The Beginning of Therapy:
Many people come into therapy as professional masters at staying in their own heads and analysing their feelings, not feeling their feelings. Often a lifetime has been spent culturally suppressing and pushing emotions away, as this is what helped the person to survive. However, there is a big cost to having this as a survival strategy. As, numbing, fighting and projecting emotions leads to stagnation, resulting in pain and the manifestation of disease. When emotions are consistently pushed down or ignored, the body experiences a sustained, chronic stress response that can lead to significant physical and mental health issues.
At the beginning of therapy, the focus is helping you to find ways to emotionally self-regulate the symptoms you are currently experiencing in the here and now. Working somatically with the body is crucial to healing, as it’s the body that’s carrying the emotional pain. It’s what happened that is remembered in the brain. For example, when you have an upsetting thought this sends a message via the vagus nerve to the body to feel upset, then the feeling of upset sends a message to the brain to respond differently. I’ll support you in helping you to accept emotions by observing them. This will require a willingness from you to sit with emotions and be uncomfortable, as this is when resistance drops as there is a sense of relief. When you try not to feel you amplify the emotion, causing stagnation. The goal is to get out of the reptilian brain and into the parasympathetic brain.
I use multiple techniques/methods of working with trauma, so we will explore together to find a technique/method that resonates with you. I’ll support you in learning how to create the safety to feel your feelings, using somatic experiencing exercises, breathwork, visualisation, metaphor, colours, hypnotherapy, working with the different parts of you, inner-child work and EFT. Opening up a small amount of emotion at a time and using pacing to avoid overwhelm. At first, this often triggers a lot of fear in people, as there is the belief that if I feel my feelings I will fall apart, or my feelings are too big, heavy, messy and overwhelming. What I am supporting you in doing, is for you to reprogramme overwhelm in your nervous system. Where you’ll be able to feel your emotions in your body, befriend the sensations, stay in the window of tolerance, and not be afraid of what is happening inside, so that you can move the emotion and release it. Where you’ll start to build a new reset at a nervous system level, of what is safe and what is dangerous.
I’ll teach you how to notice and track your nervous system states, so that you are able to recognise when you have moved into a heighted sympathetic or chronic parasympathetic state, which is the cue to use your emotional self-regulation tools to bring yourself back into the window of tolerance, where your prefrontal cortex (thinking brain) will be back online, where more choices will be available to help you calm down and feel more in control.
A Strong Focus on The Therapeutic Relationship
I am a relationally focused therapist, which means that the therapeutic relationship sits at the heart of therapy. Most trauma stems from within the context of relationships. We are all born dependant with a need for attachment. Attachment is the drive to connection and is wired into our brains. As the adult we can still survive if nobody loves us. However, as the infant we can’t survive if no one loves us. The infant’s survival is dependent on attachment. When the infant hasn’t experienced a nourishing attachment, this causes a conflict between the need to attach and the need to be authentic. Resulting in a disconnection from the authentic self in order to be liked, and avoid feeling abandoned and rejected.
As your therapist my aim is to provide a safe environment where you can start to create a felt sense of safety within the therapeutic relationship, where growth can happen. I will be truly present, compassionately engaged, and have a curiosity to try and understand you, so in turn you will be able to understand yourself better. ‘Know thyself and heal thyself’, because when you have awareness, you have choice, and when you have choice, you have freedom and access to well-being. Therapy will be an equal partnership, so there will be no secrets when it comes to knowledge and tools for you to utilise.
During sessions I’ll be aware of my own nervous state, to ensure I am regulated during sessions. I will be present with you and be alongside you on your healing journey. By building a supportive relational attachment through therapy, will enable you to start to build a healthier and more compassionate relationship with yourself. If disconnection is a lack of safety, then connecting is the path to healing. You can only heal from trauma when you are with safe people. Heal yourself first, so you’ll know how to show compassion to others. Then maybe after the healing your perceptions of others will change. You’ll be able see them for the wounded people they are. Releasing rage and hurt will help you to regain a sense of control, so these experinces/people no longer have power over you. I understand this will feel scary to start with, so this is why sessions are carefully paced. All I ask is that you express a willingness to trust the process enough to allow yourself to sit in your vulnerability.
During Therapy
Throughout therapy we’ll be looking out for any faulty/negative beliefs you have about yourself, others and the world, which keep you stuck. This is because our self-talk is our programming and the majority of us have conditioned ourselves in certain ways i.e. to believe that I'm not good enough, lovable enough, deserving enough. We’re also programmed, particularly from early school experiences, to feel guilt and shame because of our mistakes. We learned our mindset through this conditioning. What locks our beliefs in place are our emotions. Our thoughts are the language of our minds and our emotions are the language of our body.
We build and formulate our beliefs from ages zero to six. Therefore, it is the raw materials for these beliefs that come primarily from our family of origin. It isn’t just the big “T” traumas that cause the wounding, but significant damage to one’s ability to live a healthy life (emotionally or otherwise) is due to small “T” traumas i.e. a critical parent, an overprotective mother, a sibling who bullied you, a teacher who made you feel stupid, etc. It is these experiences that form the foundation for belief systems and world-views that create major limitations and dysfunctional patterns of behaviour. Our sense of who we are, whether the world is a safe or scary place, or if we deserve to have our dreams fulfilled, are primarily determined by these early experiences in our critical years. Early childhood abuse creates a defect of ‘There is something deeply wrong with me’.
These traumatic incidences that are held by the nervous and energy systems, have an innate desire to be understood, processed, and integrated into the whole of who we are through the lessons we learn from them. This is why we re-create similar experiences in our lives on a subconscious level, in an attempt to integrate these old experiences and hopefully resolve and heal that which went awry so many years earlier. For example; choosing the wrong romantic partners (with behaviours similar to parent/s), attracting friendships where there isn’t a healthy balance of give and take, attracting employers or employment that are less than ideal, or keeping yourself small by not achieving your full potential through fear of failure/success, yet they re-create feelings and scenarios that are familiar to you.
The healing work we do in therapy is to remove the charge from those childhood traumas, so you can leave behind the need for these re-enactments to occur. So, that you are no longer in a vibrational alignment with those events and therefore do not need to attract similar events to limit who you can ultimately become. If you are a person that has very few childhood memories, this isn’t a hinderance to healing. We focus on what challenges are showing up in your life or relationships, and how you react in the present.
Therapy Goals
You may have specific therapy goals you want to achieve, which we will focus on. In more general terms the goals of therapy will be:
To help you to improve your quality of life.
Teach you how to emotionally self-regulate when triggered.
Help you to tune into yourself and discover you inner-wisdom.
Disrupt and transform faulty negative beliefs and reframe them inline with who you want to be.
Be less reactive and more responsive in a way that serves you better.
Create a more compassionate relationship with yourself.
Have a set of tools that you are confident in using, so that you can become your own therapist.
