IoPT Self-Resonance | Seeing the Inner Trauma Reflected into the External World

I decided to try an experiment - I am curious about this self-encounter IoPT method I am developing vs the group resonance experience I have in my IoPT training sessions. I wonder if the same material comes up? Or in a different package?

Knowing I have my next training module coming up, I decided to explore the same intention - alone and in group process.

I knew what my intention was - I want to feel belonging. A facet of my abandonment wound - never feeling I belong to people, groups, places, organisations. I would like to belong. And I'd like to uncover more of what's behind the reason I don't.

I chose three words from that phrase—I, feel, and belonging—and pulled one card for each.

• I: The Queen of Swords

• Feel: Three of Wands reversed

• Belonging: Page of Cups reversed

I sat with each card in turn, trying to sense the part, the resonance, the imprint.

I began with “I”. She was immediately dismissive, sharp, unimpressed with the whole thing. She looked at the other cards and said: Why are we even here? Why do you want to belong? You want to be with these upside down weirdos...really? I'm out. She had the energy of someone who had long since decided it was better not to try, to keep herself apart with derision.

Then I turned toward "Feel". This part was sad. She was frightened of "I", she found "Belonging" confusing. She didn’t know how to make any of this work. She felt like a fish out of water, unable to bridge the strangeness. Then she found she couldn't understand herself either.

And when I connected with Belonging, I met a part who curled into herself like a fetus. She didn’t want to open her eyes. Possibly a pre-birth part, unwilling to come into the world or have anything to do with it. She didn’t even want to come out, let alone belong.

I wondered how to unite these parts —I tried placing "I" near Belonging—but the little one was completely terrified of "I." She thought the Queen of Swords might kill her.

I had a sudden, chilling recognition: this is my mother, the Queen of Swords. I had internalised her energy. The coldness, the mistrust, the unavailability. My mother never felt she belonged to anyone other than my father—and now, in this internal space, I could feel how her shutdown, closed off energy lived inside me.

I decided to bring my father into the resonance to understand more - he came in with The Hermit card, placed with the Queen of Swords. The moment he arrived, Belonging felt even more frightened. She recognised them both as our parents—but terrifying ones: an old man in a cloak with a stick, a terrifying Queen with a Sword. These were not safe figures to belong to.

I tried to go to Feel, to see how she was with this new information: it was too much. She became disembodied, floating away. And then the resonance collapsed.

An Experiment

Archetypes at Play

"I" – Queen of Swords

This figure is sharp, intelligent, and cutting. She dismisses Belonging, which suggests she may be a protector that guards against vulnerability by maintaining detachment or superiority. She echoes my mother’s unmet belonging needs, internalized through a lens of judgment and control - I've embodied one of my mothers own protectors...

"Feel" – Three of Wands Reversed

This card when reversed often speaks of blocked vision, anticipation met with uncertainty, or feeling disconnected from what’s on the horizon. She’s sad and scared of “I.” This shows how feeling was unsafe around my mother growing up, it's unsafe in my internal system as well. And "feel" describes herself as 'a fish out if water' - alien within the internal system—especially once the parents enter the field - she fled in terror.

"Belonging" – Page of Cups Reversed

Reversed, this Page becomes inward, regressed, fetal. She wants to stay hidden, untouched by the world. She may represent a pre-verbal exile whose only safe state is complete dissociation. I know from my birth story that my mother had a difficult birth, she didn't belong in the country where she gave birth, she couldn't speak the language and she couldn't ask for help. Her own trauma of not belonging - may have passed to me in the womb. It's not surprising that I did not want to come into her world as I felt her fear.

My Father - The Hermit

A perfect archetype for my father in this context - deeply introverted, a self-contained man who retreated to his own inner world that was impossible for me to belong to. My parents wanted only to belong to each other. My mother clung to belonging, only through him. My father only made sense to himself through her.

"Belonging" looks at these two and sees only terror. This is her reality. She sees two archetypes of adulthood and caretaking that are inaccessible, cold, and possibly dangerous. And as a child, this is the family of origin that she must find her way to belong to.

Later that same day, I repeated the same intention—I want to feel belonging—during the live IoPT training session. Something similar emerged but with a slightly different lens. When you work your intention in a group, each person resonates for a word and so much more information is returned and made available.

My "I" part again appeared to be my mother, to me at least. I was very wary of her...it felt like she might explode with anger, cry, leave...I was treading on egg shells around my "I". But my "I" was just confused, didn't know why she was being treated with such suspicion, felt hurt by this.

This dynamic between me and my I, is the same dynamic between myself and my mother - both wounded, both wary, both convinced that the other is angry, hurtful; both of us ashamed that we might be inherently bad. Looping endlessly between persecutor and victim states. I have internalised the one who hurt me...in order to survive her.

Belonging showed up as a very small child. She had to bring blankets, stuffed animals, junk—anything—to place between herself and my mother so she could feel even slightly safe. She was scared, deeply scared. She also wasn't sure if 'mother' was within the system or outside of it

Feel was deeply scared too, traumatised, also worried that she might be 'mother'. Scared of saying the wrong thing.

Inside, everything became confused. Sometimes I was the mother. Sometimes Belonging was. Sometimes “I” was. There were loops and tangles everywhere—worry about saying the wrong thing, fear of upsetting someone, terror of being punished or blamed. The feeling for each of us that it was our responsibility to understand it all, solve the puzzle and make it right. There was so much lack of safety.

Then my parents’ dynamic entered the resonance. And the truth I already know emerged: it was impossible to belong to them. They were deeply entangled, enmeshed, overtly sexual in a way that felt toxic and wrong. I was drawn into it somehow, made part of a system I should never have been part of.

It makes perfect sense that belonging has always felt like such a fragile or unreachable thing—it was never safe. I was never welcomed in, only triangulated, pulled into the toxic orbit of my parents’ entanglement.

The Truth of the System of Origin

“I needed to realise I never had a chance of belonging to the family system.”

This is such a painful truth to name. But it is also liberation.

Because as long as a part of you is still trying to earn that belonging—by being good, by staying quiet, by making sense of the chaos—then you're still caught in a loop where belonging is conditional and located outside of you.

This new truth opens a different path:

I don't belong to that system.
I belong to myself.
I belong here. In this body. In this truth.

The Intention Repeated: In Group Resonance

I Want to Belong to Myself

The World as a Reflection of your Internal State

There is a concept: found in various philosophical and spiritual traditions, including Buddhism, Taoism, and some Christian viewpoints. A concept of the internal state as a mirror of the world. It suggests that our inner thoughts, beliefs, and emotional state are reflected in our external experiences and interactions. This idea posits that the world we perceive and the experiences we have are not entirely separate from us, but rather are a manifestation of our inner landscape.

The way I witnessed the inflammatory inner loops of fear, reprisal, upset, of not belonging within my own system is both terrifying and empowering, because now I see the structure of the trap I've been living inside.

These loops are:

1. Internalized patterns: trauma-bound relational templates encoded through my mother’s behavior (the inner system).

2. Externalized projections: lenses that color how I perceive the world (especially around safety, expression, and belonging).

They create a self-perpetuating field, where the fear of rupture creates the rupture—either inside, in the body, or in relationships.

The Loop Structure

• I mistrusts Feel → in case she says something wrong or too emotional

• Feel fears Belonging’s fragility → and so censors herself

• Belonging is terrified of I → who mirrors my mother’s unpredictability

• I is sad that she’s seen as bad → but becomes even more defended or cold

• Everyone is on edge → and no one gets to rest, feel, or connect.

This loop is my mother’s own nervous system, projected into mine—and now projected out into my world.

The gold is that I saw it. In real time. It's a window we don't often get.

I know this loop is sacred. It holds vital information for my healing, and I don’t want to turn away from it. But I also took a pause and during that, life happened. I find myself, through new circumstances, fully blended with my abandoned Exile. Conversations and dynamics reopened the wound, and I’m back in the spiral. Somewhere, somehow, I left myself again. I placed my heart too fully in someone else’s hands, and now I feel lost, untethered, left behind.

It’s clear this is intimately connected to the Belonging work. The wound isn’t separate—it’s the next layer. But I know I need to come to it more gently this time, in a way that honours both the insight I’ve already found and the inflammation that’s still present.

So I return to the field, with a new intention drawn from the threads that have revealed themselves:
I want to belong to myself.

I want to do this without being overwhelmed, especially without being flooded by the internalised energy of my mother. So this time, I choose different resonance elements:

• Want: Three of Cups reversed

• Belong: Three of Swords reversed

• Myself: The Hanged Man reversed

I started with Myself. It didn’t feel like a part so much as a disoriented process—a puzzle with no edges. I got a surreal image of myself searching for myself - under and over everything, frantically looking. Then energy began to rise up through my body, and suddenly it felt like my head was falling off. Disoriented, almost hallucinatory. Like being Alice in Wonderland. I wondered if I was the White Rabbit - who is myself, what is me? I puzzled, urgently. Off with her head.

I moved to Belong. A very different energy...Alice landed with a bump. She was earthbound—stubborn, stuck. Sitting on the ground, knees up, unwilling to move.

Belong looked over to the Hanged Man card - How odd, she thought: Why would I want to belong to him? And a panic started. A confusion. Looking around the cards for an exit, somewhere else I'm surely supposed to be.

Then I sat with Want. And the sadness came in. The Three of Cups with it's women dancing together and celebrating brought the remembrance of a lifetime of tired, aching, defeated longing—for female connection, community, togetherness. Want felt sick with longing and sadness. It looked at Belong, the swords through the heart, and felt its pain of rejection. It looked at Myself and just saw a weirdo hanging from a tree. And I felt Want collaspsing into a familiar depressive spiral I’ve been living in all my life: the rejection, the deep ache of not belonging anywhere, the shutdown, withdrawl. The constant inevitability of it all.

I tried to combine Belong and Myself together, but it was awful. I just thought: Why would I want this?! This wound and this weirdo? It felt like a hard no from inside me. And that felt like the end of the road.

The Temple Gateway to Belonging

I want to belong to myself - such a potent thing... no one else wants me, at least I can have me....nope, I don't want me either...

My own system isn't feeling safe enough for me to belong to.

• Want is entwined with past longing and rejection.

• Belonging is burdened with heartbreak and refusal.

• Myself is unknown, dizzying, weird, even alien.
  

No wonder I rejected the fusion of the cards—it felt like fusing with abandonment, pain, and strangeness. It makes perfect sense that my system said: “No thank you.”

“I want to belong to myself. But my ‘self’ feels confusing, weird, abandoned, and unworthy of belonging.
I want connection. But I associate it with rejection, grief, and collapse.
So I want—but I also reject what I want. And I feel stuck.”

And this is the depression - the energetic consequence of unmet longing, held in protective freeze.

This Temple needs to be a gentle gateway, no healing, no shifting - I just will have to sit with what I have, what I am.

I laid out my three cards. I chose objects to represent the parts. I light a candle.

“I am not here to heal. I am not here to fix.
I am here to sit beside the truth of what is.
I welcome the ache, the disorientation, and the longing.
I promise I will not force you to feel more than you can.”

I simply witnessed the pain, the disorientation, the longing. I picked up each object and felt into each part. I cried. I just let them be. They are what they are. Their stories are true. Stories we all have, no better, no worse.

Stories of being human.

I blew out the candle. My simplest temple so far.

As I stayed with them a moment longer I realised I had chosen objects that did all fit together - not perfectly, not beautifully, but in their own way, these objects all belong together.

I feel so centred now. Like my adult self is present. My child parts aren't reaching, arms outstretched, pleading to be held. This is a new feeling...no people pleasing! No desire to perform, or to fawn.

No need to rescue or save anyone. Even the animals that come to my door...my heart goes out to them and I want to save them all, at my own expense...today I chased them off with a broom. It's me first - in a wholesome, self-aware, boundaried way. Not selfish, not entitled - just the 'apply your own oxygen mask' principle in action.

Looking back now, I see the full arc. I began with the longing to feel belonging—and I discovered that my internal system was still trying to belong to my mother, to a family that never offered safety. My inner parts mirrored the same dynamic as the one I was born into: the emotionally unavailable killer Queen, the terrified child, the shutdown Hermit who won't engage. The internalised perpetrator dynamic, frozen in time.

And so I searched for belonging outside, in community, in friendships, in romantic partners, in being understood. But none of those held, because the loop hadn’t been interrupted. I was still circling the same wound of longing to belong to my family.

It was only when I stopped trying to fix it—when I said, I will sit with you, not change you—that the magic happened. Not dramatic. Not explosive.

Just three stones finding their place together.

This is not the end of the story. But it is a sacred chapter.

I belong to myself. And even when I forget, I know now how to return.

Final Reflections

This blog post began as an experiment: I wanted to explore what might happen if I worked with an IoPT intention on my own, before bringing it into a group session. Would the same material emerge? Would the resonance be consistent? Would it evolve?

What I’ve found—though I still understand so little about resonance and how it truly works—is that each encounter with the wound moves the system forward in some small but meaningful way. Whether in solo process or in the collective field of a training group, something always unfolds. The resonance reveals what it wants to reveal, in the way it needs to. It seems to have a kind of intelligence or rhythm of its own—like a current I am invited to step into, if I’m willing to listen carefully and respond with respect.

It doesn’t feel like I’m making something happen. It feels like I’m entering a conversation that is already happening—between psyche, body, soul, and field. The parts come forward not because I summon them, but because I’m finally quiet enough to hear them. And even when I’m flooded or confused, something in the system remembers.

So although I still have no data, no theory, and no certainty—what I do have is a sense of faith. That the field knows. That every intention matters. That something sacred is unfolding through these experiments, these field notes, these heartbreaks, and returns.

Thoughts on my Experiment

If this resonates...

If you’ve spent your life longing for something just out of reach —
belonging, connection, joy — and no matter what you do, it slips away...

You’re not imagining it.
Often, the parts of us that crave belonging are in conflict with the parts that learned how to survive.

In my work, we gently explore these inner landscapes.
We listen for the parts that carry your longing — and the ones that keep you from it.
Sometimes, we find you’ve mapped a parents’s nervous system, or internalised a voice that is not your own.
Sometimes, the struggle isn’t just yours — it belongs to the generations before you.

Through parts dialogue, constellation, and sacred mapping, we can begin to untangle what’s yours, what’s inherited, and what is finally ready to come home.

If something stirred in you as you read this, know this:
the path to belonging starts inside.