My Approach
Over the years I have cultivated a framework of 5 general elements that I see are major contributors to the ease or dis-ease along our human journey. Within these elements of course exist individual facets as well.
In our sessions we will organically weave in these 5 elements together building a strong foundation for enhancing self-awareness and creating self-compassion and connection.
Here they are organized somewhat by how I see the flow of the layers. However, returning to wholeness is certainly not limited to, nor defined in this order and will look different and perfect for each person. Learning more deeply about yourself will empower you to be your own best healer!
Understanding Our Childhood Experiences
1
The Nervous System
2
Identifying & Processing Trapped Emotions
3
How Our Ego Has Adapted
4
Reclaiming Our Worth & Connection to Our Soul
5
Understanding Our Early Life Experiences
Trauma = Any unresolved negative life experience that changed your beliefs about yourself or the world resulting in adaptive behaviors that no longer serve us.
We all begin the journey of self-discovery because aspects of our adult lives feel painful. This is because we have old programs and limiting beliefs, learned when we were small, that have impacted our current experiences (AKA “traumas”). Many people don’t identify with having trauma yet still are faced with early life conditioning that has a negative impact on our lives. The intention is not to assign labels, but to bring bring compassion and awareness to our behaviors. Knowing ourselves more deeply will bring us to the root of the discomfort we carry. When the unconscious becomes conscious we are empowered to choose.
What remains hidden can never truly be healed. We must first understand fundamentally why we feel and behave as we do before we can claim what is rightfully ours; our worth, sovereignty and our intrinsic love for self and others. Only then can we become more present in our lives.
Many of us are disconnected from the reality of our young environments. Sometimes because there is much we don’t remember but even more importantly because we “normalize” what we experienced. If were grew up with yelling and fighting, we wouldn’t see that as traumatic. If we had a parent who would stop speaking to us for days or even weeks, we might not know how damaging that actually is. Even the devastating impact of something as obviously abusive as sexual violation is often unintentionally undermined by the victim and even those around them.
We all have wounds from our childhood- no matter how little “trauma” one feels they have. From these wounds we develop core beliefs and our ego’s coping strategies that are born to help us survive. They also block us from understanding our needs and creating healthy boundaries in order to take care of ourselves.
Many of us don’t know that when we are hurting now, typically it is our inner child that is feeling vulnerable, not the adult self. Learning how to nurture and show up for our wounded child when he/she is feeling hurt (often called “reparenting”) is a powerful way to embody love, acceptance, and compassion for self and for others.
2. The Nervous System
When we are small our body and our nervous systems become attuned to the vibration of the environment around us. A stressful event or general environment activates the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight mode). This can start as early as when we are in the womb. If your mother is stressed and has a compromised nervous system or if she is using substances etc. this will be passed down into the fetus. And when a baby is born, the nervous system will attune to the energy in the home environment, positive or negative. This attunement becomes a baseline that we revert back to throughout our lives when we feel threat (flight or flight), it becomes our default-mode.
As humans we are designed for connection, in fact our survival depends on it. Our caregivers are also fundamentally designed to be in the role of “coregulating” us when we are upset. The main role of these caregivers is to help us feel safe and nurtured so that we can return to a calm and safe baseline. Unfortunately, this is often not possible as many parents also have unhealed trauma and dysregulated nervous systems.
If the very person who is responsible for our coregulation is also creating the lack of safety with any type of physical, mental, emotional abuse or neglect it trains our brain and central nervous system to a baseline of this vibration. The “fight or flight” response is a physiological phenomenon and these traumas along with other unresolved negative experiences get stored in the body.
The Vagus nerve is a vital nerve that communicates from the body to the brain. It is in charge of the autonomic nervous system and controls all of the major bodily responses such as heartbeat, breathing, blood pressure, taste, hearing, digestion, bladder movement etc. When we experience a lot of stress and/or poor diet and lifestyle choices it impacts the health of the Vagus nerve, creating an imbalance. We then become susceptible to all types of dis-ease including but not limited to, anxiety, depression, digestive disorders, obesity etc. When the Vagus nerve is unhealthy, we cycle in and out of fight or flight constantly.
No matter how cognitively aware of our challenges we may be, we will never be able to truly heal if our nervous system is haywire. Holistic diet and lifestyle choices as well as vagal-toning exercises such as yoga, breathwork, meditation, chanting, dance, massage etc. will greatly support the healing of the body, mind, and soul. Psychedelics also can greatly release stored trauma in the body and begin retuning the central nervous system. Root Cause Therapy directly processes the emotions that are responsible for the dysregulation and can very quickly calm the central nervous system.
3. Identifying & Processing Trapped Emotions
Emotions are a vital and unavoidable part of this human experience. Yet most adults (through no fault of our own) don’t have the emotional maturity to understand what is happening within us, let alone the ability to express ourselves in a clear and conscious way. This begins the snowball effect of unmetabolized emotions, generating a massive impact on our central nervous system and behaviors at .
Emotions do not go away unless we give them space to process consciously. They don’t simply lose power if we ignore them, quite the opposite in fact. When we consciously or unconsciously suppress our emotions, they become what Eckhart Tolle refers to as “the pain body”. That is, the unprocessed emotions become a body of pain that we carry around with us just bursting to express themselves, often at the slightest opportunity.
Some of us are “exploders”, discharging these unprocessed emotions onto others. Some are “imploders”, so averse to expressing any emotion that they cannibalize themselves internally and can end up developing a whole host of physical symptoms and dis-ease.
We learn methods of processing emotions based on our childhood environments. For example, if your father was rageful and expressed it outwardly in your home, you could either become similar in your expression of anger or go completely the opposite direction; adopting the belief that expressing anger is not OK. Therefor any anger you might experience would be suppressed, perhaps turning into to inauthentic happiness or people pleasing and an inability to stand up for oneself. We sometimes will do anything to get away from impermissible feelings. In either case, the anger is in charge and is unconsciously creating negative patterns.
Because most of us are not raised in emotionally intelligent environments we weren’t allowed, let alone encouraged, to express ourselves authentically. Most parents shut their children down at the slightest outburst or bend over backwards if they are crying insisting that “there is no need to cry”, quickly attempting to resolve the situation so that the parents can feel ok by hoping the kids feel ok These parents are quite unconsciously teaching their children that emotions are no safe and our emotional repression and suppression begins.
4. How Our Ego Has Adapted
Born from these childhood experiences and our unprocessed emotions come our limiting beliefs about ourselves and the world. Some examples of limiting beliefs could be “I’m unworthy, I’m bad, I’m ugly, I’m powerless, my needs are not important, I must please others in order to be loved” etc. In response to these beliefs come our ego’s creative defenses. These strategies are designed to keep us safe from the perceived hostility of the world around us. They are quite brilliant really and serve us greatly initially. Over time however they create a negative impact in our lives. We can learn to treat them with reverence while simultaneously working on finding a healthier approach.
There are two types of coping strategies: adaptive and maladaptive. The former are healthy ways of dealing with stress such as going for a run, taking a yoga class, meditating, confiding in a friend. The latter are the unhealthy and destructive options that reflect our limiting beliefs. These maladaptive behaviors wreak havoc on our lives such as substance abuse, behavioral addictions, people pleasing, discharging our emotions onto others, or eating ourselves alive from within.
Typically, we are coming to this type of work because these strategies have become unbearable. However, it is very important to honor that our minds created these mechanisms to help us to escape from the pain that we were carrying, and to ultimately survive the feelings of disconnection. Addiction for example (though sadly demonized in a conventional society), actually saves lives. Addiction helps people cope with trauma and disconnection from self so deep that without such forms of escapism they may have turned to suicide.
By understanding these strategies, we have the power to begin to make different choices in our behaviors.
5. Our Worth & Connection to Our Soul
Feeling connected to our soul is not something that can be explained, nor can it be taught. Feeling connected to our soul is just that, “soulful”… It is not intellectual. This can be described as (but is not limited to) an inner warmth, a heart connection, an openness a sense of calm and connectedness. It is a feeling of worthiness, safety and inner stability that cannot be measured and is unshaken by the outside world. It is a trust in the divine flow of this existence that permeates our whole being.
Our soul and our worth are intrinsically linked, and one cannot be present without the other. Worth is a tricky one however. On the surface it can be easy to intellectually assign to our worth to things that we “are” or have “done”, simply saying that you like or love yourself. But worth has nothing to do with any of that. Worth is not a concept. It is something that can only be felt in the truest and deepest part of your essence, and this is when we feel aligned with our soul.
When we are not in touch with our intrinsic worth, we find it very difficult to fully trust our intuition. Decision making and navigating our way through life is clouded with far too much fear from the ego. We can’t fully trust ourselves therefore we cannot trust that we can thrive no matter what life brings. Thereby we default to the stories of the mind dragging us all over the place.
When we don’t trust in our worthiness we can never truly have authentic love with another, for we can we ever fully love someone else if we don’t embody it to the core of our own being.
Reclaiming our worth is something that can only be done on a cellular and spiritual level when hidden parts that are in this subconscious become conscious and we learn how to embrace both our dark and our light.
Are you engaged and inspired by what you are reading?