Welcome!

Here's a thought...

One of the important important and exciting things about joining the IoPT community or family, is that we recognise that we are all traumatised. That gives us space, along with our IoPT thinking, to wait a moment, to really try and  see the other member of our IoPT family, and avoid slipping into perpetrator-victim dynamics. It helps us feel compassion and understanding for each other.

We all find refuge in being IoPT-informed... being part of the IoPT world; we speak the same language, the language of IoPT, in as many diverse global languages that our community covers. The language of IoPT holds us together in common understanding and interest.

We understand the overall nature of each others' troubles, and we do find the familial connection 'of respect and joy in each others' lives'... and many of us do feel, because of our commitment to ourselves and taking our trauma seriously, an alien in our biological or 'blood' family, as we reach for 'the hand of our true family', where we feel respected and valued... and can understand and value the other.

Here's another... same book...

The solution is within us, not outside of us. To look outside of ourselves is devolving the authority for who one is onto another, whether a person, a favourite football team, an ideology or a religion... Whatever it is, if we look to the outside for solutions to who we are it is identification.

And identification is the attempt to find an identity outside of ourselves, because we lack a sense of ourselves, because of trauma, the Trauma of Identity...

And the Trauma of Identity, the trauma of not being wanted, seen and loved by our mother, is the devastating secret within, that is so painful we were forced to look outside.

In her own trauma, the mother fails to see her child, and in doing so the entirely natural child's longing for connection with his mother fails. Like a baby, a lost baby, we are constantly looking for that love that we didn't get from our mother, instead of looking inside and finding real love for ourselves.

And another...

But it will cost you in the end; it may even cost you your life. The bigger the problem, the bigger the 'run away', until death may be the only solution.