'When people become inhibited at an early age, their desire to express themselves
is curtailed by their fear of displeasing important others. Instead, they hide their real selves. Their creative energy is used to adapt, rather than to develop themselves.' - Elinor Greenberg
Introduction
I offer Humanistic Counselling and Mindfulness Based Core Process Psychotherapy. This integrates both western ways of looking at personality pattern formations, including psychodynamic theory, and neuroscience, as well as eastern philosophies around our deeper connection to our sense of Self.
Compassion is at the heart of the work. Here are some helpful 'inroads' to internal territories that can bring internal shifts, change and resolutions. They all have compassion as their main 'tool' or way of working:
Witness Consciousness
Therapy can help to develop a sense of ‘witness consciousness’. If we can be both 50% in our experience, and 50% witnessing our experience, we can cultivate and develop a sense of spaciousness around what might be potentially overwhelming. We can then in order deepen into our understanding of that difficulty, and process the feelings and sensations of that experience in a way that feels manageable.
Shadow Work
By turning towards what we don’t like to feel, instead of avoiding it, we can start to notice that we can work through these painful feelings when we take ownership of them, because they are there anyway. Such feelings can include depression, anxiety, guilt, badness, desperation, rage, sadness and loss. Feeling these feelings, in a way that doesn’t feel overwhelming, can come as a relief. This can often feel like ‘a dark night of the soul’. It is also a territory that can be rich with creative work around archetypes, icons, metaphors and journeys.
The 'Brahma Viharas'
The ‘Brahma Viharas’ are known as four central qualities in Buddhist philosophy, and I feel that they are essential to hold either energetically or work with explicitly, and include: compassion, self-care, rejoicing in others and equanimity.
Impermanence
Nature is a perfect teacher of the passing of all things, including our own sense of self, our moods, emotions and thoughts. There is nothing permanent, and it can be very relieving and reassuring to acknowledge our place in all things. This often brings a sense of perspective.
Polyvagal Theory
I find Deb Dana, and Carolyn Spring very helpful when it comes to models around regulating the nervous system and gaining a psycho-socio-biological perspective on holistic wellbeing. I particularly find polyvagal theory and application very helpful when it comes to moving from dorsal, fight-or-flight and ventral vagal aspects of our evolutionary brain (or 3 brains). This takes all judgment away or sense of ‘badness’ and I have found that clients find such ladders or traffic light systems very helpful and accessible in understanding and gaining a sense of inner agency around their capacity to move from immobilised to more mobilised states of being.
Trauma Models
Helping a client to notice the difference between experienced based on trauma flashbacks or shock, and how to come into their inner ‘wise person’ through acknowledging that they are in an ‘adult’ body, can also empower clients to find a sense of inner freedom from trauma. Books such as Rothschild’s ‘The Body Remembers’ and Van Der Kolk’s ‘The Body Holds the Score’ have helpful pragmatic exercises, which can help clients notice the different between the past and present. Such books also respect our ‘wounded child’ or ‘inner child’ and our vulnerability, and also relates this to adult awareness in a way that helpfully brings in the concept of ‘both and’ rather than ‘either or’.
Inner Family Systems
I think this is an engaging and creative way of working with personas in a way that is not overly threatening, and can offer clients more to work with in a variety of ways. A metaphor that I have found helpful is imagining a set of people at dinner together: who is the one that usually talks, who is often overshadowed, what are the other people doing? Are there any empty chairs? Working with the inner ‘village’ of people, can help clients to speak from different parts of themselves, and to become more integrated and ‘whole’ to themselves. It can often surprise clients to notice how they have had quite a dominant ‘persecutor’ in their inner lives. Acknowledging this can help to consider allowing someone else to ‘drive’ for a change which can feel far more compassionate. I find the book ‘Self-Therapy’ by Jay Earley particularly helpful and accessible in this area.
Working with 'Split' Parts
A psychodynamic term, we 'split' from parts of us that we find unacceptable at a very young age, and we needed to do this in order to condition ourselves to survive in our family dynamic, or in the societal world at that time. Another form of 'shadow' work, owning parts that we have relayed to our subconscious, can be very challenging but helps us to let go of emotional charge. Jung believed that what we push into our unconscious tends to control us, because we act out unconsciously through projecting our unowned material onto others, or of acting in increasingly contracted, painful or reactive ways. Instead, if we own our difficult feelings, such as anger, fear and sadness, then this can be a powerful way of interrupting the defence mechanisms. In owning our 'exiled' parts, we can start to integrate them into our conscious whole being, and this can help us to resolve areas where we may be holding ourselves in abeyance. This can lead to more openness and choice, because we come into a relationship with ourselves based on conscious awareness.
A very helpful book on our various edges that we tend to disown is 'Borderline, Narcissistic and Schizoid Adaptations' by Greenberg. These of course are very big labels, but the modality I work from assumes that we all have these adaptations, or processes, and it can be very helpful to own them and notice how far we lean into them.