Theoretical Orientation
Through holding space for others I have identified a set of non-linear steps that have naturally emerged from the therapy process. These steps guide my work and are based not only on my education and training but also on the healing intelligence of all the people I have been honored to work with over the years.
Although some people come to me with some of these steps already in progress or maybe even feel they are at a point of completion with some of these steps, it is fascinating how we find ourselves returning to one of these areas when there is more to explore.
I hope that through exploring these steps, you will connect with your inner healer by cultivating a deep connection to all aspects of yourself!
• Family of Origin and Ancestral Legacies
• Taking Care of Our Nervous System
• Emotional Attunement and Embodiment
• Parts Work and Integrating the Shadow
• Connecting to the Transpersonal
Family of Origin and Ancestral Legacies
To know more about why we struggle and thrive, we must look no further than our family of origin for answers. As young children, we understand that belonging to our family system is the only way to survive.
Some of us were born into supportive families that meet our needs, which often leads to a more secure attachment style. On the other hand, some of us were born into families that don't create a feeling of belonging, safety, care, acceptance, or love. We may have experienced abuse mentally, spiritually, physically, or sexually, witnessed violence or addiction, experienced neglect or abandonment, had a parent(s) that was codependent with other family members or us, or forced into the role of parenting our siblings or our parent(s), may have repeatedly had our emotions and expression dismissed or refuted in favor of our parent(s) comfort or reputation, experienced emotional enmeshment or other forms of dysfunctional family patterns.
Looking at the larger systems we originated from, we may see unconscious patterns, attachment styles, trauma reactions, or behaviors similar to our family that we may try to repress. We may be carrying family legacies that we are unaware of or cultural messages passed through our ancestral line that may or may not make sense today.
Family systems therapy is a form of developmental psychotherapy that helps individuals resolve issues they continue to harbor from their family and cultural systems. We will look at patterns in our ancestral line, cultural impacts of oppression (i.e., sexism, racism, genderism, homophobia, ageism, classism, bodyism, transphobia, and acculturation), addiction, abuse, implications of trauma, and war. We may even discover that the role we were required to fill to maintain homeostasis in our family system isn't something we want to continue to play.
As a licensed couple's and family therapist, the core of my education is in Family Systems Theory. I believe that unprocessed pain and unmet needs in our family of origin and early communities profoundly contribute to much of our suffering as adults. Using this framework is depathologizing and recognizes the essential truth that we exist in relationship to one another. One human's struggle isn't a fault in the individual but rather a product of systemic influence and varying levels of awareness of these influences.
Through compassion and understanding, the legacy parts that you carry from your family of origin can be integrated better into your psyche, contributing to less suffering and more peace. When the legacies of our ancestors and family of origin are brought into conscious awareness, we can create a bridge to the future where new choices can be made that often impact our personal lives and relationships and our family of the past, present, and future.
“When we heal ourselves, we heal our ancestors from wounds that run deep in our family. When we heal our ancestors, we heal the world from wounds that run deep in humanity.”
Taking Care of Our Nervous System
The autonomic nervous system is the surveillance system of your body and acts as a powerful intervening variable between ourselves and the outside world. The core principles of the polyvagal theory crafted through Dr. Stephen Porges’s research identified four phases of our nervous system’s rest and activation: social engagement, fight, flight and freeze.
We begin to develop our nervous system in the womb just three weeks after conception. We take in information from the womb space and our parent’s nervous system during this development. If our parent is in a stressful environment, dealing with addiction issues, has a traumatic pregnancy, is experiencing violence, or has difficulty calming and soothing their own nervous system, then our developing bodies will absorb the stress from our birth parent, setting the baseline for our vagal tone. However, suppose we are growing in a mostly calm and regulated body. In that case, we will likely feel a sense of safety that helps us begin a secure attachment to our caregivers. Developing our nervous system in utero may contribute not only to our attachment styles but also to temperament and mental and physical health symptoms as we age.
As a social species, humans need to feel a sense of safety around other humans. Our bodies want to feel safe around others and will crave secure attachment experiences. When we are a baby and well into our adolescents, we rely on our caregivers to help us regulate our nervous system through co-regulation. When our parents provide a safe, calm nervous system for us to co-regulate with, we can learn how to calm our own nervous system, and we will naturally develop self-regulation skills through the parenting relationship. On the other hand, when we don’t receive a mostly calm and regulated adult to consistently rely on, we may have an imbalanced relationship with our nervous system which leads to detection of threats more readily, causing us to be reactive to situations where there may not be an actual threat to our survival present. As adults, the underlying physiological state we experieince shifts our perspective of the world and can significantly influence our reactions to our lived experiences.
So how can we help our dysregulated and traumatized nervous system recover? There is some promising research on working with our vagal tone by stimulating the vagus nerve.
By stimulating the vagus nerve, we can learn to calm the nervous system, down-regulate ourselves from a cue of benign threat, and find new ways to regulate our body and mind. The vagus nerve can be stimulated through diaphragmatic breathing techniques, social interaction, vocal toning, sound therapy, singing and chanting, dance, massage, movement, reciprocal play, meditation, cold water immersion, yoga, and more. We can think of these techniques as a practice, as they require time and patience to find what best supports your unique needs.
Finding tools to help heal your nervous system is an essential step towards deeper knowing of your truth. Learning new skills while co-regulating in therapy can greatly support finding more resilience in your body so you begin to heal from past trauma and stress.
“There is no fixed physical reality, no single perception of the world, just numerous ways of interpreting world views as dictated by one’s nervous system and the specific environment of our planetary existence.”
Emotional Attunement and Embodiment
Emotions are an integral part of the human experience, and they are signals for us to listen more deeply to ourselves. Often when the capacity to be with our emotions is low, we will avoid our feelings, making them more intense and confusing. Alternatively, we may react to emotions by marinating in them or getting stuck in bypassing them through intellectualizing, which can reinforce limiting beliefs. Both responses create more prolonged suffering, leaving the felt emotion to store up in our body where it can cause depression, anxiety, relational issues, and other physical, mental, and spiritual complications.
Thankfully, processing emotions is a skill you can learn through compassionate inquiry, somatic embodiment, expression, and meaning-making; you can learn a new way to be with emotions and allow them to move through your system without obstruction.
Learning to process your emotions creates more space for connection to yourself and others and a deeper appreciation for our body’s wisdom and natural processes. I utilize somatic therapy, Gestalt approaches, expressive arts, and EMDR to create a pathway to feeling and moving through emotions. Additionally, psychedelics can also be a helpful support for processing emotions stored in the body.
Building curiosity and letting go of judgment of our emotions helps us to rewire our brains by building new neural pathways and a sense of safety in our capacity to move through emotionally charged moments. Learning to process emotions provides us with more self-trust, frees up tension in the mind/body, and helps to build confidence in our capacity for connecting emotionally with others while staying rooted in ourselves.
“What we resist persist”
Parts Work and Integrating the Shadow
Our psyche is like a clean canvas ready to be painted on when we are born. We have an innate capacity to survive due to our nervous system, which continues to develop after birth to keep us alive and safe. We have also likely inherited traits from our parents through DNA and nervous system regulation capacities from our birth parent. Essentially we come into this world shining, receptive, and eager to live.
As we develop a sense of self, belonging in our family and communities, and identities and roles given to us by society, we soon develop an ego to defend our innocent beginnings. We begin to push away parts of ourselves to belong and feel safe. The ways each one of us represses parts of ourselves is the shadow of our persona.
Very early in life, many of us have to betray our truth, our bodies, and our autonomy. Perhaps we heard that our childhood wisdom was childish, so we are forced to pretend to be like the adults around us to be accepted and belong. People pleasing, emotional repression, rebellion, dissociation, power games, emotional reactivity, and other responses to toxic environments emerge in a person, causing a particular flavor of neurosis we have aptly called the personality.
Integration of our shadow side can contribute to someone becoming less reactive to their internal experiences and begin seeing themselves and the people in their lives with more clarity, compassion, and less judgment. Often, when judgmental parts of ourselves become better understood, grieved, and felt, we will soften ourselves, perceptions of the world and our loved ones. From this vantage point, we may see more possibilities for our future, experience an increased connection to our hearts, a sense of gratitude for how we coped with surviving, and less attachment to human suffering and inherited trauma.
Contacting the shadow is possible through EMDR, IFS, Hakomi, Psychedelic Assisted Therapy, Somatic Therapy, Family Systems Therapy, Gestalt practices and other modalities.
“What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it.”
Connecting to the Transpersonal
The meaning of the prefix trans in Latin is to go beyond to change. The prefix persona in Latin means mask. If we combine trans and persona, we can determine that transpersonal means experiences that go beyond the sense of ego identity and expands into other realms of consciousness, including an understanding of intrinsic worthiness, heart-centeredness, access to the collective unconscious, oneness with the natural world, cosmic consciousness and experiences of unity.
I offer Hakomi, Expressive Arts, EMDR, and Psychedelic Support as transpersonal-oriented modalities.
Experiences of the transpersonal or non-ordinary states of consciousness can range from incredibly profound to destabilizing. It can be fruitful to seek therapy to integrate these significant shifts in consciousness into ordinary life. Such insights can fade quickly without scaffolding for the learning process to assist with making meaning of the unfamiliar experience. Integration of these experiences can bring awareness of the sacredness and connectedness of all things ordinary and extraordinary into our lives to benefit ourselves, others, and the planet.
Significant changes are not always simply a matter of receiving a gift; instead, work is involved to unwrap it. In therapy, we can explore finding a language and cultural context for the transpersonal experience, cultivating practices that support your shift in values, strengthening your heart/mind/body connection through somatic therapy and creative mindfulness modalities, as well as Bibliotherapy, expressive arts, and more.
“The field of boundless emptiness is what exists from the very beginning. You must purify, cure, grind down, or brush away all the tendencies you have fabricated into apparent habits. Then you can reside in the clear circle of brightness.”