Discover more from In Search of Gumption
Today’s guest lives in San Francisco but was born in France in 1963 and was raised between Paris and Cairo. When he was 33 years old, he travelled to Greece to find out where his last name was from. We recorded this episode on an island called Kythira where his ancestors once lived, and where we now go visit him in the summer.
Jean Marie is a constant human explorer, he has a PhD in Social Anthropology, and until recently has worked with the United Nations as a humanitarian officer on emergency missions in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, bringing relief to hurting populations.
After a particularly exhausting and emotionally draining mission in the Middle East, Jean Marie sought a method to help himself overcome it. His own search of gumption back in France, brought him to Etio-analysis, technique that helps you learn the root causes of physical pain or emotional distress. It is based on the core principles of awareness and consciousness.
“As you gain consciousness of the root cause of your problem, you may be better able to free yourself from its adverse consequences.”
He practiced with one of it’s leading practitioners in Paris, and then studied to become a licensed practitioner himself. I couldn’t help but ask him for a session to check it out.
We tend to think of our traumas and shame as our own. Shame researcher Brene Brown who I mentioned last week, finds that a lot of the shame we carry is rooted in core beliefs. When we spiral down the caves of depression, fly into the wheel of addiction, or get locked in the same pathological reactions to our partners, we are triggering old wounds.
And yes, traumas come in various shapes and sizes. So how can we compare someone who’s father was busy at work with someone who got orphaned or raped at a young age? The answer is we don’t.
We call people with deep, large and unresolved traumas, mentally ill aka batshit crazy. But the crazy thing is that we all have these wounds within us in varying degrees. The good news is that these wounds are not necessarily scars. However, identifying them and being aware of them is a challenge.
This is the dragon in every hero’s journey. Spoiler alert: That Dragon is You.
As we learned in Episode 7 with Ryan Ginn, adopting a mindset of having multiple parts that live withins us, we can start to befriend some of the ones we don’t particularly like about ourselves. We can finally start seeing the protective role they played in our lives, and bring them back from our shadow into our field of vision. Only then can we start talking about shame.
In Episode 8, Jean Marie helps us dig further back into our lineages, with the idea that shame can be passed on through previous generations. This always seemed like a crazy thought, but with the incredible advancements of Epigenetics, we finally have a scientific model to understand how traumas created by past environments can be integrated and passed on through gene expression.
You learn more at www.etioanalysis.com or contact Jean Marie Stratigos PhD at jmstratigos@etioanalysis.com.