The Whakapapa of Not Being Good Enough - The Weeds of Anxiety - The Closing Conversation

I presented last week the image of a young girl who, at two years old, could not understand why she became invisible when her sibling arrived. 'Wasn't she enough?'. I left that article with questions around how that weed could be pulled out, and stopped from reseeding or transferred to other aspects of her life and more importantly, to her children.

I present the closing conversation.

What Pulls the Weed Out?

This is the question that led me to develop Te Poutama o te Ora (TPO) — the nine-dimensional Māori wellness framework that sits at the heart of my work as a counsellor, supervisor, and wellness practitioner.

My thinking is this: if the weed lives in the mind — in the brain's neural pathways, in the beliefs formed before we had words — then uprooting it requires something equally deep. We must pull the metaphysical into the physical. We must bring the spiritual into Te Ao Mārama — the world of light and understanding.

Within TPO, anxiety as a weed is approached through several of our nine dimensions:

• Taha Hinengaro (Mental & Emotional Wellness): identifying and naming the root belief — giving it a whakapapa so it can be examined rather than just endured.

• Taha Wairua (Spiritual Wellness): understanding the larger story of your worth — one that does not depend on childhood Christmas mornings or office politics.

• Taha Whānau (Relational Wellness): healing the relational wounds that first told you that you were invisible.

• Taha Tinana (Physical Wellness): releasing the anxiety stored in the body, because the nervous system holds the history that the mind has tried to forget.

• Taha Tuakiri (Identity Wellness): letting go of what is not yours — that you have always been good enough.

But the work does not stop at the individual. Because anxiety — particularly the "not good enough" variety — is not just personal. It is colonial. It is intergenerational. It carries the weight of systems that were designed to make us feel exactly this way.

Te Ao Māori Offers Something Different

Indigenous knowledge has always understood the interconnectedness of past, present, and future. Whakapapa is not just a genealogical record — it is an explanatory system. It allows us to trace the origins of our experiences, to name them, and in naming them, to begin releasing them.

When we apply whakapapa thinking to anxiety, we stop asking "what is wrong with me?" and start asking, "what happened to me, and what has been happening to people like me, for generations?" That shift — from self-blame to contextual understanding — is itself a form of healing.

The Maramataka — the Māori lunar calendar — also has something to offer. It reminds us that growth is seasonal. That there are times for planting, times for tending, and times for harvest. Healing from deep-rooted anxiety is not a sprint. It is a cultivation.

My Life Is One of Growth Now

And yet, some weeds still surface. I want to be honest about that. Healing is not a moment of arrival. The work is ongoing.

But I also know this: You move beyond the two-year-old not understanding why their world has changed, or the adult who questions why this keeps happening.

You can be the person who took that pain but built something from it. For me, it was a framework, a ministry, a way of walking alongside others as they pull their own weeds.

That is what TPO is. Not a theory. A testimony.

If this resonates with you, I would love to hear your story.

What was the moment the weed was planted in your garden?

Next in the series: When Debt Became Love

Te Poutama o te Ora | Nine Dimensions of Māori Wellness