Michaela's Site

What Are the 7 Primal Wounds?

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 15:17:52 -0700

Let’s get real: if you’ve ever walked out of a situation thinking, “Why did I react like that?” or “Why does this always happen to me?” — you’re not broken. You’re likely battling something I call a Primal Wound.

These wounds are invisible, often buried, but they drive everything — your relationships, your emotional triggers, your inner critic, and even the dreams you’re too scared to chase.

So what exactly are they? Let’s unpack it.

A Primal Wound is an emotionally charged belief you absorbed early in life — typically before age 5 — about who you are and what you’re worth.

They don’t come from one big traumatic event (though that can play a role). Most wounds are created from small, repeated moments where something didn’t happen: you didn’t feel heard, seen, comforted, or accepted.

When your nervous system can’t make sense of pain, it personalizes it.
You didn’t think: “My parent is emotionally unavailable.”
You thought: “I must not be lovable.”

That belief became part of your operating system. Now you react to present-day life through that old lens — even if it’s outdated and completely false.

The 7 Primal Wounds

These aren’t personality flaws. They’re emotional templates — patterns you absorbed when you were too young to question whether they were true.

Here they are:

I Am Insignificant

You feel unseen. Like your presence doesn’t really matter and your voice is background noise.
You might:

Stay quiet to avoid “bothering” people

I'm not crazy - you are...

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:12:40 -0700

The 6 vs. 9 Trap: Why Perception Really Is Reality

I saw a meme recently of two guys standing on opposite sides of the number 69 painted on the pavement. Before your mind goes straight to the gutter, stay with me...

One guy is looking down and shouting, "It’s a 6, you idiot!"

The other is standing on the opposite side, looking down, shouting back, "Are you blind? It’s a 9!"

If you’ve ever been in a pissin' match with a partner over who "actually" said what, or watched a dispute where two well-meaning people recount the exact same holiday dinner with entirely opposite emotional realities, you know this meme hits a little too close to home.

Working in forensics and family law teaches you this truth pretty quickly: unless there is a cold, hard paper trail of indisputable evidence, people get permanently stuck in the 6 vs. 9. Who am I kidding, even WITH a paper trail of indisputable evidence, people will dig their feet in.

We write it off as stubbornness, bias, or gaslighting. Now I know many of you are saying, “that seems like a good excuse for my ex who legitimately is crazy and their brain just doesn't work right.”

But recent breakthroughs in neuroscience suggest something wilder. That argument isn't just a disagreement about an opinion—it's a fundamental mismatch in how two brains are manufacturing reality.

Turns out they have—according to...Read More

The Safety Squeeze - What losing teaches us about life

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 10:33:50 -0700

For those who want to skip right past the fun, here’s the moral of the story up front: we learn far more from our losses than we ever do from our wins. And in life there are all sorts of losses.

There's the good kind, met fair and square.

There's the dirty kind, when you're playing against people who will cheat to win.

Then there's the ultimate loss...the tragedies where we lose someone to the game of life far too soon.

But if you stick around till the fourth quarter, you’ll see exactly how we get there.

I began life as a high school cheerleader, back when Coach Cox was notorious for taking our Golden Sierra Grizzlies—a tiny squad tucked into the Sierra foothills—all the way to the championships. But after a torn hamstring on wet grass doing the splits, my cheer days were benched. I migrated straight to the sidelines, keeping stats shoulder-to-shoulder with Coach Cox. A secret strategy every high school girl should employ: it planted you front and center with the star athletes, and because we were winning, it became the soundtrack to my favorite memories. Right up there with snowwheelin' and booney crashin' out to Canyon Creek for tailgate parties, with nothing but dim headlights carving out a dance floor through clouds of red dirt dust.

Coach Cox was big on film study and replays—not during game time, but dissecting the wins. He’d review the victories with a fine-tooth comb, obsessing over how to make the wins even better and treating every single play like there was always room for improvement. Little...Read More

Day 4 Aerial Book Tour: Whoopie! -all things Red Dye & punkin...

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 11:06:18 -0700

Day 4 was, hands down, one of the most drop-dead gorgeous legs of the entire cross-country trek.

Though, as you’ve probably deduced by now, roughly ninety percent of this historic book tour has revolved around mechanical triage, questionable cockpit hygiene, and an unrelenting obsession with baked goods.

The morning kicked off in Kentucky, where the lovely and amazing Amanda showed up at the ramp bearing fresh, glorious pumpkin muffins—which, in my personal nutritional index, qualifies as close to a holy morning donut as humanly possible.

If you're trackin, you'll know most of the tour was guided by food...

Naturally, I made an unforgettable first impression. After nearly a year of being close internet friends, our very first real-life face-to-face meeting began with me emerging from the airport restroom soaked from the waist down, having catastrophically sacrificed my shorts to an Uber beverage spill on the way over. Nothing says “professional touring author and aviatrix” quite like greeting a beloved follower looking like you just waded out of the Ohio River.

We spent the morning playing high-altitude dodgeball with the peaks of Appalachia—or is it Appa-LAY-sha? Or Appa-LA-cha? I quickly discovered that mispronouncing those ancient green ridges out in these parts is practically fighting words, so I kept my head down, chewed a pumpkin muffin, and let...Read More

Imprints, Paw Prints, and the Sacred Art of Letting Go

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 07:42:39 -0700

It’s been more than a week…

When life pulls the rug out from beneath us, our creative instincts tend to go where the ache is, at least mine does.

I stood in my kitchen with a mop in my hand, staring down at the spot where Stilly’s bowl still rested, empty. He didn’t come meowing over, even though I looked for him. My mind knew he wouldn’t, but my heart still hoped he would. Just days before, he had sat right there, old and rickety, happily lapping up a Churu.

And there, dried onto the wood floor, was a single, dusty paw print.

I couldn't bring myself to wipe it away.

A mop wipes away the prints from the floor.

A cloth wipes the prints from the glass.

And the wind smooths the prints left in the dirt.

In that utter sadness and stillness, the crystal hanging in the window spun, and beams of rainbow light danced across the floor...

I smiled as I realized something precious: paw prints are really just the reminder of the imprints pressed directly into the soul—and those can never be mopped away.

I spent the next few days feeling overcome by the loss of a little being who had been part of my daily routine for 15 years… the sunny spaces I no longer had to tiptoe around to avoid stepping on his tail, opening the fridge without him begging for a...Read More

Unsilenced: My Path - Returning to the Page (and Pretty in Patina)

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 08:44:12 -0700

Took a left turn at loss...

photo circa 2008 when I wrote Teetering on Disaster

I had every intention of showing up here with reflections from the book tour…

But as life so often reminds us, our plans rarely hold a candle to where our hearts actually need to go. If you read my last post, you know we recently lost our Stilly—a once-in-a-lifetime companion who stole our hearts for fifteen years. Over the past few weeks, my journey has meant stepping into remembrance, leaning into discomfort, and entering the quiet, sacred territory of writing a parable on grief and loss.

Writing, after all, has been the baseline of my life.

When 7 Primal Wounds launched, I promised myself I wouldn’t dive into another book—at least not for a hot minute. I told my socials I needed a reprieve from the manicured photo-and-caption grind to come back to the place where my heart still finds beauty: the blog.

It started with a vulnerable, middle-of-the-afternoon text to my dear soul sister, KerrieAnn, after Stilly passed: “Um, I’m writing because I'm sad, and now it’s becoming a parable of universal truths… can you give it a look?”

(P.S. She is one of the primary editors of 7 Primal Wounds and her brilliant editorial eye and magic...Read More

be still my mama heart...

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 16:45:02 -0700

Pausing the Journey: Honoring a Gentle Soul

As we’ve been walking down memory lane, reliving the stories and skies from the world’s first aeronautical book tour, life has gently—and heartbreakingly—called us back down to earth.

Today, we’re taking a brief hiatus. I wanted to keep writing and posting, but the truth is I'm just too damn sad.

More than a decade ago, when Tucker was still in diapers, Stilly came into our lives, in an unspoken bond written in the stars.

I'll never forget the panic I felt when my tiny son reached his tiny human hand into the cage at the Shelter and I panicked, afraid the cat would claw him...

but "Moonshine Still" as the cage read didn't bite or bat, instead he started purring and rubbing his chin against Tucker's tiny hands. He picked us. And I'll forever be grateful for that.

He got the name Moonshine Still because of the sliver of white "moon" patch on his back. Tucker called him Stilly.

For over a decade and a half, Stilly loved his boy over everything else in this world. He was the kind of soul who wanted nothing more than to curl up under the covers, nestled close, keeping quiet watch over his favorite human.

Now, our sweet boy is preparing to cross the rainbow bridge.

Someone once told me that animals arrive on this earth already knowing how to love unconditionally. Because of that pure, boundless grace, they can’t spend an entire human lifetime here—their gentle hearts simply couldn’t handle bearing so much love for that long.

Right now, my mama heart is...Read More

Lemme see your Tootsie Roll: Day 3 - Wounds to Wings

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 05:07:36 -0700

Day 3 began with text from my buddy Nino saying "enjoy sewer city" aka Sioux City, Iowa...

and the inevitable life lesson that if you spend enough consecutive hours strapped inside a vintage taildragger with a window rigged shut, your dietary ideals drop straight through the floorboards.

Now this is coming from someone who drives a few hours to natural springs to get “structured water with all the minerals” and generally eats like I’m still living in the Garden of Eden, you know - veggies I grew, bread I baked…certainly not processed crap.

By mid-morning, my primary survival triangle consisted entirely of Glacier Freeze Gatorade, canned oxygen hits straight to the dome like an aging rock star backstage, and Tootsie Rolls I hijacked from the gift bags in the backseat.

They weren’t stuffed into the book tour goody bags by random chance. They weren’t even an impulse 'buy-now' on Amazon Prime.

There is deep, ridiculous, generational lore behind those little brown logs of chewy glory. Somehow, Tootsie Rolls have sneakily inserted themselves into the very fabric of my flying life.

Case in point: Smidgey.

Smidgey is my resident aviator bear who lives clipped to the air conditioning vent in my car. One day, I looked over and was horrified to discover a tiny crime scene: Smidgey’s head was completely gone. Decapitated. Vanished into the ether.

Having just left my mother’s...Read More

Rock Springs Can Kick Rocks: Day 2 Aerial Book Tour

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 08:05:43 -0700

Day 2 kicked off exactly the way any proper vintage flight should: with a fractured fuel line and the faint, romantic aroma of imminent catastrophe.

Luckily, some delightful internet friends appeared out of nowhere to say hello.

I genuinely wanted to ditch the tour and go crush a donut (again) with Eric and Chandra, but alas, the aviation gods demand a snackrifice.

For those of you who don't know, Commander’s facial hair precedes him by about three nautical miles.

We’ve been sauntering across airport aprons only to have total strangers freeze, squint, and inevitably blurt out, “Wait… aren't you the guy from Instagram?” (iPad babies anyone? iykyk)

While Commander commenced his grease-monkey wizardry on the ramp, I did what any responsible show host does: I wandered off toward the shiniest object in sight, which happened to be a sleek black and red helicopter.

Anyone whose followed my social media shenanigans knows my shameless, unapologetic crush on rotorcraft - it started with Airwolf. But let’s be crystal clear about boundaries: I have zero desire to actually climb inside a glorified box of angry rocks that is actively attempting to vibrate its own bolts out of the sky.

(I must insert that our awesome San Diego friends, did take me and my dear friend Diana, up in their...Read More

Chaos Grit & Glory: Confessions of the World’s First Flying Book Tour

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 07:11:00 -0700

(quick plug: this incredible Bomber Jacket is called the Kiaote Coat and it's available now, and was gifted to me for the tour from Boketto Brands)

The endless horizon of cuckoo ideas...

My mom (who you know by now is full of life-altering one-liners) always used to tell me—We plan, God laughs.

If I’ve got guardian angels, I’ve probably stressed them the-eff out, and they’ve likely gone from glorious celestial white to some frazzled shade of angelic grey.

One year ago today, I climbed into the cockpit of a 1944 relic and did the finger-caressing magneto massage to make her hum to life.

(I actually posted a reel on that startup that went "more viral" than anything on the tour, probably because coaxing these old birds to fire is an Olympic feat in and of itself.)

The first aeronautical book tour had officially commenced - little did I know it would also come to a screeching halt as quickly as it began.

Listening to the deep, unmistakable rumble of a vintage radial engine, I started my taxi—which, in a taildragger like this, requires a delicate dance of heel sliding and toe tapping just to keep her on the centerline.

Most modern...Read More