Guidance Counselling

There is a man in the counselling room who does not have a drinking problem.

He is not violent. He does not drink to excess. He has not passed his father’s or grandfather’s patterns down to his children. By every visible measure, the wound has stopped. And yet — every evening, almost without thinking, he reaches for the wine glass. He cannot fully explain it. He just does.

This article is about that thread.

Not the dysfunction — which may already be healed across generations — but the residue. The quiet filament that remains when the storm has passed. And beneath that residue, a wound most of us have never been given the language to name: the colonial displacement of wai Māori.

What happens when you stop surviving your wound and start metabolising it

There is a difference between surviving a wound and metabolising it.

Surviving means the wound is still whole inside you — managed, adapted to, worked around — but fundamentally intact. Metabolising means the wound has been broken down into its components. What was useful has been kept and used for something new, and what has been released. The wound no longer exists as it was. Something else exists in its place.

This article is about that third phase. I want to begin it with a word that most healing frameworks don’t use enough: fasting.

The ‘Fasting’ comes first

How five years in the dark became Te Poutama Ora – and Imago Dei brought me front and centre

You may already be familiar with my life origins; thirty-five years in a corporate environment enabled me to build a lifestyle, from all intents and purposes…was successful. Then a life-changing event that turned that vision completely upside down. That was in 2020.

When the wound became the water.

There is a kind of harm that is very difficult to see.

Not because it is hidden. But because it has been present so long, and so completely, that it stopped looking like harm at all. It became ordinary. It became the way things are, and for many of us, what we thought of as simply ourselves.

This is what is meant by normative abuse.

It is, I want to argue, one of the most precise ways to describe what colonisation did — and continues to do — to Māori and to those who carry its inheritance, whether they know it or not.

The healing that begins the moment you stop calling the wound “just how I am”…to “I am suffering from Colonisation PTSD”

There is a suffering where you are triggered by specific acts or situations…and you really don’t know why. It is the suffering of not knowing something is wrong…but not knowing what that is…and…what am I complaining about?

Three sentences. Three exiles. And why “just get over it” is not a garden — it’s a weed strategy.

Poison ivy doesn’t announce itself.

It sits quietly along the fence line, climbs where no one is looking, and waits for the right conditions. Then it releases. The strangulation isn’t sudden — it was always there. What changes is that the conditions are finally right for it to show what it’s been doing the whole time.

Colonisation operates the same way. Most of the time it doesn’t look like colonisation. It looks like ordinary sentences — said by whānau, by colleagues, by people who mean well, sometimes by the voice in your own head.

We revisit the alignment of TPO and Te Maramataka – The Temporal Spine

There is a question I get asked when people first encounter Te Poutama Ora: why ninety days?

It’s a fair question. Most wellness programmes are structured around weeks — six weeks, eight weeks, twelve. Clean numbers. Neat calendar blocks. The kind of timeframes that fit neatly into a semester or a quarter.

Te Ara Iwa doesn’t work like that. The reason why tells you almost everything you need to know about what makes this framework different.

Let me tell you something nobody said to me during the years I spent trying to fix my mental and emotional patterns.

They were not broken.

They were responding. Accurately. Intelligently. To genuinely difficult circumstances. And the reason all the tools and techniques and positive thinking and therapy weren’t landing the way they were supposed to was not that I was unfixable or resistant or too damaged. It was because I was trying to address a downstream symptom without clearing the structural conditions that were generating it.

That is what Hinengaro Autophagy is about. Not fixing what was never broken. Metabolising what has been held for too long, in patterns that served their purpose, and building something new in their place.

Symbolic Death, Dimensional Autophagy, and Identity Transformation

Looking back over my life, I can identify seven moments that changed me permanently.

Not because they hurt.

Not because they were dramatic.

But after each one, I could never return to being the person I had been before.

When most people hear the word death, they think of physical death. Yet some of the most significant deaths we experience are symbolic. A marriage begins and exposes uncomfortable truths. A parent dies. Cancer arrives. A career disappears. A family relationship fractures. Something inside us is lost that cannot be recovered in its previous form.

The event happens once.

The transformation takes years.