When the Wound Becomes Who You Are!

Episode Title: When the Wound Becomes Who You Are

Description:

Jennifer goes deep into her own lineage in this episode — the legacy of poverty, illness, addiction, and abuse she grew up inside, and how she's spent nearly 50 years recognizing and releasing the wound identity it produced. She names the difference between trauma and identity, why the nervous system chooses what's familiar over what's freeing, and what it actually takes to release a wound identity that's been working since before you had language.

She also introduces the astrological window we are in right now — Chiron in Taurus from June 19th through September 17th, then returning in 2027 to stay through 2033 — and what it's asking of us collectively. And she introduces the trifecta — hormones, gut-brain axis, nervous system — alongside the next round of Calm in Command, a live online experience built around all three.

What you'll hear:

• The legacy groove and how it forms across generations
• Why the wound identity feels safer than freedom
• The "Larry did this to me" pattern and how to recognize it in yourself
• Jung's afternoon of life and why morning identities stop working
• The Chiron in Taurus window — why this exact moment is a calling
• Why mindset alone can't release a wound identity
• The trifecta — hormones, gut-brain, nervous system
• An invitation into Calm in Command this fall

Links:

• Get on the Calm in Command wait list 
• Book a free consultation
• Join the community

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Sick, poor, and abused. Not literally, but in every conversation. So I remember my granny, who I loved, total spitfire. People have told me the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. But she would sit at the table, picking at her lip while she drank her coffee, narrowing in on the negative. Who was sick, who was in crisis, who was having whatever kind of drama. Most of the time I didn't even know who these people were. They were distant cousins or some aunt or uncle or somebody that didn't even live near me. I didn't even know them. It mattered because that was the only story that she wanted to talk about. She couldn't talk about happy things. She couldn't even tolerate hearing about it. Our family was always in chaos. And that was the lens that she experienced the world, and it became my inheritance. It has taken me almost 50 years to see it, understand it, and to heal it. That is what I mean when I talk about the wound identity. Welcome back. I'm Jennifer Moore, licensed psychotherapist and founder of the Therapeutic Coach Approach. And I've been doing this work for almost 28 years now, sitting with high achievers who look successful on the outside, but are quietly running their lives from a story they didn't even know that was on the inside. If you've been with me through this series, then you know I've been talking about the patterns that run our lives. Below the thought, there are shadow parts, which is the identity that gets built around survival, the things that masquerade our reality. Today I'm gonna go a little deeper. Probably gonna piss some family members off if they get a hold of this. But anywho, today I'm gonna talk about what happens when the wound stops being something that happened to you and starts being who you are. Let me give you a picture. There was a legacy burden in my extended family. Poverty, illness, real things. Like they had outhouses, they picked cotton, years of alcoholism and abuse, physical, sexual, and beyond. The stories are sad, really sad, like depressingly sad. And I have so much compassion and empathy for what my family has gone through, what my mother, my grandmother, my aunts, uncles, and cousins. Life was hard. My issue is not with the trauma, because it is incredibly heartbreaking. The trauma was real. My issue is how their identities got built around that trauma and how that trauma gets passed down as an inheritance to us who may not have even lived in that experience. Because my immediate family, neither of my parents drank. There was certainly no abuse in my home. We always had food on the table, but that identity that my brother, my mother brought into the home, the identity that my father brought into the home from their own experience, that becomes the inheritance. That becomes the legacy burden that I had to bear. And maybe you were having to bear, and you don't even realize that you're doing it. That at every family gathering where my granny was, she would start with, Well, did you hear about what was happening to so and so and such and such? Did you hear about what's going on over there? Because the chaos of the bloodline was a kind of identity, a familiar groove, a way of belonging, so to speak. And I grew up in that groove. And I'm sure you have heard of Mel Robbins' let them theory. She's famous for it. And yes, I'm all about let them. Let them think what they want, let them do what they want, stop trying to control other people, try stop trying to heal other people, stop trying to get them to go to therapy. They're not going to go to therapy. It's a great framework. Yes, and it has helped lots of people stop wasting time and energy on the things that they cannot change. But I want to take this one layer deeper, or maybe three layers deeper. Because those of you who grew up inside a wound identity that wasn't even ours to begin with, let them is only half the work. Yes, let my granny, let her be who she was. And as I said earlier, she was fiery. She was full of piss and vinegar, and that apple did not fall far from the tree. So I'm gonna push the envelope just a little bit. She and I did have a special connection. We had something. She respected me. I respected her. And I let her be her. She let me be me. And I've let my mother carry on the way that she has had to carry on and do what she needed to do. I let her. But that doesn't mean that I have to let that story be my story. The second half of that story is it doesn't have to be your identity, just like it doesn't have to be my identity. The people I love in my lives, they have wounds, but that doesn't have to be mine and it doesn't have to be yours. But I didn't even realize that I was doing it. Because there are blind spots, right? When you're living inside the bottle, you can't read the label because the groove that runs through that bloodline doesn't mean my feet have to stay in it. Yes, I can let them and let me become someone who's different. Let you become someone who's different. That's the work. Not to deny the wound, not to deny the trauma, because it happened. It was real. There's no question about it. The wound identity is what gets built around the wound. That's the story, the script, the lens or the perspective. It becomes the way that we carry ourselves in a room when we walk in the rest of our lives. And at some point, and this is what you may not want to hear, that identity becomes more familiar than your freedom. And your nervous system will choose what's familiar over what's freeing every single time until we make a conscious decision otherwise. It's a blind spot. It's an unconscious belief system that is running underneath everything. And you don't even know that you're inside the bottle. That's what makes it so powerful. You can see it. You can see it in other people. I certainly do. I've seen it in my own family members. I didn't realize that I was doing it myself until I recently caught myself. But I can certainly hear it whenever my clients tell a story or my friends tell a story. It's the woman who has been telling the same story about her ex-husband for 10 years. Larry did that to me. Larry said that. Larry ruined this. Every conversation always circles back to Larry. The details change. The wound doesn't. The friend who introduces herself as her diagnosis. Well, my ADHD and my anxiety and my chronic fatigue, not I'm working with or I'm dealing with, or no, it's mine, mine. It becomes who I am. It's how the entire personality is organized around a trauma that happened at 19. And now you're 47 or 48. You've accomplished great things. You're running a business. You've got a family, a beautiful family. But the story you tell, the story that's in your head, that's in your body, that walks in the room is still anchored in a story that happened when you were 19. Not saying doesn't matter. The ex-husband is real. That stuff happened. The diagnosis is real. The trauma was real. What I am saying is, does it have to be who you are now? Because at some point, continuing to live inside that wound becomes your own decision. Not a conscious one, but a decision. A pattern your nervous system keeps choosing because it's the most familiar thing. And the work is not to deny that it happened. The work is to stop letting it be the answer to who I am. Carl Young, which I've been talking about the last couple of weeks, says we cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the morning's programs. I use this a lot, especially whenever you're doing values assessments, because the values that are important in the morning of our life are no longer relevant in the afternoon. But in this sense, I want to talk about the wound identity as the morning identity. It was built when you were young, when you were forming yourself, before you had language, before you even knew what it made sense, but it protected you. It gave you a place and it told you if the world didn't feel safe that this was why. It was necessary and it actually saved you. But somewhere in the afternoon of your life, and for many of you listening today, today is the afternoon. And the wound identity stops working. It stops adapting and it stops saving you. And underneath, it's trying to be born. The wound identity says, this is who I am because of what happened to me. Your soul is calling for something else, my friend. Who am I becoming regardless of what happened to me? Let me say that again. Who am I becoming regardless of what happened to me? Are you willing to ask that second question? Not the one that's familiar and well rehearsed, that's so deeply in your nervous system and in the body. Because every cell in your body is listening to every thought you think. And that's not a metaphor, it's biology. And your cells respond to that biology. That's why the wound identity is so hard to release. Because it's been in training decades of training every cell in your body with that story, with that outcome. That's the set point. And the body doesn't just hold the trauma, it holds the identity. So I am breaking the lineage in my family, and it's not a straight line, and goodness knows it's been messy. I have pissed more people off in my family than you could shake a stick at. And still, I caught myself slipping back into that old groove two weeks ago, telling a chaos story without even noticing. I was playing the part and I was giving my power away, and I realized it, and I stopped. Mid sentence, and I felt the old pull, the familiar pleasure of the wound identity, the way it gathers attention, the way it explains, the way that things are, the way that I am. And I said, no, I'm not gonna do this anymore. I stood in my sovereign power instead of creating more chaos. Sounds simple, not easy. Hey, you gotta catch yourself. You don't even realize that you're doing it. That's the hard part, because it's a blind spot. But then to change your rhythm, to change the story, because that groove is not just in your mind, it's in your bones, it's in your blood, it's in your nervous system, in your hormones, it's in your gut, in the way that you've been wired since before you had language. And you cannot erase how you were raised, but you can stop letting it have the last word on who you are. You cannot bypass the boon, the wound, but you can stop building your entire life around it. All right, I'm gonna go back to my questions. Who would I be if I stopped being the most interesting thing about me? Who would I be if I stopped being the most interesting thing about me? Hmm. And what would I have to put down to find out? What would I have to put down or let go of if I want to find out? The wound identity is hard to release because it's been working. It's been working the whole time. It's been your co-pilot. It explains everything. It justifies your limits and it gets sympathy, gives you a story to tell. And it actually, for some people, it actually gets you a community, a whole group of people who organize around the wound that they share. When you start to release the wound, sometimes people don't want that, especially family members and or friends. So you'll lose people who have only attached to you because of that story. And yes, that is sad. There's a real grief. There's a song, Patty Griffin. I don't know if you know who Patty Griffin is. I love Patty Griffin. It's called Sweet Lorraine. It was on her first album, Living with Ghost. If you don't know her, she's an American singer-songwriter. She's fantastic. Go listen to this song. You'll get the full picture of Sweet Lorraine. Sweet Lorraine, she talks about her legacy, the legacy that she was born into. She comes from what Patty calls as a long line of drinkers and dreamers, whose businesses fail, people who sleep in the park, a father who tears through the house like a page out of out of a Bible and burns it down just to announce his arrival. A mother who is never home. And Lorraine, sweet Lorraine, she tries to leave. She starts a business. She goes to school, she gets married, she tries to have a different life than the one that she was handed to her, handed her, and her mother throws stones at her on the day that she moves out. Her father calls her a slut and a whore the night before her wedding. And then the next day he's walking her down the aisle to give her away. Yeah, it's a really sad story, but you get the picture. When you try to leave the wound identity of the family, the cruelty, the ritual, the ownership, the mother throwing stones at her when the daughter's trying to leave, that is the wound identity protecting itself. That may sound a little more dramatic than what your family has done, your family of origin, but you get the idea. There's always a way that they try to pull you back in. That's what you do whenever you're inside a groove. They throw stones, humiliate, they withhold love, they make it expensive to leave. Because your leaving doesn't change, just change your life. It exposes them. It shines a light on the fact that they could have left too, and that you have chosen a different way. And that wound is not the end of the story. It's intolerable for you to experience that wound. That's why people don't want to leave. It's hard. That groove is deep. And some people are more afraid of that freedom because they can't bear the pain. The Patty Griffith song ends with the line that gets me. I actually listened to it again today because I was thinking about this as I was preparing for this podcast. I listened to it and I cried because when she ends the song, she says something about how it gets harder to believe in magic when what came before is so very tragic. And that's the truth that sweet Lorraine had to walk through and keep moving. And it's the truth if you are still listening to this and you've tried to walk through and leave that identity. Leave that wound identity. Because that person who is successful in the boardroom, who's has the family but hasn't done the work of releasing that wound, it's still running the show. It doesn't mean that the trauma didn't happen. It doesn't mean you got to cut off the people you love. I love my family, I love my mother, I love my sisters, I love my granny fiercely, fiercely. But it does mean that you get to decide every single day that that wound is no longer the center of your story. That chaos that it was in your bloodline does not have to be your inheritance. You can release that legacy burden. It doesn't mean that you don't have ADHD or that you don't, you aren't dealing with anxiety, that you aren't dealing with something going on with your hormones. It doesn't mean that that ex-husband didn't happen, that those things didn't happen. It doesn't mean that that trauma didn't happen. It just means that you get to write a new story. That sentence at the end of the story gets to change. Yes, you could have had stones thrown at you and you get to keep walking. You could have been called names and you still get to build your own family. And that's what getting out of that groove means. It means you get to create a new reality, a new identity, but you gotta figure it out. What is the wound? Okay, so that may have been a little dramatic. And we all have some wound. And last week, so I was listening to some astrology, and I'm not an astrology guru. I know enough to be dangerous, but I do like to listen to Pam Gregory. I love her. She's this sweet little lady in London, and she gives an overview. And I listen to her her YouTube at least once a week or every other week. So last Tuesday, I was listening. As I was cooking dinner, I'm listening and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is all the stuff that's going on. There is this energetic shift going on. All these things are popping up in my life. Why is all this coming to fruition? And she explains it all. So Chiron went into Taurus on Friday, this past Friday, which I think was the night, 19th. So that's what's all many of us are experiencing it. And so Chiron is technologically, technically an asteroid, not a planet, but in astrology, Chiron represents the original wound, the one your soul came in, Carrie. And every person has Chiron somewhere in the chart. See where it looks, see where that Chiron sits in your chart, which house, what the wound is calling for you to turn into leadership, not to erase the wound, not to spiritual bypass it, but to turn it into a gift. The wound becomes your work, but it becomes your gift. You have to be willing to look at it. All right. So we have three months that we get to do a test run and see how we're going to do this. It ends on September 17th, pulls back into Aries turning before returning to Taurus. So right now there is a window, a three-month window, a rehearsal, a preview for the next eight years. Are you going to turn that into leadership and say, I'm going to heal this, say I'm safe, I am worthy, I am solid, or are you going to continue living inside that wound? The gift Taurus offers us when we do the work is to build capacity from the inside out. This is why the wound identity work is so important right now. It's in your body, it's in your bones, it's in your blood. This is not a mental script. It's stored in your nervous system, in your hormones, in your gut, in your bones, in your breath. It's in your cells. So I don't know about you in astrology. Again, I know enough to be dangerous, but for the next three months, we're doing a rehearsal for the next eight years. And we are being called individually and collectively to stop dying on the sword of what happened to us, to stop letting the wound be the center of the story, to turn that wound into leadership that only we can offer. And yeah, it's work, but this is what your soul came here to do. All right. So moving on to some a little bit lighter stuff because I'm I'm doing this work right here with you. I'm looking at it. I'm catching myself. And this is not just a mindset shift. This is not, oh, I'm gonna journal my way out of this, I'm gonna affirm my way out of this. This is you got to dig in and do some real work and re-pattern. Look at how you're how this is affecting your hormones, the gut brain axis, your nervous system. I call it the trifecta. That's where the work is done. It's on all three levels simultaneously because you can do one at a time, but then you're piecemealing. Your hormones are the chemistry holding the patterns in place. When estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone and cortisol are all dysregulated, you don't have the biological buffer to do the work. So you stay stuck. That's when the anxiety gets provoked and to a next level. You go from zero to a hundred in six seconds flat. Your gut brain axis is the somatic memory of what you've been digesting for a lifetime, literally and figuratively, the food, the experiences, the unspoken truth. Your gut is your second brain and it remembers everything. Your nervous system is the wiring for your survival and what is built in that wound identity in the first place, that's got to be repatterned, rewired at the root. So whenever you do this one at a time, you're only gonna get a short-term relief. You've got to do all three at the same time. I'm not just talking about like a weekend retreat. I'm talking about doing some deeper work. That is the work that Chiron and Taurus is calling for us. So I'm launching my next round of common command. It'll be my third launch. It's been very successful. I've had tons of fun, lots of people involved in the program, and we are seeing such huge transitions and shifts and healing at the root. So July 20th and 21st, I'll have more details to come, but it's if you're ready to stop those wounds from running the show and living in that life and start building a life on sovereignty and looking at the trifecta of the hormones and the gut brain and the nervous system and how all three are working together. That three-way that you've been in and you didn't even know that you were in. Well, I'll have details soon. So I hope that this has helped you or maybe somebody that you know to maybe have a little wake-up call that I don't want to live this anymore. I don't want this chaos in my bloodline to be my inheritance. The diagnosis is not who I am. It's something that I'm learning to deal with. That anxiety can be healed, that trauma, it is what happened to you, but it doesn't have to be who you are. It doesn't have to be get the last word. Your success does not have to cost you your piece. If this resonates with you, forward it on to somebody else. Subscribe, like, send me a put me a review. That would be most helpful. I'll put all the show notes in the links below before you go. If something landed for you today, don't let that just be information. Let's use it as transformation, integration into your body. Ask yourself, what's one thing I heard today that my body already knows is true? Feel it. Allow your body to experience it. This is where the magic happens. If this episode added value to your life, the best way to support the show is simple. Share it. Forward it to somebody who needs permission to go a little bit deeper. Just start showing up. Subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you're feeling really generous, write me a raving review. It means everything. All the links and resources are in the show notes below. And I'll see you next week. Until then, you remember just how incredibly powerful you are. Namaste.