Last week, I introduced the Weeds of Anxiety and how those were planted at the age of two when a sibling arrived, and all of the love and attention went to this new person. Leaving the question for this two-year-old of “why do they need them?”….” aren’t I enough?”.
We pick up this story again, this time in relation to Mere – a Māori Wahine struggling with these weeds that have played out in her life. This narrative now forms a wider body of work called ‘Whakapapa of the Wound’.
She is in her forties now.
She has a job she sometimes makes it to, children she loves fiercely, and a past she has spent years trying to outrun. From the outside, she looks like someone who just couldn’t quite get it together. From the inside, she is a woman who never learned that she was allowed to need things — because the moment she needed them, no one came.
Her name is Mere…and this is about what her body learned before she ever had the words for it.
First — A Word About Epigenetics (In Plain Language)
‘Epigenetics’ may be one of the most important concepts for understanding human suffering — and human healing.
Your genes are like a library. Epigenetics is the process that decides which books get taken off the shelf — and which ones stay locked away. The books do not change. But what gets read, and how often, can change — particularly in response to early experience.
In plain terms: what happens to you when you are very young — especially in relationships with caregivers — can alter how your stress response system is set up for life. Not metaphorically. Literally. This can then be passed on to your children, especially if that distress happens around conception and during pregnancy.
Researchers have found that childhood adversity can change the way certain genes are expressed, particularly genes involved in how the body manages stress hormones like cortisol. When a child experiences ongoing stress without comfort, the system can become calibrated in a way that keeps it stuck in high alert — even decades later, ‘the weeds of anxiety’ (Weaver et al., 2004; McEwen, 2007).
“Epigenetics means the body learns from childhood — and without healing, it keeps teaching that same lesson.”
What Happened to Mere
Mere’s mother loved her sister more. Not in ways that were ever said out loud — but in ways that a child’s nervous system reads fluently. The softer voice for her. The extra portion. The pride that lit her mother’s face when she walked into a room, and the steady neutrality — not cruelty, just absence of warmth — that greeted Mere.
That absence became a fact that Mere filed away in the only place available to a child: the body. The belief it created was not, ‘My mother has a preference.’ The belief was: ‘There is something wrong with me. I am not enough to be loved properly.’
Then something else happened. Gradually — so gradually that no single moment could be identified as the turning point — Mere became responsible. For her younger siblings. For the emotional temperature of the household. For her mother’s well-being. She cooked, she managed, she absorbed the family’s needs. She became, in the language of psychology, a parentified child.
No one called it that. It was simply what was expected, and because it was expected, Mere carried it as normal. Even as it cost her everything she might have otherwise spent on being a child.
The Hidden Price of Being the Family’s Foundation
Research on what is called ‘parentification’ — the process by which a child takes on the emotional or practical roles of a parent — consistently shows serious long-term consequences (Jurkovic, 1997). These include difficulty forming equal relationships in adulthood, a deep-seated sense of being responsible for others’ feelings, and an inability to identify or voice personal needs.
The cruelty of parentification is this: the child learns that their value lies in what they do, not who they are. Love, in this framework, is transactional. It must be earned, or it will be withdrawn.
For Mere, who was already carrying the unspoken message that she was less worthy than her sister, parentification added a second layer: not only was she not enough, but she also now owed a debt she had never agreed to. ‘Mum needed me.’ ‘I had to be strong.’ These narratives, held for decades, are not character defects. They are survival strategies that outlived their usefulness.
“Parentification teaches a child that love is a transaction. The adult they become keeps paying long after the debt has been forgiven.”
What the Body Does With This
Here is where epigenetics and lived experience meet.
When a child grows up in an environment of chronic unmet need — emotional unavailability, role reversal, felt invisibility — the body’s stress response system adapts. The brain becomes wired to scan for threats. Cortisol — the body’s primary stress hormone — circulates at higher baseline levels. The nervous system does not fully settle. Sleep is lighter. Emotions are more intense. The body is always, in some sense, braced (Van der Kolk, 2014).
Studies on Adverse Childhood Experiences — known as ACEs — have shown a clear, dose-dependent relationship between childhood adversity and adult health outcomes. More adverse experiences in childhood mean statistically higher rates of depression, anxiety, substance use, chronic illness, and even shortened life expectancy (Felitti et al., 1998). This is not about weakness. It is about biology.
For Mere, the substances — when they arrived — did what nothing else had managed. They quieted the alarm. For a few hours, the vigilance lifted. The body that had been braced since childhood finally exhaled. This is not a moral failure. It is a pharmacological solution to a biological problem that was never her fault to begin with.
The Violence, the Edges, the Attempts
We speak carefully here — not to avoid truth, but to honour it.
When a person has spent forty years carrying a belief that they are fundamentally not enough and has never been given the tools to put that belief down, the weight eventually becomes unbearable in one of several ways. Sometimes it turns outward, as anger — the only emotion that was ever allowed to take up space. Sometimes it turns inward, as the question of whether it would simply be easier not to be here at all.
Neither of these is a weakness. Both are the logical conclusion of a body and mind that were shaped by experiences they did not choose, in a context that offered no pathway through.
Research consistently shows that histories of childhood emotional neglect, parentification, and attachment disruption are among the strongest predictors of self-harm and suicidality in adult women (Dube et al., 2001; Afifi et al., 2009). The research does not tell us this to condemn. It tells us this, so we know where to look — and what to offer.
“The body remembers what the mind has tried to forget. Healing begins when we stop asking what is wrong — and start asking what happened.”
What Te Ao Māori Has Always Known
Long before Western science named epigenetics, Māori understood that the patterns of the past travel forward. Whakapapa — genealogy, lineage, connection — was never only about who descended from whom. It was an understanding that what our tupuna experienced, we carry. But what we heal, we do not pass on.
The concept of hau — the life force present in all things — speaks to the ways that relationship, care, and exchange shape vitality. When hau is blocked — through disconnection, through unexpressed grief, through inherited silence — wellbeing suffers in ways that do not resolve simply through willpower or time.
Mere’s story is not only hers. It carries the shape of many wāhine Māori — and wāhine of many backgrounds — whose early experiences of invisibility, over-responsibility, and unfair comparison left marks that science is only now finding language for.
What Healing Looks Like Through a TPO Lens
Within Te Poutama o te Ora, Mere’s journey would be approached across multiple dimensions — not as separate ‘issues’ to be fixed, but as interconnected expressions of a single underlying wound.
• Taha Hinengaro (Mental & Emotional Wellness): Naming and tracing the whakapapa of the ‘not good enough’ belief — back to its roots in early relational experience rather than personal truth.
• Taha Wairua (Spiritual Wellness): Reconnecting with a sense of inherent worth that is not conditional on performance, service, or the approval of one unavailable parent.
• Taha Tinana (Physical Wellness): Addressing the body’s stored stress — understanding that somatic responses are not drama, but data. The nervous system needs tending, not shame.
• Taha Whānau (Relational Wellness): Healing the pattern of transactional love — learning that care does not require repayment, and that Mere is not responsible for managing others’ emotional worlds.
• Taha Tuakiri (Identity Wellness): Reclaiming identity beyond the role of family caretaker — discovering what Mere values, wants, and offers that is genuinely her own.
This is not a quick process. Epigenetic change is real, but it is not overnight. The Maramataka reminds us that healing, like the land, has seasons. There is a time for uncovering, a time for tending, and a time for something new to grow.
“What the weed learned can be unlearned. The roots can be pulled. The garden is not ruined — it is waiting.”
A Final Word to Those Who Recognise This Story
If you are reading this and you recognise Mere in yourself — the responsibility that arrived before you were ready, the love you had to earn, the sense that others’ needs have always come first — I want to say something directly to you:
You did not fail at life. Life presented itself to you in a form that was already weighted. The fact that you are still here, still reading, still curious about healing — that is not a small thing.
The weeds in your garden have a whakapapa. They can be traced, and what has a lineage can, with the right support, have a different ending.
You are not the belief that was planted in you.
Next in the series: Same person, different face – Trauma Bonding
Te Poutama o te Ora | Nine Dimensions of Māori Wellness
If this kōrero has stirred something in you, please reach out. You do not have to carry this alone.