My Journey

     Growing up, family wasn’t always a safe community for me. I am the youngest of 3 kids. My middle brother is 4 years older than me, and my oldest brother is 6 years older than me. With the 2 boys close together in age, I feel like my mother was probably spread a little thin by the time I came around. My father was more of a hinderance than a help, and he’s expressed that much to me before. His first words to me when I told him I was expecting my daughter was, “good thing you have someone like Kris (my husband, to help me raise a child) not like me.” The truth of those words hit me like a brick of emotion, straight to the gut.

     My body has put up protective walls which leave me unable to remember a lot of my childhood and adolescence. I do remember a lot of harsh words and yelling. I remember my dad holding my brother by the scruff of his shirt and my mom yelling at my dad not to punch him in the face since my brother had braces at the time. I know that we had a live-in nanny for the first 4 years or so of my life. I remember my parents took me and my brothers to an auction and asked us which sheep and goats we wanted to buy. Some were pregnant and had their babies on our farm and we had fun naming them and playing with them. One afternoon, months later, we arrived home from school. I remember looking out the car window and I couldn’t see any of the animals in the field where they usually lived. I felt the tight clench of panic deep in my gut that began to spread throughout my body as I frantically looked around the property. As the car turned around to park, my eyes fell upon the most gruesome sight they had seen thus far. All the animals were hanging, skinned in our garage. My parents didn’t give us any warning that this was their plan all along. I remember being overcome with emotion that was shrugged off because “that’s life.” These, unfortunately, are the predominant memories of my childhood. I know we also had some good times, but those memories are much harder to recall.

     My mother started training racehorses when I was around 4 or 5. This took up her whole life as animals need care 7 days a week. At that time, the racetrack didn’t offer any childcare like they do now. I would spend my mornings sitting in the tack room rolling bandages and just hanging out until I was old enough to start doing more chores. I’m not even sure if staying home was an option at that time, I don’t know if my dad was home. My oldest brother never came to the track with us but maybe he was old enough to look after himself at that point. I had a couple friends growing up at the track who were older than me and I remember staying at their places lots over the summers. I also remember being sent to a weeklong horse camp multiple times throughout the summers since I was 6. At the time, it seemed so great that my parents were able to send me to camp but now I see it as another way to get me out of their hair, so to speak. The core beliefs of unworthiness and abandonment had started to settle into my being from an early age. I remember one time when I was only 6 or 7 years old, we had a half day at school and after a couple hours of waiting I decided to walk to my brother’s school down the road to see if he was still there. He was, so we started to walk home together. About halfway home our mom spotted us in her old beige pickup truck. As a way of saying sorry she let us ride the rest of the way home in the box of the truck after apologizing for not being there to pick us up hours before. That wasn’t the first or last time she would be late to collect us from school.

     My mother had gotten cancer at some point after I was born but before I was old enough to understand or remember it. She had an ovary removed and was in remission for many years. Unfortunately, her cancer came back and was caught too late the second time. My mother passed away when I was fourteen years old. I remember going to some of her chemo sessions with her. I remember her losing her hair and eyebrows, she would wear head scarfs or wigs at times. We never talked about the fact that she might not beat cancer this time. My parents decided to send my brothers and I to Greece to stay with family and promised that they would come join us there. I can’t remember exactly how long we were there before they came, but at least a couple weeks. I remember being so excited that I was going to see my mom again and when the elevator doors opened it felt like my heart dropped. Her stomach was severely bloated, and she actually looked very sick for the first time, in my opinion. She stayed there with us for maybe a week or so, and then begged my dad to take her home. Again, we never talked about the fact that she was dying, and no one prepared me for it. They made us stay in Greece while my dad and mom left back to Canada and it was only a day or two later that we were told she passed.

     My family in Greece didn’t speak much English and we didn’t speak much Greek. No one was there to console my brothers and I and we didn’t talk about it between ourselves. I still have never had the courage to ask my brothers or father about that time in our lives and if they were as blind sighted as I was. I am still working through my own trauma from this situation as well as the earlier developmental trauma. Marijuana was my saviour; it allowed me to relax my anxieties. It was a friend who didn’t remind me of my mother and marijuana use led me to new friends who were nothing like my old ones. I met my now husband, Kris, when I was sixteen. We became serious pretty quick and moved in together by the time I was seventeen, as I was finishing high school. I got accepted into university halfway across the country and he was the one that came with me. He is the only person who came to both my high school graduation and my university graduation. We married in 2013, eight years, almost to the date, after we met. Unfortunately, my wedding was not a happy day for me because I couldn’t get over the fact that my mother was not there with me and that she had never even met Kris. I let his mom take care of all the wedding plans and I just showed up. Kris had his own amounts of developmental trauma at the time we met, neither of us were aware of the effects trauma had on our lives and our core beliefs. At the time, and for the majority of our relationship, we were definitely codependent upon each other.

     Kris is very loyal and caring and overall an amazing partner, and this is why I resented him for a lot of our relationship even though I was addicted to having him near me. Those feelings of unworthiness and abandonment that I didn’t know were lurking deep within my core were pulling my choices in two separate directions. On the one side, I had a hard time feeling fully committed to my husband and our relationship. I would act out in sabotaging ways, being distant and cold at times. We avoided hard conversations as well as eye contact. Marijuana was both of our primary coping mechanism and allowed us to live easily together for so many years, two broken pieces trying to make up for each others’ shortcomings. The thought of separation crossed my mind many times, thinking that I could find happiness with someone else. The extreme fear of abandonment always prevented me from suggesting a separation though. I was scared to be alone but more so, I was scared to be the one to do the abandoning. I couldn’t bring myself to cause the type of world-shattering pain that I felt would come to Kris if I left him and our relationship. Therefore, we stayed in this place of distant togetherness year after year.  

     My healing journey began around the end of 2018 as I began to get curious about spirituality and specifically animal communication. My friend had told me about an animal communicator she was using, so I decided to give it a try with my horse, Vinnie. Through this communication, she was able to tell me things about myself and my own emotions and grief. She also performed some energy healing on Vinnie at the end of the session which I believe worked on me as well. My horse, who I have had in my life since 2008 is a great teacher and mirror. His anxiety was mirroring my anxiety. His dysfunctional breathing was mirroring my dysfunctional breathing. I can still judge how I’m truly feeling within my body on a given day by assessing how Vinnie is when I’m with him. This first animal communication session lead me down a rabbit hole of researching all types of spiritual teachings. My family was never religious, and I never understood how there could be so many different religions when we are all just human beings from a common ancestor. The concepts of spirituality and divine consciousness really resonated with me and lead me to try alternative healing modalities.

     Another animal communication in 2021 from a different lady for a pony I had bought, Alice, lead me to work with this lady for my own healing. Our sessions were primarily hypnosis-based therapy, where I was able to explore some past memories and alter them, to allow myself to feel safer at the time. Slowly, my perceptions of the world and my experience in the world were able to shift. I was able to experience a deeper level of connection with others and with my authentic self. Good things started happening with my work and life. Kris and I had the job security now to finally buy a home. Kris and I had always said we didn’t want to have kids even though our family often pressured and questioned us about it. Once I started healing, the prospect of starting a family became a lot more appealing. I began to manifest a life where having kids could be a possibility. I remember the lady I was working with in the hypnotherapy sessions asked me what would allow me to experience more happiness in my life. I jokingly said something along the lines of a job where I could continue to make good money (because I had been working in film which was great pay but very long hours) but not have to be stuck at work for so many hours. Not soon after, a job opportunity came up where I could work primarily from home but still be paid for a full 60 hours per week. I had no experience in administration but I was no longer weighed down with the extreme feelings of unworthiness so I asked my boss if he would consider me for the position and he gave me a shot.

     This new position allowed me so much freedom to continue studying new modalities and further my healing. I was able to spend more time in nature, rekindling my love of hiking and kayaking. One of my fears surrounding the decision not to have children had to do with the chance that cancer could be hereditary, and I could pass away while my children were still young or worse yet, pass it along to them. As I got more used to voicing my concerns, I expressed this to my doctor, and she was able to get some testing done for me to see the likelihood of cancer in my genetics. Kris and I were starting to have more meaningful conversations and we both decided that now finally felt like a good time to start a family. My doctor suggested I stay off birth control for 3 months before trying to conceive and the first actual ‘try’ lead to a pregnancy. During pregnancy and after having our daughter, Kris and I became connected on a much deeper level. As soon as I found out I was pregnant, I stopped using marijuana and this allowed me to address the anxiety and depression I was hiding more fully, which furthered my healing process. Many couples tend to have a hard time in these stages of starting a family, but the work Kris and I did on ourselves beforehand was invaluable. We were better equipped to handle stress and the lack of sleep. We felt more united to work together as a team and communicate with ease.

     Now that our daughter is two, her personality is shinning through a lot more. I recently heard someone say it’s not ‘terrible twos’ it’s ‘triggering twos’ and I completely resonate with this. Even with all the work I’ve done on myself and all the learning I’ve done, I still get triggered at times. The hardest for me, at the beginning, was having someone so fully dependent on me. My childhood had been a lot of figuring things out on my own. I don’t think I was given undivided attention as often as I may have required it. Something about my daughter clinging to me and crying if I put her down or handed her to someone else caused my nervous system to jump into overdrive and immediately elicited a stress response. My jaw would become tight, and I would clench my teeth as well as a tightness clenched in my gut. A feeling of annoyance and frustration would start to flood my system, and I would have to really focus on breathing techniques to help regulate my nervous system. Now that my daughter can talk, I find it very interesting that when she plays with her toys or sees someone upset the first thing she associates with sadness is that the toy/ person/ animal must be, “missing their mama.” To me this seems like some type of generational or ancestorial trauma.

     Even though I hadn’t ever talked to her about the fact that my mom passed away when I was young, or that I still may have some residual trauma from this, she had always associated grief to be due to missing a maternal figure. I can’t stress enough how important it is to become aware of your own core beliefs and morals before having children or when you are a new parent. This is why this area is where I want to work towards specializing in. New parents, expecting parents, even people interested in getting into foster care or adoption need to be aware of the primary caregiver’s impact on new, developing minds. More research is being done on nonverbal communication, and the results are astounding. If someone is nonverbal, either from being too young to talk or else as seen in nonverbal autism, alternate ways of communication become much more heightened. Telepathy, the ability to communicate with someone without speaking or using body language has been researched and documented and is common among nonverbal autistic people. I truly believe that our children can understand and absorb a lot more than might seem possible. This is especially true when parents are fighting constantly around them. The parents may naively think that the baby is too young to understand but I believe their unconscious minds still register and store these unhealthy experiences.

     One of the hardest changes to my lifestyle I made after my daughter was born was eliminating screen time for the majority of her first 2 years of life. In this day and age, cell phones are becoming an epidemic. So much of our attention gets hijacked by scrolling through social media to the point where it becomes an addiction that so many people don’t realize they have. I understood the importance of maintaining eye contact with my daughter and attuning to her when she was awake. Even before she could do much other than eat sleep and poop, I made sure that she had my full attention when she was awake. I tried my best to make sure she was never battling with a phone or television for my attention. As she got older and I started working from home again, and I did have to take some calls or answer some emails I seen how quickly my daughter became addicted to my cell phone. She knew that it must be something very important and desirable if I always had it near me, or I always gave it attention if it made a noise. Now that she is over two years old, we do allow her to watch around 1.5 hours of television a day. She gave up napping before she turned two, so this is her relaxation time because she stays very busy the rest of the day. Also, I believe in allowing things in moderation. If I never let her watch tv or eat sugar when its up to her she will probably overindulge or get a negative association to these things. I believe it’s more important to take the time to teach our kids about why too much of something can be bad instead of just denying it all together. Our children need to learn how to think for themselves and make their own healthy and safe choices, but communication is the key to every relationship.

     My daughter has been so healing not only to myself and my husband but to the rest of our families as well. She has an abundance of love to share, and she is so much fun to be around. She amazes us with her intelligence and ability to pickup on things as well as her courage. She loves giving and receiving hugs which is something I have always been hesitant about for as long as I can remember. I don’t usually hug my family when I see them, or they are leaving but my daughter makes sure she gets hugs from them which has led the rest of us to open up and allow more embraces from each other. Another important area that my daughter has helped me to grow has been with setting boundaries. Before becoming a parent, I would have been considered a huge people pleaser. I would say yes to everything that was asked of me even if I really wanted to say no or if it would greatly inconvenience me. With my daughter, I understand how important being firm on boundaries is, so I have been able to practice setting them as well as following through. I can see the benefits of having these boundaries and structure in a child’s life, so it hasn’t been too hard to set them. On the other hand, I have always had a hard time setting boundaries with other family members, especially my father. When the boundaries affect the well being of my daughter, they became a lot easier to make and enforce. Through practicing setting and holding boundaries that affect her, I have grown in my own capacity to hold boundaries for the benefit of myself as well.

     So far, my life has been such an interesting journey that keeps getting better and better. I am in the process of starting up my own wellness business to help others turn their lives around for the better as well. As I said previously, I am very passionate about the impact that primary caregivers have on children so I would love to work with people in this position to help them become the best versions of themselves and in turn help the children they will be caring for. Regulating your nervous system through techniques like breathwork or movement can be very beneficial in stressful or overwhelming situations. Increasing your capacity to be with and process certain emotions will enable you to regulate your nervous system. We will all be triggered at some point or another, no one is perfect. It’s how you act during and after being triggered that can make a huge difference in your life as well as the lives of everyone around you. Education on how our body and nervous systems function and the different stages of nervous system activation are so important to equip yourself with in order to be able to live a healthy and harmonious life and enjoy meaningful connections with the people in your life. I am still learning everyday, and I am so passionate to share this wisdom with others. Thank you for taking the time to read my story and understand the journey I am on. Much love, Athina Weiss.