In his work Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, legal scholar Kenji Yoshino describes covering as any activity used “to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream.” Hi, my name is Daniella Matutes and I am a recovering cover. In order to survive my childhood, I developed many strategies and…
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So many of us sacrifice our self-worth and well-being to ‘belong’ in a culture that teaches femmes that our worth is based on our output, serving others and looking sexy (among others). We spend large parts of our life grasping for love and belonging from parents, teachers, men, partners, friends, employers, and clients. Striving to…
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Self-love can feel dangerous, selfish, vain and even terrorizing if you’ve grown up in an abusive environment. Caregivers may have spent an excessive amount of time negatively focused on us, using our so-called ‘flaws’ as an excuse for the abuse. Or punished us as we asserted boundaries, teaching us that self-love is dangerous. We may…
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Learning how to love ourselves is transgenerational and transmitted to us before we learn to talk. Before we have the ability to “regulate” our own nervous systems. Essentially, from inside the womb until about age 5, we learn to love ourselves through the transmissions of our caregiver’s nervous systems. They literally send us their own…
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We practice rituals that provide the felt sense of the divine, alive in the body. This starts with feeling pleasure. Cultivating a foundation of safety that allows our bodies to relax. To get curious; feel compassion and calm, clarity, courage, connectedness, confidence and creative. This provides our bodies with the felt sense of our true…
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When we carry unresolved CPTSD, that statement may feel scary to our bodies. We learned how to form connection with ourselves in our early life through the connections we had with our primary caregivers. You may have heard of “attachement styles”… many call these attachment strategies or stances now. These attachment strategies are ways to…
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