Unbeknownst to most of us, domestication is already growing deep roots during our early developmental process, which begins while in our mother’s womb and extends through the ages of seven or eight years old. What were you taught as a boy or girl? Let’s take a look at some traditional domesticating expectations of men and women.

What exactly is trauma? How does it impact our sense of self, well-being, and relationship to life? How does trauma influence our levels of stress, hyper-vigilance, patterns of control, and fear-based behaviors on a daily basis? And how do we heal from it? In this article, I’ll explore these questions and provide a conceptual framework of trauma.

Trauma changes our relationship to ourselves. It changes our relationship to the world, and our experience self-trust and feeling safety within our own being. Let’s look at a few common impacts of trauma.

To investigate the heart of personal trauma is to gaze through three influencing factors: physical and psychological trauma; attachment and developmental trauma; and expanded cosmologies of trauma. In this article, we explore them one-by-one

In this article, we investigate three main categories within ancestral and inherited trauma: DNA and epigenetics, family and social conditioning, and eco-psychology.

Trauma that affects a community or a whole society is called a collective trauma. In this article, we will make a distinction between two aspects of collective trauma: cultural traumatic events and the disempowering and persistent psychological trauma that is a result of the matrix of social and cultural conditioning.

Your brain is the mapmaker of your belief system. While our subconscious beliefs serve us to an extent, they also leave us with blind spots, such as outdated protection mechanisms. Becoming an integrated human being isn’t about erasing our adaptive strategies, but about expanding and updating responses that reflect who we are now.

Embracing your adult relationship patterns is a journey of power reclamation. You have the power to interrupt what no longer serves you and to make conscious relationship choices that fulfill, heal, and uplift you into greater levels of growth and intimacy.

Going down the rabbit hole of personal and collective trauma can invoke what some refer to as a dark night of the soul. The phrase “dark night of the soul” is used to describe what happens when the conceptual frameworks of our life, and the associated meaning we have attributed to it, fall apart. This collapse of “normal” can occur suddenly, or slowly over time, creating a dark and disorienting space inside.

Our attachment template, our internal map related to safety, connection, and bonding, is constructed during our early life experiences. There are four windows of development that carve and curate our attachment template, ranging from in utero to eighteen years of age. As adults, we continue to draw from this template in our relationship to ourselves, others, and all of life.

We all share a universal need to feel secure and to know that we belong in order for us to thrive and be in our authentic power. Attachment wounds are areas of deep vulnerability for each of us. Being educated about why we do what we do to bond builds awareness, self-compassion, and a greater perspective into our relationship triggers.

Your erotic nature is the primal, passionate, and creative intelligence that breathes and moves you. Erotic intelligence influences all of our creations, whether it’s a business concept, an artistic endeavor, or a delicious meal, infusing them with meaning, purpose, and pleasure. How do you access your erotic nature? The joy of passion, creativity, joy, and open-hearted curiosity?

What creates sexual desire is one of life’s greatest mysteries. The drivers of our sexual arousal develop early in life. We can’t control what turns us on. And unfortunately, we may feel shame or confusion related to both what arouses us and what doesn’t. Our turn-on templates are based on a multitude of variables, starting with biological and physiological drivers. But what about the psychological and emotional components of our sexual template? There are a number of entry points to reveal the subconscious drivers of our sexuality and beliefs about love, belonging, and our sense of worth and place in the world.

As global disruption and chaos increase, most of us feel the impact through spikes of anxiety, fear, and overwhelm. The information age has placed us in a unique time. During previous decades, national news and media platforms had the ability to conceal any information deemed unfit for public consumption. They had the power to leave us in the dark.

To be a revolutionary is to be willing to listen to the voice of our heart and soul. And follow it, even when logic and reason attempt to derail us in order to protect our sense of safety or our self-images.

Most of us don’t realize, that intimate relationships (lovers, partners, friends, and even colleagues) will reveal aspects of our attachment template. If we want to integrate and embody more of ourselves then it’s a worthy endeavor to study the behaviors that arise when we feel threatened, vulnerable, and fear abandonment or rejection in all types of relationships.

Our greatest challenges are the medicine we are here to transmute from bitter into sweet healing for ourselves and others. The way to heal abusive cycles born from our past is to find safe, loving, and attuned support to help unravel the trauma of misunderstanding ourselves as bad or wrong because of other people’s projections, fears, and defended hearts. We need new and more accurate mirrors.

Boundaries are a form of power. They empower us to express our needs in relationship, whether that’s in our relationship to ourselves or others. Boundaries also offer us a forum to negotiate, using our authentic voice to stand in solidarity with our inner value system.

Differences are inevitable in any partnership. It’s part of the complexity of interpersonal dynamics. Exploring whether your primary values align (the most precious desires of your heart) in relationship is key.

Have you ever wondered what your fantasies reveal about your deeper self? What if our fantasies, sexual and non-sexual, are powerful doorways to make conscious what we actually long for beneath the surface of our daily life? In addition to our biological impulse to procreate and experience pleasure, we come to sex to fulfill a need to feel something specific.