My journey with reclaiming my power: Freeing myself from the domination system through pregnancy, birth, parenting, learning and following my calling.
As a child and teenager, I was deeply quiet, trembly and introverted.
I also had, what was called at the time, ‘a temper.’
How little we understood humans back then!
In my early twenties, I would often exude a kind of silent rage – arms crossed, quiet, eyes glinting.
Nowadays I see that I had a lot of unexpressed will energy – lots of repressed rage from experiences of not having choice, autonomy, agency, and being overpowered, from being in an incubator for 5 weeks as a newborn, being alone at night as a baby, old-fashioned school coercion, and being separated from each of my parents for 18 months each.
In photos as a teen, my fists were clenched.
As my twenties went on, I learnt a number of things which helped change this:
I started to make friends with my ‘anger’ through therapy and training as a psychotherapist;
I started to see all the places where I had choice and agency;
I began to understand what I now call the Domination Paradigm and to disentangle myself from it.
There were key points in this journey I’d love to share with you, and I wonder if you resonate with them:
I expressed loads of what I then called anger and now call outrage, in the weekly therapy I started at 22, because I wanted to understand how my past was affecting my present. I also did this in the therapy training groups I was in as I trained as a psychotherapist. I saw others expressing theirs lots too.
I learnt lots about the mainstream birthing system and the cycle of interventions whilst I was doing my Ph.D. on postnatal depression and the mother-infant relationship.
During that time, I came across The Continuum Concept in a little bookshop in Cambridge. I love that I was in one of the most masculine bastions of academia – Cambridge University – and was deeply connecting with indigenous ways of being with babies.
In some way, I sense that is my path – bringing together will, consciousness, the mind and action, with love, compassion, feelings and the body.
I listened to what I really wanted and didn’t want, even though others didn’t agree – eg. I left academia at 30.
Contemplating getting pregnant in my early 30’s, and TERRIFIED, I came across HypnoBirthing through a number of synchronicities and went and trained in it, got pregnant, and went from being terrified of giving birth to having deep trust in my body and my baby, and had the deepest sense of power I’d had up until that point in giving birth, a mostly free birth with my then-husband supporting me.
I’d done a huge amount of research, inner work and complementary treatments during the pregnancy – a midwife friend visited a few weeks before I gave birth and said that she had never seen a woman prepare as much for birth as I had.
The next part of my journey was so much about reclaiming my power through language and culture.
I trained in Private Subconcious-Mind Healing and understood profoundly about the power of words on our consciousness.
I went on to use that and Calm Birth in the birth of my son, another posterior birth, this time fully free birthing, and 1.5 hours compared to my daughter’s 86 hours, all because I’d learnt about The Lifting Technique – another experience of deep agency and power.
I had taken complete responsibility for my profound wellbeing during both of the births; and had totally freed myself from the domination paradigm around pregnancy and birth.
Parenting was the next way I reclaimed my power. Having spent the whole of my twenties combining academic study and research into babies and child development, whilst training and working as a Psychosynthesis Psychotherapist, I knew that I wanted to combine all that I’d learnt into how I was with my children.
I came across Aware Parenting when I was pregnant with my daughter, 19 years ago, and it fitted with all my academic and therapeutic work, AND it had extra pieces I’d never heard of – the idea that babies have feelings right from in utero and can heal from stress and trauma from birth onwards, through expressing their feelings in our loving arms.
I started practicing it with my daughter, and have loved it ever since.
My key reason was to support my children in being deeply emotionally healthy – getting to express their feelings in loving arms, and needing relatively few repression mechanisms – imagine my surprise when I learnt through experience that this also meant that they slept easily and peacefully and until 8 or 9 in the morning, were deeply calm and relaxed and present, were gentle with each other, cooperative, and gorgeous to be with. It turns out that most of the things we find stressful as parents are caused by accumulated painful feelings.
I loved that I was free from the old domination paradigm in parenting. I didn’t ever need to resort to punishments or rewards, to coercion or force (although my own experiences of being raised in this paradigm of course came out at times to be heard and healed!)
More of the importance of language came in. I’d learnt from Alfie Kohn about not praising or rewarding, but it was Non-violent Communication (NVC) which helped me understand language and power at a whole different level.
I came across it nearly 18 years ago, when my daughter was in her first year, and it helped me see how much domination is hardwired into our language.
I learnt about how ’should’ leads to guilt and anger (differentiated from outrage) and how words like ‘have to’ are all part of the coercion.
I learnt how our language gives responsibility and blame for our feelings and needs to others, “you made me feel…”
I couldn’t believe that in all my therapy training, I hadn’t learnt to differentiate feelings from thoughts. I thought that if I said, “I feel…” then whatever followed was a feeling. I learnt that many of the words we think are feelings are actually thoughts, eg. “I feel abused / manipulated / abandoned. I learnt that, “I feel that you are…” is not a feeling but a thought. I noticed how often people say, “I feel” when they mean, “I think.”
I deeply deeply immersed myself in NVC just as I had deeply immersed myself in learning about pregnancy, birth, and Aware Parenting. I know that if we really want to shift paradigms in our consciousness and actions, it’s not enough to dabble. We need to really immerse ourselves in the new way in order to internalise it as the new paradigm.
I saw this in my children. They both spoke classical NVC for many years. Just as I translated books as I read to my daughter, she then went on to translate into NVC when she read to her brother.
Next came my children’s learning. I wasn’t willing for them to be cared for by people, or be in systems where they would be praised, punished, rewarded or coerced.
I became very clear early on that, given the options around where I lived, that that meant them not going to school. And what I’ve most learnt in 18 years of non-school is how glad I am that I didn’t send them to school, and how much that freed us all from the domination system.
It helped me see so clearly how much the mainstream schooling system is based on industrialisation and painful beliefs about human beings.
What I’ve learnt, through witnessing my children, is that children have a profound capacity to learn whatever they need to learn and are interested in. They don’t need to be coerced, forced, given marks or homework. When we support them in following their interests, they are passionate and devoted learners. They retain the joy in learning and their own power and capacity to learn what they love.
In 2006, I started the next phase of my learning, as I dived into the consciousness-as-cause work from The Field Project. I trained with them for 6 years and became a Facilitator. That was the next level of understanding the power of my willingness and identity in shaping my experience of the world. I also deeply immersed myself in that process.
The other way I’ve reclaimed my power has been through my own contribution in the world. When I was 24, I met a man who was choosing to work just 2 days a week. I had never heard of such a thing, but it spoke to me clearly. I didn’t want to be coerced to work, I wanted autonomy and choice around work. In my twenties, I chose to work 4 days a week, combining my academic research and teaching work with seeing psychotherapy clients.
When I became a mother, I kept on seeing some HypnoBirthing and then Calm Birth clients and then Aware Parenting clients. Just one or two a week. Then I started writing articles for what became Kindred Magazine. My then-husband would look after our children at those times I was seeing clients, and I’d often write at night when they were asleep.
Over the years, I gradually increased the time I worked. I’ve always followed what I love. I ran Aware Parenting circles and NVC workshops, and mother’s circles and AwP workshops.
I’ve been a single mama for nearly 10 years, and 5.5 years ago, the next step of claiming my power happened, as I started creating online courses. The combination of earning more money (money and power being so related, particularly for mothers), making more of a difference, reaching more people, expanding my own work, and sharing my voice and my thoughts, was profound.
I choose when I work, what I do, and have created my own paradigm and practices, based on my own experiences around over the past 30+ years: Psychospiritual Parenting and ReParenting, The Willingness Practice, Conversations with Life, Inner Loving Presence work and The Inner Loving Presence Process.
From being full of self-judgment, fear and powerlessness and pent-up rage, I now deeply value myself and my work. I believe that my work is important and valuable in part of changing the domination paradigm. I have loads of free-flowing life energy to keep on taking action doing what I love and sharing what I believe is helpful to shift the paradigm.
I’ve combined my experiences in:
Coming to love my frustration and outrage;
Agency, autonomy, choice and power in pregnancy, birth, parenting, education and work;
Listening to all the unexpressed powerlessness, frustration and outrage of the younger parts of me;
Changing my language and internal dialogue from inner coercion, force and guilt, to compassionately honouring agency, autonomy and choice;
Supporting my children grow up with so many of their will-needs for agency, autonomy and choice being met.
With what I’ve learnt from others:
Love and Will from Psychosynthesis;
The power of language on consciousness from P.S.H.;
The importance of autonomy, the expression of frustration and outrage through tantrums, and how unexpressed feelings turn into aggression from Aware Parenting;
The difference between willingness and coercion from NVC;
The power of what we are willing and not willing for from The Field Project.
Into my work around Will.
Some of the offerings where you can be supported in your own power and will journey are:
The Wonder of Willingness Course;
my Powerlessness, Power-over and Power-with in Parenting Masterclass;
Power and Powerlessness in Parenting;
Transformation Through Mothering;
The Psychospiritual Parenting Course;
I’m doing a live training in The Wonder of Willingness Course this weekend – if you’re already in the Course, you get to join in. It’s one of my lowest priced offerings, because I’m so passionate about supporting women and mothers to reclaim their profound sacred power.
It’s called: Helping ourselves and our children stay connected with our sacred power through willingness work.