Marina O'Connor/Trauma-informed therapy

11/11/2025

The Most Neurotic Fear

People often talk about fear of failure as something to hack, overcome, or manage.
But psychologically, fear of failure might be one of the most neurotic fears we’ve developed as humans.

Why?
Because failure is our oldest companion.

Every developmental task we’ve ever mastered , take walking, speaking, reading as an example, began in failure.
We fell, stumbled, mumbled, and got it wrong countless times before we got it right.
Our nervous system was built to learn through trial, error, repair, and repetition.

There’s nothing pathological about failing.
It’s how we grow.
It’s how we become.

What becomes painful is how we relate to it.
When our early experiences were filled with criticism, shame, or conditional love, failure stopped being a place of learning and became a threat to belonging.
It’s no longer “I didn’t get it right this time,” but “I am a failure.”

That shift from behaviour to identity is where the wound lives.
The fear of failure becomes the fear of losing love, approval, or worth when we get it wrong.

Growth always requires rupture,
moments when what we know no longer works.
And that rupture can stir deep anxiety, even the fear of rejection that might truly come with it.

But healing begins when failure stops being proof of unworthiness
and becomes part of how we return to ourselves.

Avoiding failure is how we abandon our potential.

02/11/2025

We often crave deeper connection, but depth requires capacity.
The more we’re able to meet ourselves, the more space we create for real intimacy.

Working with couples, I often see that it’s not lack of love but lack of emotional capacity that limits connection.

When each partner expands their ability to stay present with themselves, the relationship expands too.

02/11/2025

31/10/2025

Emotional regulation is one of those phrases that gets thrown around a lot, especially in the self-development space, but it’s often misunderstood.

Let’s start with what it’s not:
• Emotional regulation is not staying calm all the time. That’s emotional suppression.
• Emotional regulation is not avoiding anger. Anger is a natural, protective and essential to life energy.
• Emotional regulation is not about not feeling. It’s about recognising when your emotional response belongs to the here and now and when it’s a trigger linked to the unprocessed past material.
• It’s not being endlessly “positive.”
• It’s not intellectualising or rationalising your emotions.
• And emotional regulation is not about expecting other people to be responsible for how you feel. Others can support your process through co-regulation, but as an adult no one else can regulate your nervous system for you.

Emotional regulation means you can recognise what you feel, understand what it’s telling you, and respond rather than react.

It also means knowing when you need to up-regulate (to reconnect and bring more presence when you’re in the state of collapse, shut down or withdrawal) and when to down-regulate (soothe your system when you’re overactivated, hyper stimulated or anxious).

In other words, it’s about knowing your window of tolerance and learning how to bring yourself back within it, safely and gently.

Emotional regulation is a relational process and something we often learn (or don’t learn) as children through the presence of another regulated nervous system.

29/10/2025

Have you ever felt that the life you are living isn’t really yours? As if you were meant for something else?

Maybe you are not using your potential.

Maybe you keep yourself small to feel safe.

Maybe you don’t like how you show up in relationships and wish you could change the patterns that keep repeating.

Maybe you find yourself in unfulfilling dynamics, or stuck in cycles of debt, scarcity, or fear. Even when part of you knows that there is more to life than this.

All of that often don’t start with you.

Those experiences are shaped by emotional inheritance you carry. The unspoken stories of your families, survival strategies passed down through generations, the patterns you once needed to stay safe and to belong.

Even though it didn’t start with you, you are the once who can transform what was passed on.

When we begin to recognise the echoes of the past within our present, we create space for new ways of being and relating.

To ourselves, to others, and to life.

Join us for in-person, 8 week therapeutic group programme starting on November 10th in Lisbon.

“What do we pass on?” is an invitation and powerful vehicle to explore inherited emotional scenarios and update them.

Healing isn’t personal. It’s generational.

24/10/2025

Join in-person “What do we pass on” therapeutic group starting on November 10th at .mentalhealth and let’s together re-decide what do we pass on

21/10/2025

When my older son was born seven years ago, I began to see something I’d only ever understood in theory: how much of what we haven’t healed quietly becomes what we pass on.

Unresolved trauma doesn’t vanish with time, it travels. Through generations. Through our nervous systems. Through how we connect and disconnect. Through what we fear, avoid, or overcompensate for.

Children don’t learn from what we say.
They learn from what we do and how we live:
how we manage closeness and distance, how we manage our own anxieties, how we express love, how we repair, how we relate to others. How we self-express and self-actualise.

When parents carry unprocessed trauma, children internalise it. Not in direct way. But as
hyper-independence, perfectionism, people-pleasing, emotional distance, co-dependence, fear of intimacy, addictive behaviours, control, patterns around self-neglect or self-abandonment, and other ways. Those patterns become emotional language for next generations.

Every belief about ourselves is relational and transgenerational. It was learned somewhere, in relationship, often long before we had a language to name it explicitly. Implicitly we remember.

Healing, then, isn’t only personal.
It’s generational.
It’s an act of repair that ripples forward.

That’s why I created What Do We Pass On: a therapeutic programme for parents and individuals who want to understand and transform what travels through their family system.

22/09/2025

When we think about trauma recovery, many people imagine being “calm all the time” or never getting triggered again. But nervous system healing is subtler, deeper, and often surprising.

Some signs you might be moving into a healthier, more regulated state:

✨ You start losing interest in proving your worth or impressing others.
✨ You can say strong no’s and set hard boundaries without guilt.
✨ You feel safe enough in the world to take risks, create, and step into who you really are.
✨ You can tolerate differences with other people without collapsing, retaliating, or needing to be right.
✨ You learn containment and gain awareness of how your responses impact others.

Healing isn’t about becoming “perfectly regulated.”
It’s about becoming more yourself: freer, safer, and more flexible in how you live and relate.

Your nervous system becomes a place you can live in, not just survive.