Understanding Your Origin Wound with Vienna Pharaon
I'm kicking off this month with esteemed marriage and family therapist, Vienna Pharaon, you may also know her as @mindfulmft. Through social media, this newsletter, and having hosted Maybelline's mental health podcast, I'm Fine You?, I've had the opportunity to meet so many people I admire in the mental health space. I've been so warmly embraced by incredible therapists and psychologists, Vienna being one of them, and any chance I get to chat with them and share their wealth of knowledge with you all, makes me feel like I'm doing something right in the world.
Vienna takes a very thoughtful approach to healing with her first book, Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate How We Live and Love. The concept is simple: there are five basic origin wounds. You don't have to have trauma to have an origin wound, or you could have trauma as a result of an origin wound. Vienna arms us with knowledge on how these wounds keep us stuck and leads us to a place where we may be able to acknowledge, accept, and integrate the lessons from these wounds so that we can live a more fulfilling life. She also weaves through her own lived experiences along with examples from her extensive career. I think this book is a great place to start if you're just embarking on a healing journey, or if you just want to learn more about how we're impacted by our family systems. Below, Vienna and I walk through the five origin wounds, generational trauma, attachment styles, and the weaponizing of therapy speak.
Welcome, Vienna! What were you like as a child?
Vienna: Hit me in the feels on this Monday morning. There's a photo of me that really stands out, and I think it was my birthday party. I must've been turning five or six, right around the age when my parents' separation started. You can see both joy and sadness in my eyes. It's really hard for me to access the pre-divorce child. I was an adventurous little girl. I was someone who liked to use her body. I remember jumping out of my bedroom window all of the time from my dad's house and just testing my limits constantly. I'm an only child. So, I really learned how to be an individual in my play.
Yeah, there's just something about looking at photos of myself as a child that breaks my heart. Even though I would say I had a great childhood for the most part, there's something about our innocence as children and not knowing what is coming for us, the pain and the joy, all of the things. There's something so melancholic in a way about that innocence.
Vienna: It's true. I have a three-year-old son, and when my husband was three, that's when his parents divorced. When you have a child who hits certain ages, which you had an experience, there's something that's really reflective about that. So you look at this three-year-old little boy and his innocence and sweet demeanor, and just loving his parents. And to think about, oh my gosh, that was the age my husband went through something so significant, and he didn't get to see his dad as much as he wanted to. It is so heartbreaking. I think photos can really evoke some of that, too. Just like, oh my gosh, you were this tiny little human going through this thing and had no idea.
Why is there such a link between our relationship with our parents and how we show up in romantic relationships?
Vienna: Well, in the relationship with our parents, there's the good stuff, which is often what we also want to pull in our romantic relationships. Then, it's the not-so-great stuff we unconsciously pull in our relationships. When we grow up in imperfect family systems, obviously, some people have it better than others. Parents get things wrong. They say the wrong thing. They disappoint us. They let us down. We don't feel like we're a priority to them. They keep a family secret from us. They are controlling of us, etc. The list goes on and on and on. So when we have that irresolution in our families, we are on this quest to resolve it in our adult lives. I've always said that unwanted patterns are pain's way of grabbing our attention. So when you think about the unwanted patterns in your adult life today, like I keep pursuing the emotionally unavailable person. I keep saying, I'm going to set this boundary, but I can never set this boundary. I hate how I show up in conflict, but every time I get into conflict, I keep showing up the same way.
You declare these things about yourself, but you can't seem to shake it no matter how hard you try. It's an arrow pointing to the irresolution from the past. Our family of origin is so linked and deeply connected to the unwanted patterns playing out in our adult lives. It's not out to get us; it's asking us to turn back to something that hasn't been properly acknowledged, honored, addressed, or healed and asking us to do something different. In my work, that really requires us to process something very differently than we have. Most of the time, when we're kiddos and something happens, we're not like eight and saying, "Okay. I really need to grieve this, mom, or I really need to process this, dad." You get through it, you survive it, and then you go on with your life.
Rarely do we turn around and come back to these ruptures in our lives where something painful happens, something that shifts the trajectory of the way that we relate to our worthiness or the way that we relate to trust, or the way that we relate to safety and security in life. We just move on with life. So, this work requires us to look back at our family of origin: the family systems we grew up in. We don't need to stay there forever. It's like a bobblehead. We hang out there for a moment, and we come back out into the present day. But we have to look there to understand the origins of these ruptures because otherwise, life is just going to keep playing out in patterns for us.
How do we avoid blaming our families? I remember being in that phase for a while where I just wanted to point the finger at my parents. But once you become an adult, a huge part of the work is accepting that, okay, now this is actually on me. I think, for me, it was such a game changer when I could really accept that my parents did the best they could with what they had. Now, it's up to me to do the work.
Vienna: There is a level of emotional maturity involved in this work, and some people want to blame their parents for everything. Then, there are those who want to protect their parents from everything, where they're like, no, they sacrificed so much. I couldn't possibly; they were wonderful.
I can also veer into that territory as well because I have immigrant parents. So it's both of that: you did everything wrong, but also you sacrificed so much for me.
Vienna: It is such a common narrative for immigrant families. It is the sacrifice. “I would feel so guilty for not being grateful.” I think we have to find some middle ground in that space, which is that my work is not about throwing parents under the bus. My work is not about pointing the finger and placing blame. I remind people, and this is not an excuse. Context is really important. It will not be the thing that excuses the behavior, but when we remember that our parents or the adults in our lives were once tiny humans in an imperfect and flawed family system themselves, that can shift something for us. Again, I don't need anybody to excuse anybody's behavior. Still, we have to find an emotionally mature way to say, that hurt or that was a big betrayal. That there is an acknowledgment without me needing to bash you, destroy you, or hate you.
That doesn't have to be a part of the work. Some people might hate somebody for the rest of their lives, but it doesn't have to be part of the work. We're trying to strike this balance, in general, walking through life, reminding ourselves that everyone, our partners, our dear friends, even our boss, and our colleagues, were all tiny humans who went through some stuff. When you think about those photos that we were talking about earlier on, you're like, all these little itty-bitties, these sweet little angels. And then some stuff went down and shifted the trajectory of their lives in really significant ways.
Again, I don't need to use context to excuse anything, but that is a much nicer way for us to be able to say, "I acknowledge it. I'm going to honor what my experience is without needing to protect you or get lost with your stuff. I'm going to stay connected to what it is that I need to identify, what it is that I need to acknowledge for myself, and what it is that I need to honor for myself. Many people will get tripped up or stuck either blaming or finding the distractions where they're like, 'Well, they did so much better than their parents did for them." Or even what you said, “They did so much for us,” and, yes, we can acknowledge that without that invalidating what your experience was.
At what age did you come to realize that your parents' divorce was traumatic for you?
Vienna: I was in denial for so long. I was in grad school to become a marriage and family therapist, and I was still saying that my parent's divorce didn't affect me. I was training to become the person who talks about this stuff. My protective strategies were in play. Now, why I couldn't really acknowledge it was that I had never learned how to feel. I didn't know that there was space for me to feel. It's a big part of my story, which is that my parents were crashing and burning. They had so much chaos. So much going on that for me, as a tiny little human, I was like, there's no room for me to have stuff going on. So I pretended like I was fine. I pretended I was unaffected. I pretended I was okay. So, I started going through the world that way as a little girl and then as a woman.
It wasn't until I was going through the ending of a relationship in my mid-to-late 20s that the denial couldn't withstand what was going on anymore. The guy I was dating, with whom I could really see a future, his ex came back into the picture. She wanted to be back with him, and he was trying to decide whether to stay in the relationship with me or get back in the relationship with her. I remember immediately saying, "I totally understand. This must be so hard for you. I'm fine. Take your time.” I'm pretending to be the cool girl, like I was unaffected by it. I'm conversing with a friend of mine, and it clicks in. And here's the thing: We can know things. We talk about this all the time. You can know all this stuff. You could read the textbooks; you could be a therapist. If it's still not in the body, it's just living up here in the mind.
It really clicked in a different way. There's me flying under the radar, pretending to be fine—the role I have lived my entire life. I mustered up the courage to call him and say, "Okay. I'm going to pull myself out of this equation. It doesn't feel respectful. I don't feel good about this. It does actually feel hurtful." That was the last time I spoke to him. It was not this mic drop moment, “Oh my God, I feel so empowered.” It was this moment, and I think that this is a really important piece for people to hear, is that oftentimes in these moments of expansion comes a moment of contraction afterwards.
So when we do something different for the first time, that one might label as healing, which I would say that was a moment where I was stepping off of my path and doing things differently than I had ever done before in the name of honoring and respecting myself, in the name of saying, I am affected. That was a healing moment for me. But the healing moment was not a celebration. I was on the bathroom floor crying for however long. It was like, "What did I just do? Oh my gosh." And still wanting the guy to come back and say, "I made the mistake, and I should have chosen you." At that moment, I got to have the experience that I could say that out loud, and I could survive. I could say that out loud, and life still went on.
Again, we all know that when you say something out loud, life is likely going to go on afterward. But I had to live it. I remember being like, okay, this feels awful at the moment because this relationship that I was really hoping would continue is not going to continue. I didn't hear from the person again. After that moment, it became much easier for me to start expressing things. It was like, okay, I did it once. Now I can do it again. Wow. Look at that. I still learn about the impact and moments today where you're like, "Oh, wow. That does have a pretty significant grip on me. Got it."
The work is never over. So this leads us to your book you wrote in 2023, The Origins of You: How Breaking Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love, inspired by your own story and the work you've done with clients. Origin wounds are different from trauma?
Vienna: It doesn't have to require trauma for it to be a wound. Using that language felt important to me because a lot of times, I've noticed with clients or people I have a chance to chat with, where they're like, “Well, I don't have any trauma, so I don't get to feel bad. And whether it's true or not doesn't matter. When people hear the word trauma, the associations with it can feel big. They're like, ”my story's not big." So what winds up happening is people invalidate and they dishonor their stories, and they're like, "Well, I don't belong in this conversation. I had a pretty decent life." For me, the human experience is imperfect and flawed, and all of our stories belong in this conversation. They have to. When people go into this place of wound comparison, so-and-so had it way worse than I did, it's the thing that says, "Well, no one abused me, so I shouldn't complain about the fact that my mom was working all of the time, but she was the breadwinner. And so I just am grateful that I had a really nice life."
And it's like, no, let us slow down, please. Let us connect to the fact that you felt deprioritized as a child. We don't have to label it anything. I use that word just as a framework for the book. We think about wounds more in a physical sense as kids, where we scrape our knees and we get a scab. This is the emotional wound. Something opens up the wound, and a scab heals over, but then we bump up against that wound from time to time throughout life. I want people to think about these emotional wounds, our experiences that are sometimes really obvious.
Wounds can be traumatic, of course, but they are also sometimes really subtle and something that a person might want to throw away—they might just invalidate and diminish in some way. This book is about honoring all of our experiences and not making a mountain out of a molehill. That's not the goal, but to honor what the molehill is for, what it is. So, that was the hope and intention with that.
In the book, you identify five origin wounds. Can you take us through them?
Vienna: The five wounds are worthiness, belonging, prioritization, trust, and safety. You might have all five, you might have one, you might have a few. These labels are not meant to put anybody in a box. They are just for us to have a framework to work with. These five felt like they really covered the human experience when it comes to pain and trauma. A lot of these are pretty straightforward. Don't overthink it.
It's about the way that someone internalizes the experience. For example, a father left and abandoned his children. For one person, they might internalize that experience as a worthiness wound. You left me because I am not good enough for you to stick around. The next person could internalize that same exact experience as a trust wound. You left, and now I can't trust the people in my life to stick around. So, I just want to name that upfront: it's how you've internalized the experience.
Worthiness wound: All of my perfectionists, pleasers, peacekeepers, and comic relief out there, it's you, likely, who maybe grew up in environments where there was conditional love. If I perform well, if I please, if I do X, Y, and Z, then I get love, connection, attachment, validation, affirmation, peace in the house, whatever it may be. So you learn that your perfect A's, your hat trick on the field, your ability to make mom laugh or be happy, fill in the blank, is going to get you an outcome of connectivity, etc. There are a lot of things that can contribute to it—statements of harm. Maybe you grew up with somebody who said you're unworthy, and that's a nicer way to say it than you're a piece of shit, or you're worthless, you are not going to amount to anything. People hear those things growing up. So those things will absolutely cause somebody to question their worth and value as a human.
Belonging wound: Within the context of a family, it is about belonging in the family without needing to adapt or change yourself to "fit in." Often, families were like, this is what we do. This is how we believe, this is how we feel, and this is how we think. If you're not like us, you are on the outside. So there are beautiful things that families do for a sense of belonging. Maybe they have traditions, Tuesday taco night, or they do something every year before Christmas. For many folks, there's a lot of control or intolerance that happens. So, if you believe differently than we believe, you don't get to be here. Or if you don't dress the way I want you to dress and you don't look the way we should be presenting to the outside world, then I'm cutting you off, or I'm punishing you in some way.
Dr. Gabor Maté talks about the trade of authenticity for attachment. When attachment is threatened, we will always trade authenticity because attachment is our lifeline. Listen, there are so many layers. I get further into it in the book, but society plays a huge part in this, too—media, teachers, etc. But I look at it generally through the lens of the family system.
Prioritization wound: If you felt deprioritized as a child. Maybe it's a parent's addiction, or a workaholic, or constant chaos and fighting in the house, or a sibling who had a mental health challenge where the family's focus was on them instead of you. I talked about this one guy in the book; his alias is Andre, and he loves his mom and respects her deeply. Single mama works multiple jobs, but they only get to go to church on Sundays and then brunch afterwards, and then she goes to her next shift, and that's the only time they get. He wanted to protect her so much, but she is trying to prioritize me by working so much and trying to give me the life and rationalizing all that. But what was really true was that he wanted to be prioritized through time spent with her.
Trust wound: Infidelity. You might've heard a narrative growing up: never trust a man. Some of those wide-reaching sayings. Family secrets. One you had to maybe keep, or one that was kept from you. We have parents who've taken out credit cards in their child's names, and they ruin their credit. Gambling away your college education fund, there's a lot of things. Sometimes, on the more subtle side, is just a parent consistently telling you something and not following through. There are big and subtle trust ruptures.
Safety wound: Oftentimes, we're talking about the presence of abuse. It's a really tender wound, and we have to touch on all the different types of abuse that can happen and talk about negligence, recklessness, and scary situations. There are scenarios in which no one was doing anything to try to harm you, but you just happened to be home with your grandma, and she had a stroke. These are events that make us feel unsafe or insecure in the world.
I like the way they're framed. My best friend is a therapist, and I remember when she first suggested I look into a trauma-informed therapist. I was like, "Oh, but I haven't experienced trauma." When you hear trauma, you immediately think of rape, physical abuse, X, Y, Z, all of these serious experiences.
Also, generational trauma exists, and as I've gone deeper in the work, I see how some of these things that I feel don't feel like they belong to me. I feel like I'm carrying other people's pain, whether it's my mother's, her mother's, and so on. I think the origin wounds are just a really great framework to help people start to peel back the layers of what might be going on with them.
Vienna: Beautifully said, oftentimes, we are carrying the pain from those who came before us. We all are carrying the pain of our lineage. But when it's not resolved, it gets transferred. And that can be overwhelming because we don't always know everybody's story or don't know the complete story. We might know some high-level stuff, but sometimes it can feel like, why is this here? I can't think of anything that makes sense, or nothing stands out to me. And might that be someone else's irresolution passed to me, and now becomes my work to resolve. The beauty of the work is that we don't have to know everything that happened. It's the acknowledgment of what it is we're experiencing. Sort of tending to an indescribable pain that doesn't have to be like, oh, in 1873… We don't need to know all of that. We just somatically are connecting to something and honoring it that way.
I think it also feels challenging for women as they're preparing to be mothers. What if you haven't healed all of your childhood stuff yet? Will you just pass that along to your child? Do you ever come up against that with clients?
Vienna: Sure. And myself, too. You'll never be fully resolved with nothing passing on. So lowering some of our standards around that is important. The fact that we are even asking that question sets us miles ahead. The beauty, the awareness of, I have stuff and I know this stuff will blend with their stuff, and I want to be as aware of that and as mindful of that as possible. That is one of the greatest gifts that we give our children. I think our ability to take ownership, accountability, and responsibility and apologize when it's appropriate. It's not about walking through life as a perfect parent. It's about walking through parenthood, willing to repair as quickly as possible. That's the game changer. It's not that you need never to do something that upsets your child, that you will never deprioritize them, or that you will never say something that makes them question their worth.
Obviously, I would love to avoid that as much as possible. The moment those things happen, then our job becomes race to repair. To become the emotionally mature parent to say, "Hey, I said something that I would like to talk to you about," or "I lost my temper and I want to talk to you about it." It's like, I'm sorry for X, Y, Z. I think that's something that so many of us have missed. When I talk to clients, we often get stuck because I just want my parents to acknowledge me. It'll be decades later, 30 years later, 40 years later. I just want you to acknowledge what I had to go through. They have a really hard time doing that.
Something is up with that generation—they're not into the acknowledgment or the apology.
Vienna: Well, shame is really big for that generation. I think we have a different conversation around shame. It doesn't mean we don't experience it. Instead of becoming defensive, there is that muscle of emotional maturity that says, you know what? I don't have to plummet just because I screwed up. I don't have to go down a shame spiral just because I said the wrong thing. I think when people can't acknowledge someone, it's because they are in self-protection. So, to get to a place as either a parent or someone thinking about becoming a parent is to get to a place where you don't have to self-protect over connecting with your child's experience.
That takes practice for us as human beings to say, "Okay. I am flawed. I did say the thing." But we have got to hold ourselves up with enough regard to say, "Right. I'm human." Not, I'm going to excuse my behavior. I'm human, and I'm going to take ownership. I'm human, and I'm going to take responsibility. I'm human, and I'm going to take accountability. That's the beauty of it. So, to all those considering becoming a parent, you don't have to have it all resolved. I would say, get to a place where, especially with your children, you're able to repair, like a wholehearted, authentic repair, and to be able to open yourself up enough where you don't need to self-protect in those moments.
Therapy can be very cost-prohibitive, especially in these times. Do you have advice for people who let's say, pick up your book, and then want to continue unpacking their stuff but they can't afford therapy?
Vienna: I know it is one of the great challenges that we face because we have a mental health crisis. We don't have enough mental health clinicians for those who need it. So that's a problem. We also don't have enough good ones. And I say that very respectfully, but I think there's a reality to it as well, in any career and profession.
On the most basic level, we have books, podcasts, and free resources out there that people should take advantage of. When I was in grad school, I saw clients. The rates ranged from $2 to $20 per session. Now, granted, I was a student and not exceptional, but it was something. We might be able to look around universities that train clinicians and often have programs where the rate is low. You can look to see if people have sliding-scale opportunities. Sometimes, we do group work or workshops that are low-cost. I'm doing one in May around loneliness, and it'll be $47. I have exceptional experts coming in to present, to be in conversation with me, to answer questions. Look for things like that, even though it might not be one-on-one, but still look for things that are not a crazy ticket price but can still be incredibly valuable and get us on some type of a path. I wish I had a solution for it. I don't. This is a much bigger conversation and discussion— because insurance companies don't support it. It's systemic.
What are your thoughts on the healing culture that is going on right now? It seems like this was fueled by the pandemic, but everyone wants to heal, which is in and of itself really great that more people want to learn about themselves. But then we've also seen this dark side of it, which is people weaponizing therapy language.
Vienna: This has many pitfalls, from people using language they don't understand and pretending to be experts on it to people who bypass the work but know the right things to say. Will people eventually see through it? Yes, I think so.
But at what cost? After they do more harm? After they make millions? After what? And that part, I think, is really scary. Also, I think sometimes well-intentioned people who go down a path of continuing to want to heal, and they'll read every book and take every course, and you're like, "Whoa. Slow down." You will be on this forever journey of learning up here [in the mind] but never somatically addressing something. I have people who are sometimes like, I've taken every course, done every this and done that, and still nothing changes. Okay, it's because you're living up here and not letting the work drop in. Finding the practitioner or the modality that makes sense to you, as opposed to 50,000 things, is generally more supportive than just becoming a student in that space. But I get the allure. I do because people sell you something that says you will be fixed if you do this. If you ever see that, go the opposite direction.
Don't let anybody tell you if you just do this, you will be fixed and solved. That is not what any "healer" would ever say. You are on this journey, and there are as many different modalities of this work as human beings on this planet. So much of this work is finding a trusted, safe individual in your life where you can move through the hard stuff differently. Whether that's a therapist, a partner, a dear friend, or whomever, there is no one way. Now, I think we should all be looking at our families for sure, but there is no one way to get to the other side, heal. So when somebody says, "This is the way, I can heal your trauma in four days."
I really relate to what you were saying earlier, though. I'm the person who reads all the books, and a big part of my story is that I had never been in a serious relationship before. So there was this part of me that was like, okay, well, if I learn all that I need to learn about being in a relationship, it just felt like I'm missing some piece to the puzzle that will get me the relationship. I've taken some pretty significant breaks from therapy a year, 18 months because I can get so wrapped up in the thinking and the analyzing. I'm like, I need to just exist and not overthink things.
Vienna: And feel. I think that's as simple as it sounds. We think, we think, we try to track it, we try to map it—and I always say, when stuck, breathe more. When we're stuck in life, there is something that we haven't grieved, we haven't felt, we haven't been deeply connected to, that needs our attention. So when we exist too much in our heads, we miss a huge component. That's not to say the head is not a valuable asset. It is—but it's being overused. We got to drop into that belly. We got to drop into the body.
For sure. Now, I have a great therapist who helps me check in and drop into my body, which has been so impactful. But I think a lot about how popular Attachment Theory has become. I read Amir Levine's book Attached around 2016. I was an editor at BAZAAR, and after I finished it, I went to work, and I was like, we need to talk about this because nobody is talking about it. Cut to a couple of months ago when I was home in New York, I see Attached is being sold at the register at Target. That blows my mind. However, I went through a period where I was also pathologizing my attachment style. Well, I'm anxious attachment, and if something didn't work out, it's because he has an avoidant attachment. I think a lot of people are doing that right now. I was able to course correct and realized it's not an identity to wear. Again, it's a framework that helps you understand how you show up in relationships. It was valuable when I first read it because I said, "Oh, I'm not crazy. This is why I'm having those thoughts."
Vienna: I love what you're saying is not the over-identification of, imagine just being in conflict with your partner and being like, "Well, that's your prioritization wound." Yes. It gives us language. It's meant to be connective. It's meant to open something up. It's not meant to be like, oh, well, that's because your identity is this, and it's unchangeable. All of this stuff is changeable. That's the beauty of it. We are malleable. We can shift from operating in a way that generally is more avoidant or more anxious to a secure place. We can move to security in our relationships. And so I think sometimes it pigeonholes people, and sometimes they wear it with pride. I'm this. I've got that. So I'm glad that you recognized it.
And imagine if your partner dismissed you by saying, that's just your anxiety. And how painful and disconnected that would be, as opposed to using these things as invitations and opportunities for curiosity to come forward. That's the beauty. When we can use language properly or understand a framework properly, it becomes connective as opposed to disconnected, shaming, blaming, or pathologizing, as you said.
Final question: what's bringing you joy right now?
Vienna: My boy is bringing me so much joy right now. He is just so precious. His speech continues to develop. There are so many moments of being his mom that are so touching. We listened to the Moana soundtrack, and there's this part in one of the songs where the grandmother is speaking to Moana, and we get on the floor together, and he just holds my face, and he closes his eyes, and he's feeling deeply as grandma is giving this speech. It's too much. It cracks me wide open. It's one of those experiences that, for as long as we've been here, people will say, until you experience it, it's just something you can't describe. But it brings me so much joy to get to walk this life with him, to guide him and lead him in whatever ways for however long I can.