Jennifer LeCompte
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Learning about the Brain and Change has been incredibly impactful for one of my clients, A. I’ve been working with A for a few months, and we have been able to really dig into partswork, Gestalt, trauma, and change as it pertains to our brain biology. It’s been a gift to watch her grow and open up avenues of awareness within herself.
One of the most helpful tools for A has been the awareness of how the voices of her various parts are manifested in the brain as clusters of neural pathways. We’ve discussed the Grand Canyon pathways a few times, as well as how one part in particular has led to a lot of her reluctance in making changes. The idea that her more critical part had this Grand Canyon pathway in her brain was mind blowing for A. She started documenting when that part would come up, point to it, and journal what was happening for her when she noticed this cycle. Daniel Siegel discusses myelin in his Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology writing “When myelin is present, the speed of the action potential passage down the axon is 100 times faster…the time for recovery before the next firing occurs-the refractory period-is 30 times shorter.” (Siegel, 8-5) This, Siegel states, means that the potential for an axon that has fired in this manner has better functioning potential 3,000 times greater than an axon without this amount of repetition. Applying this to our automatic responses, emotional reactions, and almost subconscious behaviors, it illuminates how important awareness is in noticing and changing our behaviors.
A has described many times how she has these immediate emotional reactions to her mother, and these reactions have the potential to derail her in different ways. Siegel points out that “With awareness comes the possibility of choice and change.” (Siegel 17-5) In one of our recent sessions, A told me that she was watching her mother’s words and actions, but she was no longer riled by them in that moment. She had become an observer, as opposed to a combatant. A has made huge leaps into breaking away from what Siegel calls ‘recursive and often-destructive patterns in the attempt to avoid uncertainty.” (Siegel 17-6) The Grand Canyon pathways of certainty was the emotional reactions and guilt felt by the words and deeds of her mother. This time, A managed to break free from those patterns and step into the role of the observer. This break becomes the way in which these heavily sheathed axons can start losing that speed and religiosity with which they automatically fire when A has these moments with her mother.
I asked A what is was that was different this time, in this encounter with her mother. We did an exercise the week before where we visualized giving her mother back the emotions and actions that belonged to the mother, and not A. A mentioned that she felt that exercise helped her break away and have a greater awareness of what belonged to her and what did not belong to her. The exercise created the doorway to awareness, where A can now have clarity and more choice in making the changes she wants to make.
The more I read about our myth and ritual making, our neural makeup, and how our relationships, brain, and mind integrate for overall wellness, the more I appreciate this understanding. I’ve had a couple of instances where a little education into these ideas for my clients has made them feel less judgmental towards themselves, and more aware of wanting to make changes. In his chapter on Brain and Body, Siegel writes “When the various components of the brain are learned, we become empowered to move from being passive historians of what our brain has cooked up for our lives to being the active authors of our own unfolding brain-influences stories.” (Siegel 3-2) This is my hope for my clients, to have awareness as the ultimate observer, without judgment and shame. Once you bring the light of awareness on something, then the doors to choice open before you.
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@gmlobito1
I love your choice of venue and that Gus went along! Dogs have an enchanting way of bringing us out of our defenses and into a sense of calm.
Your insight into the exploration fo shame is spot on. When interviewing the parts, it’s always fascinating how the parts don’t see shame, but protection or a sense of wanting to accomplish a particular goal. But it is the parts combined that bring out this sense of shame as a whole. It makes me wonder how much of our emotional experiences are conflicts between parts? What happens if all of our parts embody the same emotion at once. So much to think about! Thanks for sharing your experience with us. 🙂
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First, I. Love. Partswork. I don’t know if it will be my “this is it, this is all I will do,” way of coaching, but I see the potential that it could be that for me. With the Gestalt aspects supporting this kind of approach, (and Gestalt supports many approaches), partswork is a powerful, insightful tool for coaching. Ok, enough with the praises.
I have a client who has been working through her parts for several weeks now. She told me once that she doesn’t feel like she knows herself very well. Enter, Partswork. After the first session of building the mandala and introducing how we will be working with it, she was blown away. She sent me a message the next day, telling me that she feels like she is finally seeing herself for the first time. She dived head first into this exploration.
It’s a fascinating and exciting process. In each session, it feels like we have chiseled a little bit off the surface, the persona perhaps, and deeper into the underlying parts involved in my client’s most pressing conflict. She is an incredibly successful lawyer out on her own, but she feels like she doesn’t deserve it and that it is too risky. She speaks as if the risks she is taking are something that is happening in the future, and isn’t fully absorbing that she has already taken the risks and is being successful. As we have explored and meandered through the parts, we have finally came down to this part that has been telling her it is her job to be safe, to “stay in her lane,” and to stay alive from birth to death. Understanding some family background plays into this, as well as some interpersonal dynamics with parents, she now has a grasp on how her own parts are manifesting introjects, holding her hostage to those ideas of others.
I love Singer’s The Untethered Soul. He says “Only you can take inner freedom away from yourself, or give it to yourself. Nobody else can.” I feel that partswork is doing exactly this in my client’s case. The parts of her who don’t want the freedom have even at war with the parts that do. This process has been really powerful in being able to put her finger on those parts, to have them speak, to negotiate and figure out how to meet the needs of each of those parts, and to feel the support of each of her parts in meeting goals of the soul’s trajectory. Being that untethered soul requires that we examine the parts that feel the need to be tethered to an idea, a habit, a career, a process, and work with those parts to have a sense of alignment with the soul.
Ultimately, I would like to see my client create her mandala of parts on the land. She recently bought some land and is building a house with her family. The house isn’t ready to live in, but they are getting closer to being able to being where they want to be in terms of living on the land. I have already broached the idea of her and I having a session out on her land to integrate some partswork out there, but we haven’t been able to make that happen just yet. Still, very excited to experience that in the future!
Overall, I’ve learned how powerful this process could be. I got an indication of that during the intensive, but to see it working with a client is kind of exhilarating. I’m excited to be a part of it, but I’m even more excited for my clients who will benefit from this style of coaching.
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@deanna.falge
That is an excellent question. Do parts die? If you relegate parts to strictly neural pathways, I suppose there is a possibility. However, I think they are much more than neural paths, much like we are more than our brains. Watching clients in sessions and working with my own parts, I get the sense that parts morph, mature, combine, splice – in other words, they are fluid. For example, I might have a part that is my goddess part, but perhaps there is another part, a warrior part that works in tandem with the goddess part. Perhaps they combine like Voltron and become one big part that dons a different name. I liken the parts to a Lite Brite. The empty holes for the pegs never change, but the way the pegs are arranged and how they light up is subject to change over the course of our lives. I wonder if we all have the same raw materials for parts, but we name them and arrange them differently. Or, are there parts of us that flat out will never exist in someone else? If I don’t have an athlete part, can I develop one, or did t always exist despite me never using it? Enquiring minds want to know….
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@lesliewier
You mentioned the quote about how interpretation of the past makes a client rely on the coach for knowledge and understanding versus the client’s own internal wisdom and autonomy. That quote resonates with me, as I’ve made a transition myself from thinking I had to know everything the client is putting out there, versus simply guiding through the process to allow for the client’s wisdom to shine through. I feel that this is a huge misconception in coaching, perhaps even in counseling. One of the most insightful and humbling ideas I heard from a teacher friend was that if you don’t know the answer to a question, tell the student that you will figure it out together. As a teacher, you feel responsible for knowing “everything” so that you can answer every single question. But, that is an immense amount of pressure for a teacher, and it is for a coach. I like the idea that we don’t have to know everything, just to trust our intuition and recognize patterns and opportunities for questions/reflections. I guess in a sense, this is where coaching takes us out of the ego and puts us into a different space where we can be effective as true guides. Thanks for sharing your insights!
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@david.fontaine2
You mentioned in your post that “Both require attention to what the client is owning for themselves vs. projecting onto others,” when speaking to Nature Connected Coaching and Gestalt. The word that keeps coming up for me recently is accountability. I feel an ever-increasing sense of how people are stepping away from accountability in parts of their lives, especially emotional accountability. It’s scary. It isn’t so much that the emotions are scary as much as the intensity of our emotions. The energy behind that intensity gets unleashed and can lead to some uncomfortable truths. It is much easier to project it on others so that it is far away from us. I appreciate you calling attention to clients owning vs. projecting. My question to you or the collective would be what happens when a client won’t take ownership? How do we kindly call them on their stuff? I have my ideas, but I’m curious as t what the collective has to say. 🙂 -
My client left a long term relationship, where the man she was dating used manipulation and psychological abuse as a means of control. One year post-breakup, she is now dating someone new. She is excited about her new relationship, but is having a hard time enjoying her time with this man. She is constantly looking for red flags and indicators that would point to potential problems. The focus of our session was to help my client understand the tools she has that will allow her to enjoy her time, feel safe, and know when there is a concern that needs attention. We were going to meet in a local greenbelt, but had to zoom due to weather changes.
Part of my client’s frustration is not being able to trust herself, and ultimately she needed to feel safe in this growing relationship in order to enjoy the process of dating. The way that made sense to me was to use body awareness and tap into what is happening in the body to help her feel into dates instead of going straight to that place of overanalysis. My client does a lot of athletic training and is very attuned to her body. The hope was that using a Gestalt experience focused on the body would help her get out of her head.
What ultimately flowed and happened is that my client was able to recall the feelings in her body in various dating situations, ones where she felt comfortable and at peace, and others where she felt that something was off or was being manipulated. We played with those elements, recalling where certain feelings and experiences landed in her body. That led to her describing what she felt in her body when it came to her ex, and what she felt like in her body with this new relationship. She felt a vast difference between the two. Even in her description, her body would visibly change, giving me a glimpse into where she is holding these emotions in her body. Once she was able to discern those differences, then she was able to reflect back on her dates and make the connection that she felt good in her body on these dates.
Our session was very much focused around feeling into people, into experiences, what is happening in the body as we speak, how has the body changed, etc. She brought all of her emotions to the table, and I was able to feel the current of those emotions without getting into her emotions. There was a moment where I got a bit choked up, namely because I knew how what I had to say was going to land. I find that it happens with me. I know how a piece of reflection or a question is going to land, but I also feel it needs to be said or asked. Perhaps the emotional weight of such things are like humidity. It is thick and tangible in the air, but it needs to be acknowledged so that it can dissipate.
Overall, it was a really good session. My client does a lot of work on herself, with deep questioning and examination. I wasn’t sure if I would have much to offer her because she already has such a great awareness and sensibility of herself. I learned how to create goals a bit differently with this client. The goals were emotional, less so something tangible. I find that you have to be clever in structuring these types of goals so that they can be measured. Ultimately, we were able to construct something that was measurable and resonated with my client. -
@sophieturner @allysonduffindalton @vanessatermini85
I noticed your main focus was around coaching women. I know you mentioned, Sul, that you were open to exploring men’s groups as well. Is the focus on women indicative about what all of you see lacking in the world, in terms of the support for women, or a preference? I’m curious because I’ve seen a lot of other powerful and insightful female coaches who only coach women. 🙂
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Recently, I did an interview with a prospective client. She is struggling with blending a family, particularly the relationship between her and one of her stepdaughters. To get an idea of what her long-term goals are, I asked her to tell me what her goal was for this relationship over different time periods. Her responses varied, but they always started with “For that goal, she would behave _______,” or “She would treat me _________.” After she listed her goals, I reflected them back, asking her if she noticed any pattern. She rolled her eyes and said “Oh my God LeCompte. I can’t change what other people do.” Exactly.
My initial thought into my ideal client was that I wanted clients who I could help. In essence, my ideal client is the client who owns the emotions, beliefs, attitudes, struggles, challenges, and work that comes with doing this kind of work. There isn’t much any coach can do for one who refuses to be accountable to the totality of who they are. Ultimately, we have to be able to look under our personas and into all of our parts to make meaningful changes.
There are areas where I feel I have the most to offer, namely spiritual crises, emotional resilience, and relationship concerns. I hope to have strengths in grief and loss as we continue to learn coaching skills. These areas are the most familiar to me, spark the most passion because I have done an extensive amount of work of my own. In my personal work and growth, I’ve come to understand the challenges in a way that can hopefully offer compassion and empathy to those with similar journeys.
In feeling out how to do this work, I keep coming back to Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. The Hero’s Journey can be seen in movies such as The Hobbit, The Lion King, What Dreams May Come, and The Matrix, in books, and even in the major arcana of the tarot. The idea is that we start with a call to adventure, completing our adventure wiser and changed. This cycle happens again and again in smaller iterations of our lives, as our life itself, and over the trajectory of many lifetimes – the soul’s trajectory. This is the lens through which I’m currently using towards my vision and how I want to work with others. In essence, where are they in this cycle, and how can I work as a guide to facilitate their egress to the next part of their journey.
I want my clients to work within nature and utilize connection with nature as connection with self. Moreover, my hope is to incorporate the Indicators of Awareness and Core Routines mentioned in The Coyote’s Guide. The cardinal and ordinal directions with the alignment to seasons and stages of life reminds me of the seasons of our own journeys, rituals, and celebrations. It makes me wonder how I can support each person’s journey and perhaps help clients have their own organic rituals as they go through their various seasons.
I have found some coaches online, but it is hard to tell how they integrate nature into their coaching practice. They speak to loving nature, gardening, some even incorporating other healing modalities such as reiki. Still, it’s hard to determine to what extent nature is involved. This also reminds me to be clear in my own site to help send a more clear message to potential clients.
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Jenny Rogers describes moments of high performance as “being in flow.” Threshold isn’t a performance, but similar aspects apply. When I seek to understand or assimilate an experience or piece of information, my tendency is to wrap words around it. I process by talking things out, by utilizing allegory, or by likening an experience to a previous experience. Threshold, however, is more akin to simply being in the flow. I have to feel my way through the experience, let the emotional and physical energy completely wind its way through to its natural conclusion. It reminds me of the wind. Wind will move through a tree, but each individual leaf has its own latent time to complete the motion of that energy after the wind has completed its motion. To try and intellectualize, contextualizing the threshold through words after may make sense, but to do so during the experience can deter the threshold from happening in the first place.
Rogers discusses how being in the flow is almost “effortless.” Threshold may not feel “effortless” being in it. However, it is important to distinguish the difference between being “uncomfortable” and “effortless.” Emotions and insights will come unbidden and easily, even if they are uncomfortable in the feelings they evoke, or the newness of a realization. The question with threshold, I feel, is are you going to fight it, or let it happen? In myself, letting these findings naturally unfold illustrates what The Coyote’s Guide describes as the “subtle happenings that we’ve been subject to all along but never fully appreciated.” My threshold experiences haven’t been revelations of foreign knowledge coming from unknown and alien sources. Rather, they have been the subtle wisdom that has been there all along, hidden under layers of living a “civilized” life.
I am looking for that moment when a client has released the resistance, letting the threshold move through them like a wind moves through a tree. It’s the moment of letting go in order for that internal wisdom to fully land. My threshold experience was informed by the work I put into my garden, and how my garden makes me feel on a daily basis. It draws me closer to the earth, it inspires, it brings wonder and joy, which in turn continues to draw out my own internal wisdom. In the coaching experiences I’ve had so far, I’ve noticed how the observance of what is happening in the environment contributes to the internal wisdom in my clients. As written in The Coyote’s Guide, Since you live on planet Earth, then you are quite familiar with the sun’s path through our lives. You know it in your bones…” Nature is the nursery and catalyst for generating, revealing, and expanding on our internal wisdom.
When looking at the ICF Core Competencies, Creating Awareness is one that stands out as a valuable reference for this process. This section of the competencies touches on invoking “inquiry for greater understanding, awareness, and clarity,” identifying “typical and fixed ways of perceiving himself/herself and the world,” discovering “new thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, emotions, moods, etc. that strengthen their ability to take action and achieve what is important to them,” and expressing “insights to clients in ways that are useful and meaningful for the client.” There is also much to be said about the establishment of trust, asking to guide through sensitive areas, your coaching presence as led by intuition, and competences related to communicating effectively with the client. All of these areas of skill contribute to being a guide for others during this sensitive and powerful process.
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@sophieturner I hear you in your reflection on being in threshold. I have a similar feeling, where I am still trying to wrap my head around it in terms of words. I don’t think I can adequately describe it in words. Which, in reflection, might be part of my problem, in that I think out loud and in words. Not having the words to describe something can be a bit challenging. Anyway, I have found, like you, that you have to feel into it.
@allysonduffindalton I am perhaps reversed on your threshold experience in that I tend to need more time to feel into whatever is happening in that threshold. Maybe it is the need to completely experience that energy moving, to completely remediate it, wrap my arms around it? But – It is still uncomfortable and sometimes I’m not prepared to experience whatever gamut of emotion is coming out.
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@sophieturner I completely glossed over the reference to ecofeminism in the readings. I’m glad you caught that and wrote about it in your post. I’ve been exploring more pagan and earth-connected rituals over the last year or so. I find it makes me feel more connected to the changes in the earth’s seasons. This year, I’m working on foods that go with each season, as in more roots in the fall, berries in the summer, etc. I find that my body craves these changes, which points out that nature within us and how we are connected to the earth and cycles of the earth.
All of this makes me think of the maiden, the witch, the crone, that @vanessatermini85 touched on, and the care and concern for the earth that @allysonduffindalton mentioned. I guess the lesson for me in all of this is that our continual seeking of that inner connection @Heather speaks of feels like the basis for everything. It’s the secret sauce to understanding and connecting to our divine inheritance as souls on a planet.
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Sophie, I loved reading this! Your compassion and groundedness translates through text and is felt on my side of the screen. I too love the question of, “is it ok to be ok?” It has been a valuable tool in my tool belt as a coach thus far.
I do have a question for you. As a responder and witness to the pain and suffering of others, do these experiences lead to trauma for you? If so, how do you work through that trauma as one who supports others through theirs? I ask because I always wonder who takes care of the caretakers. -
Sarah, it is even more validating for me to hear your experience with listening to your instincts and being more aware of what your body and spirit are saying to you. I’ve been delineating myself between whether I am doing something because of the expectations/validation of others, or whether I am doing something because it really aligns with my path. I have come up against a lot of judgment and shame in those assessments, which speaks to the continuing need to hone in and redefine what is mine and what belongs to others.
I dig the idea of looking at all this like a puzzle. I am looking at it like a historical map, tracing things back to the roots and beginnings. It’s good stuff. 🙂 -
Ooooo, I’m curious about this transtheoretical model. What is the range from opportunist to alchemist? I have seen a lot recently pointing to alchemy in the improvement and self-help space.
On another note, in the land of tarot, the first person the fool meets is the magician, who is really an alchemist. The magician teaches us that we can bring anything into existence by harnessing our inner creativity and awareness. 🙂