-parent the wound.
I'm going to give it love.
I'm going to apply techniques and produce the outcome.
And that's a good intention,
Consciously.
But your subconscious mind and your wound very quickly picks up on this.
It notices that you're not really there to listen.
The adult is performing care while actually trying to make the wound go away.
And which the wound,
With its decade of expertise,
Can spot a mile off.
So,
This is the equivalent of meditating because you want to release something,
Of going to breath work because you want to release your trauma,
Whatever.
So,
You're telling your body that whatever is there,
I want you gone and for that reason I'm doing this.
So your subconscious mind will pick it up and you might not be able to get to the layer that you're trying to get to.
So,
The role of the adult is not to manage.
The role of the adult is to witness.
To be the steady,
Present,
Non-anxious company that the wound never got to in the first place.
To listen without correcting.
To stay without flinching.
Do not have an agenda about what the wound should feel or how quickly it should change.
And this is really really hard.
Because the adult voice by default has an agenda.
It wants you to get better.
It wants the difficult feelings to be resolved.
It wants the work to produce visible results.
So letting go of that agenda is a kind of surrender that most of us are not used to.
But surrender,
If that's the right word,
Is the work.
Let's call it non-managing.
Non-managing is the work.
Non-managing presence is the medicine.
The wound.
Finally meeting an adult voice that doesn't try to talk over it slowly starts to trust you.
And trust over time is what allowed the wound to move.
Not because the adult fixed it,
But because the conditions for movement finally exist.
If any of this is resonating,
Let's do a small embodied practice.
This is not a fix.
It's a beginning.
And let's just say this is a way of letting both voices be in the room at the same time.
Now wherever you are.
Just settle.
And let your body be supported.
And now just think of something.
That your adult self has said about your childhood.
Something which is fair.
And something which is balanced.
Something true to the perspective you've built over years.
And it might be they were doing their best.
Or it might be they were carrying their own wounds.
Or it might be,
They didn't know any different.
All of that is fine.
Find a sentence like that.
Your real adult understanding.
Just pick the words that are actually true for you.
Now holding that sentence.
See if you can also let another voice in.
The voice of the actual part of you that was there.
That lived through it,
That wasn't asked,
That wasn't met,
That had to manage.
Often alone.
What does that voice want to say?
Don't make it dramatic.
Don't make it tidy.
Just let it speak.
And it might be something like I needed something they couldn't give.
I was so alone and nobody noticed.
I am still hurt.
I am still angry.
Or sometimes there are no actual words.
There might just be a wave of sensation,
A tiredness,
Or a tiredness.
Whatever is present for you.
Just let them both be in the room.
The adult understanding,
My parents did their best,
And the wounds report.
I was still hurt.
I am still angry.
Don't make them argue.
Don't ask the wound to be more reasonable.
And don't ask the adult either to drop its perspective.
Just let them be in you at the same time.
And see how that feels.
Notice what happens in your body.
When you stop forcing them to agree.
There might be a softening.
There might be a sting in the eyes.
Or there might be a strange sense of relief.
There might be nothing in particular.
All of that is fine.
Now if you want I'll offer you a sentence to say internally to the wound.
Just a small offering.
Just receive my words and take what lands for you.
You are allowed to feel exactly what you feel.
I am not going to override you.
I am not going to rush you.
And I'm not going to tell you.
That they did their best.
I am just going to sit with you for as long as it takes.
If this sentence lands,
Let it.
If it doesn't,
That's fine.
The wound has its own pace.
And it may take many visits before it believes the adult voice is actually willing to sit with it without an agenda.
This is the re-parenting that actually works.
Not elaborate visualizations,
Not structured letter writing,
And definitely not visualizing giving your inner child a hug in an open space.
Just this.
The willingness to stop managing your own pain and to start keeping it company instead.
Because this is a teaching that can be misread.
And I want to head off the misreadings.
This is not permission to Letting the wound feel what it feels.
Is not the same as identifying entirely with the wound and refusing to live your added life.
The adult voice still has its job.
To function,
To make decisions,
And to navigate the world.
So the work is not to retire the adult.
The work is to stop using the adult to silence the wound.
This is also not permission to weaponize the wound.
Because some people,
When they finally get language for what they didn't get,
Begin to use it as a weapon.
Against their parents,
Against their partners,
Against anyone who reminds them of the original conditions.
The wound's truth is not a license to treat present-day people as if they were culprits.
The adult voice still holds responsibility for behavior.
And this is simply inner work.
You working with parts of you that were hurt.
And this is also not permission to skip forgiveness or to fake it.
Some people might move towards forgiveness as part of this work,
And some won't.
Both are valid.
So the work doesn't require forgiveness,
It requires honesty.
The forgiveness,
If at all,
Comes on its own schedule.
And any manufactured forgiveness in my experience never quite holds anyway.
Now for a long time in my own work.
I tried to make the two voices agree.
I'd hear myself starting to describe something that hurt me.
And almost immediately I'd interject with an adult correction.
No no no,
They were doing their best.
They were carrying their own wounds.
I'd say it in my own head before anyone else had to say it for me.
The thing that started to shift it was someone in a session,
Gently asking me to slow down.
To not jump to perspective so quickly.
To let the wound finish its sentence first,
Before the adult started its rebuttal.
And the first few times,
It felt indulgent,
Wrong,
There was guilt.
As if I was being uncharitable to people that who had loved me.
What I slowly understood is that I had been being uncharitable to myself.
Specifically to the part of me that was small once.
That had been waiting to finish a sentence for decades.
So the adult voice wasn't wrong.
It was just always going first.
And the wound very quietly had given up on getting a turn.
So now it's allowed to have a turn.
Now it's allowed to speak.
Now it is allowed to be exactly what it is,
While you today hold perspective of both together,
Without one defeating the other.
The adult voice softens.
It becomes less of a project manager and more of a quiet companion.
It stops trying to fix the wound and starts to simply be with it,
Which is what allows the wound to move at its own pace.
And you become in a strange way a more whole person.
Not because the parts of you have merged into one homogeneous self.
Because the parts of you have stopped fighting.
Both voices are allowed to be in the room.
Because the conversation internally has gotten kinder.
Now,
Feeling what you feel.
If this talk has given you permission to stop forcing the two voices to agree,
That's the work landing.
So the permission is the medicine.
Don't do anything with it tonight.
Just sit with it.
Sit with this possibility that both things are true.
Your parents did their best and you were hurt.
Both real and allowed.
For now.
Just stay where you are.
Process.
Integrate.
Thank yourself for showing up.
Thank you for listening.
Take gentle care of yourself.
And until next time.
Namaste.
