Trauma Bonding, Debt-Based Love, and the Wound That Goes Looking
The Wound Goes Looking
In the first piece of this series, we met Mere as a child, standing at a washing basket, watching her newborn brother receive a warmth that had never quite been pointed at her. In the second, we followed her into adulthood, into the biology of what that early experience did to her nervous system, and into the weight of a role she never agreed to carry.
This piece is about what happened next.
Because unhealed wounds do not sit quietly. They do not wait patiently for us to be ready. They go looking. They scan the world for the environment they were shaped in, and when they find it, every cell in the body says: ‘Yes…this…I know this place.’
What Mere’s body knew was this: love is unpredictable. It arrives and withdraws. It must be earned and re-earned. It feels most real when it is slightly out of reach, and the person offering it is someone whose approval is never quite certain.
That is not a description of dysfunction. It is a description of her mother. It is an almost exact description of every significant relationship Mere would spend the next two decades inside.
“She wasn’t choosing the wrong person. She was choosing the familiar one. Her nervous system didn’t know the difference.”
What a Trauma Bond Actually Is
The phrase ‘trauma bond’ has become more widely known in recent years, but it is often misunderstood as simply a very intense attachment or an inability to leave a bad relationship. It is more precise than that.
A trauma bond forms when cycles of tension, harm, and reconciliation produce a neurochemical pattern that mimics — and in some ways intensifies — the experience of love. During the reconciliation phase, when the storm passes and warmth returns, the brain releases dopamine and oxytocin in a burst that is stronger than what is felt in consistently loving relationships (Van der Kolk, 2014). The contrast creates the intensity.
The unpredictability creates the craving.
For Mere, this pattern was not unfamiliar. She had learned it before she had language. The nervous system that braced for her mother’s neutrality, and then flooded with relief when warmth appeared, had been practising for this exact dynamic since before she started school.
This is not a weakness. This is the nervous system doing what nervous systems do: finding the pattern it knows and calling it home.
Debt-Based Love in Adult Relationships
In the last piece, we introduced the idea of debt-based love — the child who earns her place through service, who learns that affection is transactional, that care must be repaid.
That template does not retire when childhood ends. It walks straight into adult relationships and begins operating there, usually invisibly.
For Mere, it looked like this: she gave more than she received and framed it as love. She managed her partner’s emotional world, as she had managed her mother’s. She absorbed responsibility for the relationship’s temperature — when things were tense, she worked harder. When things were warm, she felt she had earned it. When things were cold, she assumed she had failed.
The partner’s emotional unavailability — the withdrawal, the unpredictability, the charm that appeared and disappeared — was not a red flag her body recognised as danger. It was a frequency her body recognised as love. Or at least, as the thing that had always been called love.
Underneath all of it was the debt: the felt sense that she was fortunate to be chosen at all. That she owed the relationship her best effort regardless of what she received in return. That leaving would be a kind of ingratitude.
“A woman who grew up owing love doesn’t recognise a relationship that demands payment. She just calls it normal.”
Moving Cities Doesn’t Move the Template
Between her first and second relationship, Mere moved cities. She was deliberate about it. New environment, new community, new chance to be someone different.
What she did not yet understand was that the template she was working from was not stored in her address. It was stored in her body. In the neural pathways that had been laid down in childhood, encoding this is what closeness feels like, this is what danger feels like, this is how love works.
Researchers who have studied intergenerational relationship patterns consistently find that geographic distance does not alter internal relational templates (Johnson, 2008). The patterns that were formed in relationship must be healed in relationship — with enough safety, enough time, and enough support to form new neural pathways alongside the old ones.
Mere wasn’t failing at self-improvement. She was attempting a renovation without touching the foundations. The house kept returning to its original shape because the foundations hadn’t changed.
The Children Were Already Learning
This is the part that matters most, and the part that is hardest to say plainly.
By the time the relationship broke — by the time the tension became impossible to manage, and the children watched their parents come apart — the learning had already happened. Not because anyone intended harm. But because children do not need to be told anything. They observe. They absorb. They file, in their bodies, the information about how love works in this household.
They watched a mother who worked tirelessly to maintain warmth in the face of unpredictability. They watched a relationship where tension was the weather and reconciliation was the sun coming out. They felt, in their nervous systems, the quality of attention and absence that had characterised their home.
They began forming their own templates. Their own answers to the question every child is always asking: what is love? How does it work? What do I have to do to keep it?
They did not have the words. They didn’t need them. The body learns long before the mind has language.
“The children were not damaged by the ending. They were shaped by the years before it. Both things matter. Only one can still be changed.”
What TPO Offers This Moment
Te Poutama o te Ora does not approach Mere’s relational history as a sequence of poor choices. It approaches it as a whakapapa — a traceable lineage with identifiable origins and, crucially, the possibility of a different ending.
Within TPO, the healing work for this dimension of Mere’s story would engage:
• Taha Hinengaro (Mental & Emotional Wellness): Mapping the relational template — naming the pattern, tracing it back to its origins, and distinguishing ‘familiar’ from ‘healthy.’ These feel different in the body, and that difference can be learned.
• Taha Wairua (Spiritual Wellness): Reconnecting with a sense of worth that is not conditional on a partner’s approval. For many wāhine, this involves returning to a spiritual identity that precedes the wound — an understanding of self that is rooted in whakapapa rather than relational performance.
• Taha Whānau (Relational Wellness): Building the capacity for mutuality — relationships where Mere is not always the manager, the peacemaker, the one who works hardest to maintain warmth. Learning to receive without suspicion. Learning that consistent love does not mean boring love.
• Taha Tinana (Physical Wellness): Recognising the body’s role in partner selection. The nervous system that pulls toward the familiar can be recalibrated — slowly, with care — so that safety begins to feel like home rather than a warning signal.
• Taha Tuakiri (Identity Wellness): Reclaiming an identity that is not defined by relational role. Mere is not the family’s emotional manager. She is not her mother’s caretaker in adult form. She is a person with her own whakapapa, her own gifts, and her own right to be loved without a price attached.
What About the Children?
The next piece in this series turns toward them — the small people who did not choose this, who do not have words for what they’re carrying, who are asking their own version of the oldest question.
Because the wound that began with Mere’s mother, that shaped Mere’s nervous system, that drew her into a relationship that replicated the original pattern — that wound has not finished travelling.
But it can be interrupted. That is what this series has always been building toward.
The weed has a whakapapa, and so now, does the healing.
The Whakapapa of a Wound — Series Trauma Bonding – Debt-Based Love
Next in the series: Why Am I Not With My Mum and Dad — the children of the wound
Te Poutama o te Ora | Nine Dimensions of Māori Wellness
If this kōrero has stirred something in you, please reach out (office@iantemo.com ). You do not have to carry this alone.
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.
I presented last week the image of a young girl who, at two years old, could not understand why she became invisible when her sibling arrived. ‘Wasn’t she enough?’. I left that article with questions around how that weed could be pulled out, and stopped from reseeding or transferred to other aspects of her life and more importantly, to her children.
I present the closing conversation.
What Pulls the Weed Out?
This is the question that led me to develop Te Poutama o te Ora (TPO) — the nine-dimensional Māori wellness framework that sits at the heart of my work as a counsellor, supervisor, and wellness practitioner.
My thinking is this: if the weed lives in the mind — in the brain’s neural pathways, in the beliefs formed before we had words — then uprooting it requires something equally deep. We must pull the metaphysical into the physical. We must bring the spiritual into Te Ao Mārama — the world of light and understanding.
Within TPO, anxiety as a weed is approached through several of our nine dimensions:
• Taha Hinengaro (Mental & Emotional Wellness): identifying and naming the root belief — giving it a whakapapa so it can be examined rather than just endured.
• Taha Wairua (Spiritual Wellness): understanding the larger story of your worth — one that does not depend on childhood Christmas mornings or office politics.
• Taha Whānau (Relational Wellness): healing the relational wounds that first told you that you were invisible.
• Taha Tinana (Physical Wellness): releasing the anxiety stored in the body, because the nervous system holds the history that the mind has tried to forget.
• Taha Tuakiri (Identity Wellness): letting go of what is not yours — that you have always been good enough.
But the work does not stop at the individual. Because anxiety — particularly the “not good enough” variety — is not just personal. It is colonial. It is intergenerational. It carries the weight of systems that were designed to make us feel exactly this way.
Te Ao Māori Offers Something Different
Indigenous knowledge has always understood the interconnectedness of past, present, and future. Whakapapa is not just a genealogical record — it is an explanatory system. It allows us to trace the origins of our experiences, to name them, and in naming them, to begin releasing them.
When we apply whakapapa thinking to anxiety, we stop asking “what is wrong with me?” and start asking, “what happened to me, and what has been happening to people like me, for generations?” That shift — from self-blame to contextual understanding — is itself a form of healing.
The Maramataka — the Māori lunar calendar — also has something to offer. It reminds us that growth is seasonal. That there are times for planting, times for tending, and times for harvest. Healing from deep-rooted anxiety is not a sprint. It is a cultivation.
My Life Is One of Growth Now
And yet, some weeds still surface. I want to be honest about that. Healing is not a moment of arrival. The work is ongoing.
But I also know this: You move beyond the two-year-old not understanding why their world has changed, or the adult who questions why this keeps happening.
You can be the person who took that pain but built something from it. For me, it was a framework, a ministry, a way of walking alongside others as they pull their own weeds.
That is what TPO is. Not a theory. A testimony.
If this resonates with you, I would love to hear your story.
What was the moment the weed was planted in your garden?
Next in the series: When Debt Became Love
Te Poutama o te Ora | Nine Dimensions of Māori Wellness
The thoughts of not being good enough stem from that time when you first felt anxiety about being inadequate, or you faced a situation in life that you said you couldn’t handle, and you reasoned this to be – “It’s because I’m not Good Enough”.
If I then proposed that:
Anxiety is a weed, with the root of that weed stemming from a dysfunctional belief or thought.
Further, if it is a thought, then it likely can’t be medicated.
Instead, you must train your brain to think differently and replace that belief with something else that is positive and true, or the old belief will return.
This is not about chanting positive affirmations – it is about retraining your brain, the neuropathway that was set in place all that time ago when you accepted the anxiety of inadequacy – when the ‘weed’ was planted.
When did it start?
I can trace it back to when I was two years old, to my sister’s birth. At first, I didn’t understand why they needed her…Wasn’t I enough!!. Of course, at two years old, it’s all about you. Neighbours and relatives came around. We were poor, so my mum had my sister in the washing basket. I remember thinking what’s going to happen with the washing now.
The weed was planted.
Again, I didn’t understand what all of the fuss was about with this little person in a washing basket. I remember trying to remove my sister from my doll’s bed, Mum came in and was furious….I said, “This is my doll’s bed’, a spanking followed. It wasn’t against the law in those days to hit your children.
The re-minding moments of not being good enough continued, no longer getting the better presents at Christmas. My own really good things being given to my sister, my dresses, when there was something special to go to, how her hair would be fussed over, and my hair was pulled up into a bun. I felt like a school matron at 7.
The weed was watered and nurtured.
I tried my best to be a good child…but as other siblings arrived, all that happened was that I became invisible.
Then, as if by order, other situations reinforced this ‘loss’. My parents often forgot about me, and I found out I was missed from family trips…their reason being they forgot. I remember spending days at my aunties, brought home at dinner time…for my father to ask, “Where have you been?”
I had been gone the whole day, and I walked for an hour to get to my aunt’s home.
Probably the worst reminder of ‘not being good enough’ was one time Christmas shopping with my Mother as a teenager, and she brought a present for my sister. My mum’s reason was that my sister had been a really good girl that year. When Christmas day came, and we got to the presents under the tree…there wasn’t anything for me. My aunt and cousin arrived later that day, and I got a present from my cousin that I treasured. It was beautiful and a blue top with a white band…I wore that as much as I could. Mum’s actions told me that Christmas that ‘I wasn’t good enough’.
The weed became strong and multiplied.
Then there was knowing at school that you weren’t going to be chosen by other students…dreading athletics and sports fixtures. Thankfully, I wasn’t bullied at school. I was clever, and as Māori, the other students treated me as if my success were their own… they still didn’t choose me for games or to be on their teams.
That weed planted at two years old was nurtured and grew over the years, to where I came to expect it. Trying to stand out as the good child, excelling at my education, getting prizes to show ‘hey I am good enough…’ but there was never that celebration.
The weed was now a forest.
The feelings of exclusion or being set apart followed me into my working life…although that was also combined with being the token Māori, so it became a bit more complicated. Isolated from team decisions or ignored during meetings when I was clearly upset, with one time my leaving the room to cry in the bathroom.
Not getting that promotion even when you are more qualified than the successful person. Having to reapply for your own job, only to find you have to train the new person, and then hearing later that the new person actually didn’t know anything about your old job. They were put there by the senior manager who needed you gone.
I am still plagued by that anxiety when I have a management one-on-one meeting, as my work history has taught me these sessions are used to discipline or ‘correct’ a behaviour and ‘insert’ a more acceptable one.
Although my life now is one of success and growth…these ‘weeds’ still surface. How can I retrain my brain to think differently…what or how can modern thinking be utilised to ‘pull that weed out’ for good!…cut that forest down and turn the land back into good soil.
Where to from here?
My thinking tells me that – if the ‘weed’ is in my brain, then I need to ‘pull it out’ and replace that belief with one that is ‘true’ and ‘real’.
The principle of – pulling the ‘metaphysical’ into the physical world, bringing the spiritual into Te Ao Marama.
What does that look like?
Also, how far is the concept of Anxiety being a weed, translated to other supposed causes of anxiety?
What does indigenous knowledge offer, and how does this fit Te Poutama o te Ora?
Think of the last thing you really wanted. Maybe it was something you saw online; something a friend mentioned; it’s been sitting in the back of your mind for months — a holiday, a purchase, a version of your life that looks a little different from the one you’re living.
Now here’s the deeper question: where did that wanting come from?
In te Ao Māori, we have a concept called whakapapa. Most people know it as genealogy — the tracing of family lines, the recitation of ancestors, the understanding of where we come from. But whakapapa is also a method of understanding anything deeply. To know the whakapapa of something is to know its origins, its lineage, the forces that shaped it into what it is.
Within our Te Poutama o te Ora framework, we apply this same principle to our desires (wants). We call it tracing the whakapapa of desire — and it might just be one of the most liberating practices you ever try.
We Are Swimming in Manufactured Want
Here is something worth sitting with: in 2023, the global advertising industry spent close to one trillion dollars — not to inform you, but to make you want things. To make you feel, at some quiet level, that what you currently have is not quite enough. That the life you’re living is a slightly lesser version of the one you could be living, if only you had this product, this programme, this look, this experience.
This is not conspiracy thinking — it is simply the business model. Your dissatisfaction is the product. Your longing is the engine.
And it works. Not because we are weak or foolish, but because we are human. Our brains are wired to want. The same neurological system that once motivated our ancestors to seek food, shelter, and belonging — a genuinely life-saving impulse — is now activated hundreds of times a day by systems designed precisely to exploit it.
The neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky points out that the dopamine surge in the brain is actually larger in anticipation of something than in the receiving of it. We are, biologically, built for wanting more than for having. In a world that understood this and worked with our flourishing in mind, this would be channelled beautifully. In a world of consumer capitalism, it becomes a vulnerability.
The Colonisation of Your Inner Life
In Te Poutama o te Ora, we speak often about colonisation — not only as a historical and political reality, but as something that can happen to our inner lives. Just as tangata whenua experienced the occupation of their lands and the suppression of their language and ways of knowing, each of us can experience the occupation of our desires.
When the wanting that fills our days comes primarily from outside us — from what we see others have, from what advertising tells us we should aspire to, from the story we were handed about what constitutes a successful or sufficient life — our desires are not our own. They have been colonised.
This is not a blame game. The forces shaping our wants are enormously powerful and often invisible. But naming them is the beginning of freedom.
Moana Desire and Ngaru Desire
When we trace the whakapapa of our desires, we often find two kinds of wanting.
Moana – desire rises from depth. Like the deep ocean, it is quietly insistent, connected to something real in you — a genuine need for connection, for meaning, for growth, for belonging, for expression. When you follow moana desire, you tend to feel more yourself, alive, and aligned. This kind of wanting has roots.
Ngaru desire, by contrast, rises from the surface — it is wave-like, stirred up by external forces. It arrives with urgency, smells like comparison and speaks in the voice of:
‘I need to keep up’
‘I’ll feel better about myself if I have this’
‘Everyone else seems to have figured something out that I haven’t’.
Ngaru – desire is not inherently wrong — waves are part of the ocean’s life. But when we mistake them for the deep current, we spend enormous energy chasing what will not ultimately feed us.
The invitation is not to eliminate desire — desire is life-force, it is energy, it is what moves us through the world. The invitation is to know which kind you’re holding.
How to Trace the Whakapapa of a Desire
This is a reflective practice. It works well in a journal, in conversation with someone you trust, or simply as a quiet inquiry on a walk.
Pick something you currently want. Something you find yourself thinking about, longing for, maybe working toward. Then sit with these questions:
When did this wanting first appear in me? What was happening in my life at that time?
Who or what introduced me to this desire? Was it my own discovery — or was it shown to me?
What does this desire promise me? What do I believe I will feel when I have it?
What genuine need sits beneath this specific want? Could that need be met another way?
If I imagine having this thing fully, and still feeling empty — what then would I want?
You do not need to arrive at a tidy answer. The purpose of these questions is not to tell you whether to want something or not. It is to restore your capacity to choose. To make you the author of your own wanting, rather than the recipient of someone else’s agenda.
This Is a Practice of Sovereignty
Tino rangatiratanga — self-determination — is one of the most cherished principles in te ao Māori. It refers to the right of Māori to govern themselves, to be the authority over their own lives and futures.
Within Te Poutama o te Ora, we extend this principle inward. Tino rangatiratanga over your inner life means that you — not an algorithm, or advertiser, or the comparison and cultural messaging — get to decide what you genuinely want and what you genuinely need. You get to be the authority over your own longing.
This is not a small thing. In a world that has invested so much in occupying your desire, reclaiming it is an act of resistance and restoration.
A Final Word
The whakapapa of desire is not about becoming someone who wants nothing. It is not about self-denial or pretending that longing is somehow beneath you. It is about becoming someone who knows the difference between the deep current and the surface wave — between the hunger that nourishes you for a long time, and the hunger that returns before you have even finished eating.
When you know the whakapapa of your desire, you are not just making better consumer choices. You are coming home to yourself and tracing a lineage back to what is genuinely yours — to the wanting that was there before the world told you what to want.
That is worth tracing. That is worth knowing.
This post is part of the Te Poutama o te Ora Wellness Wisdom series. Te
There is a moment that many of us know well. You are standing in a shop — or scrolling through a website at midnight — and something catches your eye, and almost immediately, a thought forms: I need this.
But do you? Really?
The difference between wanting something and needing something might sound like a straightforward question. But in my work as a wellness practitioner and in developing Te Poutama o te Ora (TPO), I have come to see it as one of the most important distinctions in a person’s whole wellbeing journey. Not because wants are bad — they absolutely are not — but because when we confuse the two, we end up chasing things that can never truly satisfy us, and sometimes neglecting the things that genuinely would.
Let us sit with this together for a moment.
Needs and Wants: The Simple Version (That Is Not That Simple)
On paper, it sounds easy. Needs are the things we genuinely require for survival, safety, and basic wellbeing. Without them, we experience real harm. Food, water, shelter, and sleep are needs.
Wants are the things that enrich and enhance life — they bring us pleasure, joy, beauty, and comfort — but their absence does not threaten our fundamental wellbeing. The sushi from that particular restaurant, the designer shoes, and the upgrade to business class are a want.
Simple enough, right? Except life, as you know, is rarely that clean.
Is belonging a need or a want? Within Te Ao Māori — the Māori worldview — this is not even a question. Connection to whānau, hapū, community and to each other is as foundational to our wellbeing as food and water. Severing those connections does not just cause sadness; it causes genuine harm. The same is true of our relationship to whakapapa, whenua, our Tīpuna, and our spiritual life. Western frameworks sometimes label these as ‘cultural preferences.’ Kāo — no. These are needs.
What we call a need and what we call a want reveal what we value. And those values are always shaped by culture, context, and history.
And here is another layer: what counts as a need shifts over time and across cultures. Two hundred years ago, running water was a luxury. Now, in Aotearoa, it is a basic right. Internet access was once optional. Now, try finding work, healthcare, or education without it. Needs are not fixed categories. They are living, relational, contextual things.
Three Questions to Help You Tell the Difference
Within the TPO framework, we use three simple tests when someone is unsure whether something is a genuine need or a want seeking attention.
The Consequence Test: Ask yourself — what actually happens if I don’t have this? If the answer is disappointment or missing out, it’s likely a want. If the answer is real harm, decline, or suffering, it’s likely a need. Be honest with yourself here. The feeling of urgency around a want can be very convincing — especially when marketing has been designed specifically to create that urgency.
The Upgrade Test: Would any version satisfy this, or only a specific version? If you are hungry, any nourishing food will do — that is a need. If you will only accept the specific meal from the specific restaurant, the need is nourishment, but the want is the experience. Both are valid to know about yourself.
The Timing Test: Is this pressing, or can it wait? Genuine needs tend to be time-sensitive — you cannot postpone sleep indefinitely, and health needs cannot always wait. Wants are generally more flexible. There is wisdom in this, connecting to the Maramataka, our ancestral lunar calendar: the teaching that there is a right time for everything, and knowing when to act and when to wait is itself a form of wellbeing.
The Hidden Needs Beneath Our Surface Wants
Here is where this reflection moves from interesting to genuinely life-changing.
Sometimes, the things we want most persistently and most intensely are not really about the thing at all. They are about something deeper — a genuine need that has not yet found a direct pathway to satisfaction.
You want the new car. But dig beneath that — what need is it trying to meet? Reliable transport? Yes, perhaps. But also: status? Belonging? The felt sense of having made it, of being enough? If the need underneath is really belonging and recognition, buying the car may give you temporary relief — but the longing will return, and next time it will ask for something bigger.
You want to stay constantly busy, filling every hour, saying yes to everyone. What need is that serving? Purpose, perhaps. The comfort of feeling is needed. Or maybe — and this takes courage to look at — the avoidance of what might arise in the quiet: grief, uncertainty, a question about who you are without the doing.
You want the perfect body, the transformed appearance. And underneath? Perhaps it is health. Or the longing for safety in your own skin. Or the hope that if you look different, you will finally feel the acceptance that has always been just out of reach.
The wisdom is not in denying our wants. It is in tracing their whakapapa — asking where they came from, and what they are really reaching for.
In the TPO framework, we call this tracing the whakapapa of desire. Whakapapa is about lineage — the genealogy of something, its origins, what it comes from. When we apply this to our wants, we are asking: where did this longing come from? Is it rooted in something authentic in me, or has it been shaped by external forces — by advertising, by comparison, by a story I was handed about what I need to have in order to be enough?
Many of the wants that drive us most powerfully are, in this sense, colonised desires: longings that have been shaped by a consumer culture that profits from our sense of insufficiency. One of the most radical acts of wellbeing is to reclaim your own knowing — to trust your own sense of what you genuinely need, rather than accepting the list that the market has prepared for you.
Both Matter — But Differently
I want to be clear about something: this is not a call to live a spartan existence or to feel guilty about your wants. Wants are beautiful. They bring colour, richness, and delight to life. The latte you did not need was still lovely. The holiday that was a want, not a need, still restored something in you. These things matter.
The invitation is not to eliminate wants. It is to stop treating wants with the same urgency as needs. It is to stop living in a constant state of manufactured crisis around things that are, when we are honest, optional.
When your genuine needs are met — when you are nourished, rested, connected, safe, seen, and spiritually grounded — something shifts. The wanting quietens. Not because you have achieved some perfect detachment, but because you are no longer trying to fill genuine needs through indirect wants. From that place of met needs, wants become what they were always meant to be: joyful additions, not desperate substitutes.
A Practice to Take with You
This week, when you catch yourself saying ‘I need…’ — pause. Just for a moment.
Ask: Do I actually need this? Or do I want it? And if I want it, what need might be underneath that want?
There is no judgment in any answer. The point is to get curious about yourself. To know yourself a little more clearly. Because that clarity — knowing what you actually need, and ensuring those needs are met — is one of the most generous things you can do for yourself and for everyone around you.
When you know what you need, you stop chasing every shiny thing that marketing throws your way. You stop outsourcing your sense of sufficiency to the next purchase. You stop confusing the symptom with the cure.
You start living with intention. With discernment. With what the tīpuna might have called mōhiotanga — a deep, knowing wisdom about yourself and your place in the world.
And that, in the end, is what Te Poutama o te Ora is inviting us all toward.
Mauri ora,
About Te Poutama o te Ora
Te Poutama o te Ora is a comprehensive, Māori-grounded wellness framework that integrates nine dimensions of human well-being. It draws on indigenous epistemology, four generations of healing practice, and contemporary wellness research to offer a culturally responsive pathway to genuine flourishing — for individuals, whānau, and communities. To learn more, visit our website or explore the TPO Nine-Cycle Life Realignment Series. Subscription.Wants and Needs.
