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Your birth rights were denied? Learn to heal from it.

#1 You deserve to feel cherished. To feel valued. To feel loved. It is your birthright to feel valued and seen.

If this birthright is not met, you may experience difficulty holding yourself with compassion and respect. You may fluctuate between what is called a “one-down” position AKA shame-based esteem, or a “one-up” position AKA a grandiose-based esteem. This means depending on the circumstance, you may minimize your value, or you may inaccurately inflate your value. Often, we fluctuate between both positions with different people and within different contexts.

When working to heal your trauma wounds, the goal is to practice loving yourself and holding yourself with compassion and respect.

#2 You deserve to feel safe enough to be vulnerable in relationships. This is your birthright to be the vulnerable human you are.

When this birthright has not been met, you may struggle with boundaries. You might have no boundaries or you might have built impenetrable walls. If you were not allowed to be vulnerable as a child with safe adults who exerted appropriate boundaries with you, you might feel completely lost with creating healthy boundaries today. You CAN learn this skill now. You can protect yourself and have functional, healthy boundaries. You have the RIGHT to set boundaries and limits to protect yourself, and to let yourself be vulnerable with safe individuals.

#3 You deserve to feel safe to make mistakes. It is your birthright to be imperfectly human. Perfection doesn’t exist and striving for it only increases our suffering.

If this birthright is not met, you may experience heightened stress and anxiety about being “good and perfect.” Or you might have developed a “f*ck it” attitude and acted out. If it’s not just right, then might as well just be “bad.” On either end of the spectrum, you likely experience deeply held beliefs about yourself that you are not enough because this birthright to be imperfect and make mistakes was not met. When working to heal your trauma wounds, the goal is to let go of false beliefs about yourself, to let go of shame for making mistakes. You are human and you are good and whole, just as you are. You are enough.

#4 It is your birthright to have needs and wants, to express your needs and wants, and to have them met.

If this birthright is not met, you may have difficulty even understanding your own needs and wants. You might know what they are, but find it challenging to express them to others or ask for others to help you meet them. You might feel like the only person you can depend on to meet your needs and wants are yourself, so you never ask others for help. Or you might overly depend on others to meet your needs instead of taking responsibility yourself. When working to heal your trauma wounds, the goal is to understand yourself and understand what you need and want to thrive in life. The goal is for you to develop a healthy balance in meeting your needs yourself as well as inviting others to help when you cannot meet them by yourself.

#5 It is your birthright to experience joyfulness and spontaneity. It was your job as a child to play and test boundaries because that is how you learned about how the world works. This looks like getting into the cupboards and reorganizing the pots and pans, or making a mess. It looks like having big emotions and learning to regulate with a safe adult. To a child, everything is fun and play, and everything is new.

If you grew up in a home where this birthright was not met, you might struggle with self-regulation. What this means is that if joy, play, and mess were punished, you might struggle with being out-of-control today. An easy example is look at the kid who grew up with parents who controlled their every move and see how they behave when they experience their first taste of freedom at university. On the other end of the spectrum, if you grew up in a home that was chaotic and overwhelming, you might struggle with being over-controlled today. You like order and predictability. Both “out-of-control” and “over-controlled” are adaptations used to survive childhoods where spontaneity and joy weren’t allowed or were allowed too much. When working to heal your trauma wounds, the goal is to moderate yourself and self-regulate. To be playful and joyful, but also practice containment boundaries. It’s about finding balance.

#6 It is your birthright to experience secure attachment to your caregivers. You were born into this world a precious and vulnerable human. Babies depend 100% on their caregivers for survival, and it’s not just about changing diapers and feeding. Survival includes emotional needs and caregiver responsiveness.

If you grew up in a home where this birthright was not met, you likely developed an insecure attachment style. Insecure attachments develop when caregivers were not responsive to your physical and emotional needs, or caregivers completely neglected your needs. Sometimes it happens when caregivers intermittently are attuned to your needs, like they are hot and then cold.

When working to heal attachment trauma wounds, we want to develop healthy interdependent relationships with others.

Information in this post is adapted from the Healing Our Core Issues (HOCI) model for developmental and relational trauma (DART). This information is not a substitute for therapy.

When working to heal your trauma wounds, the goal is to moderate yourself and self-regulate. To be playful and joyful, but also practice containment boundaries. It’s about finding balance.