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.
There is no single answer to that question. But there is a wider truth that deserves to be said plainly, with care and without blame:
The pathway into state care is rarely just ‘individual choices.’ It is history. It is stress carried in the body across generations. It is poverty, violence, addiction, disconnection from culture and identity — and the way those experiences can become biological patterns that travel forward, quietly, long before anyone understands what is happening.
I appreciate how difficult a subject this is. For me, given my current life stage and work, it is time to say it plainly.
The Reality in Numbers
Statistics matter because they show patterns. Māori Tamariki remain significantly over-represented in care and protection pathways in Aotearoa.
Tamariki Māori in care (per 1,000) – 9 in 1,000
Compared with fewer than 2 per 1,000 non-Māori (Oranga Tamariki, 2023)
Reporting rate (per 1,000) – 79 per 1,000
Māori Tamariki reported to Oranga Tamariki, versus 23 per 1,000 non-Māori
Intergenerational pattern – ~70%
Of Māori parents who experienced care themselves report subsequent involvement of their own children with Oranga Tamariki (The Spinoff, 2025)
These figures are not evidence of individual failure. They reflect children repeatedly confronting the same unanswered questions: why home was not safe, why their parents struggled, and why the patterns kept returning despite everyone’s best intentions.
“The statistics don’t tell us who these children are. They tell us how far back the wound goes — and how urgently the healing is needed.”
What Epigenetics Tells Us (In Plain Language)
DNA is like a recipe book. Epigenetics doesn’t rewrite the recipes — but it can change which ones get read more often, and how strongly they show up. The recipes themselves don’t change. But what gets consumed, and how frequently, can.
Research on intergenerational trauma describes how severe stress can shape biological systems — especially the systems managing stress hormones and immune function — and how some of those effects may be carried forward across generations through epigenetic mechanisms (Yehuda & Lehrner, 2018).
Research involving Indigenous populations who experienced forced child removal — including residential schools in Canada and the Stolen Generations in Australia — has found altered patterns in specific genes involved in stress regulation and neurodevelopment (Matheson & Anisman, 2019). These findings align with what Māori have always understood: trauma is carried through whakapapa, not confined to individual memory.
This does not mean trauma is destiny. It means the body adapts to what it repeatedly experiences — and those adaptations can echo. However, what can echo forward can, with the right conditions, echo differently.
Why Age Matters: The Developmental Windows
Trauma doesn’t land the same way at every stage of life. The timing matters enormously.
• Around age 7: Children develop narrative memory and causal reasoning. Removal at this stage is often remembered vividly and may become woven into their identity — frequently accompanied by self-blame. The child who is separated at this age is old enough to remember, and young enough to decide it must be their fault.
• Ages 10–11: A sensitive period in which trauma exposure is associated with heightened amygdala reactivity and altered threat perception (Dennison et al., 2016). For children in care, repeated placement changes and multiple social workers during this window intensify the stress load at exactly the moment the brain is most responsive to it.
• Ages 14–16: The prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for decision-making, impulse control, and emotional regulation — is undergoing critical development. Trauma during this period is associated with a significantly higher likelihood of substance use, self-harm, and contact with the justice system (Layne et al., 2014). What looks like ‘bad choices’ at this age is very often a developing brain doing its best under impossible conditions.
• At 18, Many young people age out of care. The outcomes — housing instability, lower employment, higher mortality — reflect not personal failure but the consequence of a system that offers transition without foundation (Independent Children’s Monitor, 2024).
Biology is not the destination. But it helps explain why the journey looks the way it does.
‘Why Can’t They Just Stop?’
This is the hardest question children carry. Why can’t Mum stop drinking? Why can’t Dad control his anger? Why does the violence keep coming back?
Sometimes the honest answer is this: because the parent is carrying unhealed trauma, and their nervous system is living as if danger is always near. They may be self-medicating a body that won’t settle. They may be reacting from survival wiring rather than choice. They may be repeating what was done to them, not because they want to, but because no one ever showed them anything else.
That does not excuse harm. Children deserved — always — to be safe. But it explains why shame, punishment, and ‘just try harder’ approaches so often fail. Because they don’t touch what the body is doing, and the body is where the wound lives.
“When we ask why parents can’t just stop, we are asking the wrong question. The right question is: what would it take to make stopping possible?”
The Oranga Tamariki Paradox
Removal can be necessary. Sometimes it is the only way to keep a child safe in the short term, and that safety matters absolutely.
But separation itself is a stress event — particularly for younger children — and can introduce additional biological consequences even when it is the right call (Widom et al., 2015). The Independent Children’s Monitor has noted repeatedly that parental desire for reunification is often unsupported by sufficient trauma-informed, culturally grounded services (Independent Children’s Monitor, 2023). Without addressing the parents’ own trauma history, reunification is unlikely to hold.
This is the paradox: the system intervenes to protect the child from the parent’s wound, but rarely has the resources to heal the wound itself. So the wound waits, and the pattern continues.
What Te Poutama o te Ora Offers
Te Poutama o te Ora was not developed from a textbook. It emerged from lived experience — from Matapihi Kirihou, from the plastic windows, from the long reckoning with what poverty, colonisation, and accumulated silence do to people across generations.
Its nine-dimensional structure is designed precisely for the complexity of what we are describing here. Not a single intervention for a single symptom, but a sustained, multi-domain journey of healing across the whole of a person’s life.
• Taha Tuakiri (Identity Wellness): Placed at the centre of TPO because you cannot heal the body without healing identity. For Tamariki in care, and for the parents who lost them, reconnecting with who you are — your whakapapa, your Reo, your belonging — is not supplementary to healing. It is the foundation.
• Taha Whakapapa (Relational & Ancestral Wellness): Acknowledging that the wound has a lineage, and that lineage also carries the seeds of a different story. What travels through whakapapa can include healing as well as harm.
• Taha Tinana (Physical Wellness): Attending to the body that has been braced, that has self-medicated, that is holding decades of unprocessed experience. The body is not separate from the healing.
• Taha Hinengaro (Mental & Emotional Wellness): Building the capacity to understand and name what happened, without shame. Psychoeducation is a form of dignity.
• Taha Wairua (Spiritual Wellness): Reconnecting with a sense of worth and belonging that is not conditional on performance, on sobriety, on having got everything right. A worth that predates the wound.
TPO’s cyclical structure reflects what the science also tells us: epigenetic modification doesn’t happen through a single intervention. It happens through sustained, consistent, culturally safe change over time. The Maramataka reminds us that healing has seasons. This is a long cultivation, not a quick fix.
A Word to Parents and Whānau in the Care System
If you are a parent navigating Oranga Tamariki involvement, this is not written to blame you.
Many parents in these pathways are carrying layers: poverty, violence, addiction, unmanaged grief, disconnection from culture, and often their own experiences of being unsafe as children. The wound you are carrying was very likely given to you before you had the capacity to refuse it.
If your body reacts fast, shuts down, numbs out, or reaches for something that gives temporary relief — please hear this:
That does not make you a bad parent. It means your system learned survival, and survival can be unlearned when the conditions are right, and the support is real.
Healing rarely begins with judgment. It begins with support that is consistent, relational, and culturally anchored — and with steps small enough to be real.
“The biology that carried the wound can also carry the healing — when the conditions change, and when the change is sustained.”
The Real Answer — and the Hope
So — why are so many Tamariki not with their Māma and Pāpā?
Sometimes it is because safety was compromised in the home. Often it is because trauma was already at work long before that day — shaping biology, relationships, and capacity.
Sometimes it is because systems respond to harm after it is entrenched, rather than resourcing whānau before a crisis.
But the cycle is not fixed. Cultural continuity is protective — a strong cultural connection, identity, and belonging buffer against the worst effects of trauma (Chandler & Lalonde, 1998). Iwi-led initiatives that are relational and culturally grounded show genuine results.
Science increasingly affirms what Indigenous frameworks have long held: healing becomes possible when people are held in safe relationships and supported throughout their lives.
The wound has a whakapapa. So does the healing.
From plastic windows to glass. From disconnection to reconnection. From survival to a stairway.
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.
