My Entire Practice

“In order to change, people need to become viscerally familiar with realities that directly contradict the static feelings of the frozen self in trauma, replacing them with sensations rooted in safety, mastery, delight, and connection.” Bessel Van der Kolk.

If I were to sum up my practice, this would pretty much be it. Change needs to be experienced directly through the body and mind together in order to be strong enough to grow within the individual.

When we are in pain or struggling in other ways, the experience gets ingrained in our perception over time. Our minds adapt and begin to expect “this is how it goes,” which is a normal response to a pattern that repeats over and over again.

However, as a result, the possibility of experiencing something outside of the pattern begins to feel smaller and smaller; and eventually, it gets almost impossible to imagine things any other way. That’s a tough place to be.

The role of the therapeutic setting is to provide an experience of “something else” happening. It doesn’t have to be completely better, it just needs to be different at first.

Maybe we use acupuncture needles and now it doesn’t hurt to raise your arm like you were expecting, maybe we use Somatic Experiencing to adjust the way anxiety expresses itself in your body, maybe Cognitive Behavioral Therapy helps you question and defuse over-reactive thoughts, etc.

But at the end of the day, we need to have an experience the contradicts the feeling that the painful pattern is inevitable and unchangeable. The change may be small and slow to start, but proving to the body and mind that other possibilities still exist is the crucial step.