[Rachel Thor]

Initial Post:

I am trying out a new strategy where a client pays me a monthly fee and then in addition to regularly scheduled sessions they get a certain number of “on call” coaching hours, which they can use whenever they want (within guidelines). That means, people are more able to call for coaching in the heat of an experience, when they are more emotionally connected to the experience and therefore the neural pathways involved. I’m super curious too see how this experiment plays out.

I just had my first “on call” session yesterday. One of my clients is a young male (early 30s), attempting to explore dynamics of sexuality, relationships, consent and tantra. He has found a woman he believes is mutually interested in creating a non-romantic, practice-partner relationship based in sexual/energetic exploration and learning within safe containers. I am working with him on getting super clear in his intentions and communication as he navigates that learning, as well as processing experiences.

I happened to be on a walk in a new neighborhood and discovered a cemetery. I was just noticing the eerie plastic flowers dotting the graves as a symbol of our cultural discomfort with grief when he texted me asking for a session. I thought to myself, I wonder if this means we will be dealing with unfelt grief during our call? Answer, yes 🙂

He first called in a flurry of fast-paced storytelling, typical for him, about his latest encounter with his practice partner which felt “yucky” somehow. I usually let him talk for a few minutes and then I ask him to distill to the core point of his thoughts, which he can usually find. In this case, he felt his boundaries had been crossed.

In that moment I decided to name the cemetery and my curiosity around if we were working with grief today. He didn’t seem to have the answer but then his association jumped to his ex-girlfriend, who we do indeed know he is still processing his breakup with.

Because of Julie’s teaching, I allowed him to spend more time in story than I would have previously before bringing his experience back into the body. But when we took it into the body he was able to identify sadness in his heart and a closing throat.

I asked him what his throat wanted. He said my throat wants to say that it wasn’t my fault (that things ended with his ex and the things she blamed him for).

We he shared a little more story which helped his brain circuits (previously separate) to integrate into a shared story of these two situations. His ex had blamed him for crossing her boundaries, and he had held onto the story that he was a bad person for that, which feeds his interjects that his actions hurt others and its his fault when they suffer and he is powerless to change that.

We came back to the throat, which had been waxing and waning, and this time it was ready to speak directly to him: I need to let her go. I need to let go so she can have her own experience. I need to let go of fixing her.

I asked him what did that allow space for in his life. To which he realized, it allowed him space to move toward his own goals of self-responsibility, self-care, and self-healing from some recent painful events. He hadn’t been able to truly take care of himself so long as he was trying to fix/change someone else as an attempt at not feeling “like a bad person”. Once he faced the feelings themselves, felt the sadness, and discovered what was underneath them, what had seemed like grief about his breakup transmuted itself into empowerment toward his goals.

After we gave time to grieve and transform some unacknowledged beliefs and feelings so they could integrate in a healthy way, he was able to return to his immediate circumstances and make a healthy plan for exploring his own boundaries in the situation and communicating authentically about them, as an experiment, with his practice person.

I love that there are times before sessions I am drawn to something that seems very appropriate as a metaphor for what arises in the session. Whether I am using my RAC to look for my interpretation or it’s showing up because it’s already going to be there, I’m not sure.

________

In other news, I’ve had a few people in my life experience deaths lately. I hosted a “day of the dead” party the first weekend of November and our first guest showed up admitting she had discovered minutes earlier her friend passed away.

Just two days ago, my sister, a medical student, called me crying saying 3 of her patients had died that day, one of whom reminded her of our dad.

So in both of these non-coaching situations I found myself supporting someone’s grief process anyways. Because we hadn’t entered a coaching agreement, I stuck to a civilian approach and offered care, presence, and affirmation of their process.

I watched with awe as the party guest went around to everyone else at our party that night and retold the story of her friend. I would have definitely been annoyed or embarrassed prior to hearing Julie say that retelling the story is the brain’s way of learning that they are truly dead. So I just encouraged her to share and really to keep doing whatever she wanted, whether it was to be with others, to be by herself, etc. I did feel happy that, because of our celebration, we had a flower altar and fire ceremony set up to honor, grieve, and celebrate the dead. She continually came back to the flowers, adjusted them, added more, took them with her, etc. I tracked her through my periphery and it seems she was going back and forth between telling her story/connecting with others, and spending time in solitude on her phone or at the altar. I smiled and thought, while unconventional, this might just be a wonderful way to spend the first night of a friend’s death.

With my sister I also simply held space, asked questions, let her share the stories of each person who died, and reflected what I heard. We are currently spending the weekend with my Grandma where she retold the story of how our grandpa died, and we all discussed death together for the first time. It was really powerful.

I think my biggest learning is that while I LOVE jumping right into the body and the “distilled” truth of the situation through gestalt or similar somatic forms, I am growing my appreciation and patience for storytelling as a viable and important part of integration and learning for the clients.

[Rachel Thor]

summary

It’s quite clear to me that body-centered and nature-centered therapies co-relate, whether in coaching or counseling, especially when it comes to trauma. For one, moving between internal and external awareness is one form of titration that supports healing. For two, looking at either one helps to map the other. For example, my client’s internal sense of disgust alerted us to a “part” on the external map, those evergreens. And her external movement toward the white flowers signaled an internal shift toward nervous system regulation. There were many times when my client could NOT really feel her internal states while working in shadow, so the externalized exploration made it possible and safe to begin seeing what’s in her insides without jumping into overwhelm. Nature itself allowed an increased window of safety and tolerance, and then the final explanation of the nature metaphor is grounded in awareness of body states.

[Rachel Thor]

Initial post

This client I’ve been working with for about 6 months now. She’s in her mid 40’s, has a 5 year old son, teaches mindfulness and meditation at a University, and is growing her tarot reading practice.

It’s so beautiful actually. In PA, we would meet every time at this same park. Over months of parts work and thresholds together, we discovered the “map” of her soul, laid out in the park. Often an entire session’s threshold would end up teaching us about one of these parts and how it relates to the whole, what it’s here for. And then it would be available to interact with other parts or go to as resource as we externalized the inner dialogues.

There is this giant oak that is her “facilitator of transformation” part. It’s bright and works closely with Soul. There is the “innocence grove” where her child lives and hides and feels safe. There’s the goddess sycamore and the Hawkeye canopy and all these wonderful locations mapped out, similar to how I mapped my mandala during my vision fast. When I got curious about which part of nature would wind up representing the soul, she surprised me. I thought it would be the biggest tree maybe… it wasn’t! “Soul” for her shows up in a slow, undulating movement and she feels it as the field, literally the field of ground that each tree is growing in. The field of consciousness that each part arises from and returns to. I am just so inspired by the felt sense and imagery of this map. And then there’s the shadow place. It was signified by the public bathroom and triggered disgust and fear whenever she would notice it out of the corner of her awareness.

Each time for the past few months, we have done the work of acknowledging it as part of the whole place without going toward it. We stayed with resourcing, quite literally staying in the “light places” of the park, and of her psyche. She would often go to the park in between our sessions to do ceremony and offer gratitude to her parts, to listen and understand. My hunch is that since this shadow is triggering disgust, there is likely self-disgust or shame involved. Shame and self repression, whether from an acute stored trauma, or likely the semi-developmental trauma of the repression of shame itself surrounding this part.

This particular session, she had arrived to the park 30 mins early to meditate and check in with her parts (she’s so badass). When I called, we moved through severance relatively quickly. This was unique, as she often has trouble identifying “what she wants”, and getting in touch with what she WANTS in life is a big goal of hers actually. Anyways today her soul knew clearly. She wanted to explore the shadow place. The beauty was also in her soul’s innate knowing of resource. She was very calm, assured, and present the whole time we were together because she had already known to be with her resourced parts on the ground of her soul. If it had not been for that, I would have likely guided us to some resourcing activity to begin threshold.

I felt this as obvious “shadow work” in the sense that there might be parts or experiences that have been unknown before, that typically function out of conscious awareness. She said she felt drawn to a sort of archway hole in the bushes surrounding the bathroom/shadow place, and a tree she could see through it.

As she second guessed herself, I asked her to check in with her body. She identified that her body wanted to go there, and felt safe. I was in awe, guiding this highly nature based session over the phone from Colorado!

She crossed the shadow place’s physical threshold (among others) and began to explore. What I noted was the state of curiosity and calm she was in. She realized for the first time there was a whole world, so to speak, BEHIND the bathroom. New trees, new plants, new places. There were parts back here, living their lives! She took time to notice the physical aspects, that hemlock or this hawthorne. I guided her through the sacred questions a number of times for each noticing, and continually back to her inner sensations to check in and regulate.

At one point, she was confused at what she was seeing, but eventually realized: there were two evergreen trees that had “enmeshed”. Their branches where poking into and through each other. As she witnessed, she began feeling that sense of disgust and panic. Rather quickly from there, she began weeping. At this point, I was able to recognize that this particular weeping belongs to one of her parts that arises as a form of protection from intensity (it has done so many other times and we have worked lovingly with her, acknowledging this part and bringing it back to the soul to decide if it was safe to continue).

In this moment, sensing that she was beginning to hit her window of tolerance for the discomfort, I decided to speak Kindly and firmly to “Weepie” and let her know, “I see you here to protect *client* from this experience and want you to know that we don’t have to go any farther today, and that you are safe.” “Oh…. Okay!” She said, somewhat startled yet relieved at the invitation to pause.

Immediately she was back in curious explorer mode and she quickly found a patch of lovely white flowers that attached her. Again, her soul’s ability to identify and move toward resource, even in the shadow place, was inspiring. I often felt excited as though I were along for the ride and merely offered a paddle stroke here or there as I watched her unfold her own story. She told me these white flowers are special because they actually bloom at night, in the dark. This became SUCH a metaphor for resource that we will come back to. The beauty in the shadow.

Anyways after a bit of time with the flowers, she found a stump calling her to sit. Here she began integrating her time in the shadow place through simply resting in it. She reflected on just HOW MUCH self-compassion building and ground work it has taken, over 6 months of mapping AND loving herself internally and through the metaphor of this park, it took to even be ready to LOOK at the shadow place. And she sent herself love then, more resource.

While there, she remembered other moments in her past when “Weepie” would show up – every time she used to talk about the harm done to the earth in her environmental classes, for example. And she began feeling Weepie’s role. That she’s a part here to support the shadow journey in many ways. Here to help feel, here to protect. She wished someone had been there, at the time of her memory, to let her know that is was okay that this part showed up, that she isn’t crazy or incompetent, rather it was a form of support. 

I asked her if she would like to be that person now, to infuse this wise and self-compassionate voice into that memory. She was excited and chose to do just that. In sweet rhythm, she was ready to “return” to the light side again. She crossed the shadow threshold into the field which holds all her known, “light” parts.

She laid on the ground in the sun for several minutes and I invited her not to rush. When she sat up, we discussed that this was a DEEP threshold, and that integration might need to continue a while, however in order to incorporate what was ready now, we reflected a bit. She saw that her soul was truly guiding her through that experience. That the parts voicing opposing concerns were not problematic, but helped her find the balance of moving toward without overdoing it. When it comes to discovering what she WANTS in life, it seems she often gets scared of “going too far” into one side or the other, and she saw how her body naturally titrated the experience with loads of safety and love, just to touch into challenges. Her action step for this week is to follow her intuition more often in those moment to moment urges.

While this isn’t a super specific smart goal, I felt it was appropriate for the stage of incorporation we were in at the time. I believe that next session will be more focused on a larger incorporation of this deep experience.

What I learned was just how powerful time, trust, and safety can be with clients to allow them to move toward their own challenges gracefully. I can FEEL the power of the nature map like WHOA. I’m blown away by this work.

While I was guiding gently, I was tracking her experience, or possible experience, of trauma and dis-regulation sharply. I was listening to her breathing pace, changes in vocal tones, and the level of interception vs external description she was giving as ways to track her regulation.

It’s also a great experience for me and reminder that true, healing shadow or trauma work actually feels good often, because of how slow it moves and how much resource is available… because it maintains if not slightly stretches the window of tolerance.

I’m grateful for Katie’s writing on trauma and resource exercises because I had a clear understanding each time my client naturally moved toward one that her nervous system was self-regulating.

I’m absolutely going to continue this work, and my client is “excited to visit this place again”. I think we have some real potential for healing in this shadow place as we continue to track regulation and resource, and of course always relate it back to her coaching goals.

[Rachel Thor]

Summary Post:

Understanding our own brains and physical wiring (increasing awareness) creates new possibilities. It’s one of the first steps needed to go from automatic to intentional, from pre-contemplation to contemplation, which is needed for any true action to occur.

To steal a quote from Seigel (and Mandy), “Knowing about the brain empowers you to transform confusion into insight, self-blame into self-compassion. When we teach others and ourselves about the brain’s mechanisms of energy and information flow, the mind is strengthened as we move from blaming the self for automatic behaviors and instead transform our experience into self-understanding and self-responsibility”. (Interpersonal Neurobiology, p.3-2)

[Rachel Thor]

Initial post:

My practice client is a 24 year old male, very entrepreneurial, very interested in his personal, spiritual, and professional growth. He’s created a little team around him of myself, another coach, and a spiritual mentor, and he’s seeing us all regularly and integrating from each experience.

To be honest, because some of the work he is interested in exploring is his sexuality and relationships with women, and because going toward those energies somatically bring up what can feel like “attraction” energy for either of us, we spent our entire first session establishing the coaching relationship in a real way beyond just the standard coaching agreements of not therapy. Getting clear on how to do this, for myself, is one of the biggest challenges and growth edges I’m learning right now, so I’m so grateful for the parts of him that have worked WITH me to discover this.

It felt very empowering and created healthy boundaries to be clear that should attraction energy arise or be projected on me, that we will name and work with it just like any other somatic experience, rather than attempting to act on it or hide from it. Spending extra time normalizing what might arise as we discuss relationships helped our trust deepen, creating safety both in that whatever arises is still allowed, and, that it will not be jumped into in a way that would breach our coaching-client relationship.

This feels potent and important for me as over the past few months I have once again heard from my soul that it’s time to work with men to heal relational issues. I have been afraid of it for a long time, parts of me worried that if I went into those realms with men that I would be unsafe. However after deep diving with my own therapy and coaching, I feel really good right now to try this experiment WITH a super safe container both personally and professionally.

Anyways, he’s wanting right now to focus on what his central voice has to say, to make decisions from his center and not be so swayed by the many voices outside himself. He wants to strengthen his boundaries and he wants to know that it’s okay to be powerful and have a healthy ego, which for a long time he was attempting to get rid of, per many of today’s spiritual teachings.

His deeper need was to feel and know his own power. Somatically, he was able to tap quickly into a very present source of power, I would say soul. It flowed fairly quickly into him, eyes closed, saying how it was his job to channel all this power toward making the world better. I could hear “part” written all over this, so I asked him more about it and explained parts work. Soon after, more parts began to arise in response to what should be “done with” this power. So we spent our session beginning a parts work exploration of what are the interjects that show up AFTER he feels his power, since he actually is already in touch with it.

I explained the neuroscience of parts work to him at the end of the session to help contextualize the work we were doing physiologically as well as in the mind. Basically how each part, each voice, is its own neuro-network in the brain physically, and they are sending energetic triggers to each other. what we are doing is building new pathways that help contain each part by defining it and understanding its circuitry (in terms of its service to the whole system, needs, and relationships).

He was open and willing to do the parts work with me, to play out the voices, but I think he found it very useful and grounding to hear the explanation of WHY we were doing all that.

He had seen his other coach earlier that morning and spent a good deal of time sitting somatically with a painful experience that he’s trying to work through. He first wondered if that unfinished pain would get in the way of our moving toward his other goals and if we needed to go back to be with the painful experience more. I got to explain titration to him as a possibility, and he lit up to be able to make an empowered decision to base our session on feeling his power rather than his shame, which he had done that morning. It felt really cool to remember that all the principles we are practicing extend beyond any one session and into the larger rhythms of life too.

Anyways, we were planning to meet at a park, and on my way over, the sun was shining where I was, but he called me and told me “its pouring rain and hailing at the park!” So we met inside his cozy art studio, door open to the rain, but cozy and safe from it. This choice point felt so reflective of the choice point to move toward titration and gentleness rather than him attempting to grow by continually pushing himself into the discomfort. His words were “I don’t have to stay in the hail storm all the time to grow” and that felt like a powerful lesson as well. With that, I have begun to see EVERYTHING as a collaborator, like nature. The books in the room, the location we choose, inside or out. Everything can be and is a reflection if we choose to use it, and I’m loving the little ways those keep getting worked in.

I noticed I had more “teaching” or instructional moments than usual with this session. Between explaining parts work and its neurology. I’m curious to watch this expand, wondering if this is the natural way my coaching and teaching will inter fold, or if there was a part of ME that slipped a little into wanting to find answers for him. I’ll keep you posted! Otherwise, we both felt we learned A LOT and walked away with a solid action plan for him to first learn some specific things about 3 parts that arose, so that next week we can make the action plan out in the world for him bringing his power into external situations with a plan for how to work with these parts when they arise in opposition. Basically, we’re in the process of walking through the steps of change. Right now he’s in contemplation, and we’re going to take that increased awareness and apply it to action stages.

I think I’ll do a refresher of the theory of change and actively bring the framework to him in our next session. He’s someone who likes to act act act, and is wanting to slow down enough to ground himself and act from his center more. So I think a framework outlining that “pre-contemplation, contemplation, and planning” are all important steps will help him feel as though he IS taking the right step.

What I keep learning is how much I love coaching. I have so much fun, in the discomfort, in the unknown, in the listening, in the aha moments. I’m so meant for this work. Good to feel and remember again after a few months of not coaching anyone. Having more neuroscience background has helped me feel extremely more comfortable and confident going toward things like threshold and what I would have typically considered only “spiritual”. Because I have an understanding of what I’m doing that’s grounded in biology, I can explain WHY we’re doing these “strange things” in ways that make sense, increase buy in, and get results faster. YES!

[Rachel Thor]

Summary:

I am starting to see Gestalt and parts work as in some ways, two sides of a coin. if every level of our psyches, relationships, and cultures are “wholes” made up of “parts”, then gestalt is a tuning into the wholes and partswork is the tuning into the parts. it’s like an up-down approach and a down-up approach to the same principle of wholeness. it’s almost like tuning into different lenses of focus, or zooming into different sizes of the issue or question we’re working on, and I see how they are so supportive of each other! Very excited

[Rachel Thor]

Summary:

Gestalt is one of my favorite modalities because it so resonates with my personal life view, that EVERYTHING is a living organism, or more precisely everything lives within concentric rings of living organisms, and all of life, all of psychology, all our parts, are all parts of larger systems which each have the inherent drive toward healing, wholeness, and growth. and these systems have actually been around, healing, whole-ing, and growing, for longer than we can comprehend. Aka the System, the Organism, the Living energetic body of which I am also a cell, is always moving toward love. To me gestalt is the closest real-life modality to a spiritual practice of surrender and trust in the animated system of which I am a part. this is a practice that resonates so deeply in my coaching and comes quite naturally because it is a main way I have intended to live all of my life. I am so grateful for this basic training and will definitely invest in more learning in this field.

[Rachel Thor]

Summary post:

My actual lived experience of coaching and wilderness guiding feels like a similar symbiosis to the one I described in my post. I can do coaching anywhere (ie indoors) because we are typically working with the inner landscape. however the external landscape can feed that work in mutual ways.

For example, when I first describe nature connected coaching, I talk about nature as one form of “conscious object of reflection or projection”. It’s a tool for the inner work, if that’s what they’re orienting toward. However, as time progresses, the relationship to nature evolves (the concentric circle of awareness increases) and what was once merely a tool for reflection becomes an actual relationship, with inherent value in itself for connection. the stronger that reciprocal connection deepens, the stronger the tool becomes, giving the client autonomy to listen, react, learn, and love through this relationship all on their own.

[Rachel Thor]

Initial Post (catch up): Where does Ecopsychology and Coaching come together? How does this blend add foundation to your interests as a Nature-Connected Coach. How might it fall short? What skills are needed?

Bill Plotkin talks about our psychological development through (among other things) a concentric ring model, where we begin our psychological and soul journey from an ego-centric place, I believe rightly so. we are each a collection of cells whose first priority before any actualization or larger mission can be accomplished, must learn to survive, depend on the world around it, and as such focuses its attention fully on the self. According to Plotkin, it’s not until we’ve completed certain developmental tasks (no matter what chronological age) that we can expand our awareness further out the concentric rings to other people, other communities, and eventually other-than-human communities. In my own experience, I can remember being a teenager and seeing people around me fighting for environmental rights and regulations. I remember thinking very clearly, “I know I SHOULD care about the environment, but right now, I am hurting and I am healing myself, and I DON’T CARE and even CAN’T CARE about the environment outside of me until my inner world feels safer. Even though I feel selfish, I need to stick to my healing path now and not rush off to look outside of myself.” In essence, a part of me knew and identified that it’s actually healthy NOT to expand my concentric rings of awareness too big until my inner rings are developed, if I want my awareness to indeed increase positivity in the world. And that maybe if I had reached to tackle issues outside of myself at the time, it wouldn’t have been authentic or even impactful.

I’m saying this because I firmly see inner development, aka coaching, as integrally woven into eco-psychology. They inherently develop and grow together. As My call toward RELATIONSHIP with nature (not environmental activism yet) has grown, as my psychological interdependence of nature has grown, so too has my inner strength, healing, and capacity for power. As my inner world has been coached and coaxed, so too has my care and fierce protection of the relationship I love – the natural world.

So While eco-psychology seems to be focused more on building understanding of and relational interdependence with the natural world, and coaching may be focused more on building any number of understandings – from relational strength to self, other humans, or action in the world, I see them as two sides of a similar coin of a soul-centric model of human development (Plotkin). In this model, both grow in tandem, both have their own set of tasks, and both feed each other while remaining separate.

[Rachel Thor]

Heber’s your sentence “if feeling stuck is always a form of trauma…” jumped out at me and I got really curious in my own mind what I think about that.

According to Katie A’s paper: “trauma will be defined as the body’s physiological response to a life-threatening or perceived life-threatening situation that does not fully sequence out of the body.”

I know some clinical therapist friends who take a hard stance on what is and isn’t trauma, clinically. And they would probably not agree with your statement. I know this because I have asserted similar things to them and gotten push back!

But I think where I’m landing once again with it is that to require the firm clinical definition of trauma is to be doing therapy from the perspective of the DSM-5, or ” a cultural mental illness telescope” as Roger might say. (Self, Soul, Spirit. Strachan p 8) For me to take a coaching lens, perhaps one thing that separates strictly clinical practitioners, is the mindset that the client is already inherently whole and has what they need to move themselves forward through their life toward greater goals, whatever they may be.

He goes on to say that “Genetic predispositions have no intrinsic value nor do the environmental influences that interact with those inherited factors; the only value is the one the culture assigns. As stated previously, human beings do what they want to do at any given moment under any given circumstances, and make up reasons, excuses, and logical constructs post facto for what they did.” (Self, Soul, Spirit. Strachan p 10) Whether it’s because I work with higher functioning individuals or because I use a more “gestalty” worldview, I appreciate the individualized sense of letting each person’s animal body be acting, followed by noticing what their reasoning brains decide about those actions.

I appreciate this more fluid perspective, as it relates to what you said Heber, about trauma being any form of stuck, or unsequenced. Not being “allowed” to sequence, whether internally or culturally, is itself a sign that the body feeling the energy is not “safe enough” yet to process. So I love the idea of continually coming back to helping the client feel they are okay just as they are, even in the moment. That level of love and safety – safety to feel triggered and not need it to change – may be what your friend is still looking for from you. I’m curious how that’s going!

[Rachel Thor]

Mandy OH MY GOSH THIS IS AMAZING!

I’m smiling ear to ear reading through this experience. I’m so impressed with how you totally listened to her “no” at the time and allowed her system to talk it out, even if it seemed dis-regulated, in order to find her own ground in her own time. And your patience and guidance with really grounding and sequencing her 12 year old part through the body – incredible! I’m like jumping for joy here.

And this sounds a lot like therapy, so my question again to Michael, Ivy, Ryan, Daniel, etc. is, (just confirming) that we’re still coaching if we’re doing client-based sessions focused on the client’s goals, right? There are parts of me that show up in regard to this, on the one hand I recognize this work as very important and resonant with the work I want to do with trauma. on the other hand, some part of me gets scared of crossing too far into therapy territory and basically having someone sue me. I get that those are PARTS that show up for me, but I am still curious about what you all have to say about this if you see this comment.

[Rachel Thor]

Mandy,

so cool to read! It sounds like you were tracking with him very well. I love how you could feel his rise and fall of energy and map it to the theory of change model so well.

This moment stuck out to me:
However, after just a few moments of touching it and experiencing the new state of being, something came in and dropped the energy that had been building. I asked him what he was noticing and he said “everything just felt so daunting”. It’s as if the natural cycle of change is pulling him into contemplation, but he still has a foot in precontemplation. I have a sense that this is a natural process that takes time and by raising awareness his system will naturally arrive completely in contemplation, wanting and ready for change.

It’s almost as though his contemplation is itself his “action” in a way right now, and he’s relapsing. Or said another way, that maybe there’s a relapse option between each of the stages of change, and that oscillating or titrating from one to the next is the brain and body’s way of building safety in the new step, and strengthening the neuro-circuitry needed to maintain that stage for longer.

His ‘it feels so daunting’ comment also had me curious about a story or interject he might have about himself. I can feel that my style would be to take it to Gestalt in that moment – I’m curious what you chose and what happened!

Loving these examples, I learn every time I read one.

[Rachel Thor]

Hi Kaity,

This was a cool session read about, as I particularly like how you’re always weaving in the body and yoga.

This particularly stuck out to me:
The thing that felt challenging to me was how to balance the planning and action in the change model without fueling the obsessive compulsive symptoms she experiences. I felt like there was a fine balance between accountability and being gentle when it came to this particular issue. There are still some questions I have for her in what the best was to do this is. We didn’t get there in our first session.

And yet, you mentioned she has a lot of low road circuitry and possibly trauma, so it seems like you found exactly her deeper need – to be safe and resourced. whether or not you named it as the deeper need, that’s what her body and your tracking brought you toward. To me it seems to make perfect sense. So while you maybe didn’t get to a “different” deeper need, it seems to me that you got to the deeper need that must come first, and you’re working it together.

Congrats!

[Rachel Thor]

Nick,

So cool that you got to experience a “real time application” of parts works so directly with your coworker.

I love that, given the framework, you were both willing to be vulnerable about what was truly going on and find a new way to relate in more productive ways. I’m curious how that relationship has been going since this conversation, and if you’ve had a chance to bring the framework into your company more officially at all as a teaching tool.

Although I already try to avoid “always’s and nevers”, I find myself ever increasingly identifying that “a part of me” feels a certain way, not the whole thing. it’s been giving me space to elicit other parts more intentionally, which has been helpful personally and with clients.

[Rachel Thor]

Hannah thank you so much for bringing this! I firmly believe that bringing our full selves to both parts of this this polarity – thinking and feeling, offers the best support. not about fighting culture with our counter culture, or about not belonging to the counter culture, but about building ourselves and each other up in every way we can. And I feel built up through mind and body every time I interact with you. I feel your sharp focus and understanding, curiosity and probing, AND I feel your warmth of presence and acceptance, strong ability to hear your intuition, and I am so grateful for those superpowers. They make us all better!! I’m so grateful to share this program with you.