Vienna Pharaon Quotes

Reactivity is one of the greatest indicators that you have a wound. When you have a strong reaction to something, that reaction is sounding an alarm.

Your inner self knows something about what’s happening, and your reactivity is letting you know that you don’t like what’s going on, that you feel uncomfortable or threatened, or that you’re in danger.

A prioritization wound leaves you questioning your importance and value to the people to whom you so desperately want to matter.

When someone in your family system does something that violates your trust and doesn’t do anything or very little to restore it, then closing off and shutting down might feel like the only option.

Instead of trying to get others to change, to take a different path, or to see the suffering they were living in, I acknowledged who they were—and I changed the way I related to their not changing.

True belonging has no hint of arrogance or reactivity, and as Brené Brown says, it is not passive. “[True belonging] is a practice that requires us to be vulnerable, get uncomfortable, and learn how to be present with people without sacrificing who we are.

prioritized child is a child whose needs are seen, understood, and honored. It doesn’t mean that you’re given everything you want or that you’re the focus in every moment. Parents are allowed to have boundaries and say no, and they’re allowed to have a life of their own that they, too, honor and prioritize.

The way our parents speak to us and the words they use tell us a lot about them . . . but when we’re children, their words tell us the most about ourselves.

And instead of needing to be in control, I learned to trust that someone could lead me without taking advantage of me.

It’s interesting how whether you’re in adaptation or rejection mode, you’re still left feeling like you’re on the outside, or at the very minimum, that you can’t be authentically you.

Living authentically means that your choices and actions align with your core beliefs, values, and true self. It means that you choose that path even when there are consequences from the world around you.

Whether you avoid connection and intimacy to protect yourself from being abandoned again, or whether you attach quickly and anxiously in your relationships, the end result is still an absence of authentic connection.

In what ways did you learn to survive through rejection? How has rejection served you? And does it still today? In what ways do you currently operate from a place of rejection, and might you get curious about what that’s protecting you from or blocking you from?

A chronically distracted and preoccupied family has lasting effects. It’s painful to grow up questioning whether you’re a priority, whether you matter more than those other things that are distracting the adults from paying attention to you. And that experience can come forward with you into your adult relationships, in ways that are both obvious and subtle.

When I first started therapy, I didn’t see any of this. I was convinced that the issue I needed to work on was “improving communication and conflict in my relationships.” I found myself inexplicably at odds with people in all aspects of my life—friends, colleagues, and especially people I dated—but somehow I never traced these different frustrations and struggles back to this inciting incident in my childhood. I survived that, I told myself. I kept the peace.

The things that distract parents from children are at best stressors to that child, and at worst threaten children’s beliefs about themselves and their value in this world. Later in life, the children of chronically distracted parents may consciously believe they are seeking out relationships in which they are a priority. In reality, however, these still-wounded adults wind up unconsciously seeking out dynamics that tend to repeat and support what they learned from their families decades earlier: they don’t matter. If you didn’t feel prioritized in your family system, then you might have a prioritization wound.

Maya Angelou famously said, “You are only free when you realize you belong no place—you belong every place—no place at all.

We may walk the path of adaptation or rejection before we discover a way of belonging via being authentically ourselves.

Most of us who are keenly aware of our differences start with adaptation.

On the healthy side of this, it’s where belonging thrives. But when adaptation becomes a requirement, it intensifies. You get a false sense of belonging: You’re a part of the system, but only because you’re changing who you really are. This isn’t belonging; this is fitting in.

When you try to fit in, you adapt to what the system is requiring of you for fear of the very real consequence: that if you don’t, you won’t belong.

Rejection is when you consciously or unconsciously choose a path of opposition. This usually happens after you’ve participated in adaptation.

Either way, rejection generally leaves people feeling like they still are the outsider, the black sheep, and the one who doesn’t belong.

If you take a scan of your life right now, can you see where your choices and actions match with your core beliefs, values, and true self, and where they don’t? Be gentle and honest with yourself here. If you were living authentically, what would be different?

Bri increasingly noticed her inner critic and was able to offer herself compassion and grace.

Naming Can you bring into focus the first time you questioned whether you belonged?

Witnessing Now become more focused on yourself. Try zooming in on the younger version of yourself as you experience your belonging wound for the first time.

Grieving You might begin to feel emotion start to surface.

Just notice what you want to offer your younger self in this moment. Do you want to hug her? Do you want to tell him that you’re so sorry he ever had to go through that? Do you want to pick them up and tell them it’s going to be okay?

Pivoting As we come to an end, I’d love for you to take a moment to acknowledge how your belonging wound shows up today.

During the period when you were growing up, the adults in your life likely experienced wounds of their own. In fact, they might still have wounds that are unacknowledged and unresolved to this day. These wounds can easily get passed on to you.

People are living in fear of being canceled or living in fear of being exiled if their beliefs differ from those of their neighbor. It has become easier to conform and comply than it is to honor your authenticity.

Social media tools that create the “perfect” image distort reality and will have you comparing yourself to the “better” lives of everyone else. Because of FOMO (fear of missing out), we don’t want to be the only one who doesn’t have the experience that everyone else is going to have.

No one wants to be othered. No one wants to feel left out. And no one wants to feel like an outsider. And yet this is what so many individuals experience. It’s a lonely place to feel this way at home, at school, or in your community.

This is a profound moment of recognition. That when you belong to yourself, meaning you are at peace with yourself, you will simultaneously belong everywhere and nowhere. Everywhere is within you.

cultural system may ask you to be more like the majority in order to be acknowledged, validated, respected, or even safe.

In what ways did you learn to survive through adaptation?

Living authentically is uncomfortable if you haven’t been living that way. It can shake your system in big ways because it means those who don’t agree with you or those not living authentically themselves can’t control or persuade you, can’t shame or judge you into something, and their intolerance of you can’t dictate your choices.

The work is moving away from emotional reactivity and moving toward emotional tending. It’s the only way to end the cycle.

Dr. John Gottman say, “Behind every complaint there is a deep personal longing.” We criticize and complain about our partners, our family members, even our friends when an emotional need of ours isn’t being met. Instead of standing beside that emotional need, getting to know it, and bringing it forward, we move away from it, become reactive, and make it about the other person.

Instead of being led by fear, insecurity, or unhealed origin wounds, you can put into action the behaviors that support your goals.

A well-known quote attributed to Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, author, and psychiatrist, goes like this: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

The pause is where you begin to ask yourself questions like: What’s familiar about this? What’s the origin story here? How do I normally respond? What opportunity is in front of me? What is something healing I can offer myself right now? and What is one shift I can make to step out of the cycle?

Love will put you face-to-face with endless obstacles. It will ask you to reveal the parts of yourself you tirelessly work at hiding. It will ask you to find compassion for yourself and receive what it is you are convinced you are not worthy of. Love will always demand more. Surrender to being seen and being loved. Surrender to the beauty of revealing yourself to yourself, and to the ones who saw you before you saw you.’ It was written by Vienna Pharaon, who is a therapist.” She took a drink of her beer and then went on, “We have faced obstacles. We have hidden parts of ourselves. We should give

As the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung would say, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

As the research shows, if a parent, especially a mother, is inconsistent in praise, acknowledgment, and expressions of love, the child may suffer from a lack of self-esteem and be more vulnerable to depression.

Inconsistency isn’t the only way parents make themselves unavailable. Sometimes parents remove themselves entirely and are physically or emotionally unavailable.

Absent parents might be gone for months at a time due to work, have a mental health challenge that has them checked out of life and parenting, have started a new family and committed themselves to their new partner and the children they have together more than to you, or just not want to be bothered.

If I was difficult (that is to say, behaving like a kid or a teenager) and he didn’t like what was happening, he’d burst out in anger and then I would be given the silent treatment for days or even weeks at a time. This was a cruel form of punishment.

I love the boundary terms that Dr. Alexandra Solomon uses in her book Loving Bravely.

It doesn’t matter how much you try to avoid that painful past: how far away you physically move (“the geographical cure,” as psychologist Dr. Froma Walsh calls it) or whether you fully cut yourself off from a harmful family member. There is an internal resolution that must happen if you’re going to heal, and that internal resolution requires an understanding and awareness of the origin wounds that have a tight grip on you.

To be authentically yourself means that nothing can be taken from you, and that you relate to the threat of judgment, shaming, rejection, or disowning differently.

Unfortunately, many families and groups have ways of being in which they consciously or unconsciously expect you to mold yourself to fit their expectations and maintain their ways. Too often individuals feel like they must sacrifice who they are to be part of a group, even to belong to their families. If only belonging was just given, instead of needing to be earned. But unfortunately, what we wish for doesn’t always come, sometimes not ever and sometimes not easily. And children made to feel like outsiders will most likely become adults who still feel like they don’t belong.

Research has shown that people who had secure attachments in infancy tend to have secure attachments in adulthood, and people who had insecure attachments in infancy tend to have insecure attachments in adulthood.

Of course, your parents can’t protect you from everything out there, but when members of your own family are abusive, negligent, exploitative, domineering, reckless, or emotionally immature, it’s quite easy for a safety wound to be born. You know that saying “Home is where the heart is”? Well, that’s not true for everyone. Home isn’t a place that everyone wants to return to. Sometimes home is where the unpredictability is. Sometimes home is where the chaos is. And sometimes home is where the abuse is.

Love and abuse cannot coexist.

You can see how pain can pass from generation to generation, and how unaddressed mental health challenges can wreak havoc in a family.

Many safety wounds come from abusive situations. Parents, stepparents, caretakers, adults, or older siblings can be reckless, domineering, negligent, and abusive in obvious and subtle ways.

trauma is not what happens to you, it is what happens in you, as a result of what happened to you.

Childhood abandonments are a type of betrayal that happen when parents or caretakers willfully forsake or forgo their parental duties without regard for their children’s overall well-being.

There’s no guarantee that a relationship will go on forever. There’s no guarantee that a person will stay. And when you have a parent, a person you hope will be that guarantee for you, choose to up and leave you, it’s a devastating experience—one that makes it nearly impossible to trust that there will be people in the world who won’t abandon you.

we’ve all got something, and we’re in this together. We

Origin stories are often (but not always) childhood stories. We’re continually writing and rewriting the narrative of our lives.

to giving more than you receive (nonreciprocal relationships).

My father’s anger was always scary to me. He was the kind of man who often dominated situations he was in, and the power and control he exuded felt threatening and manipulative

The two people whom I’d trusted to be my protectors were so busy fighting each other they for a time lost sight of me. I realized I had to create my own safety.

Just because we have wounds from our childhoods doesn’t mean we are doomed to repeat those patterns. If we pause to understand where these wounds come from (our origin stories) and take the time to make different choices, we can access powerful healing.

Our wounds and our gifts are next-door neighbors.” What a beautiful reminder that some of our greatest gifts do emerge from the pain we’ve endured.

As family therapist and author Terry Real says, “Family dysfunction rolls down from generation to generation, like a fire in the woods, taking down everything in its path until one person in one generation has the courage to turn and face the flames. That person brings peace to their ancestors and spares the children that follow.” Will you face the flames?

The past is persistent, my friend. The more you turn away from it, the more it follows you and asks for your attention.

There is likely much more going on under the surface than the issue you first come into a therapist’s office to discuss.

And though I didn’t then have the language to describe it, it was then—at that moment—my own safety wound was born. I had no idea, at the time, just how long I would remain trapped in that moment.