The Narrative Begins:
Every wound has a beginning.
Not always a dramatic one. Sometimes just a moment — a child watching a room fill with warmth that isn’t pointed at her. A question forming in a body that doesn’t yet have words.
Am I enough?
That question — and the answer the world gave before she could challenge it — is where this series begins.
The Whakapapa of a Wound is a four-part series that traces a single wound through time. It moves from the moment a belief about unworthiness is first planted in a child, through the biology of what that experience does to the body, into the adult relationships that replicate the original pattern, and finally to the children of those relationships, who inherit the question before they have language for it.
It is not a series about individual failure. It is a series about the way wounds travel — through nervous systems, through relationships, through generations — and about what it takes to interrupt that journey.
“What has a whakapapa — a lineage, an origin, a pattern — can also have a different ending.”
What You Will Find in This Series
Each piece in the series stands alone — you can read any one of them and find something useful. But they are most powerful read in sequence, because together they do something that no single article can: they show how one wound wears many faces across a lifetime, and why healing requires attention to all of them.
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01 |
The Whakapapa of Not Being Good Enough – Weeds of Anxiety – The wound and where it begins — the child, the belief, the weed planted before she had words |
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02 |
When Love Became a Debt – Epigenetics, parentification, and the biology of not being enough — what the body learns and carries forward |
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03 |
I Keep Choosing the Same Person with a Different Face – Trauma bonding, debt-based love, and the wound that goes looking for what it knows |
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04 |
Why Am I Not With My Mum and Dad? – What the whakapapa passes on – The children of the wound — what the science and the whakapapa say about intergenerational transmission and healing |
Why This Series Was Written
This series was not written from a textbook. It was written from a life — from the lived experience of someone who has stood at the washing basket, cried in the corporate bathroom, sat with other people’s children who were asking the same questions she once asked, and built a framework for healing from the inside out.
It was also written because the clinical and community settings we work in are full of people who are carrying versions of this wound — people who are being judged for their symptoms rather than understood through their history. People who have been told to try harder, to make better choices, to just stop — without anyone asking what the body is doing, and why.
This series offers a different question. Not ‘what is wrong with you?’ but ‘what happened to you, and what has been happening to people like you, for generations?’ That shift — from self-blame to contextual understanding — is itself a form of healing.
Each piece is written in accessible language. The academic versions include references for those who need the evidence base. The blog versions are for anyone who recognises themselves, or someone they love, in the pages.
The Framework Beneath the Series
Every piece in this series draws on Te Poutama o te Ora (TPO) — a nine-dimensional Māori wellness framework developed from lived experience and grounded in kaupapa Māori. TPO does not treat symptoms in isolation. It traces the whakapapa of the presenting distress — its origins, its transmission, and the conditions needed for genuine transformation.
The series is itself a demonstration of why all nine dimensions are necessary. The wound the series traces does not live in one place. It lives in the mind, the body, the spirit, the relational world, the cultural identity, the economic reality, and the ancestral lineage of the person carrying it. A framework that addresses only one dimension will leave the rest untouched — and the wound will surface there instead.
The nine dimensions of Te Poutama o te Ora:
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Taha Whakapapa |
Relational & ancestral wellness — our connections across time and lineage |
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Taha Tuakiri |
Identity wellness — knowing who we are, where we come from, and why that matters. Our purpose, contribution, and the gifts that are genuinely ours |
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Taha Wairua |
Spiritual wellness — our relationship with the sacred, with meaning, and with worth beyond performance |
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Taha Hinengaro |
Mental & emotional wellness — the mind that holds the story and the heart that feels it |
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Taha Tinana |
Physical wellness — the body that holds the history the mind has tried to forget |
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Taha Whānau |
Relational wellness — the quality and integrity of our connections with others |
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Taha Kai |
Puku wellness (Gut Health) — food that is nurturing and sustains our bodies, intentional eating and autophagy |
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Taha Pūtea |
Financial wellness — resource, security, and freedom from material constraint |
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Taha Matihiko |
Digital & informational wellness — navigating the modern world with clarity and agency |
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Taha Auaha |
Creativity wellness — metabolising trauma through creative freedom |
Who This Series Is For
This series is for the person who recognises themselves in Mere — the composite wāhine whose story runs through all four pieces. Who has felt not good enough? Who has worked hard to earn love that should have been freely given. Who has looked at their relationships and wondered why the faces keep changing, but the feeling stays the same?
It is for the practitioner who works with people like Mere, who wants to understand the biology and the whakapapa beneath the presenting symptoms, and who needs a framework that takes culture seriously rather than treating it as supplementary.
It is for the educator, the community health worker, the pastor, the supervisor, the whānau member who watches someone they love repeat a pattern they cannot name. Who wants language for what they are witnessing that does not reach for blame?
And it is for the parent in the system — the one navigating Oranga Tamariki involvement, whose children are asking the question in the title of the fourth piece, and who needs to hear, before anything else, that what is happening to their whānau is not a verdict on their worth.
“The weed has a whakapapa. So does the garden that grows in its place.”
Begin where you are. Read the piece that speaks to where you stand right now. Or read all four in sequence and watch the wound travel — and watch the possibility of interruption emerge.
The wound is not the destination. It is the starting point. And Te Poutama o te Ora was built for exactly what comes next.
Nōu reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.
The Whakapapa of a Wound — Series Introduction
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.