Peacock Haven- Counselling and Eco-therapy

04/26/2025

04/15/2025

Now open to new clients at my Cobble Hill location, in the Valley View Centre.

02/02/2023

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02/02/2023

TRAUMA, THANK YOU FOR PROTECTING ME

Here’s the main thing you have to understand about trauma:
It wants to keep you hidden.

Why? It’s trying to protect you.
It’s only ever trying to keep you safe.

It imagines threats where there are none.
Stuck in the past, it wants to keep you close to what you know, close to what you can control.

And away from death.

When you begin to leave your comfort zone, take that brave step, express yourself, assert a boundary, try something new, separate from the known world, it will assume, based on past evidence, that YOU ARE IN DANGER, and it will do everything it can to get you back to safety, convincing you to be small again - in order to protect you from failure, ridicule, abuse, further shaming.

Your mind will scream.
Your body will shake.
Your muscles will tense up.
Your heart will race.
Your breath will quicken.
Everything will feel… wrong.

We can’t destroy this conditioned fear.
We can’t get ‘over’ it.
The more we resist it, turn against it, judge it as bad or wrong, or fight it, the worse it gets.
The more we reject it, the more we reaffirm to it that the world is TRULY unsafe.

We cannot delete the fear but we can turn towards it. Understand it. Have compassion for it. Have a more loving conversation with it:

“Thank you for protecting me, trauma. You’ve served me well. But maybe the danger has passed. Maybe I don’t need your protection today. Maybe I am bigger, stronger, safer, than I knew…”

Then, the very same energy that repressed your authentic self, starts to work for you. Liberated, it begins to express your authentic self, helping you play, be creative, speak up, take up space, and take those courageous steps into the Unknown.
The very same energy that suppressed you, now works to express you.
The energy that used to shut you down from life, now spends its time trying to open you up to life.

You learn, IT’S SAFE TO BE ME.

This is the greatest thing of all. It really is.
To feel safe within yourself.
To know that your nervous system is always working for you.
To love your body, and to know that you are not your body.

Trauma is condensed life energy, that is all.
Stuck, constricted, it longs to be liberated.
It longs to be seen, known, felt.

When it's met with love, it can blossom, YOU can blossom, into pure creativity.

- Jeff Foster

01/31/2023

01/27/2023

Growing up, I was sure we were the only ones with a crazy family. We hid our truth under a bushel of shame, never once daring to let anyone know how dysfunctional it was inside our home. And then I went out into the world, and slowly but surely realized that we weren’t the only ones. In fact, we were in the majority: trauma and unresolved emotional wounds were part of most everyone’s lived experience.

Although this may seem obvious now, it was not obvious for centuries. It was all kept “within the family.” So when I hear people telling others that its time to stop sharing their traumatic "stories", I hear a return to the repressive world we have come from. I hear the same shaming that we have known forever. And its the wrong direction to go. Because what we need now is to fully acknowledge our suffering. What we need now is to tell our stories of victimhood with great openness. This is the bridge that will humanize us. This is the bridge that will connect us.

There is a paindemic on this planet. It is bloody everywhere. Let’s not pretend otherwise. Let’s bring it all out in the open, where it can be healed and transformed.

01/27/2023

Respect that is forced...isn't respect. It has to be earned.

01/27/2023

Life is amazing. And then it's awful.
And then it's amazing again. And in between the amazing and awful it's ordinary and mundane and routine.
Breathe in the amazing, hold on through the awful, and relax and exhale during the ordinary.
That's just living heartbreaking, soul-healing, amazing, awful, ordinary life.
And it's breathtakingly beautiful ..

~ L.R. Knost ~

Artist Credit : Tricia Newell

01/27/2023

❤️🤗

From The Little Book of Wise (and Powerful) Thoughts.

Available on Amazon. :D ❤️

01/27/2023

This.

Image via The Thoughtful Parent