Imagine this: you are a big beautiful kite with a long kite tail and, throughout your life, things happen where — developmentally — you didn’t get the care, attention, tools/skills, etc that would be ideal for you to develop into the best version of you. If you are like most people, you may have also encountered bumps/hiccups along the way: anything from well-meaning parents who used shame or criticism to “inspire” you, to being bullied by a peer, to internalizing rules/guidelines like “I need to be perfect to be loved” or “you get what you get and you don’t get upset.” Or perhaps there were developmental traumas bigger than bumps or hiccups that left an impact on you: an accident, a divorce, death of a loved one, an assault, etc.
Sometimes we are not fully aware of the knots in our kite tails — they may have happened before we were too young to remember, or may have been too stressful to manage at the time, causing our body-minds repress them. These incidents — if not fully addressed at the time — can result in unmetabolized material that form knots in your kite tail and keep you from being able to soar as high, or as smoothly as you have the potential to do.
When I work with clients, sometimes we start at your childhood and work towards the present. Other times we start at the tail of the kite — at whatever most recent incident is impacting you. Either way, I hope this kite analogy helps you see that you are not broken…you are not “doomed” to be this way or that way because of your experiences (childhood or otherwise). We all have knots in our tails that can impact our flight paths, maybe even cause us to crash into the ground at times, but we can locate those knots, tend to them, liberate our tails, and take back our lives!