04/16/2026
“The greatest paradox of maturation is the inevitable return to the child”
I want to share something personal about me, since we have so many new followers!
There came a point in my inner child journey where I realized it was not enough to keep looking only at my parents.
That had been the frame for a long time.
What happened in my childhood.
What happened in my home.
What I became from that experience.
But eventually I hit a deeper layer.
I started to realize that some of what I was carrying felt older than my conscious story. Older than my adult relationships. Older even than the specific shape of my childhood pain.
It lived in the body in a different way.
It lived in vigilance.
In overfunctioning.
In how quickly I could read a room.
In the way grief and usefulness seemed braided together.
In how deeply I longed to be held, and how reflexively I became the one who held everyone else.
In how my body seemed to know things before I had language for them.
That was the point where I stopped asking only, “What happened to me?”
And started asking:
“What am I carrying that did not begin with me?”
That question changed me.
Because when I began mapping my own lineage, I found that I was not carrying one simple inheritance.
I was carrying both.
Both settler blood.
Both Indigenous blood.
Both griefs.
Both survival systems.
Both burdens.
And the more I studied them, the more I realized that neither side could be reduced to one neat story. And in both— I saw myself.
On the settler side, I found severance.
I found people who did not arrive whole. People shaped by migration, land pressure, separation from kin, frontier adaptation, labor, discipline, and hardness. I found women taught to survive through usefulness, respectability, piety, restraint, and moral accountability. I found bloodlines where goodness was tied to function, where endurance became virtue, and where softness did not seem to have much room to live.
That side of the lineage seemed to carry at least four burdens:
severance, hardness, usefulness, and implication.
Severance — because migration breaks things.
Hardness — because survival under labor and scarcity hardens a body.
Usefulness — because daughters are often taught they matter through what they can carry.
Implication — because settler survival here did not happen outside colonial structures, but inside them.
That matters deeply to me.
Because I do not believe healing comes from innocence stories.
And I do not believe it comes from flattening sorrow either.
Settler blood, as I understand it, often carries both deprivation and implication at once.
Not just what was lost, but what survival joined itself to. What it broke in thyself, and others.
And then there is the maternal side.
When I turned toward that line, I did not just find culture or pride.
I found interruption.
I found maternal rupture.
Child loss. Daughters separated from mothers. Women carrying reproductive burden under grief.
Men destabilizing the maternal field through violence, war trauma, abandonment, dysregulation.
Institutions entering where kinship should have held.
Children removed.
Mothers cut off from daughters through law, race, violence, silence, and structure.
Again— I saw myself. I saw my mother. Her mother. Her mother.
On that side, the burden did not feel like hardness in the same way.
It felt like the repeated breaking of the female holding system.
And what made that even more painful was that I could also see, through the daughter teachings on the Indigenous side, what was supposed to have been there.
I could see the shape of a different order.
Girls held through aunties, grandmothers, and mothers. Body change recognized. Transition witnessed.
Moon time contextualized. Womanhood formed through kinship, place, ceremony, daily life, and elder women.
So on the maternal side, I was not only looking at trauma.
I was looking at the loss of the very system that would have regulated trauma.
That side of the lineage seemed to carry four burdens too:
rupture, interrupted daughterhood, reproductive grief, and interference.
Rupture — because attachment was repeatedly broken.
Interrupted daughterhood — because girls were not always held through becoming.
Reproductive grief — because the maternal line carried pregnancy, loss, burden, and fear under instability.
Interference — because the maternal bond was not only wounded by family pain, but repeatedly disrupted by larger systems.
When I saw both sides clearly, something shifted in me.
I stopped trying to explain myself through one wound.
I stopped trying to make my pain make sense only through my parents.
I stopped reducing my story to childhood psychology alone.
Because the biology showed me something deeper:
this was embedded.
This is a pattern.
Embedded in attachment.
Embedded in daughter roles.
Embedded in reproductive burden.
Embedded in stress calibration.
Embedded in the body’s sense of what was necessary to survive.
Embedded in the ways women were taught to become women.
Embedded in the ways lineages adapt when grief is not witnessed and transition is not held.
That realization changed the way I understood my inner child and shaped the way I built All Her Work.
Because I began to see that healing her would require more than blaming or forgiving my parents.
It would require learning how to honour both sides of what made me— and them.
Honouring the settler side did not mean romanticizing it. It meant telling the truth about severance, hardness, usefulness, and implication.
Honouring the maternal side did not mean idealizing it. It meant telling the truth about rupture, interrupted daughterhood, reproductive grief, and interference.
And somewhere in the middle of that honesty, I started to feel something new:
compassion without simplification. I met myself underneath the hardened, masked, traumatized little girl throwing fists.
I could begin to understand why my body had become what it had become.
Why I read the field so quickly.
Why people felt safe around me.
Why I overfunctioned.
Why grief lived in the body the way it did.
Why I longed for deep witnessing and also knew how to survive by becoming useful.
Why some parts of me were still looking to be held, while other parts only knew how to hold.
That is part of what led me to create these offerings.
I know what it is like to carry something that is older than your own language for it, and when I didn’t have language for it, I created language for it.
I know what it is like to feel that your pain is not just personal, but patterned. That your body is not only reacting, but remembering.
That your role in the room did not begin as personality, but as adaptation. That your inner child is not only your parents’ child, but also the descendant of multiple survival worlds living in one nervous system.
That is the ground these offerings come from.
They come from mapping my own body.
My own lineage.
My own contradictions.
My own grief.
My own regulator patterns.
My own need to understand what I was carrying and what I no longer wanted to pass on unchanged.
Because healing, for me, stopped being only about relief.
It became about truth.
It became about honouring both lineages without flattening either.
It became about understanding what was embedded, what was inherited, what became role, and what could finally be witnessed rather than silently reenacted.
That is the work I’m inviting others into now.
There is no hierarchy here, and you’ll hear that a lot. We’re in this together.
My work calls on a deeper reckoning with what lives in the body, what shaped it, and what becomes possible when we finally stop carrying it unconsciously.
Welcome to All Her Work 🤍
Let’s heal ✨
