This is not a framework I built and then applied. I lived it first. Every pillar of RAWSOME Foundations™ was forged inside a real life — mine. This 7 part series is the proof. Living proof. In every sense of those words.
🟢 R is for Relationships
Relationships are not the soft stuff. They’re infrastructure. Every system we build, every intervention we design, every child we try to reach — all of them run on relational wiring first. Strip the relationship and you strip the capacity. What you see after that is not the problem. It is the signal. This is why Relationships is first in RAWSOME Foundations™. Not because it is the ‘standard’ pillar. But because without it, none of the others can do their work.
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🟠 My mother called it a treasure. She bought it the year my father left. The year I danced for the first time. The year everything cracked open. I was five. I still have it. The small porcelain pierrot clown. Silver. A painted tear on one cheek. Rising from a drum to the tune Send In The Clowns. It has sat on my shelf for forty years through everything that followed — and as I recall, everything that followed was considerable.
🟡 Relationships are like gold. They are formed under pressure. They are found in the dark. They survive everything. And they only reveal their true worth when you finally hold them to the light. I grew up surrounded by relationships. That is the first thing to understand. My story is not one of absence or isolation. It is one of abundance — complex, layered, sometimes beautiful, sometimes catastrophic — and the long, uneven work of learning what to do with all of it.
Salisbury, in northern Adelaide. Mid-socioeconomic. The 1980s. My mother was the principal of her own ballet school. My father was a flyman, working the ropes above the stage in the theatres that were, in many ways, our second home. As the principal’s son I had the run of those places — autonomy, access, a child’s deep sense of belonging. My brother, fourteen months my junior, stayed close to the wings, near the sets and props, near dad he stayed anchored. I roamed. That was simply how we were.
My parents separated on my fifth birthday, just before the extended family arrived. My father walked away with two black garbage bags. He went to Western Australia. But he came back later. Every Friday after school. Every Saturday. Every birthday. No courtroom, no lawyers, no custody arrangement put to paper. My mother and father sorted it between themselves, quietly and without war. Four parents eventually — each formative, none of them simple, all of them present in their different ways.
🟢 To understand my mother you need to know what she carried before I was ever born. Her mother. Her father. And her firstborn child. All gone before her mid twenties. She arrived at motherhood already intimate with loss — already someone who knew, at the deepest level, how fast the people you love can be taken. That knowledge did not break her. It made her a builder.
She was the stable income throughout my childhood and beyond. She held the financial weight of our lives while also holding us. By the time we reached high school she had a support card for our school tuition. She moved us from Salisbury to the Barossa when the environment we were growing up in was no longer enough. She built the ballet school, became a psychologist, and never — not once — stopped reaching toward what her children needed.
She is also dyslexic. And she won the Australian Psychological Society prize for her thesis on adolescent bodyform. I want to sit with that for a moment — because it matters. A dyslexic woman who had lost deeply, who built a life from the rubble of that loss, who went back to study and came out the other side with the highest honour her peers could give her. She did not succeed despite the odds. She succeeded while carrying them.
She was a woman constructed entirely from survival and love, and she still is.
My mother and I are connected by psychology as much as by blood. The conversations we have had across these decades — about the self, about growth, about what it means to wound and to repair — are among the great privileges of my life. I send her messages with music attached, to ignite the thread that has always run between us. We discuss philosophy. We talk of life and the end of it. We share in the weight of the world and then we always return to this: we become what we pay our attention to. And we ensure we linger where it won’t hinder.
She was not always able to see the full picture of my life. That is also true, and I hold it with tenderness rather than judgment.
🟠 My father moved through many jobs across those years. In and out, restless, never quite landing in one place for long. What none of us knew — what he did not know himself until he was sixty-five years old — was that he has ADHD. The same neurology that runs through me, undiagnosed in him for a lifetime.
A lifetime of wondering why the world seemed to require something of him that he could never quite consistently deliver. I think about that often. The years he spent not knowing. The jobs. The leaving. The returning. All of it makes a different kind of sense now — not as failure, but as an undiagnosed nervous system doing what undiagnosed nervous systems do. Adapting. Surviving. Showing up in the ways it could.
Today we FaceTime three mornings a week. I coach him. I support him. I give him now what neither of us had language for when I was five years old watching him walk away. That is what repaired relationships look like. Not perfect. Present.
🟡 My grandmother — my father’s mother, Grandma Pat — was a set dresser and stage manager in local arts theatre, as embedded in that world as any of us. We spent hours together, often not in the theatre at all but on roadsides, scouring verges for dead branches and dried seedheads that others had walked past without seeing. We would bring them home and arrange them into something worth looking at.
She said to me once, on one of those wanders:
“You know, lovie — you and I see things differently. We see the beauty in the things others discard.”
I did not know then that she was naming the spine of everything I would one day build. The capacity to find worth in what the world has written off. Not as sentiment. As practice.
🟢 The babysitter — less than ten years older than me — who had found her own safety in my mother’s ballet school. She made chops and vegetables. Reliable, warm, unremarkable in the way that only the most sustaining things are unremarkable. She is my best friend now. She comes to stay every year. What she gave that child with the inconsistent schedule and the bracing nervous system was somewhere to land. She still does.
And there was the potter, whose home was a world unto itself — dried arrangements in large floral vases, an in-ground pool, lush garden, crazy stone paving. And the ballet mum who made banana cake with lemon icing every single visit without fail. I did not understand then what I was receiving in those houses. I understand now. Environment as care. The lesson absorbed before I had language for it — that the way a person tends their surroundings is also a way of saying: you matter enough for me to make this beautifully safe for you.
That understanding lives in everything I have since built about the relationship between environment and nervous system state.
This is what co-regulation looks like before it has a name. A reliable meal. A consistent presence. A home that feels the same every time you walk into it. The nervous system of a child does not regulate in isolation — it borrows regulation from the people and environments around it. It learns safety not from being told it is safe but from feeling, repeatedly and predictably, that it is. Every one of those early relationships was doing that work. Not perfectly. But genuinely.
🛑 And then there was the harm that lived inside the same world as that love.
(*trigger warning*) From the age of eight to fourteen, a man known to my family — a longstanding presence in the world my parents had built — sexually abused me. The access he had was granted in good faith. My mother was a safe mother. She was blinded, inside a dynamic none of us had language for then. We have spoken. We are at peace with what can be peace. I do not hold blame. Blame is static. What happened was dynamic — and so, eventually, was my survival of it.
What it left was a nervous system that had learned to brace. To perform warmth while scanning for threat. To be present in a room while never quite landing in it. This is not weakness. It is adaptation. A child’s brain doing exactly what it was built to do — keeping the body alive inside conditions it should never have had to navigate.
I was also, though no one had the words yet, autistic. ADHD. Dyslexic. A neurodivergent child in a body that was learning that closeness could be catastrophic, in a family that loved me but could not quite see all of me — including the part that was quietly, achingly, beginning to understand that I was gay.
I know now that I was never the problem or to blame
🟠 I was sixteen when my sister was born — to my mother and stepfather.
I had just left school to begin my apprenticeship. A new chapter of my own, just beginning. And then she arrived. I acted as though no one in the history of the world had ever experienced anything like it. I told everyone I could find — including strangers in the supermarket. That sixteen year old boy, carrying everything he was carrying, completely undone by joy.
She is in my life still. I see her when I return to South Australia. Her children know me. Her husband and I do not see eye to eye — and that has shaped the distance between us in ways I have had to accept without fully resolving. I wish the relationship were deeper. It isn’t. And I think, in the way that siblings sometimes do, that she looks at my life and feels something complex about it.
I hold that with honesty rather than judgment. Not every relationship arrives at the depth we hope for. Some stay at the distance that other people and circumstances create. The love doesn’t require resolution to be real.
🟡 The years that followed were not gentle. At eighteen, anxiety arrived with a clinical name and a prescription. Swift. Certain. And then, not long after, a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder that would take years to unravel. I was handed a map for the wrong territory and told to navigate. The confusion that followed was profound — not because I was broken, but because the wrong label is its own kind of harm. It tells you the problem is you, when the problem is the framework being applied to you.
Depression. An identity forming in the dark with no mirror and no map. Job after job after job. Poor, but stable — I say that plainly, because stability has a dignity that poverty narratives often erase. I kept moving. I kept reaching toward people, against considerable evidence that it was safe to do so.
At twenty-one I went back to ballet. After almost eight years away — years in which I had not danced, had not returned to the world the theatre represented, had not let my body be that open or that visible. I danced to Big My Secret by Michael Nyman, from Jane Campion’s film The Piano. A woman who cannot speak. Whose voice lives entirely in her hands. Who is not broken — she is expressed differently. And those who see her do not try to fix her silence. They learn to hear what she is already saying.
That is co-regulation. That is what it means to be truly met. I let my body move again. I let myself be seen. I do not have adequate words for what that took, or what it returned to me.
🟢 And then, as an adult, the relationship that mirrored the earliest wound.
A younger man. A deep need to control. Love that came with conditions and surveillance and the constant low hum of having to earn your place. My neurology — the same wiring that made me creative and perceptive and relentless — also made me vulnerable to exactly this pattern. I could read a room brilliantly and still not read the relationship I was standing inside.
It took time. It took rupture. It took sitting very still in the aftermath and asking who I was when I was not performing survival.
Midlife is not a crisis. It is an awakening. The confusion lifts. The misdiagnoses fall away. The labels that never fit are quietly returned. What remains is the self that was always there, waiting with considerable patience to be taken seriously.
🟠 And then Eoghan. We met fourteen years ago. Online. Two older men, both carrying the weight of what had come before, both done performing. From the very first conversation there was only one way we knew how to do this — raw, honest, transparent. We had both been through enough to know that anything less was a waste of the time we had left.
Eoghan gets up every day and goes to work in complex community health. He has done this for all the years we have been together, without complaint, without ever begrudging a single day of what I do or what it costs. He cooks our meals. He washes and irons our clothes. He is, in the truest sense of the word, a rock. And when I have asked him why — why he supports this work so completely, why he gives so consistently — he says: because you are deserving. We are deserving. Not me alone. Us.
We run what we call a ‘one pot system’. We each put in what we have — financially, emotionally, physically, in whatever capacity is available to us on any given day — and we take out what we need. No ledger. No debt. No performance. Just the quiet trust that the other person is giving what they can and taking only what they need.
My grandmother Pat (mentioned earlier) used to say there are two types of people in this world — those from Givington and those from Takington. I have thought about that for decades. And what I know now, from fourteen years of living it, is that the answer to both is Matchton. Matched capacity. Matched giving. Two nervous systems that have found their equilibrium in each other. That is co-regulation at its most complete.
Eoghan did not give me worth. He created the conditions in which I could access what had always been there. We are two halves. One whole.
🟡 My relationships now extend across the globe. Colleagues, clients, families, educators, reformers, advocates — people I have met in person and online, in Australia, the United Kingdom and beyond, through the work and through the networks that have grown around it. the International forum for Inclusion Practitioners. The World Inclusion Congress in Kazakhstan. The families I support through the RAWlife Centre for Applied Neurocoherence. Every one of those relationships matters to me. The good ones…. and the not so good ones. The ones that have held and the ones that have broken. All of them have taught me something about capacity — mine and theirs.
Because that is what the work is, at its core. Relational. Always relational. The families I support are not cases. They are people in relationship with a system that has often failed to see them. My role is not to fix them. It is to create the conditions in which their capacity can emerge. And I can only do that because I know — in my body, not just my mind — what it feels like when someone finally does that for you.
❤️ And then the most important relationship of all. The one with myself.
Every wound I have described in this piece was also a wound to my understanding of who I was. The gay teenager with no mirror. The child whose body was not entirely his own. The man who stayed too long in something that diminished him. The boy whose stepfather shared his first name — until he gave a new one to himself. The person handed the wrong diagnosis and told to navigate with the wrong map. The answer, it turns out, is yes. I am the kind of person who deserves to be chosen. Unequivocally. Without condition
The RAWSOME Foundations are not separate from life. They are life, given form.
“Relationships are dynamic. Sometimes they hold you. Sometimes they harm you. The work is in learning the difference — and having the courage to choose accordingly.” ~ J. Cavanagh.
Because we become what we pay our attention to, I pay mine to connection. To repair. To the people who show up. And to the one person I spent the longest time learning to show up for — myself.
So why share this?
Because the work only means something if it is real. Anyone can build a framework. Not everyone has lived inside the conditions that made one necessary. I have. And if my story creates even one moment of recognition — in a parent, an educator, a child who has learned to brace — then the telling is worth it. This is not vulnerability for its own sake. This is evidence. And evidence only works when it is visible.
🌻 J.