David Raffelock
Forum Replies Created
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Summary Post
There’s so much more to learn! I’m so grateful for this module. In my work with adults in treatment, trauma and addiction go hand in hand. One seldom exists without the other. It actually blows my mind that simple methods and tools like guiding through trauma are not taught to anyone working in addiction recover. Fortunately, most of my co-staff are incredibly talented guides and have a natural ability to stay emotionally present with clients. However, after this module I can see that there is a severe lack of formal training in the field I work in. My training in working with trauma has come in handy countless times at work. I’m actually considering doing/learning more to better understand guiding through trauma so that I can lead a staff training for the other guides at Legacy.
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Initial Post
This learning module has been one of the most beneficial foundations for my work with clients in treatment! One example of work with a client comes to mind. I was working in the women’s program, Juniper Canyon, and I was in the severance phase of preparing clients for a 3-day vision fast. I was meeting with clients individually to help them further distill their intentions for the ceremony.
I was meeting with the first of three clients. She was in treatment for heroin addiction. Vulnerability was challenging for her, and she always deflected from her emotional experience, staying focused on task-orientation. We were diving into a conversation, and I was pushing her to her edge, guiding her to her deeper need. The flow of the process led use to pendulation. She was dive deep, withdraw and flirt with a trauma response, and I would bring her back to the present moment using the senses.
As we continued this for some time – diving deeper, coming back out to get grounded again, and so on – I eventually decided to explicitly establish a resource for her. I talked to her about what had been happening and why having her own resource could be helpful. I tried to establish a “safe place” similar to that used in EMDR. I guided her through envisioning a nature scene that felt peaceful and safe. For a moment it felt as though she found somewhere that was working. Then I felt a shift and noticed she was going down some dark rabbit hole, leaving a place of regulation. I asked her to open her eyes, and she was clearly no longer there in a regulated way.
I asked what happened, and she had envisioned a scene from her childhood, at the beach with her family. The nature of the scene was perfect for a resource – it was safe, calm, and filled with joy. However, the feeling of safety was so foreign to her that this triggered the thoughts of how distant that feeling actually was. What resulted was a deep sadness and grief for a life that was lived without emotional safety or a feeling of acceptance. She was deep into a low-road circuit, so I again used more sensory resources to bring her back.
Situations like this leave me feeling humbled and grateful to have learned how to trust and honor the process. The conversation that followed led to a deeper need associated with what came up – to accept herself and be gentle with herself. Since around the time that she envisioned as a child, she hadn’t felt safe to have emotions or be vulnerable. As a result, she shut down any emotional existence she had and instead focused on perfection in task orientation.
In this experience, I had an immense amount of confidence in guiding through trauma. I couldn’t imagine how the situation would have gone if I didn’t have a strong foundation in maintaining emotional contact and resourcing. What would have happened if I felt ill-equipped and panicked for a “solution”, if I didn’t know how to pendulate or use resources, or if I left her in a state of dysregulation?
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Summary Post
PartsWork has been the most impactful module on my life and my guiding thus far. I’ve grown tremendously as a person by using my mandala to understand the nature of my own suffering, and by using the tool of internal dialogue to self-design and initiate new ways of being. What is remarkable is how effective partswork has been with clients, and simply how much clients resonate with the partswork model. Working with a demographic of highly dysregulated addicts who have little self-awareness, being able to help them simply map their parts offers them a massive amount of self-awareness never experienced before. I’ve introduced partswork to a handful of clients, and it has given every one of them the ability to differentiate from the voices in their heads for the first time ever.
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Initial Post
The last PartsWork session I facilitated that comes to mind is one I did with a client at work. At Legacy. If a client is not showing up for the emotional work in the program and needs additional support, they are removed from their group and put on “quest” – sent out to the field to work one-on-one with a guide. I was asked by a client’s therapist to quest him before he had his scheduled “family workshop”. Family workshop usually happens around 8-10 weeks into the program. The client’s family comes out to the treatment center for two full days of educational groups, time with their loved one in the program, and group therapy sessions.
This particular client was objectively unprepared to have a productive and meaningful family workshop. He was unable to look at himself as the root of any of his troubles, always looking at the outside world to place blame. He saw his parents and therapist as obstacles in getting what he wanted and was participating at a minimum in the program to just get through the 3 months. I was asked to take him on quest to see if I could shift some energy and get him prepared for his family workshop.
I watched as he switched from part to part throughout the first few days out together backpacking through canyons. His mood was all over the place and he would end up on a daily basis entirely dysregulated and hypo-activated, shutting down to the point of suicidal ideation. A few days into our week, I told him how I related to his experience, and how PartsWork was a powerful tool that I’ve used to help sort myself out. I opened up my portable mandala and explained how it works, demonstrating some of the internal conflict I’ve navigated within my own Self.
His interest peaked tremendously and he almost begged to map out his own mandala. Since it was just the two of us alone in the wilderness, we were able to spend hours mapping his parts and having a thorough interview of each part. The interview process alone was enlightening for him, and for me to understand how deeply rooted his need for validation ran. In the interview process, we discovered that many of his parts learned to operate with the sole purpose of seeking external validation. Whether it was his jokester putting other people down, or narcissist disregarding whatever others say, many of his parts learned unhealthy ways of finding validation in response to his parents attempting to correct his behavior by steering him in a direction that was not who he was.
The work continued and we had a conversation between his adult, observer, narcissist, and critic. The conversation began with the intention to figure out how he wanted to show up for his family workshop. In the process, we discovered even more – how his critic judged how his other parts sought validation and triggered an overwhelming feeling of shame that resulted in dissociation. In the process, he used trees to represent each part in the conversation. One curious part was that in the conversation both his critic and narcissist agreed to stay out of family workshop, but only to stay away during the workshop. They would not agree to change their ways any other time.
What happened was astounding. The moment family workshop ended his narcissist and critic got to have the final say. Regardless of the fact that he and his parents opened up a level of communication and vulnerability they had never had before, he walked away from family workshop dissociated and enraged and the fact that he didn’t get what he wanted. He wanted to go home after the program before his 6-month aftercare program (something that all professionals warn against). He was again seeing his parents as obstacles and not the people he just connected deeply with, and his critic made him feel shame for not achieving the goal in the external world that his narcissist set as the only thing that could happen for him to feel validation.
Afterwards, we processed what happened and he realized the parts that came out, what they told him, how it was the same pattern they’ve played out most of his life, and that he had actually had great success and progress in the family therapy session we had. For the first time in the 9 weeks he was in the program, and likely the first time in many years, he had a tool that allowed him to take a step back, practice self-awareness, and begin to take ownership back into his life and make informed choices.
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Summary Post
I look forward to deepening my gestalt skills in this job and when I work with coaching clients again. These skills set me apart from other guides and even from the therapists at work. My ability to track, be present, and practice awareness of my clients’ deeper feelings, needs, and narratives has improved drastically from this module. The gestalt module helped me to guide on a far deeper level, and I feel as though I’ve only scratched the surface of my skills in gestalt and toolbox of experiments.
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Initial Post
Since my move to Utah for my guiding job, my clientele and “session” structure has changed drastically. My one-on-one interactions with clients are sporadic, less focused, and rare. Most of my chances to do some real guiding happen in our daily therapeutic groups, which are always introduced as a subject of conversation.
My use of gestalt presence, and the phenomenological and field theory perspectives have invited significant feedback from my co-staff, usually that what I do is different and effective. Most of guide-client or therapist-client interactions I witness at work are rooted in intellectual conversation and following through on therapeutic goals, and my use of gestalt presence and dialogue stands out.
A few instances with clients stand out to me in using gestalt principles at work. Once was a fairly recent daily group. Around 4 weeks into the program (a 90 day treatment program), clients receive “impact letters” from their closest relationships at home. The impact letters are written to them, describing the client’s past destructive behavior and actions and how it impacted their family member/loved one. These impact letters are read for the first time by the client in front of the group of clients and guides and opens up to dialogue after the letter is read.
Most recently, a client read his impact letters from both parents. While follow-up questions from my co-staff and other clients focusing on backstory were helpful in building relationship with the client, my approach was rooted in gestalt. I tracked the client while he read his letters, noticing points that felt charged with emotion, his changes in body language, and how I felt throughout the letters. My questions and reflections focused on those things, and every time brought him closer to his emotional experience as opposed to intellectual story telling. Reflecting on when I noticed emotion or a shift in body position/language continuously lead the client into a deeper awareness of himself.
The other interaction that stands out to me and an empty chair session I facilitated with a client. My first interaction with this client was of him being on a team I was to be guiding that week and he refused to go out into the field with the team. He stayed behind with another guide, withdrawn and dysregulated, demanding to go home. My next shift he was in the team I worked with and we spent the week in the field together. He was slightly more committed to the program, yet hardly committed to actual growth in it.
In our conversations, I discovered that he had significant losses and grief that he drowned out with drugs and alcohol. One of his losses what his grandfather – someone who he looked up to as a mentor figure and who loved him and saw him for who he was at his core. With the intention to feel the repressed emotions of his loss, I guided him through an empty chair experiment with his grandfather. We projected his grandfather onto a juniper tree and he spoke to the tree, then I invited him to speak back to himself from the perspective of his grandfather. I helped guide him through his emotions by noting when I felt or saw shifts and encouraging him to stay with sensations or repeat things that felt emotionally charged.
We uncovered that he had defined who he was as a bad, hopeless soul defined by his actions. In speaking from his grandfather, he was able to believe that he was not actually defined by his actions, and he named qualities that defined who he truly is. By the end of the session he tapped into a new-found commitment to himself and his recovery. His progress in the program was exponential from that week on.
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My most recent session with a practice client after our F2F was an intense one. My client is a therapist working with clients who are court-mandated and on parole. Our first session was great and allowed a full process which lead to solid integration. New connections were made, and we set up a solid action plan which she followed. Our second session – the most recent one – was challenging. She came to me having come out of a weekend or crises that caused relapse, edged her window of tolerance, and brought to light a lot of her deeply rooted habit patterns.
To begin the session, she jumped into a story about the weekend. She was seemingly operating mostly from her arousal system. Once she shared and I reflected back, I asked what she needed from the session, and we decided to work with helping her ground, see what it would be like to come out of the story and into the body, and try to release some tension that was there. We worked for a while with pendulation, coming to discover where she holds tension, sadness, and anger in her body.
About two thirds through the session she finally transitioned more to her quiescent system and we were able to refocus the session on how to incorporate resource, self-care, and boundaries into the work she is doing outside of sessions (all things that came up during the session). It was amazing to watch her seemingly looping in a low-road circuit at first, and then transitioning to more of a high-road circuit throughout the session.
Looking at the stages of change model that we learned, my client was in the action phase after our intake session until her challenging weekend when she had a relapse. Our session was spent circling back to contemplation and planning some with new realizations she had. She told me, however, that even during the weekend filled with crisis she was able to integrate a lot of what we worked on in the first session and that she had never before been so grounded and connected to herself during crisis. Sounds like the ritual we set up was able to strengthen some new neuropathways!
To be honest, because of what my client came in with this session was focused a lot more around trauma than change, so I have less to write about in regards to the brain and change. Moving forward in my coaching, I want to keep change theory in the forefront of my mind. I feel that the coaching format we work with integrates change theory easily without much conscious thought. However, I think my coaching can improve with more awareness toward the subtleties of where my clients are at in the stages of change. I can also see myself offering some sort of diagram of the stages of charge to introduce clients to another tool for creating awareness of where they’re at.
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(I’m sleepy and likely not catching grammar mistakes at this point, fyi)
I loved this module. I think it came at a perfect time. We’ve all been learning and integrating these foundational practices and techniques, which sparked a flame with our readiness to engage in inner vision. For me, now that I’ve found the foundations of NCC, my vision and purpose feel empowered. Because of that, being asked to hone in on business planning and development could not have come at a better time. I feel almost a sense of relief to be engaging in the practical aspect of bringing my gifts and these skills to the world.I also LOVE how unique everyone’s vision is, even though we’re learning the same material. It’s amazing to me how everyone’s gifts have become so apparent in speaking to their ideal client. This thread has also got me thinking about the unique medicine we all offer, and how the medicine has been sculpted and strengthened by how we’ve experienced the world.
I feel so honored to be a part of cohort that I know will offer such unique and important gifts to the world.
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Kaity,
Your post sparked a lot of reflection for me around getting to deeper need. I’ve noticed that I tend to hold myself to a standard of success that is defined by getting to deeper need in one session, and that my vocabulary for deeper need tends to be limited. I love what Daniel said about the levels of deeper need. Reading this was a good reminder that not everyone is ready to look at some of those deeper needs we access in our intensives, and that for a lot of people the deeper need is a step on their path, not a resolution of a core wound.
Something you wrote that stood out to me was, “I can see her just entering contemplation, but wanting to move forward with planning.” I see that a lot in myself and some clients I work with. From my own experience, planning and action tends to fail without proper contemplation.
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Heber,
Interesting post! Your connection of anxiety and trauma with wide angle vision really got me thinking. It makes sense. Tunnel vision seems to be the automatic operation of an anxiety/trauma response – being hyper focused and aroused is a survival instinct, and trauma and survival go hand in hand. I’ve noticed for myself that being in wide angle vision aids in my anxiety because it helps me to see the bigger picture and get out of my head.
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Kairon,
I was nodding my head so much while reading your post. You so eloquently described the nature of working with trauma – you are not controlling someone’s process, but rather being fully there in service of a process that needs to happen. I loved your words on this, saying “I am not in charge of the process but rather, the process was a larger organism that I am part of.”
I also really loved when you said, “It is trauma because it is stopping the soul from its continual evolution and maturity.” I feel heavy thinking of the magnitude of that statement. Trauma truly can halt the process of self-actualization and development. I work with so many clients with trauma and it is so important for them to begin the work to resolve some of their trauma in order to progress.
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Never too late. I’m posting mine now lol.
I love how well this illustrates the power of partswork, Kent. It sounds like your facilitation and ability to be open to the process really allowed your client to discover some deep internal processes that weren’t apparent before!
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Nick,
What a great illustration of how parts of people show up in response to the parts of others, and how some parts can “run the show”. I also love how this narrates how it can often be people’s parts that are in relationship to others, not the whole self. It’s amazing that you have a work environment that allows the space for that level of self-awareness.
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Awesome, Kent! I loved reading that post. It seems like you integrated this module really well. Your ability to reflect and bring awareness to your client, to track her experience, and to keep everything rooted in her deep inner-knowing is remarkable. I also love how detailed and well animated your story of that session is.
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Rachel,
What Hannah pointed out in your writing also stood out to me. I admire your ability to track, look at the bigger picture, stay present and keep clients there, and ultimately guide everything back to the deeper core.
And also responding to what Mandy resonated with – this module seemed to have solidified our ability to detect consistencies in how clients operate and their lens of themselves and the world and reflect what we see to unearth the depth of our clients’ inner narrative.