The First Exile: When Māori Identity Became a Liability
My tūpuna did not wake up one morning and decide that Māori culture was not worth passing on. They made a calculated decision — made out of love, made under duress — that the safest thing they could do for the next generation was to equip us for a Pākehā world.
“Learn the ways of the Pākehā. There is no future in being Māori.”
I recall both parents saying this to me as a child. They were not wrong about the world they were describing. Te reo Māori was banned in schools. Children were beaten for speaking it. Land was confiscated. Māori cultural practices were suppressed and, in some cases, actively criminalised. Choosing cultural visibility in that environment was not a cultural preference — it was a risk assessment.
But that survival strategy — however loving its intention — had a cost that got passed down quietly. The cost was this: we arrived in the world carrying shame about who we were. We didn’t speak te reo. We didn’t know our whakapapa beyond a generation or two. We didn’t feel at home on the marae, and everywhere we looked, there seemed to be a standard of Māori authenticity that we had already failed to meet.
Not Māori enough. That phrase. If you know it from the inside, you know how heavy it is.
The Second Exile: When the Corporate World Finished the Job
Then came the workplace. The white-collar environment. The professional world that was supposed to be the reward for following the instruction — learn the ways of the Pākehā — all the way to its conclusion.
I was successful, by external measures. I worked hard. I was competent. I rose, and inside that rising, I learned something that nobody had told me: there is a version of yourself that the corporate world will accept, and there is who you actually are, and these two people are not the same.
The words I heard in that environment stay with me. These are real words, spoken in real workplaces, to real people:
“The only good Māori is a dead one.”
“Cunning as a Māori dog.”
“We caught an eel — can you tell us how to cook it? You know, you being Māori, you must know.”
“Do you know [person]? You know, they’re your people.”
“I see you got the time off — or is it a Māori day off?”
“You know, Māori with funerals… they end up taking a week off. Such a nuisance.”
Words that stick. Words that land in the body and stay there, quietly confirming what you had already been taught to fear: that who you are — what you carry in your blood and your bones and your history — is a problem to be managed.
Then, alongside the racism, came something that masqueraded as professional development but was something else entirely. I call it now what it was: structured deconstruction.
“You are saying too much in meetings, responding too fast — people think you haven’t heard them.” “You aren’t saying enough. Let people get to know who you are.”
I remember saying, once, “It doesn’t really matter what I do. I’m stuffed either way — told I say too much, and the performance counsellor saying I need to reflect more of myself.” They called it restyling your brand. I know now that it was deconstructing who I was.
A dear mentor — who has since passed — used to say to me: “What are you being asked to ‘fix’? You don’t need fixing. They need to understand more about you as you are and always meant to be.”
He was right. But I didn’t have the language for it then. I had been taught to fit the mould, and every time I tried to fit it, the mould shifted.
The Double Exile
Here is the architecture of it, seen clearly:
Colonisation stripped away cultural identity and taught the next generation to be ashamed of what remained. That generation entered the professional world already carrying the wound of the first exile: not Māori enough.
The professional world then spent decades completing the work colonisation began. It took the authentic self — the self that was already diminished, already doubtful of its own legitimacy — and subjected it to a second systematic dismantling. Not in the name of colonial policy, but in the name of Personal Brand. Performance. Professionalism.
And at the end of it, you are left standing in the space between two worlds, belonging to neither:
Not white enough to be Pākehā. Not Māori enough to be Māori. Two different kinds of rejection, one continuous wound.
At 55, after a redundancy that forced me to stop and look clearly at what had happened, I finally understood the truth: they didn’t teach me. They dismantled me, and before that, colonisation dismantled my tūpuna, and the gap that was created became the wound I carried into that corporate world.
Now I had neither. And somehow, losing the corporate identity — as painful as it was — cracked something open. For the first time, I had to ask: Who am I, beneath all of this?
Why “Just Deal with the Burnout” Doesn’t Work
If you have experienced the double exile and tried to address the burnout part of it with standard tools — better boundaries, stress management, yoga on your lunch break, a holiday — you will know that they don’t touch it. They cannot touch it because the burnout is not the wound. It is the symptom of the wound.
And the wound is not primarily psychological. It is stored across five dimensions of your being:
In your tuakiri — your identity — which has been performing a self that is not yours for so long, you have forgotten what yours feels like.
In your whakapapa — your relational and ancestral self — which is carrying intergenerational survival strategies that were never yours to carry alone.
In your wairua — your spirit — which has been offered professional achievement as a substitute for cultural belonging and real meaning, and has been quietly starving.
In your hinengaro — your mind and emotions — which are exhausted not from overwork but from the maintenance of a gap between who you are and who you are permitted to be.
In your tinana — your body — which is keeping the score of everything listed above, and has been keeping it for a very long time.
You cannot heal one of these while the others remain untouched. That is what Te Poutama o te Ora calls dimensional autophagy: metabolising the wound across all five dimensions at once — not managing the symptoms, but processing the source.
The Three Movements of Healing
In the TPO framework, healing the double exile moves through three phases. They are not quick. But they are real.
Recognition: See it clearly
The first movement is naming what happened, not as personal failure, but as structural injury. The cultural disconnection was done to your tūpuna, who passed it to you in love. The professional deconstruction was done to you by systems that needed you to be useful, not whole.
This phase allows the grief and, where it exists, the rage. Both are appropriate. Both are part of recognising the wound accurately.
Metabolisation: Process what happened
The second movement asks: what remains when the shame and the performance are set down? Forty-one years in a demanding environment, however difficult, built genuine capacity — resilience, skill, the particular intelligence of someone who learned to navigate a world that was not designed for them.
In this phase, you begin to sort what is genuinely yours from what was imposed. You begin cultural reconnection without shame — learning te reo or whakapapa not as an admission of failure but as an act of reclamation. You release the professional identity not as defeat but as the setting down of something that was never yours to carry.
Regeneration: Build what is actually yours
The third movement is the construction of an integrated life — one that holds both the Māori self and the professional self without requiring either to be hidden. For many, this involves significant change: career transitions toward work that allows full expression, renewed engagement with cultural community, and the beginning of teaching the next generation something different.
At 62, I am building something different. Work that allows me to be fully myself. A wellness ministry that integrates my Māori identity instead of requiring me to conceal it. My anxiety is nearly gone. My body is healing. I wake up with purpose instead of dread.
Not because I learned better stress management. Because I finally metabolised both exiles — and found, on the other side of that work, that I had always been enough.
For Everyone Who Knows This from the Inside
If you are carrying the double exile — if you recognise yourself in the space between two worlds, not Māori enough for one and not Pākehā enough for the other — I want to say this directly:
The disconnection from your culture was done to your tūpuna and passed to you through love. It is not your failure. The dismantling of your professional self was done by systems that valued your performance over your personhood. It is not your failure. You have always been Māori. And you have always been enough. The reclamation of both — your culture and your authentic self — is not about becoming something you are not. It is about returning to who you were before the world decided who you should be.
Nau mai, haere mai. The healing is hard. But you are not broken. You are colonised. And that is something that can be undone — one dimension, one cycle, one reclaimed piece of yourself at a time.
This post is part of the Te Poutama o te Ora Wellness Wisdom series. Te Poutama o te Ora is a nine-dimensional Māori wellness framework developed in Aotearoa New Zealand, integrating indigenous wisdom with contemporary transformation practices. The dimensional autophagy programme addresses complex, layered trauma across whakapapa, wairua, tuakiri, hinengaro, and tinana dimensions.
Today’s Alignment is designed as a gentle daily guide rather than a productivity tool or traditional calendar. It offers a reflective space to pause, observe rhythm, and consider how energy, focus, well-being, and restoration may be moving through the day.
Each day includes:
Maramataka phase alignment
Moon and energy rhythms
TPO rhythm cycles
Dimension focus areas
Reflective activity guidance
A forward view into the next few days
The intention is not to tell people what to do, but to support greater awareness of timing, pacing, restoration, and connection — both within ourselves and with the wider rhythms around us.
This project sits at the intersection of:
wellbeing
reflective practice
rhythm awareness
cultural insight
holistic restoration
At this stage, the platform is still evolving, and I am intentionally sharing it early so people can begin engaging with it in real life. Over time, I hope to continue developing deeper TPO dimension guidance, rhythm reflections, and expanded wellbeing tools.
You are warmly invited to explore the live experience here:
On the surface, that does not sound like much. But when I read it, I felt something shift in my chest — a recognition so deep it was almost physical. She had found language for something I had never been able to name. Something about what it is to look through a barrier at the world, where the quality of light that comes through is not quite clear. About beauty that is simultaneously present and just out of reach.
That poem was not just a gift. It was a passage, and when I received it, I understood something about creativity that no clinical definition had ever captured for me:
Creative expression is not about producing something beautiful. It is about giving something held, somewhere to go.
That is what Taha Auaha is about.
You Have Probably Been Told You Are Not Creative
Maybe you haven’t been told directly, maybe it was more subtle than that.
At art classes, you were made to feel foolish. Your singing was compared unfavourably to someone else’s. Someone laughed at something you made. Maybe the culture or home environment you grew up in did not have space for creative expression — people were too busy surviving.
Maybe you were a Māori child who lost access to the waiata and kōrero that would have been your natural creative inheritance. Your creative language was taken before you knew what it was.
Whatever the pathway, many of us arrive at adulthood carrying the belief that creativity belongs to other people. To the talented ones. The trained or those selected as being worthy. The ones who were given time, space and encouragement.
This is one of the most damaging beliefs we can hold. Not because everyone needs to make art, but because we all carry stories that need somewhere to go — and if we have decided that creativity is not for us, we have also decided that those stories have no passage.
You are not trying to be an artist. You are trying to give your held stories somewhere to go. That is a different thing entirely.
What Taha Auaha Actually Is
Taha Auaha is the ninth dimension of Te Poutama o te Ora — our Māori wellness framework. The word auaha means creative, inventive, and generative. But in the context of healing, we understand it more specifically than that.
Taha Auaha is the dimension of the passage.
Think about it this way. Each of us carries, somewhere in our body, a library of stories. Stories from our own life — things that happened, things we lost, things we never got to say. Some stories from before our own life — from our parents, grandparents, the generations before them, carried forward in the body through what science now calls epigenetic inheritance.
These stories do not disappear because they are unspoken. They lodge in the body. They show up as anxiety, as a tightening in the chest, as the tears that come at unexpected moments, as the rage that feels too big for the situation. They wait.
Creativity is not the only way these stories can be addressed. But it is one of the most powerful — because it reaches material that words alone often cannot. When we write, draw, sing, weave, move, cook, garden, or make in any form that comes from a place of honesty, we create a pathway. We give what has been held somewhere to go.
That is Taha Auaha. Not talent. Not technique. Passage.
Why Deep Emotion Needs Creative Form
There is a simple reason why creativity works where words alone do not.
Trauma and deep emotion are not stored in the brain as stories. They are stored in the body as sensation, image, sound, and felt experience. The language centres of the brain — the parts that help us construct sentences and tell sequential narratives — are among the most disrupted by intense emotional experience.
This is why people who have been through difficult things often say: I cannot explain it. I don’t have the words. It just lives in me.
Creativity bypasses the need for words. It invites the body to speak in its own language — through image, sound, movement, texture, or form. In doing so, it reaches the material that ordinary conversation cannot always access.
This is also why, when people create from a place of truth, they sometimes feel things they did not expect. A wave of grief. An unexpected release. A sense of something completing. That is the passage opening. That is Taha Auaha at work.
The Stories We Carry Are Not Only Ours
One of the things I find most remarkable about recent science is what it tells us about inherited trauma. Researchers studying the children and grandchildren of survivors, of war refugees, of indigenous peoples whose cultures were suppressed — they are finding measurable biological traces of that ancestral experience in the bodies of descendants who were never there.
This is not a metaphor. It is biology. The body inherits what the ancestors could not fully process.
For many of our whānau — for Māori, Pasifika, and other peoples whose whakapapa carries the weight of colonisation — this research names something that has been felt but rarely said aloud. The grief in your body is not always your own grief. The fear is not always your own fear. The silence you carry may have been learned across generations, in conditions where speaking was not safe.
Here is what moves me about Taha Auaha in this context.
When you create from a place of deep truth — when you write the poem your grandmother could not write, or paint the grief your father carried without words, or sing the song your people were forbidden to sing — speak the mother tongue denied your own mother – you are not only doing something for yourself. You are doing something for the whole lineage.
The creative act becomes an act of intergenerational healing. You give passage not only to your own held story, but to the stories that were passed to you.
When we reveal our creativity, we give passage to all the narratives we have held — brought through from epigenetics, upbringing, and environmental conditioning.
This Is Not About Being Good At It
I want to come back to this, because the resistance to creativity is strong and it is almost always rooted in the same place: the belief that creative expression requires competence.
It does not.
Art therapist Shaun McNiff has spent decades working with people who do not consider themselves creative. His work consistently shows that the healing power of creative expression has nothing to do with artistic skill. It has everything to do with honesty.
A drawing that is clumsy but true is more therapeutically powerful than a polished piece that conceals. A poem that is rough around the edges but comes from the gut carries more passion than a technically perfect poem that says nothing real.
In our framework, we do not ask people to be creative. We ask people to be honest in some form that is more than words. That might be:
• Writing — anything from a sentence to a full piece
• Drawing or painting — without expectation of product
• Singing — even alone, quietly, or without a tune
• Making — weaving, knitting, cooking, gardening, building, crafting
• Telling — story, kōrero, spoken word
• Being in te Taiao — the environment as a creative partner
The form is not what matters. What matters is whether something held is being permitted to move.
A Word About Tūpuna and Creative Inheritance
In te Ao Māori, creativity has never been understood as individual achievement. It has always been understood as participation in the creative lineage of one’s people, in relationship with one’s tūpuna, in the ongoing conversation between the living and the dead.
When a kairaranga weaves, she does not weave alone. She weaves with all the women who taught her, and all the women who taught them. The pattern she creates has a genealogy.
When a poet writes, she writes with all the voices that have shaped the words she knows. Even the words themselves carry whakapapa — histories of usage, transmission, and meaning.
Understanding creativity this way changes everything about how we approach it. It removes the pressure of individual originality and replaces it with something much more sustaining: the sense that we are participating in something larger than ourselves. That our creative voice is part of a conversation that began long before us and will continue long after.
For those of us who feel separated from our creative heritage — through colonisation, cultural loss, or family disruption — this reframing can itself be healing. You do not need to have been raised with access to all your ancestral creative traditions to participate in them. You only need to begin, in whatever form is available to you, and trust that the lineage will meet you there.
How to Begin — Right Now, Without Waiting
If this is resonating with you, I want to offer something very simple.
Do not wait for the right time, right materials, right inspiration, or the right level of skill. Those conditions will not arrive on their own.
Begin here:
Pick up something — a pen, a pencil, your phone’s notes app. Write one true sentence about something you are carrying. Not a beautiful sentence. A true one.
That is enough for today. That is Taha Auaha.
Tomorrow, you might write two sentences. Or draw one line. Or hum something under your breath that has been waiting in your throat.
The channel opens with use. The more you give your held stories permission to move — in whatever form — the more passage becomes possible.
Here is the thing about the passage: once it opens, it not only releases what was painful. It also releases what was beautiful. The joy that was suppressed. The delight that was dismissed. The wonder that was too vulnerable to show.
Taha Auaha gives passage to all of it.
Te Ara Whakamua — The Path Forward
In the Te Poutama o te Ora framework, Taha Auaha sits as the ninth Pou — the integrating dimension that draws from and gives expression to all others. If you have been working through the other dimensions of your wellness — attending to your body, your relationships, your spirit, your finances, your identity — Taha Auaha is where you bring all of that to form.
It is the dimension that says: what has this journey opened in you? What can you now express that you could not before? What story is ready to find its passage?
The Steps 1–3 programme for Taha Auaha — Creativity – The Passage of Freedom — will guide you through a 7-day creative awareness process, goal setting, routine building, and the 9-day creative intensification that builds the kaha to sustain your creative practice even when resistance arises.
But before the programme, before the framework, before the steps — there is just this:
Your stories matter. Your voice matters. The things you are carrying need somewhere to go.
Taha Auaha opens the passage.
Ko tōu reo, ko tōu māia. Your voice is your courage.
He mihi
This blog is part of the Te Poutama o te Ora weekly series exploring each of the nine dimensions of wellness. If this has resonated, share it with someone who might need to hear it. And, if you are ready to begin, pick up your pen.
Ngā mihi nui,
Ruku I’Anson
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Further reading: Taha Auaha Academic Article | Steps 1–3 Taha Auaha Creativity the Passage of Freedom Programme | Te Poutama o te Ora Framework Overview
The Whakapapa of a Wound series traced a wound from childhood through to the next generation — from the child at the washing basket to the Tamariki asking why they cannot go home. But there is a place the series did not reach. A place before the washing basket. Before the child draws her first breath. Before the question is even possible.
This piece goes there.
It is not a prescription. I do not offer it as the right way or the only way. I offer it as a reflection of what our tūpuna understood, of what colonisation took from us when it severed that understanding, and of what one whānau found when they tried, imperfectly and deliberately, to live by a different set of values. Take what fits. Leave what doesn’t. But know that what is described here is possible — because it was lived.
Te Tapu o te Whare Tangata
In te ao Māori, the whare tangata — the womb, literally the house of the person — is among the most Tapu spaces in existence.
Not Tapu as a rule to follow.
Tapu as a statement of reality: this space is sacred because of what it is and what it does. It is the threshold between the spiritual world and this one.
It is where a person crosses from te Pō — the realm of potential — into te Ao Mārama, the world of light.
Everything that our tūpuna built around pregnancy was built to protect that threshold. The karakia. The rāhui on certain foods and activities. The role of the kuia in accompanying the hapū wāhine. The expectations placed on the tāne. The community’s responsibility is to hold the space around the mother.
None of this was superstition.
It was a complete system of understanding that said: what happens in and around this space matters enormously, because a person is being formed here, and that person will carry whatever they are formed in.
Our tūpuna understood, long before science had language for it, that the pēpi is not passive.
The child forming in the whare tangata is absorbing. Learning. Being calibrated by the quality of the field they are developing in. The spiritual, emotional, relational, and physical environment of the mother and the father is the first curriculum the child ever receives.
“The womb is not a waiting room. It is the first classroom. And what is taught there is taught before the child has any choice in the matter.”
Two Worlds
Let me show you two versions of the same moment. The arrival of new life. One held as it was meant to be held. One adrift from that knowing.
The First World — What Was
When a young wāhine in the traditional world discovered she was hapū, the community moved around her before she had to ask. The kuia came. Not to congratulate her in the modern sense, but to begin the work of preparation — because preparation was understood as protection.
She was told what her body now was. She was told what the tāne’s role was — that his spiritual state was not separate from the child’s formation, that how he carried himself in this season mattered. She was given karakia. She was guided away from certain foods, certain places, certain people — not arbitrarily, but because the knowledge of generations said: these things interfere with what is happening in that Tapu space.
There was no alcohol. There were no substances that opened spiritual portals without the protection of a tohunga and a held container. The understanding was clear: the veil between worlds is already thin when life is forming. You do not open it further without knowing how to close it. And you do not expose the pēpī — who has no defences, no whakapapa knowledge, no spiritual protection of their own yet — to what comes through.
The child arrived at a community that had been preparing for them. Into a relationship that had been spiritually readied. Into a field of intention.
The Second World — What Is
Hine is nineteen. She did not plan to become hapū. There was no kuia. There was no preparation. There was a relationship that was passionate and volatile and held together by the kind of intensity that the previous series called a trauma bond — two people drawn together by the familiar shape of each other’s wounds.
There was alcohol on the night the child was conceived. There were substances used in the weeks that followed, before she knew she was pregnant. There were raised voices and slammed doors and the silences that follow violence. Her nervous system, already calibrated toward threat from her own childhood, was running at high alert through the first trimester.
Nobody told her that her body was Tapu. Nobody told him that his spiritual state mattered. Nobody told either of them that the child forming in that field was absorbing all of it — the chemistry, the cortisol, the spiritual disruption of substances used without ceremony or protection, the ambient violence that the pēpi’s developing nervous system was already beginning to map as the shape of the world.
Hine loved her baby. That is true, and it matters. But love, without knowledge, without preparation, without the structures that used to hold this threshold, is not always enough to protect what needs protecting.
What the Science Is Beginning to Name
Epigenetic research is now confirming what Te Ao Māori has always held. The environment of the womb — chemical, emotional, relational, spiritual — shapes the developing child in ways that persist across a lifetime and can transfer across generations.
We know that maternal stress during pregnancy alters the calibration of the infant’s stress response system — the same HPA axis dysregulation we explored in the earlier series, present before birth (Yehuda & Lehrner, 2018). We know that prenatal alcohol and substance exposure produces epigenetic changes in the developing brain, affecting gene expression in systems governing emotion regulation, impulse control, and stress reactivity (Balaraman et al., 2013). We know that exposure to family violence during pregnancy is associated with measurable changes in infant cortisol patterns, detectable in the first weeks of life (Moog et al., 2016).
And — crucially — we now know that the father’s biological state matters too. Paternal stress, substance use, and trauma history leave epigenetic marks on sperm that transfer to the child at conception (Rodgers et al., 2015). This is not a metaphor. Both parents are present in the child’s biology before the child exists.
Our tūpuna knew this without the laboratory. The Tapu placed on both the wāhine and the tāne during pregnancy was not an arbitrary restriction. It was a scientifically coherent system of protection, grounded in generations of careful observation about what children carried and why.
“The science is catching up to the whakapapa. Both are saying the same thing: what surrounds the child before birth shapes who the child becomes after it.”
What We Lost When We Forgot
Colonisation did not only take land and language. It took the knowledge systems that governed how life was brought into the world.
When kuia were removed from their communities, the transmission of pregnancy knowledge was severed. When the tohunga were marginalised and their practices criminalised, the spiritual framework that held the whare tangata as Tapu was dismantled.
When whānau were urbanised and disconnected from whenua and each other, the community structures that once wrapped around a hapū wāhine dissolved.
Into that vacuum came a different set of messages. That pregnancy is a private medical event managed by a system rather than a communal spiritual one held by whānau. That alcohol and substances are recreational choices without spiritual consequence. That the tāne’s role begins at birth, not at conception.
That children are individuals arriving into a neutral world, rather than spiritual beings crossing a threshold that requires preparation from everyone around them. The absence of the kuia or koroua means indigenous knowledge about childbearing falls to parents who are already disconnected from that whakapapa.
For some, those children become a commodity, a source of income. A career choice made by a thirteen-year-old who, after speaking with her friends at school, said she didn’t need to work at all. Had never been told what a child is, or what it costs — spiritually, relationally, physically — to bring one into the world with integrity.
That thirteen-year-old was not broken. She was uninstructed. The knowledge that should have been hers had been taken two or three generations before she was born. She was living in the vacuum that colonisation created, reaching for what the system offered in the place of what the kuia would have given.
One Model That Worked — A Lived Reflection
This story is not a prescription. I tell it because it is true, and because true things — lived from the inside rather than prescribed from above — are sometimes more useful than theory.
When our children were born, my husband and I did not have access to all the traditional knowledge that would have surrounded that threshold. Being Māori, I was not guided by kuia in the way our tūpuna would have been. I was navigating, like so many of my generation, in the space between two worlds — carrying fragments of what we knew, trying to piece together something intentional from what remained. I consumed every book about pregnancy and child parenting I could find. I turned to Western methods as the only message that was available at the time.
But we knew some things. We knew that bringing a child into the world was a life choice — that came with responsibility and must be accepted fully or not at all. I also learned from my upbringing that I didn’t want to repeat those patterns and that our children (like all parents) would have the best chance we could give them.
Alcohol abuse, substance use and violence were not in spaces during pregnancy or our children’s upbringing. It meant sometimes we didn’t have my family over, where alcohol might be consumed. It caused isolation and still does to this day.
Our children’s environment mattered — not because we were rigid about form, but because we understood that a child’s identity is built in part from the stability of what they can see around them. Two parents, working, parenting, managing daily life, and school schedules. Not perfectly — we had heated discussions, as all people do — but those discussions were worked through, not in violence, drugs or alcohol. Arguments were followed by repair so our children could see that adults can resolve issues in responsible ways.
The child’s nervous system learned: things get hard sometimes, and we come back…in a safe way…and what love looks like in practice.
We knew that violence — of any kind, for any reason, especially after alcohol — was not acceptable in the space where our children were growing. Not because we were morally superior. But because we had both seen what violence does to a child’s nervous system. I had witnessed this in my own family…and chose, deliberately, not to pass it on.
“We did not have all the knowledge our tūpuna had. But we had enough, and we were deliberate with what we had.”
Our children are, as I sometimes say with a mixture of pride and wonder, unicorns. As teenagers, they didn’t drink or take drugs and were often ridiculed by their schoolmates because of this. Today, they are both professionals, both in their younger years and looking forward to their own parenting experiences when they choose to start families.
They are unicorns because of the field they were formed in — before their first breath and in every ordinary day that followed — told them that they were worth protecting. Their lives were sacred. The choices you make about how to bring children into the world and how to raise them are among the most significant choices a person ever makes.
That message was not delivered in a single conversation. It was delivered in ten thousand small moments. Intentional teaching, responsible drinking, responsible behaviours and consequences. In the spiritual intentionality with which their arrival was received. In being told, in ways both direct and ambient, that they were taonga — persons who had crossed the threshold and deserved to be held with care on this side of it.
What We Can Begin to Restore
I am not suggesting we can simply return to a pre-colonial world. We cannot, and attempting to do so without acknowledging the complexity of where we now stand would be its own kind of dishonesty.
But I do believe we can restore the understanding. The knowledge that the whare tangata is Tapu. Both parents carry spiritual and biological responsibility for the child they are forming. That preparation — spiritual, relational, physical — is not optional but essential. Those substances do not belong in that sacred space, not because they are morally wrong in all contexts, but because they open thresholds that the pēpī cannot be protected from. That violence is not a relationship style — it is a spiritual violation of the most Tapu environment a child will ever inhabit.
That knowledge does not require a return to a specific cultural form. It requires a return to the understanding beneath the form. That understanding is available to us — through our kaumātua, through our tohunga, through the research that is finally finding language for what our tūpuna already knew, and through the lived testimony of those who tried to hold it differently and found that it worked.
The young wāhine who is hapū right now, who has never been told that her body is Tapu — she deserves to know.
The young tāne who does not understand that his spiritual state matters before his child is born — he deserves to know.
Not as a lecture. Not as a programme delivered by a system that caused the disconnection in the first place. As a story. From someone who lived it and who knows what it grew.
“The knowledge was not destroyed. It was interrupted – and what was interrupted can, in the right conditions, begin again.”
Before the First Breath
The Whakapapa of a Wound series asked: how does a wound travel through generations? This companion piece asks the earlier question: what protected us from the wound before we forgot how to protect ourselves?
The answer is not complicated, even though restoring it is.
We knew that life was sacred. We knew that the threshold between worlds required preparation and protection. We knew that the child arriving was already present in some form before they were visible, and that what surrounded that arriving mattered.
We forgot because we were made to forget.
We can remember. Not all at once, and not perfectly. But enough.
One whānau at a time. One deliberate choice at a time. One child was received into a field of intention rather than chaos, of knowledge rather than vacancy, of love that was prepared rather than accidental.
Before the first breath, there is already something forming.
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.
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
02
When Love Became a Debt – Epigenetics, parentification, and the biology of not being enough — what the body learns and carries forward
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
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:
Taha Whakapapa
Relational & ancestral wellness — our connections across time and lineage
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
Taha Wairua
Spiritual wellness — our relationship with the sacred, with meaning, and with worth beyond performance
Taha Hinengaro
Mental & emotional wellness — the mind that holds the story and the heart that feels it
Taha Tinana
Physical wellness — the body that holds the history the mind has tried to forget
Taha Whānau
Relational wellness — the quality and integrity of our connections with others
Taha Kai
Puku wellness (Gut Health) — food that is nurturing and sustains our bodies, intentional eating and autophagy
Taha Pūtea
Financial wellness — resource, security, and freedom from material constraint
Taha Matihiko
Digital & informational wellness — navigating the modern world with clarity and agency
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.
The most recommended and well-researched type of therapy overall for any issue is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).
If you’ve tried CBT and feel it’s not for you, or you’re curious about other types here’s the most recommended type of therapy for your issue:
Anxiety
Exposure Therapy
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Depression
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is the gold standard for depression.
Eating Disorders
Dialectical Behavioural Therapy
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Family Therapy
Stress/Burnout/General Overwhelm
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Solutions-focused brief therapy
Trauma/PTSD
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing)
Relationships
Emotionally Focused Therapy
Gottman Method Couples Therapy
Substance use / addictions
Motivational Interviewing
Neurodiversity
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
Coaching based approaches
Psychoeducation
Read on to learn more about each of these therapy types.
Most therapists use a mix of these therapy types and most therapies are designed to suit a wide range of concerns. Because everyone is different, if a particular approach resonates with you, it’s worth exploring even if it’s not listed as the “standard” treatment for your concern. If you want to follow what the research suggests is most effective, the reality is: you don’t need to choose a type of therapy.
So how do I pick the right therapist or counsellor?
For decades, researchers in psychology have consistently found that what matters more than the type of therapy you choose, is the relationship you have with your therapist. In fact, it’s one of the strongest predictors of successful outcomes (Flückiger et al. 2018). Meanwhile, the differences in outcomes across types of therapy tends to be relatively small.
The psychology world calls this the: Therapeutic Alliance
What is the therapeutic alliance? It’s how safe, understood, and supported you feel with your therapist.
How do you know if your therapist or counsellor is “the one”?
What matters most is how you feel with them. Can you fully be yourself with your therapist? Do you feel like your therapist has your best interests in mind at all times?
Do you feel:
Open
Accepted for who you are
Respected in your values
If you don’t feel this right away, it’s important to remember that trust and openness take time to build in any relationship, including with your therapist. If you don’t feel it right away that’s okay, it’s natural. Therapy is a vulnerable environment and it may take a few sessions to build that connection.
It might help to ask yourself: “Do I like who my counsellor is and what they believe in?”
Can you imagine:
Building trust with them over time
One day feeling able to tell them anything
Expressing your true feelings honestly
I’m unsure about my therapist or counsellor
Every relationship has its ups and downs, it can take time to figure things out.
As a counsellor, I do my best to maintain that therapeutic alliance but there could be times where I unknowingly get it wrong. Everyone is different, and sometimes things I say may not land the way I intended. That’s why, from the get-go, I encourage my clients to let me know if something doesn’t feel right and I promise to not take it personally. If you didn’t like something I said, or you want to change the direction of our sessions, I want to know. Being open about this helps me support you better and leads to better outcomes.
If therapy isn’t going how you hoped, it’s okay to say that. Your therapist or counsellor wants to know, and these conversations are a normal part of the process.
But if the same issues keep coming up and nothing changes, it might be a sign to look for a better fit. Finding the right therapist isn’t always easy, you may need to try out a few before you find “the one.” Look at it this way, you wouldn’t stop eating out after one bad meal at a new restaurant, would you? It may take you a few tries before you find your favourite place.
What are the different types of therapy
As you read these descriptions of the types of therapy you may notice many overlapping ideas or themes. This is because many therapy types build on one another and have been adapted over time to focus on specific goals or beliefs. Also please note, there are many more types out there beyond this list.
What is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)?
Core Idea: Take control by changing how you think = Change how you feel and act
Our thoughts are patterns of habit. CBT is about identifying unhelpful thoughts and behaviours to break the cycle. Check out this video explaining the common cognitive distortions you might unknowingly be falling into: 9 Cognitive Distortions that can Cause Anxiety and Depression
What is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)?
Core Idea: Psychological suffering is often caused by trying to control or avoid internal experiences.
Feeling like you can’t keep up with the rat race? Use ACT to learn to notice the rollercoaster of feelings from daily life without fighting them or getting stuck in them. Make space for them, let them pass and maybe even develop a different outlook on life. Learn more with this video: Values vs Goals – By Dr. Russ Harris
Or check out this interesting metaphor on the theory behind it:
Core Idea: Your comfort zone can grow by facing your fears.
You break fears into small, manageable steps and gradually work through them, starting with situations that feel easier and building up over time. This reduces avoidance and helps retrain your brain to respond with less fear in situations that once felt overwhelming.
What is Family Therapy?
Core Idea: Problems don’t just exist within one person, developing a functioning family system creates a better life for all.
Family therapy helps family members get on the same page, improve communication and connection, resolve conflict and identify unhelpful interaction patterns. For young people with eating disorders, it uses the family as part of the support system, rather than placing responsibility on one person to manage recovery alone.
Core Idea: Shift away from talking about the problem to figuring out solutions
Instead of talking about your problems in depth, your counsellor asks questions that help you identify your strengths, what’s already working, and what you want your future to look like. Together, you build small, practical steps toward change.
What is EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing)?
Core Idea: Trauma symptoms happen when memories get “stuck” in the nervous system without proper processing.
While recalling traumatic events, EMDR uses bilateral stimulation (side-to-side eye movements, tapping, or tones) to engage both brain hemispheres, similar to REM sleep, which helps process stuck traumatic memories
Core Idea: Relationship problems are usually about unmet emotional needs and attachment fears.
Access the deeper emotions underlying your reactions in a safe place. Then learn to respond to your partner with more openness, emotional accessibility and connection.
It works to:
Identify negative interaction cycles
Explore deeper emotions underneath conflict
Strengthen emotional bonding and safety
What is Gottman Method Couples Therapy?
Core Idea: Healthy relationships are built on specific habits, while unhealthy ones have predictable patterns of breakdown.
Learn about love and develop skills through small actionable changes to build a healthy relationship based on Gottman’s core tenets. One major tenet says that couples require five times more positive interactions than negative, as negative emotions hurt a relationship more than positive ones heal.
Core Idea: Change is most effective when it comes from your own motivation and choice.
You are the expert. The counsellor acts as a guide, helping you explore your motivation and commitment to change, clarify your goals, and strengthen your confidence in making those changes. Check out this video to learn more: Lifting the Burden in Motivational Interviewing
What is Coaching?
Core Idea: Achieve your goals with structured support and ongoing accountability.
Coaching is more action-oriented with less emphasis on mental wellbeing compared to counselling. It often uses techniques similar to solution-focused counselling to support productivity, confidence, and performance.
What is Psychoeducation?
Core Idea: Understanding what’s happening makes it easier to cope and make changes.
Psychoeducation involves your counsellor explaining the biological or evolutionary processes behind your thoughts, emotions, and behaviours. While many counsellors may not list psychoeducation as a specific speciality, it is commonly used alongside other approaches to help clients better understand themselves.
For example, you may have heard of the fight, flight or freeze responses, but have you heard of the fawn response? Check out this video to learn more: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn: What’s Yours?
Ready to book a session with a counsellor? Find the right counsellor for you here:
Flückiger, C., Del Re, A. C., Wampold, B. E., & Horvath, A. O. (2018). The alliance in adult psychotherapy: A meta-analytic synthesis. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 316.
