Overcoming her own early abandonment trauma shaped Irina’s approach as a Compassionate Inquiry® Practitioner, energy therapist and educator, dedicated to raising trauma awareness and passionate about trauma-informed education and personal transformation. An experienced Qigong Practitioner, Irina integrates movement into her therapeutic practice to support her clients’ nervous system regulation, emotional balance, physical vitality and everyday well-being.
This short edited excerpt of Irina’s interview explores repeating trauma wounds and gifts in the lives of three consecutive generations of women in her family. Hear her full interview on The Gifts of Trauma.
My intention for this conversation is to inspire people so they have more hope, more self-love, more regulation and more trust in life.
I’m a positive person. I love breathing in life and being present in the here and now. This may seem strange when you hear my story, but it’s evidence of the solid foundation that’s built when a child is seen, heard and loved for their first eight years of life. What happens after that can be traumatic, as it was in my case, but their resilience will support them.
When it comes to my life path, for you to understand me, we need to go back several generations. I am from Soviet Russia and its culture coloured my traumas. My grandmother was born into a rich family that was exterminated during the Russian Revolution, leaving her alone and homeless in a big city at a very young age.
In Russian families it’s taboo to discuss what happened with previous generations, so I don’t know a lot. But Compassionate Inquiry helped me take the little I knew and puzzle it together. During World War II, my Grandmother found herself alone once again, raising 3 children while working at a bread factory. One of her children died so she was left with 2 girls, my mother and my aunt. At the end of the war, the politics of the times resulted in her imprisonment. Her youngest daughter, my mom, was sent to an orphanage, and my aunt was sent to a labour community. Something happened to my mom in the orphanage, I don’t know what it was. She died 13 years later from systemic lupus, an autoimmune condition which I sense, through the awareness I gained from Compassionate Inquiry and Gabor, began in the orphanage.
At some point my grandma came home from prison and took her girls back. I don’t know any more about their years growing up. When I was born, my mom and dad had a relationship. They couldn’t marry because of grandma’s imprisonment. It was a cultural and political issue, and if they had married, my dad would have lost his job. When I arrived, dad left my mom, so I entered the world with a huge abandonment trauma. My grandma and mom were my only family. Their lives were difficult. I felt their grief, their sadness and their struggle in my body. But the care they gave in my early years helped me sustain myself through everything I‘ve gone through in life since then.
My ancestral history is a repeating pattern of women raising children on their own, which was quite common in the Soviet Union after the war. My grandmother raised my mother and aunt on her own, and my mother raised me, with my grandma’s help.
I was 12 when my mom died. Initially I was angry with her, an illogical, but very human response. For 10 years I lived in a beautiful world of shutdown, completely numbed, or disconnected, which helped me survive. I never took drugs, drank alcohol or smoked and I couldn’t understand why people did, as I was so comfortably numbed that I didn’t need it.
My grandmother continued to care for and raise me, but she died when I was 18. I was left alone and in charge of my life, the third generation in my female line to be on my own. I didn’t know how to truly live life. I believed life was something to be controlled. I also believed I was not good enough to have a father, and there was a flip-side to this belief. Since I wasn’t good enough, I strove to be perfect. I also believed that I’m small because I have no relatives, and that I should be small because otherwise people could hurt me.
Then I started to learn, to get out of my shutdown and suddenly my life came online. I started my own family, but, just like my mom and grandmother before me, I separated from my husband and raised my son on my own. I started travelling between Russia and Sweden because something told me I had to leave Russia to survive. I’m so grateful to Sweden, which gave me my second life. Centuries ago, my family came from Scandinavia, so whatever drew me here may be connected to my ancestors, calling me home.
I completed my master’s in Sweden and began working here. I have 12 years of high level education, the equivalent of two PhDs. As I’m driven by the belief I’m not good enough, I need to be perfect, but my belief also said, don’t get too big, so I stopped at the master’s level. Being so small, it took so much energy to boost myself to be bigger. And when I boosted myself, I was still a very small child inside. It was exhausting, it was not the way. So I stopped boosting myself which was a big tipping point for me.
Over time, I came to sense intuitively that there was another way to live in the world. Amazing qualities (that I didn’t study or learn) somehow emerged and let me be myself without any effort. It took years, but when I started to see and live this way, my life opened up.
The trauma of abandonment shaped my life, my grandmother’s life and my mother’s life. I can still be quite socially disconnected, but in the felt sense, I’m very connected to the people around me. When I work with clients, I get an understanding, I attune with them before they begin to speak. My gift of trauma, my intuition, is also a generational gift. When I was a child, I saw my grandmother using the same intuitive qualities I now possess.
My coping mechanism was to be small and a bit naive. I didn’t trust, but my naivety let me show people I trusted everyone. I had no boundaries and I never felt safe. I did not know what safe felt like, so I naively trusted everybody. Fortunately, my naivety and my intuition worked well together. My intuition gave me the certainty that it would all work out, and today I can say that it certainly is.
The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma, transformation, healing, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. Listen to the interview, and if you like it, please subscribe, leave a rating or review, and share it with others in your community.
