Renée Willis: Freed & On Fire

11/14/2025

When we have to be the parent to our partner, it will change the dynamic of that relationship in unfavourable ways. In short, you stop having romantic feelings simply because you view them ‘as your child’.

All the healthy love,
Renee

11/14/2025

Our physical health is linked to emotional pain and unprocessed emotions. It’s an amazing ecosystem. 💪☝️🧠🤓❤️‍🩹

All the healthy love,
Renee

Many of us carry two powerful beliefs that silently shape our lives: that we're responsible for other people's feelings, and that disappointing others is something to be avoided at all costs. These aren't just passing thoughts - they're deeply embedded cultural programming that affects our physical health in ways we rarely recognize.

Think about how these messages were delivered throughout your childhood. When adults said "you're making me angry" or "don't make me sad," they weren't just expressing emotions - they were teaching you that their feelings were your responsibility. This conditioning likely came with consequences - punishment, withdrawal of love, or criticism whenever you failed to manage someone else's emotional state properly.

What makes this particularly damaging is how our nervous systems adapt to these expectations. Our bodies develop a state of continuous hypervigilance, constantly scanning for signs of others' displeasure while simultaneously suppressing our own authentic needs and emotions. This isn't just psychologically taxing - it creates a persistent state of stress that demands enormous physical resources from our bodies.

The connection between this chronic stress response and physical illness is profound but often overlooked. When our systems remain in perpetual alert mode, constantly monitoring others' reactions and suppressing our own truth, we deplete the very resources our bodies need for immune function, tissue repair, and overall health maintenance.

What might be possible if we could release these burdensome beliefs? Imagine if our wiser, more compassionate adult selves could revisit those moments of early conditioning and offer our younger parts what they actually needed - permission to have their own emotions without responsibility for others', validation that their needs matter, and assurance that disappointing someone doesn't make them unworthy of love.

This internal shift creates ripples that extend outward. When we stop participating in the cultural pattern of codependency and self-suppression, we challenge the very notion that these patterns are "normal" or healthy. We create space for a new paradigm based on authentic self-expression and healthy interdependence - where relationships thrive on mutual respect for each person's sovereignty rather than emotional management and control.

This transformation begins within but ultimately becomes a profound act of cultural change - one person, one relationship, one community at a time.

11/14/2025

Truth. Hard truth and yet we can do hard things.

Travelling with you with all the healthy love,
Renee

We carry more than we realize. It’s not just our parents’ eyes or the curve of a smile that shows up in the mirror. It’s the weight of their unspoken stories, the emotions they never had the language or safety to name. Sometimes it’s in the way we tense when someone raises their voice, or how we chase approval without knowing why. These things live quietly in us, shaping how we love, how we fear, how we move through the world.

The psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes that what is wounded in one generation often seeks expression in the next. It is as if the soul of a family keeps trying to finish a story that was cut short. That thought used to scare me, this idea that we might be carrying the echoes of other people’s pain. But the more I sit with it, the more I see it as an invitation. We are not doomed to repeat what came before; we are invited to bring it into the light. Awareness itself is a kind of healing.

Virginia Woolf once said that each of us must face the fact of our inheritance, not to be bound by it, but to understand it. She was speaking about women and creativity, but her words reach further. Facing what we have inherited, emotionally and psychologically, means looking with compassion at the people who raised us, and at the younger versions of ourselves who learned from them. It means asking what love was supposed to look like in our family, what silence was protecting, what was never finished.

When we begin to ask those questions, something shifts. The patterns that once felt inevitable start to loosen. We realize that what we have been carrying is not all ours to keep. Some of it belongs to the generations before us, and some of it we can finally lay down.

That is the quiet work of becoming whole, not rejecting where we come from, but transforming it. We take the unfinished stories, the griefs, the hopes, and we give them a new ending. Not perfect, not final, but honest. And in doing so, we offer the next generation something lighter to inherit, a story that has been seen, felt, and finally tended to.

11/14/2025

The amount of tragedies that have come from those who weren’t during their pain mattered…..💔💔

If you relate to this….

I’m so glad you’re here! 🫶💞✨

11/14/2025

Your current relationship problems goes back to your childhood pain.

All the healthy love,
Renee

11/13/2025

This is so hard and painful! And yet, we all have our version which is hard and painful.

Group hug.

Let's change those voices with saying kind, smart, wise things about ourselves. Be proud of you!

Travelling with you with all the healthy love,
Renee

11/13/2025

And they do speak. Well they were punished and or dismissed when they spoke and learned that it was not safe to share. They learned that they are a burden if they shared or too much. And let's be real no healthy person would punish, dismiss, etc. however it is abusive and we learn quickly how to cope and survive so we learn 'what is the point of trying to share', and learn that we can't share. It's not that we do not want to share, because we all need to be seen and our pain measured; however we learn that it's not safe to do it because others had the opportunity and they messed it up badly to the point that the fear is too great to share and or, the person simply shuts down and isolates.

All the healthy love,
Renee

I’d love it if this question went away….

I’m so glad you’re here! 🫶💞✨

11/13/2025

Edit: Meaner is actually unhealthy. Let's say we no longer dismiss our needs, our hurts, our emotions. We speak up, but in a healthy way even if we are angry. So not meaner, but honest and showing our feels and speaking our needs and upsets and boundaries and all that healthy stuff and no more people pleasing, etc., in healthy ways. (giant grin)

Travelling with you with all the healthy love,
Renee

💯💯🙌🏾

11/13/2025

Hmn. Interesting discussion point for sure. I am against anything that is under the umbrella of toxic positivity, where we are not to feel our struggles and uncomfortable emotions because that is so unhealthy. However this do have merit that at some point in our life we may be at a much more hard time in our life, that we would wish to have this complaint. Know what I mean?

Travelling with you with all the healthy love,
Renee

Carpe Diem! https://www.elephantjournal.com/2010/09/video-death-comes-without-warning/

11/12/2025

This applies to women as well. It’s not a male thing. It’s an attachment thing. And our attachment was formed when we were babies, young children. And if we adapted with stress by shutting down as a child, then as an adult we will do the same unless we learn to heal.

All the healthy love,
Renee

11/12/2025

Giggle giggle. 🤭