by Megan Caper | welcome
Hello! There have been quite a few new folks joining us lately and I think that means it’s time to do a little intro/re-intro post and let you know who I am and what I believe.
I’m Megan Caper and I’m an intuitive who works with complex medical issues, healing trauma, and supporting people in doing shadow work so they can find happiness, connection, and meaning in life.
I offer a few ways to work with me – medical intuition sessions, intuitive shadow work coaching, and group workshops and classes. Let me know if you have any questions about how I can support you in any of these ways.
I came to this work through my own life experiences of both emotional and physical trauma and healing, and along the way realized I have psychic gifts that most people don’t naturally have (although I believe everyone can develop this with practice!)
Here’s what I want you to know – all of us are worthy and whole already, there’s no such thing as a person who “will be good enough once they do X” or who is broken in any way. Being in process and figuring it out is not a prerequisite to being worthy and adored. You are already where you are supposed to be. My deepest desire is to help others have those lightbulb moments where they realize they are worthy and good now, and they don’t have to do anything to be deserving of love right where they are.
I want you to know healing is not a linear process. It’s more like a spiral where we work on the same lessons or issues for years by revisiting them again and again from a place of greater and greater wisdom and compassion.
I want you to know that your physical illness is complex and multifaceted and involves physical, emotional, and spiritual issues. Treating symptoms through medication or surgery doesn’t get to the root of the problem and won’t bring balance or harmony to a system, it will only cover up the issues temporarily.
I want you to know that all of your fears and doubts are because of stories that you’ve absorbed about yourself, oftentimes to keep yourself safe and well, but that your true nature on a soul level is someone who belongs completely and does not know anything other than love and acceptance.
I want you to know that it’s not your fault that f*^%ked up shit happened to you, but that same shit is also your doorway to find out how to build compassion and deep understanding of both yourself and your fellow humans. We all suffer in similar ways, it just looks like different circumstances.
I want you to know that I don’t believe in spiritual bypassing, and that you can’t heal solely through being in a place of love and vibrating at a high frequency. I believe we feel happiness and joy as a natural byproduct of doing shadow work and looking at where we can break down barriers inside and outside of ourselves. These barriers once kept us safe like high castle walls, but now they wall us off from connection and love in all its multitudinous forms. Break those walls down in a compassionate and caring way and you will come back to your natural state of love and joy.
I want you to know that there is no “one size fits all” approach for how to heal or how to live a good life. We are all different for a reason, we have different life lessons to learn and different ways of expressing how we are a creative expression of source energy. My job is to help you find your way back to that place of love and acceptance, in whatever form that takes for you.
Hopefully some of this resonates with you. And if not, that’s fine too. We each need to hear different messages of healing and spiritual growth, and I’m not the right guide for everyone.
And please let me know what parts of this made you stop and think and what it is you thought. I’m no guru, I’m learning as I go, as well, and this is a two-way conversation. You are my teacher as much as I am yours.
You are already worthy. You are already a good person. You are in the process of figuring some shit out, which is exactly where you should be.
Xo Megan
by Megan Caper | Childhood trauma, emotions
Earlier this week, a video made the rounds on TikTok of Lillie, a 13-year-old getting arrested at an abortion rights protest because she used a megaphone and violated a noise ordinance. The video made a splash not only for the fact the police are arresting 13-year-olds for protesting (Hello, first amendment right to assemble and protest?!) but for Lillie’s mom who was filming and can be heard in the background.
As Lillie’s being taken into custody, we can hear her mom, Lauren, who is following just behind her say, “Lillie don’t resist honey, it’s okay. I got ya. Lillie, you’re okay bug. I got you. Mom’s right behind you!!”
So many of the comments on the video talked about Lauren’s words of support:
The “I’m right behind you” is what broke me 😭😭😭
If that isn’t the most public display of MOM I’ve ever seen. Way to go momma.
The pride in mamas voice and the “I’m right behind you!” Oh my gods 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 STAY STRONG BABYYYYYYYY!!! 💪🏾💪🏾💪🏾💪🏾💪🏾✊🏾✊🏾✊🏾
“Just don’t resist” “I’m right behind you” wrecked me 😭😭😓
And I have to admit, this video broke me, too. I’ve watched it a bunch of times in preparation for writing this post and I still find myself in tears each time I watch.
So, what’s going on here?
I’m crying not because she was arrested (in fact, that makes me angry, not sad) it’s the idea of having a mom who would be so supportive and say such reassuring, loving things in a time of crisis.
I never had that, and I know a lot of you never had that too.
I know for me, when I see scenes of moms being loving, kind and supportive, there’s a part of me that’s reminded of my loss. It’s grief for the emotional nutrients I know I needed, but never got. Just like a starving person might break down at the sight of an all-you-can-eat buffet, those of us who had emotional neglect or abuse will also break down at the sight of emotional sustenance.
However, my friends, there’s a way to turn that grief into a powerful tool for healing.
When I see something like this that “breaks me” and find myself crying big time, that’s a signal. It’s a sign – here’s an emotional nutrient that I really need.
This is what I do when I see examples of loving parenting and it makes me cry:
- Sit with the sadness. This is another chance for grief to come up and be acknowledged, so let it come and meet it with tenderness and validation.
- Recognize that this type of emotional care is something you need. Be grateful that you found this out, because now you can give yourself this exact, wonderful type of care.
- Internalize this voice of support. I talk about this in my post on your inner caregiver if you need more info on how to do this. For me, the line, “Mom’s right behind you!!” especially with Lauren’s tone and emotionality was the thing that really hit me hard. I’m adding this to my repertoire of supportive messages and Lillie’s mom is now another one of my inner moms, I can hear her voice saying just this, right when I’m going through something scary and hard.
Once you’ve gathered a few of these inner caregiver voices, they act as powerful tools to use when times are tough. Or even when they’re not, I know we all need to hear “Mom’s right behind you!!” as we go about our lives, because adulting is hard, amiright?
Xo Megan
by Megan Caper | emotions
It’s been an angry week for me (both feeling my own anger and being on the receiving end of someone else’s) and I’ve been thinking a lot about the two types of anger, healthy anger and trauma response anger. Let’s look at ‘em, shall we?
Healthy anger moves you forward in a positive way, one of my mentors even called it the most spiritual of all emotions. In the five-element cycle, anger is the Wood element and it precedes Fire, which is joy. This means that in order to get to joy, we have to go through anger first. What does this look like in real life? I’ll give you a personal example from this week. As you probably know, this week a draft of a supreme court ruling that would end access to abortion in the USA was leaked to the press. I could go on and on about why this is horrific both in terms of women’s control of their own bodies and in how this is a huge step towards the crumbling of personal freedoms in the US, but there are people who can speak to that much better than I can, so for the sake of this post, I’ll stick to talking about anger.
When I heard the news, I was furious. It felt like a slap in the face to everyone who has been working on social progress in the last 50 years. I felt an anger welling up inside me and I knew I had to take action to change this. This is the hallmark of healthy anger, it drives you to change something for the better, it makes you strive to create a world for yourself and others that contains more joy, acceptance, compassion, freedom, or understanding. This anger drives you forward to do something that is in alignment with your highest values and that makes a positive change in your world. Positive anger leads you to create positive changes that lead to better things.
Trauma anger feels very different. Earlier this week, I was on a call with a client and I sensed she was repeating a trauma response pattern (appeasing) that I had seen before, so I voiced my concern. Pretty quickly, she got angry and said she didn’t like what I was accusing her of and she felt attacked. She let me know she didn’t like being yelled at and was done talking about it. It was pretty clear this was a trauma response — I was not yelling and hadn’t attacked her at all. By the end of the call, she was able to see how her anger had been a trauma response, how it had clouded her judgment of what I’d said and how I’d said it, and process through it.
Trauma anger isn’t driving you to take action towards a better world, it’s purpose is to shut down an uncomfortable situation that reminds you of a similar, traumatic situation from your past. It could be a situation where you felt misunderstood, or like you were “bad”, or unheard, or trapped. Trauma anger is a way of derailing the conversation and making it about something else — your anger — instead of the issue at hand. It’s an escape, and works quite well to get us away from traumatic situations. But now that you’re not in a dangerous place anymore, it’s preventing you from being present with uncomfortable situations, even if you are with safe people that can give your body mind a different, safer experience and help you grow.
The way to identify trauma anger is to check in with your body and ask, “is there fear or shame beneath this anger?” (To do this, you must be familiar with what the sensations of fear and shame feel like in your body, so doing mindfulness + somatic work is a vital prerequisite here.) If you can answer yes, then it’s trauma anger. Another sign is when, after the event you think, “Wow. I was really angry. I’m not sure why that made me so mad.” There’s a saying “If it’s hysterical, it’s historical” and the awareness that you were more angry than the situation warranted can be another good clue that it’s trauma anger.
I want to stress that neither type of anger is bad. Heathy anger drives, inspires, and motivates us to create a better world. Trauma anger helps us see areas where we still live in shadow and illuminates where we can do more healing work with ourselves. It’s through our own healing work that we lessen the harm we do in the world and simultaneously act as a model for others of what healing looks like. As Ram Dass says, “I am arriving at that circle where one works on oneself as a gift to other people so that one doesn’t create more suffering. I help people as I work on myself and I work on myself to help people.”
With gentle noticing and acceptance, take a look at your anger when you are able to be present with it and ask, “Is this healthy anger or trauma anger?” If it’s healthy anger, go out there and change the world! (Or at least your small corner of it.) If it’s trauma anger, know that you made it as far as you have today because you were smart enough to protect yourself this way. But now that you are safe, you can work on doing it another way, if you’re ready.
Xo Megan
by Megan Caper | Empathy, life lessons, resilience, Self-compassion
The term “shadow work” has been everywhere lately. But what is it really?
I think of shadow work in terms of healing and clearing the way for better spiritual, emotional and intuitive connections. Shadow work uses strategies or tools to look at the parts of ourselves we’d rather not look at like shame, feelings of unworthiness, or our deepest fears (You know, the stuff we’d rather have remain in the shadows if we could help it) and then find ways to heal or bring comfort to those parts.
If you’re not sure what I mean, think of something you believe about yourself that you’d do anything to prevent from being shared on the internet. There’s a shadow, right there.
Identifying and noticing your shadows is the first step in shadow work. Sometimes, we already know what our shadows are, like things we’d be embarrassed to admit or fears we have about how other people judge us, but sometimes they’re still in our subconscious and we have to do some work to name them and identify them. Most often, those hidden shadows will be our triggers. Someone will do something that really triggers us, to the point where our reaction seems disproportionate to what happened (“Why am I so mad/sad/terrified about this?”) and that’s often a sign that there’s subconscious shadows influencing our behavior.
I want to share with you some real-time shadow work I did this week to illustrate both how to identify a shadow and how to work with it, aka “do shadow work.” Here’s what happened…
As part of my marketing strategy for my business, I’ve been reaching out to lots of podcasts lately to see about being booked as a guest. I usually do this by sending an email to the host telling them that I like their podcast, why I might be a good guest, naming a few topics I think could be interesting to their listeners, and linking to a few of my past podcast interviews so they can get a feel for me as an interviewee. Pretty standard stuff. Most often I get either a yes, or I don’t get a response at all. Occasionally, I’ll get a note saying “thank you for reaching out but it’s not a good fit for us.” All of which are fine and just part of the deal.
Last week, I sent out about 10 emails to various podcasts with the usual ratio of some positive responses and some crickets. But one response I got was unlike any I’ve received before:
[“Dear Megan,
Thank you for reaching out with your guest interview proposal.
I have visited your website and listened to one of your interviews (one link is not working at all).
While I don’t question your personal experiences or your medical intuition skills, and you can certainly talk to these topics – when choosing my podcast guests I tune in and look at them holistically, beyond just the good fit of the topics of their professional expertise and whether they interview well.
I’m seeking the energetic resonance. This means that if something about the potential guest bothers me, anything at all – I don’t invite them to my show, as they are ultimately not a good match at the energy level.
I don’t know how much information on my website you have read, so I will tell you that I’m highly intuitive, and interface with people and the world at the energy level, the 6th sense. I am Reiki Master, I work with energy every day, and so the energetic resonance is the most important qualifier for me.
I could have just politely declined; however, since you have addressed your email to me personally (unlike most guest proposals I receive), I feel that you deserve to hear my feedback and the reason why I decline your proposal, for your benefit – regardless of what you choose to do with it.
When I went to your website and read the big header:
“You’re here because you had a crappy childhood and you’re done letting it affect your life” – I was INSTANTLY put off and wanted to leave. If I were a potential client – that’s what I would have done. Why? I didn’t have a crappy childhood (quite to the contrary) and while the heading is generic of course, I found it offensive, presumptuous, judgmental and aggressive. Like many people, I have had a fair (or unfair) share of issues and traumas in my life which happened later on. My childhood was the happiest time.
Now – I know NLP very well, all about using presumptions, embedding expectations, “mind-reading” and all that jazz. I’m a very experienced Life Coach and use NLP in my work with clients and know-how and when to use it, but my first reaction to your homepage was “how can you know why I am here, you know NOTHING about me, and you are wrong”.
Anyway, this is not a coaching session so I’ll keep it short. 🙂
As I perused your site I found few other points that bothered me (meaning- created energetic dissonance with me, like a scratch on an old record playing lovely music), including words like “shit” and “goddamn” which I would never use in my professional setting. Your website is peppered with negative energy which you are not even aware of. This is clearly your style, your language which is absolutely fine – for you and perhaps many other people, but not to me.
I read people very well, on many levels, and your website gave me a lot of insight into your personality and your approach. I am not saying it is wrong, right or indifferent. I’m not making any judgment. All I am saying is that as a guest you are not a good match for me and my podcast. That’s all.
Thank you for considering my podcast for your interview.
Wishing you all the best on your journey
XXXX {name redacted} ” ]
I want to take you through what happened to me step-by-step as I read this reply, both to share what a trauma response looks like and how I did shadow work to address the trauma response.
- I felt terrible. I felt deep fear, almost a feeling of terror, that I had done something wrong (I know, I know— I hadn’t — but this was my unconscious trauma response safety system kicking in) and that I had somehow been inappropriate or overstepped my bounds. Then, I felt myself dissociate, which feels a bit like I’m looking at what’s happening from a distance, with a bit of numbness and brain fuzziness thrown in.
- I recognized that my emotional response was BIG and that I was having overwhelming, unpleasant emotions as a response to this. My dissociation happened because the response was so overwhelming that my brain decided it was better to “go offline” than experience something so unpleasant. (Meditation and mindfulness practices have helped a ton in being able to observe and identify both my emotions and dissociation in real-time.)
- I understood that this person’s email was inappropriate, but I second-guessed myself and wondered if I was overreacting by being so upset by it. This is a complex PTSD response that happens when, as children, we were consistently told that our reactions to abusive behavior were too much in some way like, “you’re overreacting” or “we can talk about this when you’ve calmed down” or “don’t be such a drama queen.” When this type of gaslighting happens, we lose the ability to trust our own feelings and reactions and learn to downplay them. (Jeffrey Marsh has some amazing videos on this topic if you want to learn more.)
- I started 3rd guessing myself and realized that my self-judgement as “overreacting” was also probably a trauma response, so I reached out for help with what I call “reality testing.” I forwarded the email to someone I trust, my business coach Caroline Leon, and said, “I just got this reply to one of my podcast pitches and I’m not sure what to make of it. It seems unnecessarily harsh. I mean, I usually have a thick skin, but this is over the top, right?” She replied and said, “Oh Megan, I am so sorry that you had to receive this email. This isn’t someone you ever need to listen to or feel triggered by. This person is self-aggrandizing, judgemental, lacking in self-awareness and clearly has some personal issues.”
Caroline’s response helped in two ways. First, it confirmed my suspicion that my judgment that I was overreacting was wrong, this email was really terrible. Second, it made me feel seen and heard, something I didn’t get much of growing up, and something I know I need to seek out now as I reparent myself as an adult. She then offered to hop on the phone with me, and my first instinct was to say, “I’m fine, I can handle this” but, lately, I’ve realized how much I’ve “I’m fined” my way through some pretty horrible shit in my life when, in fact, talking to someone and feeling comforted was exactly what I needed to complete the stress response cycle.
- Once I felt sure that this email was in fact an attack and inappropriate, I looked at why I had such a strong reaction to it. I’ve had people be rude to me or say nasty things to me many times which did not cause a trauma response, so why did this one trigger me so much? I realized that this passive-aggressive set-up of “I’m doing this for your benefit” followed by an attack on me was exactly how my mom spoke to me as a child. She’d say things like, “I want you to know that I spoke with your friend’s mom and she only hangs out with you because her mom is forcing her to. I’m only telling you this so you can look at how you could be a better friend and think about why no one wants to be around you.” (None of this was true, by the way, she never talked to my friend’s mom, but I didn’t find that out until years later. This type of abuse is common with malignant narcissists.)
- As I came to understand why this email had felt like such an attack, I took care to do some deep self-compassion work for myself. I meditated and brought to mind what I call my “inner caregiver”, a character in my head who is kind, supportive and stands up for me against this kind of bullying. I imagined her coming to be with me, soothe me and defend me. It felt wonderful.
- I recognized that the person who wrote this email is likely in a lot of pain themselves. “Hurt people hurt people” as they say. When I felt calm and strong enough to do so, I sent them the Mettā prayer of compassion, “May you be free of suffering and the causes of suffering. May you find happiness and the causes of happiness.”
- Over the next few days, I made sure to check in with myself and make sure I was okay, much like I’d check in on a good friend who had been through something rough. I gave myself some extra leeway to take it easy if I felt off in any way.
Within 2 days, I felt much better. I could even read the email and feel only compassion for this person without being triggered at all. (Note: it’s taken me almost 20 years of practicing this kind of shadow work to get to this place. Even 5 or 10 years ago, I would have been a wreck for weeks if I’d received this email and probably would have read it over and over or felt the need to reply and defend myself.)
I’m sharing this story with you because I know when I first started trying to heal my shadow parts, it felt monumental and insurmountable and I didn’t even know where to start. So, I’m hoping that sharing my process can either give you some ideas for your own shadow work or at least can show you what’s possible if you work at it. Obviously, I’m still a work in progress and I suppose if I’d really worked through all my stuff this wouldn’t have triggered me at all. But I know that I’m in process, I’m doing the healing work of wherever I am, and that’s okay, too.
We’re all exactly where we should be (which may not be where we want to be, but that’s also okay) and I hope you know that wherever you are in your healing process is just as right, just as good, and just as perfect as where I am with mine.
Xo Megan
