About the Process

What Will a Session Look Like?

Most often a 1 hour individual session looks like this:

• Connect and talk for 10 - 30 mins. Zero in on what would be most helpful or what we’ll be orienting towards for the session.

• Next I will invite you to notice your body. Grounding then becoming aware of any sensations, emotions, images, or desire for movement. This is our gate way to the deeper work.

• We will slowly explore, as the wise adrienne maree brown says, “we will move at the speed of trust”. I will support you to trust and stay with what arises.

• In our last 10 mins, or whenever you are ready, we will re-connect and integrate through reflections, sharing, or grounding practice.

Not every session will look exactly like this but it is a basic structure. Group therapy and other forms of work will look differently.

Core Concepts That Inform My Practice

Inner Healer

This is something that is in all of us. An inner healing intelligence that always moves toward wholeness. MAPS said it well in the following quote when they compared it to healing a physical wound, “the body knows how to heal itself. If someone goes to the emergency room with a laceration, a doctor can remove obstacles to healing (e.g. remove foreign bodies, infection, etc.) and can help create favourable conditions for healing (e.g. sew the edges of the wound close together), but the doctor does not direct or cause the healing that ensues. The body initiates a remarkably complex and sophisticated healing process and always spontaneously attempts to move toward healing. The psyche also exhibits an innate healing intelligence and capacity.”

Attachment Dynamics

Attachment wounding is one of the “obstacles to healing” mentioned above. I agree with the extensive research on the topic, that our early years impact our adult years. When we are children, the connection to our primary caregiver is the absolute priority above all else and we will disown parts of ourselves that threaten that connection. We will learn how much of ourselves is acceptable and hide the rest. Fast forward to adulthood - if we don’t consciously retrieve those parts of ourselves that we disowned years before, we are not showing up in the world in our wholeness. We are using a map for relationships that we drew when we were children for a landscape that has since become exponentially more vast. Watch this short video of Gabor Maté explaining what we sacrifice in order to maintain attachment.

Parts Work

Parts work honours that we are complex and multi-faceted beings. Have you ever been invited to an event and a part of you wanted to attend but another part of you wanted to stay home? These inner tensions show up in all areas of our lives and vary in intensity.  My hope is to support you to understand what energizes your various parts. Is it your present day value system and authenticity or is it a wound still open from when you were a child? As Richard Schwartz says, “there are no bad parts”. We are not doing this work to reject the parts of you that feel confused, rage, fear, etc. Our intention in this work is to befriend those parts of you, understand why they developed in the first place, and heal the internal relationship so that all parts can work together harmoniously. 

Somatics

One of the most effective tools to discover and do healing work with parts are somatic therapies. They support us to access a deeper level of processing than traditional talk therapy will allow. You may have heard the saying, “trauma is stored in the body”. When we experience danger or threat, we are no longer experiencing the world from a meaning making (talking) place, we are experiencing the world from a place of survival. 

Consider this: if you came across a bear in the woods, your response would not be to sit and philosophize about meeting a bear at this moment, your response would be to run, fight, or freeze! That is a body-based response. So the way that experience is getting stored for you, is not in your explicit memory that recalls a clear story about the event, but instead that experience is getting stored in your implicit memory, an unconscious part of ourselves that acts automatically.  

So when does this become a problem? If this threatening event is not processed, we will be unconsciously waiting for it to happen again. This can result in anxiety that we can’t explain, digestive issues, misinterpreting events because they resemble that experience from the past, etc. Working with the body allows us to find where those experiences are stored and process them in a way that talk therapy cannot.