Mandy Bishop
Forum Replies Created
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Summary Post:
For me, learning about the brain has been so empowering. And I find that it is empowering for my clients as well to understand how they are wired and how change actually works. It takes change from this out of reach concept into a grounded physical possibility. It helps me to feel that there is possibility and that I have the power to change what I want. So, I want to write out my understanding of the brain and change so far, so that I can practice summarizing how it works. And also so that if I am missing anything or incorrect somewhere, y’all can let me know!
The majority of our behaviors are coming from the programming that is stored in our unconscious. Often we have experiences that have generated an uncomfortable feeling, many times from a pre-verbal age but also including trauma and grief, and this creates some of the programming of the unconscious brain and constitutes our self-image. When we try to veer off this self-image to make a change or incorporate a new belief, our subconscious mind sends signals to keep the system in line with the old habitual programming. Our unconscious mind is wired around NOT feeling the uncomfortable feeling and will fight, flight or freeze to avoid feeling this, keeping us in a loop of behaviors that are no longer serving us. It is possible to change the underlying programming, but in order to do that we have to be willing to experience the uncomfortable feelings stored with the associated limiting beliefs. By increasing our window of tolerance to experience the uncomfortable feelings often associated with core wounds, we can teach our systems that we are now safe. It generally takes 90 seconds to experience something and integrate it into the body. By touching the uncomfortable state/sensation and feeling it, you are giving yourself what you most want — to be seen, accepted and accompanied. This is the beginning of shifting the unconscious. From here it is possible to identify the new state desired to reach one’s dreams and goals. This is where threshold can be a very powerful felt experience of the new state that is possible. Whether it is the new state out of threshold, or an experience of touching the uncomfortable feeling, it is incredibly important to integrate. This can include moving the experience/belief/state into and throughout the body — from left to right hemisphere, from brain down into body, connecting to now, telling the story. This all begins to re-wire the unconscious brain. Once the new state is experienced through threshold, ritualizing the experience now becomes imperative. Ritual acts to entrain the brain to the new state, keying the Reticular Activating System into what is possible now. This can be done through words, images and feelings such as affirmations, mantra, movement, creating art. The key to ritual is that is has to evoke the same level of euphoric feelings experienced during threshold each time it is practiced in order to change the neuropathways in the brain and hack the subconscious wiring.
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Initial Post:
My client is a woman I have been working with regularly for the past several months. She is an art therapist with a high level of self awareness. She has a deep connection to nature, and a large capacity and willingness to imagine. She is working with shifting old patterns and limiting beliefs that were encoded throughout her childhood (like all of us). She is doing the dance of creating change, fluctuating somewhere between contemplation, planning and action and then looping around again. She has an overarching goal/desire to be rooted and grounded in the present without getting pulled back into old behaviors and limiting beliefs.
Prior to the session I will write about, she had been in the planning and action stages. She had identified the new mythic image she needed to embody — a woman standing at the edge of a cliff, sure footed and centered, watching the tide go out and come in trusting that when she is in her center what she needs will come to her, and allowing herself to receive it. She had stepped into action by getting involved with a teacher at a healing monastery to further her commitment to meditation and to taking steps in a direction that her soul felt was right for her even though she couldn’t see where it was all leading. Prior to our last session, she had been feeling a sense of excitement and expansion in trusting her intuition and taking steps that she felt were right.When she came to our last session, she was in a different state. She arrived feeling exhausted, fuzzy and confused after spending the previous 4 days visiting family. She identified that the time with her mother was triggering and pulled her off center, back into her old beliefs and old programming. She had difficulty believing the new mythic image and what might be possible. As we worked through severance in our session and began to identify these unconscious beliefs, my client identified them as fear-based beliefs coming from her family of origin, and even possibly being passed down ancestrally.
We worked with her mom, both her external relationship to her mom and the mom part that has been internalized within her. Some of the old operating system that is deeply programmed into her unconscious/limbic brain include these beliefs: “I can’t ever win”, “I am not good enough/working hard enough — I am not enough”, “You have to work hard to make something happen”, “Anything is possible, but not for me”. These are beliefs coming from mom (external and internal). When I asked her if these statements felt true, she stated that these beliefs felt like “lies”, but that she didn’t know what was true anymore and that she felt really confused. I took this opportunity for a teaching moment to explain brain and change.
I explained that these old beliefs are encoded into her unconscious brain and live in the lower limbic brain center. She is in a process of change wherein she is becoming aware of the old beliefs that no longer feel true for her, and her Pre-frontal Cortex has identified new beliefs and a new state that she would like to embody (the new mythic image). However, this new belief system has not yet fully integrated into her entire system. And when the system is deeply triggered by a stressful event (spending 4 days with mom who reinforces the old limiting beliefs) the limbic system and nervous system abort the new programming and revert back to survival mode and old programming. For the new self-image to change, the system needs to be accepting of this new potential, and her unconscious brain has not yet fully accepted this new potential.
Because this new belief system is different from the old operating pattern, her subconscious mind and Reticular Activating System are going to find evidence to prove that the old operating system is the truth (which is what happened with mom). What our work is, is to inform the subconscious that a different way is possible, that the new belief is actually possible and to increase tolerance for the new mythic image/state, thereby increasing the neuropathways associated with the new programming, behaviors and beliefs. I encouraged that you can change your brain/mind. It simply takes awareness of old patterns, embodying a new state, and consistent repetition of bringing yourself into that new state.
We did some parts work with “mom” and my client was able to ask her mom for what she needs stating, “I need softness. I need warm and slow. I need to be listened to, not told. I need to be asked how I am and what I need. I need to want to be connected with. I need to be seen.” I think through this process, my client was able to give herself what she needed and quiet her system from the fight/flight response (old operating system) that had been activated. Once she was able to reach a calmer state, she was closer to soul and her own center. From this place, I asked her, if those beliefs no loner felt true for her, what DOES now feel true?
What she said was, “My life has been a success. I have persisted in being myself despite the lack of support I have received.” I encouraged her to bring that into the present and try out the statement, ‘I am a success’. She tried that on and I could see the new state emerging from her entire body as she said “I AM A SUCCESS.” I encouraged her to stay with that and let the feeling saturate her entire body, allowing for integration to take place vertically. She described some of the feelings to me verbally, which furthered integration.
By this point in the session, we had to move into incorporation and wrap up. I think she was still in contemplation at this point, but almost as if the stages of change were a spiral and she was back in contemplation but a whole loop deeper in it. I am excited to see how this session unfolds during this next week because it feels like she had some deeper integration of the new state during this session than in past sessions.
In an ideal world, I hope to guide my client back to the new state and mythic image, and have a threshold experience there with enough time remaining to really integrate and incorporate some form of ritual that can be practiced consistently moving forward, really working to increase her system’s belief in the new possibility.
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Summary Post:
I feel that learning to work with (or actually just BE with) grief is one of the greatest acts of service we could offer to our clients. It is one of the most natural and universal things we all encounter on our paths. Just looking around in nature, it is a constant. It is imperative. It is winter. It is the north. It is necessary for life to emerge and new growth to occur. It is completely universal. Francis Weller states, “Coming home to grief is sacred work that confirms what the indigenous soul knows and what spiritual traditions teach: we are connected to one another.” Grief teaches us of our humanity.I feel like within the coaching dynamic, my job is to recognize grief when it rears it’s head. To say hello to it and to honor it by giving it space. By doing this, I act as a guide for my client’s to open the door to being with what is present for them. If done in such a way that we create a safe container, clients can inch closer towards their grief realizing that they will not be annihilated by the bigness of it. That actually, there is extreme love and life living in the same place that tremendous grief resides. Francis Weller sums it up well with the following quotes:
“To honor our grief, to grant it space and time in our frantic world, is to fulfill a covenant with soul—to welcome all that is, thereby granting room for our most authentic life.”
“It is our unexpressed sorrows, the congested stories of loss, that when left unattended, block our access to the soul.”
p.s. If you have not checked out his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, it is very much worth a read.
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Initial Post:
My client is a woman I have been seeing regularly online for about 3 months now, with a one-month break. She is a very energetic, highly motivated and positive person. She is an art therapist and has a high level of self awareness. In many ways, it feels like she coaches herself in our sessions and I am just literally a mirror for her and a way for her to be held accountable. It’s pretty ideal.
About a month ago, when she returned from the one-month break, she came to our session very disregulated. She said right off the bat that the divorce from her husband had been finalized a couple days before. Her husband had not been a big topic in our prior sessions as he had not been a big part of her life for nearly a year. She expressed that they had ended the relationship long ago but it took until now to finalize everything in the courts. She came to the session crying, “a mess” as she put it (but generally appearing more disheveled than her norm), and I noticed energetically she felt heavy or weighed down.
She mentioned right off that she was experiencing extreme exhaustion, not wanting to eat, as well as anger at the feeling of being out of control of her emotions. She didn’t like that this experience was upsetting her and that she couldn’t stop it from doing so. I recognized right away that she was experiencing grief from the finalization of her divorce, and that this was a completion of a huge part of her life. As simple as it is, I just named the grief and this set the focus for the session.
The reaction she was having surprised her as the relationship had ended long ago and there was probably already some grieving that had occurred. I remembered from our grief section that grief is a response to loss and, in this case, there was a grief of letting go of the hopes that the relationship might some day work out or be efforted over. I let go of any plan for setting intentions or identifying coaching goals, and just gave time and space for this grief to be there. I noticed quickly after I energetically gave space for the grief to be, that my client’s energy dropped and expanded. It was as if she needed permission to allow herself to just be exactly as she was in that moment. Like my permission gave her permission.
It quickly became apparent to me that there were parallels between the divorce from her husband and the divorce of her parents. The unprocessed grief that she experienced as a young girl was resurfacing with this experience that was in some ways very similar. She was experiencing cumulative grief—losses from the past affecting current losses.
I feel that the entire session flowed very well, as we were not trying to do anything or achieve anything or get anywhere—we were simply acknowledging what was present and honoring it. We spent the majority of the session simply giving space for any and all feelings to be there. My client named feeling ashamed of having this reaction to a divorce that was so ready to happen. There was a brief teaching moment where we talked about this experience bringing up grief from the past and compounding with the grief of this loss. We also talked about grief being a wild and unpredictable creature that can shape-shift from anger, to exhaustion, to shame, to sadness, to giddiness, to emptiness, to obsession, to flatness, to gratitude, giving permission for any and all feelings that surfaced.
Nature connection came in with some imagery that my client and I have been working with during our coaching together. Many years ago, she had a dream of herself on a rickety old bridge trying to cross the Grand Canyon that has stuck with her. In this session she stated that she felt as if she had fallen from the bridge and was now all the way at the bottom of the canyon, treading water. We used this imagery to explore. I asked her from this place what it was that she needed. She said she needed to get to the raft and to set an anchor. Exploring what this meant in her daily life, she identified getting onto the raft represented getting back to journalling every day. We set an attainable goal of writing for 5 minutes a day. She was not yet able to identify what setting an anchor looked like, so we agreed to start with journalling and to hold the question of what an anchor would look like for her until our next session.
Overall, I think honoring the bigness of the life change she was going through and letting her know that I was walking beside her was all the “coaching” that needed to happen in this session.
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Wow, Rachel, these reflections are so powerful! Thank you for sharing all of this. I feel like, for me, two of my biggest take-aways from the grief portion were the power of NOT doing, of holding space and allowing for the feelings that are there to just be there. Sounds like in both your coaching experience and “civilian” experiences this played out to be super powerful and exactly what was needed. The other part that stood out to me from the module is that we are creatures that really need to make sense of traumatic losses and one way we do that is through telling our story. How awesome to see this play out in several instances. Really confirms that less is more, particularly when they are going through grief.
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Great reflections, Kairon. What comes up for me reading this is just the power of attunement with our clients which opens up space for us to listen deeply and without agenda or attachment to outcome (something I continue to cultivate and develop). Seems to me like there are a few different ways to speak about that place deep inside that is pure, intact, connected to truth and all things, has a knowing. We’ve been speaking about it as soul, but I think you could also refer to it as the deeper self, or heart, and it seems like it may be important to be versed in different wording and imagery for this deeper state of ourselves as some people have a holdup around the word “soul”, etc. I’m curious to check out that documentary. What you write about seems like such a simple yet powerful practice!
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Summary Post:
Summary Post:
One of the things that stands out to me the most from the trauma section is “increasing the window of tolerance”. This can be in the form of ability to touch into the difficult feelings without going into fight, flight or freeze. But this can also be about being able to experience pleasurable sensations as well. Building resourcing, even if it just begins with identifying and experiencing states of resource only in the coaching session, but eventually extends beyond into the client’s life, this is one of the greatest tools to lay the foundation for shifting one’s state from habitual reaction to safety and trust. Incorporating nature as a way to find safety, resource, and increase one’s window of tolerance makes so much sense to me. It is a benign force, always supporting us and giving to us. One that can be a visual representation of all that is going on inside of us that we may have rejected or shamed. And when we see ourselves reflected back to us through nature, we are much more able to accept those parts of ourselves as natural elements, without judgment. It is also one of the only places I have found that I believed could hold the amount of grief, anger, fear, etc. that I’ve carried. I really appreciate Kairon’s reflection that “when we as nature-connected coaches embody nature and are attuned to the frequency of nature, we ARE nature that could talk and respond back to our client.”
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Initial Post:
My practice client is a longterm client I have seen about six times so far. We meet every other week online. She is someone who has a known history of trauma and grief. Having developmental trauma from various abusive relationships (physically, sexually, and verbally) from a young age, as well as shock trauma experiencing assault as an adult and undergoing a major surgery, I would say she has a complex traumatic background. She has a long history of extreme and real threats to her safety that have been stored in her hippocampus, and a pattern of dissociating as a way to get through stressful traumatic experiences when her amygdala fires off the flight, fight, freeze response. This is happening currently on a regular basis. Parts of her are very aware of how trauma effects her ability to grow, and she sees a therapist, coach, does yoga and other mindfulness exercises to work at changing deeply engrained reactivity patterns and coping mechanisms, and other parts of her just want to keep her safe and shut down. The major goal she has identified in our coaching sessions is to close the gap between her habitual survival state of being and her deep desire to be more comfortable in her body, to feel safe and be able to be in the flow.
In our sessions we have done some partswork as well as looking at unconscious beliefs through storying, but much of our time has been spent slowly building up resourcing and increasing her window of tolerance for “it to be okay to feel okay if everything is okay”. This client has built up a very strong ability to deflect and dissociate by “talking about” — talking about her husband, her latest workshop, her past, she will also talk about her body rather than have a present experience in her body. This has been a learning edge for me as I have had to learn to decipher when she is talking about how something in her life effects her body, versus being with the sensations in her body in that moment. I have begun to bring her awareness to this when it happens and use the Gestalt method of statement making to see what fits for her bringing her more into a present moment experience in her body, down from the pre-frontal cortex. In addition, I have focused on building up resourcing both in our sessions and with invitations for practice between our sessions.
Two sessions ago, my client arrived in a very hyper-aroused state as her family life had been thrown into chaos in between our sessions. My client had awareness to know she had been operating in survival mode for the past couple weeks and that she was disconnected. In a previous session, we had identified her feet as a place in her body that felt positive/neutral, so I had this in the back of my mind as we continued. I asked if she’d like to start with a grounding, however she stated she didn’t want to be in her body as it felt as though she might get swallowed up if she allowed herself to feel. I brought the goal up of her wanting to find safety and be more at home in her body, and named that I was aware that in this moment she was dissociating. I asked if this goal still felt like what she wanted to work with. She said yes overall, but she was afraid and just needed to talk. I remembered from the trauma section the importance of respecting the no and a person’s boundary for creating safety. “Although being challenged by and moving through stressful situations has the potential to be empowering, it also has the potential to have a re-traumatizing effect.” (Asmus & McDevitt, p.23) So, I celebrated her choice and boundary setting, and followed where she took the session. She talked as much as she needed and I held space and reflected. By the end of this session, her speech had slowed, her tone of voice had dropped, breathing returned to a deeper, slower pace and overall she appeared to be more grounded to me. I asked her what she was aware of after summarizing what I had heard during the hour. She said that “Just in sharing my story and in being heard and allowed to be how I am right now I feel much more grounded”.
By the following session, she appeared to be more ready and willing to go towards the goal of shifting old patterns and beliefs to feel more comfortable and safe in her body. Her capacity to be with difficult emotions seemed to have increased. As we went into the state of survival she had been experiencing and wanting to shift, she identified feeling like she was a 12 year old girl. At this point she was able and willing to spend some time looking at her 12 year old self that was wanting to disappear, and she was able to name from this place that she wanted to “stand her ground, have command of herself, and stay strong”. A lot of strong emotions arose in voicing this. However, this time my client allowed me to guide her to ground into her feet. I just stayed with her feet, not wanting her to get flooded but wanting to allow the resource to be a place of safety for her so that this experience could soak into her being. As we spent time naming and experiencing the sensations in her feet, the most remarkable thing happened! The safe and positive feelings just naturally began to move up her legs and into her spine. Eventually she was standing up tall and her eyes had risen to direct contact. She was exuding a natural strength and confidence I had not seen before. Neither one of us had to DO anything for this state shift to occur. It naturally began to happen because my client felt safe enough to allow the feelings to naturally arise. Over our time together, her window of tolerance for positive or neutral feelings has increased. And this particular experience allowed a sequencing to occur. Because my client was able to tap into a resource and a sense of safety, her nervous system was able to naturally find its way back to homeostasis. As we talked about incorporation of this powerful experience, my client came up with a mantra “I am a brilliant badass!”, along with an intention to drop into her feet daily to return to that safe and strong feeling.
I don’t know how I might do this with an online client, but in the future I’d really love to build upon forming deep relationships with nature as part of our resourcing. In addition to the safe places in the body, I’d like to build up my ability to guide clients through nature based experiences where they begin to relate to the tree’s ability to provide touch, the meadow’s ability to listen, the river’s ability to release and cleanse. I’m drawn to this because sometimes, especially when you’ve experienced a lot of body trauma, it can feel safer to resource outside of yourself rather than dropping into the body. I’m realizing how important building resourcing is to the coaching work we are doing, and that it is not something that people inherently know or have. In many cases, especially with people that have a traumatic background, it needs to be taught and practiced ritually. Once we have enough of a sense of safety within our bodies and our environment, then like all other natural beings, our systems naturally find their way back to homeostasis and balance. The challenge is to not get caught up in fixing anything or get bogged down with the life story, but to focus on building up resource and re-establishing safety so that nature can do the rest.
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Summary Post: Learning about the brain and the theory of change has been a very empowering experience, not only for me, but I believe it has been empowering for my clients as well. As we learn the biology of what is happening in our brains, how our nervous systems are wired, it gives context to WHY we are the way we are. And it informs us that we are not beholden to the ways we have reacted to situations in the past, but that our reactions are happening due to wiring within our brain/nervous system, and we all have the ability to re-wire, to make a different choice. I am leaving this module feeling inspired to keep learning about the brain and increase my ability to talk about it with clients, in a language they can relate to and buy into, so that they can be even more empowered to do the work to change their own neuropathways.
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Thanks for sharing about this, Kaity. Something I can relate to in your post is the client staying caught up in the story, and the difficulty of dropping into deeper territory with them. It seems like when a client is circling in their story, they are more than likely in pre-contemplation talking about what happened (often to them) and what they did or didn’t do. It seems like it isn’t until they drop into identifying what they want, but especially how they want to be (need) that they enter contemplation. I hadn’t really connected the dots fully about that relating to circular story telling until now.
I’m really impressed with your ability to read your client’s energy. I love that you asked her permission to pause and to drop a little bit deeper, brining her from the story into the present (how the telling of the story informs and effects her body presently). Awesome!
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Rachel,
Oh gosh, this post got me all excited! Great job!!! I totally agree with Kaity and Hannah’s comments, so will keep this brief and not repeat. But, I love how it sounds like you met your client exactly where she was at in not wanting to get emotional, and allowed the session to move into more of a teaching/learning experience, which then inevitably engaged her emotionally, but from a different angle than the road she had been on previously. I also feel that it is really important to have those teaching moments. Sometimes the neuropathways and the brain really don’t know what else is possible (i.e. self love) or what it looks like, and this is so beautiful that you could partner with her to brainstorm, almost helping her know what one could feel like or what is possible. Yay!
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Kaity! Awesome to read your very raw and honest post about your experience with grief as it has come up in your client. I can relate to the experience of seeing that a client’s reaction to a current situation really has roots to a deeper grief that may be lying underneath that has not had the proper time and space.
I really appreciated your sentiment: “We spent the rest of the session in grief work. There was no coaching. No real defined threshold or incorporation, just space to feel. I suppose this space was a threshold for her in itself.” I have also been in that situation where it feels like we put aside “coaching” and just go into grief work. This feels so critical because, as you said, there are not many spaces or places within our culture that allow for grief to be. I love thinking of that kind of session as a threshold in and of itself. Crossing the threshold into allowing the grief the space that it needs to take up!
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Kaity, I love hearing about this as well! It is beautiful how fluid you can be and attuned to the strengths of your clients. Using your client’s theatricality to go deeper and create a meaningful threshold is so wonderful. It reminds me of how creative we can and need to be as coaches, which is so exciting to me!
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Kairon,
Thank you so much for your post. Having been the client in your fishbowl session, it was really powerful for me to read about your experience coaching someone going through a traumatic response. There were a couple things you mentioned that really stood out to me as wonderful reminders and aspects that I notice I can get caught up in as a coach as well.“I am not in charge of the process but rather, the process was a larger organism that I am part of.”
“There is no space for doubt even though the whole process is a big experimentation process where mistakes bound to happen. For me, the doubt comes in when I as a facilitator tried to make “something” happen and it becomes especially strong when nothing that I did seem to work or make any progress. The problem wasn’t because there wasn’t any progress, but I was too attached to my own idea of progress that I did not catch the miniscule progress we were making”
I can resonate with this feeling of needing to “make something happen” in a session and there has been a real learning edge for me to recognize there is nothing I need to MAKE happen, but that I am a part of a larger system that has its own innate wisdom and is finding its way back to homeostasis. I am just holding space for that.
I would disagree with one thing you said when you write “I was too attached to my own idea of progress that I did not catch the miniscule progress we were making”. In my experience as client, the process that occurred was absolutely NOT miniscule. That session was deep and profound for me and a lot was shaken up and reorganized deep within my system. As I write this, this is a very good reminder for me as coach as well – that we might not know the depth of progress that is happening under the surface for a client. Something that we observe from our view point, might be a very profound experience under the surface for the client.
Thanks for all you shared!
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Sorry I misspelled your name! Rachel <3