7 Keys Creation Story
Where it Started
As the child of an alcoholic, chain smoking mother and a workaholic father during a time period where mother’s natural instincts were superseded by male doctors, to the point that breast feeding was abandoned, I grew up in an environment where there was little to no consistent palpable connection.
The current field of psychology with its Attachment and Affect Regulation Theories labels this lack of “attunement” to an infant or young child, along with other ongoing adverse child hood experiences as “Developmental Trauma”. Where the opposite, "secure attachment" occurs when there is eye to eye peaceful, present connection between mother and baby.
This history (of anxious & avoidant attachment as a child), along with my natural inclination, (as my mother told me when I was 9 that “I really understand people”), is what spurred a lifelong quest to understand “what makes people happy?” This quest was also motivated by my own deep level of discontent and sense of not enough, unloveable and other core states of defectiveness. All of this comes from and continues to create an underlying shame, that exists as a result of this lack of initial “Self” building connection. These feelings of inadequacy (no matter how successful I was in the outer world) were only enhanced by my poor choices in relationships. Core Shame with its attending “not enoughness” is always part of the mix, that ultimately needs transforming.
50 year Growth Path
My first book Express Yourself: Discover Your Inner Truth, Creative Self and the Courage to Let it Out, took me 7 years to write and was my first attempt at expressing all that I had learned and discovered up to that point. Which, I had been deeply on the growth and healing quest since the early 80s. (actually since the early 70s but I wont go into that here.) Express Yourself integrated the concepts, awareness's, tools and deep understandings that had helped me move beyond the inherent sense of inadequacy that was lodged deep within my cellular memory. That book was published in approximately 2000. When I did radio interviews for this book I had distilled what was in this book down to 4 Keys.
Antidote to the Great Disconnect
Now many years later with more life experience, trainings and working with many more people as a workshop facilitator and counselor, I have enhanced the existing keys, added more and refined it to 7 Powerful Keys. I also have come to understand that so much of the woes of our culture come from a great sense of Disconnection that I talk about in the book as “the Great Disconnect.” The Antidote to this and the keys to transformation and freedom are contained within this new book, the 7 Keys to Connection, as well as what happens in one on one work, I call TLC – Transformational Life Counseling.