The other day I was in a conversation with someone about the backup beeping on their car. We were discussing how it has become so omnipresent that it fades into the background. This person has since fixed the dent on the vehicle that resulted from the missed “beep,” but it is not always so fixable.

In fact, in life, the backup beeping from some other source of knowing cannot be fixed. The only thing it can become is a lesson.

The trouble is that we need special tools for mistakes to become lessons. Otherwise, we use these hand-me-down ones I have come to call “the bad tools.” Not because they are evil, but because they avoid processing and are bad at it.

These tools, repression, suppression, and dissociation, compress what happened into manageable data bites, minimize their lesson potency, and numb the body’s reaction to them.

The other day, when this person was backing up, missing the beeping, and hitting something, well, that story has the potential to become a metaphor for us here at You Are Not Broken®: The Phases of Healing.

What if we all asked: “What if I was wrong about that beeping?”

Or: “What if I was wrong about backing up?”

Or even: “What if I was wrong about driving meaning I am in control of the road?”

In the new healing program I created, Enter the Phases of Healing with The Toolbox Approach®, the goal is to move beyond insight and toward inward seeing, which is different.

Inward seeing is the ability to recognize your own false narratives, core wounds, limiting beliefs, and the imprint of past messaging on both your neurobiology and your body.

The concepts of Trauma Imprint, creating a toolbox, and accessing safe neurobiology through somatic tools are all encompassed within what is more widely known as a “bottom-up” approach.

This means you cannot simply talk about healing and expect transformation. Recovery and reclamation require staying connected to the body, the beginning place of experience, long enough for the nervous system to communicate something new. When the mind pauses its constant interpretation, the body gets a chance to speak. Over time, a different story emerges, and with it, a better narrative.

In the meantime, if you are outside the healing program and still wondering whether it calls to you, you can still ask:

What if I was wrong about...

* closing the door on that opportunity

* deciding they never respected me

* believing I am unsupported

* thinking I am out of time to change

* the willful silence I constructed around what hurt me

* what she meant, he meant, or they meant

* my child’s perception of our family

* what love and partnership should look like

The reason to ask is not to question rightness or wrongness. The reason to ask is because you missed the backup beeping. You’ve tried to fix it and move on, but a fix is not the same thing as a repair. We could all drive our cars into the ground and still arrive at our destinations. But along the way, micro-decisions are made that slowly alter our course. Sometimes we pretend the destination was where we intended to go all along. Meanwhile, the beeping remains subtle in the background, always there . . .

What did you miss?

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Before we can ask a difficult question, we have to remove the threat from asking it.

For example, when a cat is purring on your chest, you know it feels safe and connected. Or when a child comes to a parent in the night with a concern, and the answer is not a solution but a snuggle.

Neurological safety is the experience of feeling warmth, connection, and security even while considering information that might otherwise feel frightening. It is not the absence of challenge. It is the presence of enough safety to stay curious in the face of it.

To do this, we have to pause the mind and access the body.

Try it now.

Shift your attention inward to your ribcage. Place your hands there if you’d like, or simply feel the width of it from the inside. Imagine breathing into the center of yourself, expanding your ribs 360 degrees, front, back, and sides.

Take a slow breath in.

Hold it gently for two beats.

Then exhale slowly for eight.

8... 7... 6... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...

At the end there may be a moment of resistance. That’s okay. Let go and breathe normally.

Now settle in.

Smile inward.

Feel your state shift.

Feel your true nature.

And perhaps notice something remarkable: this brief exercise may only have shifted things by 1%, 10%, or 20%, but it shifted something.

That matters.

Now ask yourself, seriously:

What if I was wrong about ___________?

Notice how the answer may emerge differently from this state than it would have a moment ago. The backup beeping becomes easier to hear.

In meditation, philosophy, and many healing traditions, there is a concept called Pure Potentiality. It suggests that beneath our assumptions, defenses, and certainty exists something expansive and unfinished.

When we clear away false narratives, we do not lose ourselves. We reclaim possibility. This is why healing is not about becoming someone new. It is about becoming less constrained by the stories that no longer fit.

From that place, we become capable of healthier giving and receiving. We no longer give from depletion, obligation, hidden resentment, or the hope of earning love. Nor do we guard ourselves so heavily that receiving care becomes impossible. We begin to participate in relationships more honestly, openly, and freely.

And when we stop fighting reality long enough to learn from it, something else changes. The experiences we once judged as mistakes, failures, betrayals, or detours become integrated into our path. What once felt like a debt to carry becomes part of our purpose to live. We spend less time deciding whether life was right or wrong and more time asking what it is trying to teach us.

That is the invitation of healing.

And that is exactly where Step One: Enter the Phases of Healing with The Toolbox Approach® begins.

Start with a free 7-day trial and explore the program:

The first reflection with that free access, is offered for less than the cost of a coffee using the discount code below. You may just discover that the most powerful question in your life is not: “What happened to me?”. But:

“What if I was wrong about what it meant?”

“The Laws of Success and Your “and Now” Reflection inside Enter the Phases of Healing with The Toolbox Approach®

Message me, Melinda, for more questions about healing and a healing program that is designed to meet with you. This is really me answering, not AI, not some random inbox monitored by a Bot, it is the real Melinda, HEAL ON!

Thanks for reading You Are Not Broken®: The Phases of Healing! Sharing is caring, so please consider if someone needs to read, hear, or watch something you connected with here!

What’s the Deal? Is It Me?

If you’ve ever found yourself asking, “Is it me?” after a conflict, breakup, difficult family interaction, or painful misunderstanding, you’re not alone. Most of us have asked that question at some point. Sometimes it comes from healthy self-reflection. Sometimes it comes from years of carrying responsibility that was never ours to begin with.

The challenge is that many of us were taught how to perform, achieve, accommodate, survive, and succeed, but very few of us were taught what emotional maturity actually looks like. Emotional maturity is not something automatically bestowed upon us when we become adults. It is not measured by age, career success, home ownership, marriage, parenting, or financial stability.

In fact, some emotionally sensitive children begin developing capacities for empathy, awareness, and reflection long before the adults around them. None of us had perfect parents because parents are human too. When caregivers are unable to consistently provide emotional responsiveness, children naturally adapt. These adaptations often become the roles, beliefs, and patterns we carry into adulthood.

In my work helping people navigate The Phases of Healing®, I repeatedly see individuals struggling not because they are broken, but because they are still living inside roles they learned long ago. Healing often begins when we become willing to examine those roles and learn what emotional maturity actually requires.

We All Need to Know the Pillars of Emotional Maturity

Pillar One: Freedom From Roles

Many of us grew up believing our value came from fulfilling a role. Perhaps you became the helper. The peacemaker. The achiever. The caretaker. The responsible one. The invisible one. The strong one. Or you may have shifted around one or more of these. These roles may have helped us survive our family systems, but they can limit us as adults.

A person trapped in the role of helper may struggle to receive support. A person trapped in perfectionism may struggle to rest. Someone raised to keep the peace may find it difficult to express disappointment, anger, or hurt. Emotional maturity requires the freedom to become more than the role. It allows us to be human, complex, changing, and imperfect.

Pillar Two: Emotional Authenticity

Many of us were taught to manage appearances before learning to understand feelings. A child who is told to smile when sad may learn that emotions are inconvenient. A child praised only when they recover quickly from distress may learn that emotional needs should be hidden. A child who is constantly corrected may begin valuing perfection over authenticity.

Over time, we may become skilled at functioning while disconnected from ourselves. We show up and perform. We smile and keep going. Yet underneath, sadness, fear, loneliness, or resentment remain unacknowledged. Emotional maturity is not the absence of emotion. It is the ability to acknowledge what is true within us.

A mature person can say: “I’m hurt.” “I’m disappointed.” “I’m overwhelmed.” “I need more time.”, all without feeling weak, dramatic, selfish, or ashamed.

When people learn that their emotions do not have to be perfect to be valid, a profound freedom occurs. Feelings are not always facts. But they are important information.

Pillar Three: Reflection Over Defensiveness

One of the strongest indicators of emotional maturity is the ability to reflect. When someone shares an emotional experience with us, maturity allows us to become curious rather than immediately defensive.

Instead of saying: “That’s not true.” or “You’re too sensitive.” or “You’re remembering it wrong.”. We become capable of asking: “Help me understand what that was like for you.”

Reflection is difficult because it often requires tolerating discomfort. It asks us to consider that another person’s experience might hold valuable information even when it differs from our intentions. Many of us grew up around adults who were unable to reflect. They defended. Avoided. Minimized. Justified.

As adults, we can unintentionally recreate those same patterns. Alternatively, we can be in patterns with others that brace for immaturity and therefore stifles our own. Emotional maturity asks something different of us. It asks us to become students of our impact, not merely defenders of our intentions.

Pillar Four: Respect for Boundaries

Many people struggle with boundaries because they confuse them with rejection. In reality, healthy boundaries are one of the clearest signs of emotional maturity. Mature people understand that love and limits can coexist.

Sometimes relationships need repair. Sometimes they need space. Sometimes they require difficult conversations. And sometimes, despite genuine effort, temporary distance is necessary. You may find yourself needing to suspend contact with someone because repeated interactions leave you feeling unseen, dismissed, drained, or unsafe. That does not automatically make you cruel. It does not make you selfish. And it does not make you crazy.

When communication has occurred, perspectives have been considered, and genuine effort has been made, creating space can become an act of self-respect rather than punishment. Many of us were conditioned to tolerate relationships that lacked mutual reflection because they felt familiar. Emotional maturity gives us permission to question what is familiar and choose what is healthy instead.

Pillar Five: Reciprocity

Healthy relationships cannot be maintained by one person carrying all of the emotional labor. Maturity involves reciprocity. Interest moves in both directions. Care moves in both directions. Effort moves in both directions.

This means that we move beyond texting emotions as if that is a discussion and recognize the phone rings both ways. It means that we recognize questions are asked both ways and repair is initiated both ways. When reciprocity is absent, many people exhaust themselves trying harder, giving more, explaining better, and accommodating further.

Eventually they find themselves asking: “What’s the deal? Is it me?”

Sometimes there are areas for self-reflection. Sometimes there are things to repair. But sometimes we are simply recognizing a relationship that lacks mutuality.

Emotional maturity means being willing to tell the difference.

The Real Question

Perhaps one of the greatest signs of emotional maturity is that we stop asking, “Is it me?” as an act of self-blame and begin asking it as an act of curiosity. We become willing to examine ourselves honestly while also recognizing that not every relationship problem is ours to carry.

Emotional maturity is not perfection. It is the ongoing practice of becoming more honest, reflective, boundaried, authentic, and human. And for many of us, that journey begins when we stop trying to become perfect and start becoming real.

The healing program is also a pathway to embodying your growth through feeling your own maturity rise inside. It is finally a place where you don’t waste time thinking about your ex or what your partner should change; what your mother needs to look at, or how anyone else works inside their attachment style. It’s alignment with your growing maturity, not to rise above others, but to make more sense to yourself.

A Note About This Space

First, I want to say this:

You Are Not Broken.

And I am glad you are here because You Are Not Broken®: The Phases of Healing® is a special place. Not because I find what I create special, but because it was created from a calling that emerged after two decades of sitting with people who entrusted me with their stories. Through them, and through my own journey, I came to recognize something powerful: there is far more that unites us in our struggle than separates us.

So, if you are here, something is happening inside of you. I don’t mean that something easy is happening. I mean something important is happening. An invitation is building, and some part of you is trying to listen.

Because of that, I encourage you not to engage with this space passively. Reflect on what you read. Bring it into therapy. Share it with a partner. Comment. Disagree. Get curious. Allow it to become part of your healing process.

There are many reasons I invite you to do this, but one of the primary reasons is simple:

I will feel it.

The more engaged and invested you are, the more clearly I can listen for where people are in their healing and continue creating from that place.

Many people who know me have heard me say, with warmth and kindness, “Come back when you’re ready.” Not because the door is closed, but because healing requires willingness.

Over the years, I have learned how to keep an open door in my heart, in my mind, and in the reprocessing space that exists between human beings trying to heal. I know that openness can close. I also know it can reopen through intention.

So I invite you to be ready. Be present. Be engaged. The content here will get better because of it. The conversation will get better because of it. And the love I have for your healing journey will deepen because I will feel your investment too.

Don’t be surprised if you notice that this space is built around something that resembles a partnership. There is no hierarchy. I am not a guru or a fixer. This is a partnership if you want one. It is an equal investment in healing.

And if you’re here, perhaps you’re already beginning.

FEEL FREE TO TELL ME MORE ABOUT THE TOPICS YOU WANT TO SEE TO HELP YOU BECOME READY FOR A FULL HEALING JOURNEY

You Are Not Broken®: The Phases of Healing is a reader-supported publication. It is offered by ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always LLC which supports affordable healing experiences. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

We are addressing our traumas in droves and suddenly, relationships, past and present, don’t make as much brain/body safety sense as they used to. But were any of us wired the same to begin with?

Before we begin, I want to welcome you

Over the past several years, I’ve watched something quietly come together. What began as my own healing journey has evolved into a larger initiative centered around a simple truth: You Are Not Broken®.

Today, that truth lives in many places: the You Are Not Broken® book, the healing programs, the subscription, the podcast, and the conversations we have together. These are not separate offerings. They are all entry points into the same path.

Welcome to You Are Not Broken®: The Phases of Healing Subscription. Everything is in alignment and we’ve moved on from calling this Holding Space Subscription with intention. The space, now, is everywhere. You, coming here, are claiming it. You are taking up space to be present in your healing.

So, hello. This is organized healing. This is the trailhead. If you choose to engage with this work, I will help you stay on the path. I take that responsibility seriously. I take good care of people here. You will feel that. The links here are invitations, you are already inside a special place, enjoy belonging, it’s a wound closing when you are held in community and you are here!

What we’re about to explore together will likely land somewhere deeper than thought alone. It may feel less like learning something new and more like uncovering something you have always known. Something almost archeological. As though you dug through the layers of your own experience and discovered that the truth about connection had been waiting there all along.

I suspect this conversation will make sense in more than one place. It will make sense intellectually. It will make sense somatically, in your body. It will make sense neurologically, in the wiring of your brain and nervous system.

I am going to state it plainly, our connection to our lives is misled. This misdirection has led to a disconnection epidemic that links to partnership. This disconnection is a mirror to why partnership as we know it also needs to make a huge shift. Most of us spend our lives accumulating what we believe will finally satisfy us.

Here is a list:

* Achievement.

* Work.

* Success.

* Security.

* Belonging.

* Partnership.

* Children.

* Homes.

* Possessions.

Yet underneath all of it remains a quieter longing. A longing for a deeper inner wisdom. A longing for a nurturing presence. A longing for a protective presence. And a longing for a peaceful presence. The restoration of those capacities often begins through conversations like this one.

This will unfold slowly, safely, and with pacing. Most importantly, it will be with nervous-system awareness, with authenticity, and with truth. So before we go further, I’d like to invite you into the conversation.

Place a hand on your lower rib cage. Take a breath. Now breathe into your back body. Come here with all of yourself. Not just your thoughts. Not just your opinions. Not just your conclusions. I invite you to bring all 360 degrees of your awareness.

This is the truth: Every person you encounter in life is different from you. Partnership is an agreement towards permanent curiosity about that difference. Curiosity requires a willingness to build a toolbox and use it. Repair builds partnership. The work is a positive feedback loop; the reward is not quantifiable, it is foundational.

Every person you encounter in life is different from you. They are wired differently. They possess different capacities. They have different histories, different nervous systems, different adaptations, and different ways of pursuing safety. One of the greatest limitations of the human mind is its tendency to simplify this complexity.

We label. We categorize. We decide. We say someone is a good person or a bad person. We talk about a healthy partner or a toxic one. We ask are they safe, or unsafe? These interpretations help us make quick choices, but they do not necessarily help us understand. And understanding is where healing begins. The truth is that emotional processing does not happen exclusively in the mind. Much of it happens within the body and nervous system. We often believe we can think our way into understanding another person. We cannot.

We cannot figure someone out. We can only invite them to know us from the depth at which we know ourselves. This has always been the heart of my work. Helping people develop tools that access deeper forms of intelligence. These forms are: Emotional intelligence. Somatic intelligence. Neurobiological intelligence.

To do that, we need tools for processing emotion, understanding the body’s experience, and working with the sensory systems that shape our experience of safety.

Each of us organizes safety differently. And many of us are attempting to navigate life with entire systems partially offline. When that happens, we tend to over-rely on the mind. We analyze. We explain. We interpret. We attempt to solve. Meanwhile, the body continues carrying information the mind cannot fully access alone.

And nowhere is this disconnect more evident than in our closest relationships.

How This is Not a We Yet!

There is no “we” yet because most of us are still relating through protective strategies, unhealed wounds, neurological differences we don’t understand, and nervous systems that have never learned how to truly see one another.

Before we talk about men and women, trauma, neurological differences, attachment styles, or why so many relationships seem to fracture under pressure, I want to acknowledge something uncomfortable: There is no “we” yet. Not collectively.

We have not yet reached a place where most people understand the transformational power of a relational mirror. We are still largely approaching relationships through protection rather than healing.

People are breaking up everywhere. Some through divorce. Some before marriage. Some while technically staying together but slowly disconnecting through years of unmet needs, misunderstandings, and old wounds. Forget about dating today, everyone is learning more from walking away and expansion is happening after the worst heartache, betrayal, trauma bond, or dating the wrong person.

What I see as a trauma therapist is that many dating or marriage partnerships today are struggling in new ways, they begin to struggle the moment one person starts healing. Someone enters therapy, starts examining old patterns, begins recognizing trauma responses, and suddenly the relationship feels upside down. What looked stable was often organized around adaptation rather than healing. The entry into therapy for trauma is a shift on a neurological level, and sometimes it’s happening without the necessary resourcing stage that can begin inside therapy, but takes time even inside that environment. Resurfacing wounds, is not what many partners specialize in, and yet it’s happening regardless.

The difference between the couples who repair when one partner enters healing, and the other feels betrayed by something unidentifiable, and the couples who separate is rarely who is right about what is happening. More often, it comes down to whether both people can recognize that they need tools.

Because mental health has always been primarily about tool acquisition. A diagnosis may be a tool. Attachment theory may be a tool. Love languages may be a tool. Spirituality may be a tool. None of these exist to tell you what is wrong with you. They exist to help you understand how you learned to survive, connect, protect yourself, and love. Together they form a toolbox.

The problem is that we don’t all have equal access to these tools, nor are we all standing in the same phase of healing. Some people are years into understanding themselves. Others don’t yet know where the trailhead is.

Until we recognize this, we continue choosing partners through our unhealed patterns and then become surprised when those same patterns emerge inside the relationship.

Partnership is not evidence that healing is complete. More often, partnership is the place where healing becomes impossible to avoid. Every relationship becomes a mirror. And when we look into a mirror, the challenge is not to fix the reflection. The challenge is to remain present long enough to learn from what we see.

This is where the conversation about men, women, trauma, and the brain and body truly begins. Because before we can understand each other, we have to understand the protective systems we are bringing into the room.

The Brain/Body Conversation Most Relationships Never Have

When people talk about relationship differences, they often talk about men and women as though they are different species. I don’t think that’s quite right.

What I see more often is a difference in how people attempt to create safety. This strategy is neurological. Many are offline to our neuro-somatic intelligence, so it’s not in our strategy switchboard. We rely on what we “know” and that comes right out our mouths through communication. But, it also has to do with what side of the brain orients you most to speaking.

One person reaches toward certainty. They want clarity, answers, explanations, solutions. When conflict occurs, they begin drilling into the problem, trying to penetrate the confusion and arrive at understanding. This is the left brain.

The other reaches toward connection. They want space to process, feel, explore, and make meaning. They act more like a portal through which experiences, emotions, memories, and relationships move in order to become integrated. This is the right brain.

Neither is wrong. Both are attempting to arrive at safety. The problem is that trauma changes how these capacities operate.

Many women have begun gaining language for the small and large traumas they carry in their bodies. They are becoming more aware of the ways they abandoned themselves, suppressed their needs, over-functioned, tolerated disconnection, or learned to prioritize survival over authenticity.

As they heal, something begins to shift.

What can look chaotic from the outside is often a profound neurological reorganization from the inside. They become less interested in performing partnership and more interested in experiencing it. They begin wanting relationships that support healing rather than merely stability.

This phenomenon is not limited to women. Across genders, more people are reclaiming their capacity to feel, process, and trust their own internal experience.

At the same time, many men are beginning to encounter a different challenge.

For generations, emotional suppression has been mistaken for strength. The ability to continue functioning despite loss, fear, grief, or loneliness has often been rewarded rather than examined. As a result, many men arrive in therapy not describing trauma, but describing confusion.

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“Everything was fine.”

“I don’t understand what happened.”

“I feel disrespected.”

“I feel like I’ve lost everything.”

Beneath those statements is often a person searching for reconnection while lacking a map for the emotional terrain they are standing in. They may seek answers because answers feel actionable. They may seek certainty because certainty feels safe. But underneath the search for explanation is frequently the same longing their partner has: to feel seen, understood, and connected.

This is where many couples become trapped. One partner is asking for deeper connection. The other is asking for reassurance. One partner is trying to describe an internal reality. The other is trying to solve an external problem.

Both are speaking about safety, but they are speaking different languages.

The brain is having one conversation.

The body is having another.

Until both conversations are welcomed into the relationship, neither partner feels fully understood.

The Bridge Between Worlds

I’ve worked with couples, individuals, and moved back and forth in a hybrid fashion for different cases, in many instances, they watch the same scenario, and have entirely different interpretations. I normalize this from the start, this is not what therapy is going to change, what it can do is create a bridge between the two worlds that you want to do the work to travel over. Eventually, the work is not work and is a new neural pathway for each partner, one they see as their own personal growth.

Recently, I found myself attuning to a pattern. Couples, no matter how they are configured; broken up, married, same-sex, or even singles talking about the past, seem to be having an entirely different conversation despite using the same words. In the healing program, we help them equalize their polarity and take the same modules. This allows them to move into the next phase with the same knowledge, but a separate learning process depending on how they are previously imprinted on. Let’s look at a healing program couple in their discovery phase.

Sharon’s main complaint about her relationship is carrying an experience that she had to be the one to give more, explain more, or do more to continue to make the relationship work. She realized this doesn’t work for her. She realized she was done doing this pattern overall in many areas and needed to give herself permission to stop but she couldn’t. She felt everything would fall apart. She would say. “I just need someone to understand what it felt like to have to give more at that point.”. She would be certain she was providing background details for how she anticipates her partner’s needs all day long, even when they are not around, and is triggered when they can’t do the same.

Her partner would immediately begin offering possibilities:

* “Well maybe I didn’t mean to come off that way.”

* “Did you ask me directly, because if you are direct, I can do it?”

* “Have you considered that I was tired and wasn’t really at my best?”

Both would leave feeling frustrated. She felt unseen. And her partner felt unsuccessful and picked apart. At first glance, it appeared to be a communication problem. But underneath it was something much more interesting.

The human brain is divided into two hemispheres connected by a structure called the corpus callosum, a thick bundle of nerve fibers that allows information to travel between the left and right sides of the brain. In many ways, it acts as a bridge between logic and emotion, analysis and intuition, language and lived experience.

While every brain is unique, research suggests that some people naturally move more fluidly between these domains, while others rely more heavily on one style of processing during moments of stress. What often gets described as a “male” or “female” communication difference may actually be a difference in access to integration.

One partner may be experiencing the conversation primarily through feeling. The other may be experiencing it primarily through problem-solving. Both are intelligent. Both care. Both are trying to create safety. They are simply entering the same room through different doors. We don’t feel like we are in the same room together, however. If there is a bridge, we feel perched on it precariously, and not like it is one to cross over.

Trauma complicates this bridge.

When the nervous system has learned that emotions are dangerous, overwhelming, or unsupported, access between thinking and feeling can become disrupted. A person may become highly analytical while losing touch with emotional awareness. Another may become flooded by emotional experience while struggling to organize thoughts into language. Neither response reflects weakness. Both represent adaptations that once served survival.

This is also why broad assumptions about men and women often fall apart in therapy. Trauma, attachment history, culture, neurodivergence, and identity all shape how people process experience. Trauma, how it affects us neurobiologically, is essentially stress, and all brains have their nuances with this process, firing danger cues that don’t speak truth outside the mind’s interpretation, and are just information, when we miss out on tool acquisition, this complicates crossing the bridge.

An autistic partner, for example, may communicate in ways that prioritize precision, clarity, and direct information while still possessing profound emotional depth. A partner with ADHD may experience emotions intensely and process them through movement, storytelling, or associative thinking. Someone recovering from complex trauma may constantly scan for relational cues while another person with a similar history may rely on emotional distancing. Likewise, same-sex and gender-diverse couples frequently reveal something important that heterosexual relationship stereotypes miss.

When you remove traditional gender expectations, the underlying nervous system dynamics become easier to see. One partner may move toward certainty. One may move toward connection. One may need space. One may need reassurance. One may intellectualize. One may emotionalize. The roles shift. The people change. The nervous system patterns remain remarkably familiar.

What matters is not gender. What matters is whether each person’s way of creating safety has enough room to exist without becoming the enemy of the other person’s. The healthiest relationships are often not those where partners think alike. They are the ones where both people become curious about the bridge that exists between them. Because connection is rarely found by convincing another person to stand where we stand. It is found by learning how to cross.

Case Example: “Safety verses Responsibility”

David and Sarah came into therapy convinced they had a communication problem.

Sarah would spend ten minutes describing how she feels very complex inside but feels she gets to the bottom of it well due to her need to come to terms with childhood sexual trauma teaching her the tools for processing her emotions. By the end, she was often in tears. Stating she has to hold so much in around him, and is starting to feel like, “if he always needs me to explain my triggers to him, it’s going to make me feel so alone”.

David would listen carefully and then respond:

“Okay. So what do you want to do about it?”

Sarah would immediately feel hurt.

“You’re not hearing me.”

David would feel equally frustrated.

“I listened to everything you said.”

To Sarah, understanding meant entering the emotional experience. To David, understanding meant helping solve what caused the distress. Both believed they were connecting. Both felt alone. It was not until the healing program therapy and coaching pointed out to them in individual sessions that one was wired to process connection for emotional safety, and the other was wired to process responsibility and expect connection. The approaches to connection for Sarah were based on a history of having to attune outward, pick up on everyone’s feelings, and then create a mental logical structure out of it, all by herself. This was her expectation of her partner subconsciously. For David, his history was to create a buffer from the emotional needs of others, attune only to the responsibilities he could learn made his gender “appropriate” or correct somehow out in the world. He felt he was not always the best at his male responsibilities and was willing to do better but could never figure out how in her eyes.

From a neurological perspective, they were processing the same situation differently. Sarah’s brain appeared to move rapidly between emotional, relational, autobiographical, and sensory information. David tended to organize information through logic, sequencing, and problem-solving. She experienced connection through shared meaning. He experienced connection through practical support.

Neither approach was wrong. The conflict emerged because each assumed the other’s nervous system worked similarly. As therapy progressed, another layer emerged.

Sarah had a history of developmental trauma. Throughout childhood, she learned to suppress her needs to preserve relationships. As she began healing, emotions she had disconnected from started coming online. What David experienced as “overthinking” was often her brain attempting to integrate years of unprocessed emotional information.

David, meanwhile, had learned that emotions were solved through action. Growing up, vulnerability was often met with discomfort or dismissal. His nervous system learned to move quickly toward solutions because solutions created a sense of control and safety. The more Sarah sought understanding, the more David offered solutions. The more David offered solutions, the more Sarah felt unseen. The more unseen she felt, the more detailed her explanations became. The more detailed her explanations became, the more overwhelmed David felt.

Neither partner was creating the distance intentionally. Their nervous systems were. The breakthrough occurred when David learned that listening itself could be an act of protection and connection, while Sarah learned that David’s desire to solve problems was often an expression of care rather than avoidance.

For the first time, neither person was trying to change the other.

They were learning to translate.

Expanding Beyond Gender

What’s important is that this dynamic is not exclusive to heterosexual couples.

I have seen nearly identical patterns in same-sex couples, neurodivergent couples, and gender-diverse relationships.

For example, in one relationship between two women, one partner processed primarily through emotional exploration while the other preferred structure, planning, and concrete action. The dynamic looked remarkably similar to David and Sarah’s despite neither partner being male.

Likewise, an autistic partner may seek clarity and direct communication not because they lack emotional depth, but because predictability helps regulate the nervous system. An ADHD partner may move fluidly between emotions, memories, sensations, and ideas, creating a communication style that feels interconnected but difficult for their partner to follow.

Trauma adds yet another layer.

When the nervous system has been shaped by chronic stress, attachment injury, neglect, or abuse, the bridge between thinking and feeling can become disrupted. Some people become highly emotional and struggle to organize their experience. Others become highly analytical and lose access to emotional awareness. Many move back and forth between both states.

The question is rarely:

“Is this a male brain or a female brain?”

The more helpful question is:

“How has this person’s nervous system learned to create safety?”

Because once couples understand that they are not arguing with each other so much as speaking from different survival languages, compassion often enters where judgment once lived. And compassion is frequently the first plank laid on the bridge between two very different worlds.

No One Article or Post

Now, no one article or post can say it all about this subject matter. Message me below about what you’d like to hear more on.

Head to the healing program for your first step if you are curious about the monthly membership, a series of modules that can start your transformation from the bottom up rather than a lot of talking. What I have found is the transformation process is the reverse of what we thought. Learn how inside The Toolbox Approach® to Healing Trailhead Course.

My suggestion is that you start the modules at $45/month and gain access to all the extras offered in addition to the course. Start digesting this in a weekly program with yourself. Watching 30 minutes a week would only take three weeks, or you can do this more quickly, it’s up to you. When you are ready, message me inside the program with any questions and we can prepare you for your therapy and coaching. The program is tailored to you at that point, for $340 a month, in two 80-minute sessions bi-weekly. I hope to see you there.

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The Mind Lies

Have you ever noticed how easily we accept ideas that seem true? For decades, people were told not to swim after eating because it would cause cramps and could even be dangerous. It sounded logical, so it became accepted as fact, despite little scientific evidence to support it (look it up if you don’t believe me).

Our minds do this all the time. We mistake what seems true for what is true. We cannot think truthful intuition, intuition is warm sensation of what to do or not do, and what to trust, not a thought. We don’t logic intuition, so if you think you do, you are caught in a thought lie. I am privileged to be a therapist for 20 years; it has healed my intuition greatly. I can open to people in pain, and sense it warmly, without fear. However, that does not mean the same occurs in my personal life, and this can be confronting.

Recently, I got in my own way in a relationship. I had done a lot of inner work since my last heartbreak, dating minimally and playing it safe while I excavated the wounds of the past so that if anyone was going to dig them up again, I had done it myself first! I created The Toolbox Approach®, developed a healing program for my therapy goers, and felt like a better therapist, even more trauma-informed than six years prior when the pandemic hit.

But there was something I had overlooked: my own tendency to create a thought prison for myself.

This is not because I wasn’t healed enough. It is because it is the nature of the mind to lie for the sake of quick safety. In prison, even though it’s uncomfortable, it’s predictable. Everything can be monitored and strategized. One can get used to being hyperalert as a form of safety.

So, I completely missed my disappointment turning into a critic after several dates and no build in attraction. I could feel my body repelled by romance, but my mind said, “What’s wrong with you?” With that as my thought prison, I went on a couple more dates and eventually ended it.

It was both the truth of what needed to occur and not necessarily due to missing attraction or uncomfortable repulsion alone, but because of an impenetrable thought-prison issue affecting my emotional safety. I wanted to be thinking, “I am free to keep dating and build attraction. I was an open and good companion; it just wasn’t a match.” Instead, I started questioning, “What’s wrong with me?”

Broken Narratives

When I was a child, a lot was kept from me, “for protection.” I was the last child in a blended family of five: three kids, two sets of adults. The truth was that these siblings I had were half-siblings, but we didn’t talk about it that way.

One day, I realized I was becoming a very sad child. I didn’t know what was happening or why I was changing so rapidly, but when I look back at my mind, it was not the traumas I was repressing around my first seven years of life that made me sad. Their impact would be much slower, emerging through habits, future choices, and relational patterns.

It was this: “What’s wrong with me?”

That thought became, “Something’s wrong with me,” and my own thought prison.

No one did that to me. And what I am about to reveal is something that happens to all of us, the mind’s initial interpretation becomes a lie we hinge our lives on. Like a door we open everything with it and walk right through, and it takes a long time to realize that most doors open inward. To look at this process, the mind’s interpretation lying, is confronting, but it’s a step in the right direction. It is not a mindset shift, willpower, discipline, or knowledge, it’s simply the truth. (Click below for inward looking resources)

So, in this particular story of my mind lying (which is not the only story I have mind you). It was my mind’s interpretation of my own nervous system, and once my mind could question it, there was no boundary preventing the question from becoming a statement; no adult to supervise a changing mind at the hands of a fearfully attached nervous system. You may recognize these common interpretations, “I am broken”, “I am crazy”, “I am on my own”, “I have to keep it in”, “No one understands”, “It’s too much to ask”, “I have to be okay”, “I am better off alone”, “I have to need less” . . . .

Being a therapist, I hear these things without them being spoken, and I help people use tools to welcome subconscious material up gently, so it can be reprocessed rather than interpreted. Even still, my story exists, and in this one, I interpreted that I never belonged and that was my own fault. I was too much, or believed too deeply, or was too small or needy, and I longed to be intelligent and independent, but that was also a false interpretation.

In this part of my story, for protection, growing up the adults thought the message should be, “We are a family,” but we were a different kind of family. My cousins, my friends, the neighbors—they were all connected in ways that I was left out of, and I felt it. No one else had a gap of ten and over thirteen years between siblings who looked nothing like them.

I felt it for a long time before I thought, “What’s wrong with me?”. Subconsciously, this started to translate to other questions, and I can see now how that felt like a lifeline, something I could figure out.

I played spy games on everyone, looking like a doll with blinky blue eyes, smiling when I was supposed to, fearfully attaching to places I went for daycare or babysitting, frozen in my Velcro sneakers; self-sufficient.

One day, a teenage babysitter decided it would be fun to take me shopping in town. I was five. Unless we were going to Caldor with my mother, I didn’t even know how shopping in town worked yet.

I think my mother was starting to notice that being left at people’s houses was hard on me, although she never asked why. I assumed all the other families were normal. I was bullied, violated, and manipulated, and I didn’t say a word thinking I should belong as best I could. While the sitter was a better alternative, I was wary of what her rules would be.

While barely in tow with the sitter, I saw my sister in town and pleaded to go see her. The babysitter did not believe me. How could a brown-haired, olive-toned, green-eyed fifteen-year-old my mother had told her nothing about be my sister?

I was told I was a brat. But I still believed vehemently, “We are a family.” I bit the babysitter. And then it came: “What’s wrong with you?”

Recently, four decades later, I asked my half-sister about this. We say sister out loud authentically now. Everyone knows, and we are healing together. It has been forty years, and neither of us knows what happened. The babysitter never came back. Neither of us was talked to. But I know what happened for me: “Something is wrong with me. I am defective. I am different...” Whispered in my thought prison for decades.

Looking back, I know it’s not helpful to think the prison bars were built by my family. I think the freer thought is that they were built by an overwhelmed child’s mind trying to solve a mystery it didn’t have enough information to solve.

The mind is not evil. It is protective. But protective interpretations can become lifelong convictions. The accomplishments I garnered over those decades didn’t remove the bars of my prison. Recognizing the subconscious thoughts by specializing in Internal Family Systems, EMDR, and Integrative Attachment Theory—and performing them all on myself; didn’t entirely remove them either.

The full toolbox is what I specialize in now as a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional, Level 2. But mostly, I specialize in what worked for me, because I can stand behind it without performing. I needed a healing program that shifted my interpretation on a body level.

The thought prison kept me safe in many ways. I selected things that told me, “This is what is right with you.” We all have a whisper of faith that something is right with us, or else I would not be writing this and you would not be reading this.

Capacity builds over time for all of us to see our thought prison: on a daily basis and much more deeply at the subconscious level. When that capacity builds, you can select change on a nervous system level.

Everything before that phase, whether you know it or not, is a part of your healing.

Now I know. I want everyone to know. There is a healing program you can co-create.

WORK WITH ME AND CLICK ABOVE.

FIRST, WE HAVE SUPPORT MODULES THAT IMPROVE YOUR STRUCTURE OF CARE, THEN THERAPY AND COACHING MONTHLY, MOVE IN AND OUT AS NEEDED.

Change is Possible. But it Doesn’t Start with Mindset or Knowing What You Want

The mind may lie, but it is not a mind that tells the truth that makes change possible. When I can help my client Shelly face her hidden core wounds regarding “I am nothing”, and the way she struggles with boundaries, fearfully attaching to a mother that will call her every day but never give and only take and offer up family gossip that triggers her, we see together more questions she has. Ultimately, all the questions boil down to, “how can I change?”

Here is where we start blowing people’s minds. People like Shelly, like me, maybe like you, we think we want peace in our minds. We want to connect from our goodness, and finally have that be good enough, but the truth is, relatedness is hard work. There are moments of ease, but it is not all peaceful connection that deems any of us healthy, whole, healed, or sane.

Regulation isn’t about stillness; it is about flexibility. If you want to change, asking the question, can my system meet the challenges of connection is an important question? Can your system meet the challenges for the situation at hand? By system, I mean nervous system, and that nervous system is not a new one, it is imprinted on by the past. The modules of the healing program start with this key understanding, your nervous system is imprinted on by the past, it’s not about telling a therapist what happened, it’s about seeing the imprint and repatterning your way of outputting what your nervous system picks up. If anyone’s nervous system cannot meet the challenges of a situation, we want to know we can change and not avoid or use behaviors to sidestep the actual management of it.

Patrick, a therapy goer I meet with who is entering the healing program this month, told me to share his story with you. He came to therapy two years ago, his marriage already on life support. When Patrick is in love, he has a different nervous system, a one he thinks is regulated, when really it is upregulated for connection. He doesn’t realize it, but his connection system is looking for repair. He sees his parent’s marriage as “just the way it was”. His mother was no longer affectionate towards his father by the time he was a teenager, they fought out of earshot, there was coldness but no open complaint could come from the children, and his family and extended family were all configured around “boys will be boys” and no one was allowed to seek connection to feel better. When his wife began to change and become less warm and affectionate, he blamed her. This created a nervous system that was out of love chemically, but his mind said, “this is not fair to me”.

Patrick is in the program, and he is learning that it is his nervous system that went into the past. Uncomfortably, his mind created, “this is not fair”. He is spending time learning some neurological skills that bring back what I call neurological safety. The skills help us realize how in a manner of minutes you can instantly feel safer without the use of your mind. Slowly, it creates an intelligence to pause and stay in the body. The goal for Patrick is to feel the constriction of breath, the clenching of his jaw, and the bracing in his abdomen when his wife withdraws affection and use the skills to ground him, watching his mind’s interpretation, “that’s not fair, well two can play that game”, and recognizing how much more dangerous he becomes inside.

Patrick is discovering something many of us never learned: change does not happen because we finally think the right thought. It happens when we build the capacity to stay present in moments that once sent us into the past. The mind can tell a story, but the nervous system carries the imprint. When we learn to work with that imprint instead of fighting it, new choices become possible.

This is the foundation of Enter The Phases of Healing, the program built from The Toolbox Approach®. Through nervous system education, reprocessing and somatic healing, narrative healing, and relational healing, participants learn not just to understand why they react the way they do, but how to create lasting change from the inside out. Because healing is not about becoming someone new. It is about helping your system discover that it is finally safe enough to become more fully yourself.

PLEASE FEEL FREE TO MESSAGE MELINDA IF YOU WANT TO LEARN MORE OR CLICK AND JOIN FOR $45 FOR A MONTH OF ACCESS!

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Holding Space Subscription has been on a little pause so that I could be sure I was leading my own life from the parts of self that were agents of change and not the conditioned managers that keep everything “safe.” And by safe, I mean in control.

Sometimes the mind creates a twisted version of safety. It says, “This is handled,” or, “That has a plan.” The problem is that the mind doesn’t actually feel things. It interprets them.

If you’re walking into therapy carrying a boatload of feelings that have already been interpreted, explained, analyzed, and organized by protective parts of yourself, you could be on the pathway to stuck. You may sound insightful. You may have a very accurate story about your pain. You may even find yourself saying, “I don’t know,” while somehow overlooking all the things you actually do know and feel underneath the words.

This is why I promote democratizing mental health through The Toolbox Approach® and The Phases of Healing™. It’s the program that helps you show up. I know, as someone who dedicated my entire life from twenty to forty-five, to trauma-informed mental health and healing, that I was the worst therapy goer. I am not ashamed to admit it.

I couldn’t talk to myself correctly in my own mind because there were parts that wanted to heal and change, and parts that picked up everyone else’s baggage, and parts that said the past could never happen again on my watch, or parts that said keep it all down and just be a good therapist. The subconscious mind also said, “you are trapped, your needs don’t matter”, and ran my life subconsciously, selecting a career as the ultimate caregiver, so that core wound could work out quite nicely and keep on being there bandaged over but not healed.

So, I am the first to say it: if therapy hasn’t worked yet, you might be part of the problem. I know I was. I didn’t have the tools to address the right things or even reveal them to myself. I sensed they were there, but every time they rose up, I became afraid of my own nervous system.

As a therapist, I knew how to show up for everyone else. But when it came to myself, I didn’t understand that my deep sadness, my patterns, my lonely childhood, or even six near-death experiences were not necessarily the thing that needed attention. What needed attention was the relationship between my body, my subconscious beliefs, and the parts of me trying desperately to protect me.

For many of us, seeking therapy and avoiding therapy are not as different as they seem. One person stays away because they’re afraid of what they’ll find. Another goes faithfully every week but never lets the real thing into the room. Both are protecting something.

When we think about a therapist, we are of the assumption we need the “right one”. Picking the right therapist, just like picking the right partner, can seem so hard. Some think why would you want to trust a stranger, others fall into too much comfort with goodness, and still others don’t stay long enough and the same patterns they have with themselves or in regular relationships move into the therapy space. For a while, that’s your excuse, it’s the therapist, the time, or your partner or job or other relationships need to change, until you meet that good one who is writing an article your read, or you see a YouTube video that lands, or you finally start to get momentum in some other way and realize, you keep dealing with the same stuff no matter how many traumas you talk about, or resurfaced realizations you have about how you were raised and the partnerships you’ve formed, your last job, or your first!

Here’s where things get interesting. The parts of you that run your life are often organized around protecting core wounds.

A manager part may overwork because it is protecting an “I’m not enough” wound.

A people-pleasing part may protect an abandonment wound.

An avoidant part may protect a betrayal wound.

The problem is that these protective parts often come to therapy and do all the talking. They explain. They intellectualize. They tell stories. They analyze everyone else.

Meanwhile, the wound itself never gets a chance to speak.

When that happens, therapy can become a conversation between a therapist and your defenses rather than a relationship with the hurt parts underneath them.

Lose Your Mind

In the healing program you’ll see linked throughout this publication, the first step is taking two introductory modules designed to help you use your mind to lose your mind.

By that, I mean learning a Bottom-Up approach to healing. Most of us have spent years trying to think our way into feeling better. The mind keeps interpreting, analyzing, explaining, and organizing our experiences in an effort to stay in control. Meanwhile, the body’s experience of those events remains largely unexamined.

We have to loosen our grip on the idea that our mind knows everything about us.

Try a brief experiment. Look straight ahead and notice your peripheral vision; without moving your neck, span your eyes all the way to the left and all the way to the right. Then take a slow, full breath, allowing your ribcage to expand all around, even in the back. Gently turn your head left and right and notice what changes. Perhaps your vision widens, your neck moves more freely, or your body feels slightly different. Just notice what you notice.

The point isn’t the exercise itself. The point is that your body can shift your experience before your mind has figured anything out.

Many of us spend years looking at our lives through a nervous system organized around protection rather than safety. We become experts at explaining ourselves, yet strangers to the version of us that feels regulated enough to see clearly.

When your nervous system experiences greater safety, even briefly, you gain access to a different observer. This version of you is often better equipped to recognize patterns, core wounds, and protective parts without getting stuck in the endless loop of analysis. Instead of asking, “Why do I keep doing this?” over and over, you begin developing the capacity to truly see what has been running your life.

The mind has been over-interpreting life all this time; for more control of what happened. This has led to the use of bad tools for healing and transformation: Ego, Repression, Suppression, and Dissociation. These tools were meant to be used in moderation, but they tend to take over if one doesn’t get enough of the following inner resources: Peaceful Presence, Nurturing Presence, Inner Wisdom Presence, and/or Protective Presence. At times we do get enough but we have leakages and lose these internalized resources, and the bad tools take over later on in life.

We have to lose our mind, so to speak. This means we have to lose the idea that it knows so much about things. We have to honor that it has layers, and we can’t know them all without tools and time spent building capacity to become a truth seer.

This is The Version of You

If you noticed even a slight shift from that brief exercise, you experienced something important. You weren’t thinking your way into feeling safer. Your body was giving your mind new information.

That’s the part many of us miss in healing. We assume the version of us that is anxious, overwhelmed, hypervigilant, numb, or overthinking is seeing our life clearly. We rarely stop to ask what our life might look like from a nervous system that feels safer.

For some people, that regulated version of self is so unfamiliar that it feels almost like meeting a stranger. And yet, that is the version of you I want looking at your life. Not the part that is explaining everything. Not the part that has a brilliantly constructed story about why you are the way you are.

Not the part that has spent years in therapy saying, “Look at all these insights I have,” while secretly wondering why nothing is changing. The parts that come to therapy are often the very parts that have been managing pain, preventing pain, organizing pain, or avoiding pain. They have important information, but they are not always the best guides to healing.

Beneath those parts are often deeper beliefs that have been quietly shaping your life for years without your awareness.

Core Wounds

I think of core wounds as the subconscious conclusions we reach about ourselves when painful experiences happen and we don’t yet have the ability to understand them fully.

As children, we are meaning-making machines. When something hurts and we can’t explain it, we tend to explain it through ourselves.

A parent is emotionally unavailable. “I must not matter.”

A caregiver is critical. “I must not be good enough.”

Someone leaves. “People will always leave before I am ready.”

The child doesn’t have enough information to understand the complexity of what is happening around them, so they do the only thing they can do: they personalize it.

Over time, these conclusions become less like thoughts and more like facts. We stop questioning them. We build our personalities around them. We choose relationships through them. We make decisions through them. We even go to therapy through them.

The mind is actually trying to help. Human beings are wired to remember danger more than safety. If a dog chases you down the street, your brain pays attention to the dog, not the flowers. That makes perfect sense when the goal is physical survival.

The problem is that emotional wounds are different. A subconscious belief like “I am not enough” or “I don’t matter” doesn’t create more safety. It simply creates more vigilance. The wound becomes the lens through which we view ourselves, others, and the world.

It won’t be obvious you are thinking this, we don’t think in core wounds, it’s in a different part of the mind called the subconscious. And if we never learn to identify the wound underneath the protective parts of our mind, we can spend years talking about our life while never fully understanding what has been running it.

Common Types of Core Wounds

Core wounds fall into recognizable themes. Most people carry two or three dominant ones, usually formed before age seven, and each one tends to generate its own cluster of beliefs, emotional reactions, and behaviors in daily life as an adult. These are often formed when our emotional needs aren’t met completely as children. The best way to work with them is in a healing program that supports you rather than passively reading alone. Here are the most common types I see in my clients. If you want to use therapy like I believe it was intended before we shrunk our needs into what the insurance company says we are allowed, this tool and more are offered in the:

CHEAT SHEET FOR WOUNDS

The Abandonment Wound

A deep fear of being left, either physically, emotionally, or both, by the people you love and depend on.

How it shows up as an adult: Clinging in relationships, intense anxiety when a partner pulls away, reading small signs as rejection, or pre-emptively leaving before someone can leave you.

The Rejection Wound

The belief that who you are is not acceptable or welcome, and that being fully seen means being cast out.

How it shows up as an adult: People-pleasing, shapeshifting to match who you’re with, hiding parts of yourself in relationships, and struggling to tolerate disagreement or disapproval.

The “I Am Not Good Enough” Wound

A subconscious sense that your worth is conditional, and tied to what you produce, how you look, or how useful you are to others.

How it shows up as an adult: Perfectionism, chronic self-doubt, overworking, and a quiet sense of low self-worth that no accomplishment seems to fix.

The “I Don’t Matter” Wound

The felt sense that your presence, feelings, and needs don’t register. That you could disappear, and no one would notice.

How it shows up as an adult: Minimizing your own needs, not speaking up when something hurts, feeling guilty for taking up space, and chronic emotional exhaustion from over-giving.

The Shame Wound

The internalized belief that something is fundamentally wrong with you at your core. Not what you’ve done, but who you are.

How it shows up as an adult: Hiding, self-sabotage, difficulty receiving love or compliments, and a strong inner critic that punishes you before anyone else can.

The Betrayal Wound

The belief that trust is dangerous, and that opening up to someone means eventually being hurt by them.

How it shows up as an adult: Testing partners, struggling to be vulnerable, holding people at arm’s length even when the relationship is safe, and interpreting small inconsistencies as proof you shouldn’t have trusted.

The Helpless/Trapped Wound

The sense that you have no agency, and that your feelings, choices, and needs don’t change what happens to you.

How it shows up as an adult: Shutting down in conflict, freezing when asked what you want, feeling claustrophobic in close relationships, and avoiding commitment because commitment feels like losing yourself.

The Safety Wound

The body-level sense that the world, or your own body, isn’t a safe place to be.

How it shows up as an adult: Hypervigilance, difficulty relaxing, a nervous system that stays braced, trouble trusting stability when it arrives, and anxiety that doesn’t seem to have a clear cause.

The Program

Under the scope of The Toolbox Approach® and The Phases of Healing™, after you are done with your introductory modules, we move into a monthly subscription of coaching and therapy, which involves co-creating your toolbox and formatting new modules for returning to a classroom experience so you can build capacity between intensity. At times you will be in therapy intensives for a month, twice a month 80-minute sessions, and at times you will be in modules. Together we decide the length of time you spend in the healing program, based on various factors, and talk about supportive insurance covered therapy, for traditional 45-minute counseling, if that is a pause from the program you need, or helps you ease out of the program entirely with support.

Healing Begins

Healing begins when the parts of you that have been running the show loosen their grip just enough for something deeper to emerge. The goal is not to get rid of these parts. They protected you. Many of them saved your life in the only ways they knew how. The goal is to help them stop carrying jobs that no longer belong to them.

Because underneath the manager, the fixer, the caretaker, the performer, the avoider, and the over-thinker is often someone who has been waiting a very long time to finally be met. And that person rarely shows up through more thinking. They show up through presence.

Thanks for reading Holding Space Subscription! This post is also offered as a free podcast called “ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always” on Spotify. Head over and follow or share there. We need each other to do this inner work, yours affects another’s, so share and pass this on.

Message Melinda Above for More Information on The Healing Program

On autopilot, I pressed the button and waited for the signal. But something shifted. I felt the metaphor tap me on the shoulder and tell me to notice I didn’t want to be rushed across this or any threshold. I felt a new sense of purpose arise.

I became aware of the traffic lights changing on one side, and I felt the holding space for me to walk, even though the walking signal had not yet appeared. I observed more closely and realized there was a moment occurring for the other crossing; the one I was not on the precipice of. It was a subtle cue: the light would turn yellow just before the walking signal was triggered.

Grounded, focused, and mindful, I watched for it for my own threshold. When it turned yellow, I waited three seconds and began to walk.

I came within five strides of the other side, and only then did the walking signal turn on. Unrushed, I had plenty of time—and I knew it. I kept moving calmly until I reached the other side. And in that moment, it dawned on me: I had trusted something before the signal told me it was safe. I had observed a threshold that wasn’t my own, but there was value there; not comparison.

I trusted myself. I did not trust hyper-alert thought, but steady breath and observation, and I moved. I was waiting on a threshold for a signal, but I didn’t need one. Nor did I need an internal sign. I needed a felt sense of being on the threshold and knowing the pace at which I wanted to cross it.

I am changing. I am no longer rushed to be helpful to others, but guided for myself, and sharing that energy. It is what we all want: guidance that comes from a collective source of wisdom, and the ability to walk toward it ourselves with the presence of a trusted hand at play.

So, I am trusting its movement; the guiding and the knowing, and that is a different intelligence. That’s a walk across something. And I think it’s a tool worth exploring. A tool to guide you through, knowing you will make it your own.

A Forgotten Process; Collecting Tools

Recently, I have begun drawing a line with the word “disorder.” As a therapist who focuses on the phases of healing related to trapped trauma, and on democratizing access to trauma-informed tools, I feel the weight of labeling individuals as “disordered.”

Bipolar Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and eating disorders, to name a few; these are labels found in the diagnostic manual. But what these labels often miss is that many of these presentations begin as intelligent nervous system choices.

These “disorders” describe a collection of symptoms that, when traced backward, reveal a nervous system that has reached capacity. From there, the imprinted nervous system is no longer operating with a clear map of its window of tolerance. Instead, it learns stress responses outside of that window and begins to live there.

Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—the diagnosis I eventually came to terms with in myself, after a tiresome fixing mentality extinguished my own healing—led me to become both a trauma-informed provider to myself and, in many ways, my own patient zero. And yet, it doesn’t even have its own diagnostic code in that diagnostic manual-based care system.

However, it has become, in my experience, a kind of gatekeeper to trauma-informed wisdom—a doorway into what could be considered a new manual on mental wellness that has yet to be fully written.

Here, at Holding Space Subscription, and through the resources of my small company, we continue writing and educating across as many mediums as people invite us to explore in their healing. We aim to be a fluid place; one you can enter at any point, to engage the phases of healing and begin structuring your own path.

So, I have begun telling individuals the truth as I see it, from a healing perspective: we need tools. Because your intelligent nervous system chose this. And we don’t want to fix that choice; we want to expand it. We want to build capacity so that nervous system responses can become fluid rather than fixed. So that the window of tolerance can widen. So that presence can restore itself as the new imprint.

If anyone is going to move through the many thresholds of change in life, we need to prioritize structured healing and access to tools. Even when we are at our most “disordered,” and our bodies or minds require these diagnostic frameworks, we will still meet the journey beyond them on our own. And to do that, we need tools.

If this perspective continues to grow and take hold, our healthcare system could evolve into a community that shares tools. The diagnostic system would still exist as a frame we can call upon for care; but it would become something we use, rather than something that defines us.

We would no longer feel inconvenient for needing what we need in order to heal. Don’t forget; this is your process. This is your access; here, or somewhere else. Gather your tools.

There is no disorder in organized healing.

Not Changing

Now that you’ve got the call to gather tools. We must digest not changing as not an option. Not changing costs. It spends out our lives, and as your swiping, it can become a familiar sacrifice; one that feels like comfort because it no longer shocks you or those close to you. This is not acceptance; it is complacency without choice or resistance. There is not a “why” this happens, only how it does. Complacency, as a trauma-informed process is different from how you may normally conceptualize it.

Complacency can be understood not as laziness or lack of care, but as a protective nervous system state in which a person settles into what feels “safe enough,” even if it limits growth, change, or fuller engagement with life.

From a trauma-informed lens, complacency often reflects:

* Nervous system adaptation: The body prioritizes predictability and stability over risk because past experiences taught it that change can be unsafe.

* Protective parts (IFS language): A part of you may discourage striving, questioning, or change to prevent exposure to disappointment, rejection, failure, or overwhelm.

* Window of tolerance for stress management: Remaining in familiar patterns can help avoid dysregulation (e.g., anxiety spikes, emotional flooding, or shutdown).

* Learned safety in “less”: If someone’s history includes instability, criticism, or unmet needs, “not reaching” can feel safer than risking being hurt again.

Trauma-informed reframe

Instead of viewing complacency as a flaw, we might understand it as:

“A wise, protective strategy that once helped me survive or stay regulated, but may now be limiting my ability to expand, connect, or pursue what I truly want.”

This framing helps shift the conversation from “Why aren’t I doing more?” to“What part of me is trying to keep me safe—and how can I help it feel safe enough to allow movement?”

Instead of being “chosen,” many of the patterns we struggle to change are responses that learned us first. What can look like complacency is often something quieter, older;a rhythm of safety-seeking shaped by encounters with “hard things” that the nervous system never forgot. These patterns don’t announce themselves as strategies. They settle in. They repeat. They begin to feel like personality, like preference; until we notice how much of life is being organized around not returning to what once overwhelmed us.

It doesn’t quite make sense that avoiding difficult conversations could become a way of living, yet we see it happening or use it automatically, as if it is a logical strategy. Another example is how it doesn’t quite make sense that rest could also feel like it needs to be restricted, or that structure could become so precise it no longer allows for ease; yet these, too, are familiar.

These are not random habits. They are not personal failures. They are intelligent protections, rooted in places that formed before we had language for what we felt.

When we begin to turn toward them; not with urgency, but with curiosity,they often soften enough to show us where they began.

A child moving through unpredictability may have found safety in structure, in precision, in “doing it right.” Another may have learned independence too early—reaching, figuring, becoming; not because it was time, but because it felt necessary. Before we can trust ourselves, we are taught what to trust. Sometimes we are conditioned that togetherness always means love, even when the body says no.It is inferred into our bodies that silence means everything is fine, or that those who are older must also be safer, wiser, steadier. But when these messages don’t feel true, we don’t yet have the capacity to question them. So, the body keeps the record. And slowly, quietly, safety becomes something we build not from what makes sense—but from what once helped us get through.

Gentle exploration prompts

* What might feel unsafe about wanting more or doing more?

* When did it become safer to stay where I am?

* What is this part of me protecting me from?

* What would ‘safe expansion’ look like instead of forced change?

Check Your Nervous System with The Toolbox Approach®

Complacency may coexist with:

1. Freeze or dorsal vagal states: (immobility, low energy, disengagement)The freeze response, or movement into low-energy states like numbness, depletion, or autopilot; can signal that your system has been outside its window of tolerance for too long.

What matters here is that your body is remembering a state at a cellular level, a state it can return to for protection.

You can learn to trust, notice, and gently shift this state; not by forcing a new narrative, but through nervous system-based practices: breathwork, release work, and somatic awareness in muscles, tissues, and fascia.

The Toolbox Approach® highlights this work within the Reprocessing Healing Phase.

2. Shame-based narratives: (“Don’t try—you’ll fail anyway.”)These narratives often take hold when we lose trust in the integration of internal and external signals. They can keep us frozen in place, reinforcing complacency as protection.

The Narrative Healing Phase supports identifying and loosening these beliefs, especially those shaped by fear-based assumptions like:

* “You can’t risk that right now.”

* “People are relying on you to stay the same.”

* “Failure would ruin me.”

3. Attachment adaptations: (e.g., minimizing needs to preserve relationships)In the Relational Healing Phase, The Toolbox Approach® helps illuminate the roles we perform to maintain safety in relationships.

These patterns can lead to complacency by disconnecting us from ourselves—narrowing our perception into black-and-white categories (safe vs. unsafe, supportive vs. toxic), and reducing our capacity for presence and flexible response.

When we begin restoring connection to self, our signals for change become clearer, and movement becomes possible; without abandoning safety.

Inside the above Enter the Phases of Healing with The Toolbox Approach® program, the modules provide structure, pacing, and a coherent path through the phases of healing.

The Toolbox Modules Extras is where you can go deeper—or wider—depending on how you learn and process best. After your first month of self-directed, module-based learning—at just $45/month—you have the option to enter two 60-minute sessions where future modules can be tailored to where you are in your healing.

These sessions can be repeated at any time and may also serve as a pathway into a more immersive, three-day healing intensive—designed to maximize your time, focus, and progress. Your entry point is only $45/month because I learned your self- investment is needed, one that makes you feel safe yet valued.

Why do I offer this?

I have watched many people attempt inner work without a truly trauma-informed internal shift. This impacts individuals and couples alike. It can create a sense of betrayal, even while help is being sought, and often reinforces patterns of self-abandonment when there is no clear structure to fully face ourselves, hold ourselves with care, and stay engaged in our own healing process.

I do this because it matters deeply to me that therapy, content, and healing interventions do not waste your time or create the illusion of change without truly supporting it.

Lastly, I want to invite you to share this publication. Not just as something to read, but as a doorway.

In a world where we so often share reels and memes, consider the impact of sharing something that can meet someone at the exact moment they are ready to begin their healing. You never truly know when that moment will be.

Half of anyone’s progress is simply knowing where the trailheads are, and that they exist at all.

By sharing this, you’re not just passing along content. You’re helping democratize access to healing. You’re placing a marker along the path for someone else to find when they need it most.

If this pulled on your heart strings like it pulls on mine to write this, “heart” the post or publication and it will be your fee for service and let me know this matters!

Bust Open

There is an imaginative child inside of you who would never tolerate the way you are living your life right now. They hold qualities ready, almost desperate, to be unleashed. But to let them live would disrupt the life you are currently in. And still… part of you knows disruption, intervention, or transformation is needed.

Some call this midlife. I don’t. I’ve witnessed this awakening stretch across months, years, even a decade, and at any age it can happen. It is less a moment and more a slow recognition: Something is no longer deniable.

A theme emerges.A truth repeats.

And it distills into this: You are not taking up the space that is actually yours. The space any of us take up comes from things imprinted on you from before you had a thought process to form your mind, all this imprint data is still inside you; particularly gut memory of how things felt internally, and emotional memory like fear crept particularly deep into storage. If you try, you can remember something free of interpretation, like the love you had for a favorite blanket, there is a slight “because”, or explanation why, but you also just felt comforted by it.

In the meantime, before your mind, your body is just open and storing things. Therefore, what was said about life, about you, and also what was not talked about, interpreted things for you until you grew your own thought process. All that data in the body is there, but the priority seems to be the mind and its development, we enter school, knowing and learning is prioritized. Already your mind is not entirely your own, but we don’t know this. There is no guarantee that those around you when you start out warm and open, are mature enough to have all the interpretations you need or that they fit who you are meant to be. We start to fit the somatic knowing of our imprints into a thought process modeled after ones that were shown to us. At times we end up fragmenting our minds to survive and form an identity, seeming to pick one inner voice, and yet as you age you feel it, sometimes you are not in control, sometimes you are, sometimes emotions flood, other times you are all intellect, or trying to escape confusion.

After the imaginative child, free to take imprints and enjoy being open, another one emerged; the one who endured the blows. They reframed pain. They learned to survive. There was no single turning point. Even when there was trauma, the shift was quiet; gradual enough to miss. At some point, your intuitive, warm motivation stopped feeling safe to trust. And a new version of you took over. This part protected you well. But a child can only do so much.

A child does not know how to take up space. It seems like they do, running around, or curling up, being good, or acting out, but after the age of 4, there is less and less intuitive knowing about space claiming. Even when grown, these children inside often trust ideas more than growth itself. The idea is “I will be”. And the premise is that we will learn to be and earn our space. The truth is: Growth requires space. Ideas do too, but without embodied growth, they become a crowded forest of thoughts.

There is a path through that forest of thoughts, perhaps not the paved one where your intellect figures it all out. Can you sense that your roots—your growth—are pushing up through the pavement? Space is opening. Uncomfortable space. The kind where your idea of the relationship you should look for, the career or project you should build, the shift, and the truth, all would actually exist if you stepped into it.

And yes, it may make people uncomfortable. Not because you would be too much, or different than before. But because the space was empty, and now, it’s visible. It could actually be anyone’s space. You were always free to move there. The illusion was that someone else had taken it. They haven’t. Most people are standing at the edge of their own expansion, waiting for permission.

If this resonates, you already know it, you are waking up. There will be no invitation.No permission granted. You are not the one who waits for discomfort to disappear. Even if you have been that person. Feel this landing with you. You are the one who moves and meets it there. And let me be clear: You are not creating discomfort by taking up space. You are revealing it. Revealing a little of your own discomfort to yourself happens in the micro-decisions; taking a course, saying no, saying yes, doing therapy, getting blood work, deliberate spending, resting, or setting a boundary.

“Busting open” doesn’t happen all at once. It is quieter than that. More cellular. Like skin. We shed continuously, often unnoticed. Over time, an entirely new layer forms. A full skin cycle takes at least 28 days. New cells rise, replacing what has hardened and finished its time. Everything inside of you is already doing this. Always pushing into new space. No second-guessing. Only renewal.

I invite you to subscribe for my free Holding Space Content to help you access The Toolbox Approach® and The Phases of Healing®. To explore these themes more deeply through self-directed courses, private sessions, or a unique tailored intensive, visit my program offered in the links. A paid subscription helps me democratize healing access, education, and services for $5.99 a month!

We try to understand change. But change is not something you think into. You move into it. It is not purely cognitive. It is somatic. It has everything to do with space, and your body’s relationship to it.

On a crowded train platform, your body already knows it cannot expand. No thought required. So why do we stand so tightly in our lives, waiting for space to appear, instead of creating the space our bodies already need?

Human Design (and the Illusion of Self-Creation)

Maybe you’re someone who works tirelessly when inspired. Or someone who generates ideas in bursts. Initiates. Reflects. Guides. There are many ways we are designed. But we forget. We start believing we make ourselves through effort.

The “path” becomes an idea. But sensing who you are is different. And often, it comes later. It can feel like everything before was a lie. It wasn’t. But it was incomplete.

There is a space you’ve been conditioned to occupy. And another you’ve imagined, but haven’t fully entered. The work is not to rush across that gap. It is to stay in the in-between long enough to feel what is shedding. Because something is returning to you.

Not new. Old intelligence. The kind you had before adaptation took over. At some point, life was: Too much. Too soon. Too alone. And your system adapted beautifully.

It compartmentalized.It turned feeling into thought.It created safety through interpretation.

But something was lost: Your capacity to feel and trust your own expansion.

You learned to trust the conditioned self. And question the original one.

Uprooted

Look down. There is pavement beneath you; a path you didn’t question.

A way forward that made sense to the thinking mind. But now, your roots are breaking through it. And that can feel like losing the path. It isn’t. It is seeing it, and yourself, clearly. Uprooting isn’t pulling yourself out of your life. You grew within this.

It isn’t good or bad. But something changes as capacity grows: You look down; at your roots, your history, your trauma. And then…You look up.

And you see yourself differently: Tall. Wide. Dimensional. You realize you have a backside. More than what faces forward. More than what performs. And something shifts. You begin to sense this: I can take up space differently now. Expansion doesn’t feel good at first. It can feel like fear. Anger. The urge to flee. Because your body isn’t used to holding this much of you. But it isn’t permanent. It is capacity forming.

Let’s take a look at someone in mid-expansion; in a moment in a therapy session. This is a combined example of many of the therapy goers I work with annually for 20 years. The therapy I do is at the root, “trauma-informed”, we don’t look down the roots in this approach, we meet them and look upward at how much sense it all makes you expanded the way you did. This is The Toolbox Approach® and The Phases of Healing®. We don’t look at it as damage; we focus on repair for continued growth and expansion. The work we do is largely reparenting when it starts to move like a familiar muscle. Instinctively, the individual knows what phase of development towards healing is in their capacity to address. This approach repatterns acting and thinking out of fear and stress responses, loves into the past methods of living that way, and grows a parental warmth that was missing, as they pick up a tool for narrative, reprocessing, or relational healing. Let’s view a session with Layla.

Layla

Layla is provided a target memory she has spent several sessions on; building inner resourcing and grounding to hold space for it visually and somatically without interpretation. Holding it without words, she is led into a safe place with a tool called bilateral stimulation. The memory links to why she continues to hide in her office, performing her job behind closed doors, fearful someone may ask more of her as well as think less of her somehow. She has been holding fear and distrust for decades; she was molested by a family friend and never told. She hid under the table and stayed part of the family as the youngest, as everyone laughed off the behavior. She told her mother decades later and was told, “don’t tell anyone else”.

We meet the girl under the table warmly, telling her how much sense it makes she chose this place, for watching steps and feet and people approaching ever since what happened. We explain to her that she is not hiding but looking out for herself. We encourage her to see herself this way and gently ask her to flip several pages in a scrapbook to the scene where she tells her mother. See, we say, you were so smart, she doesn’t know what to do even years later, that’s what she would have said, and you already knew.

We ask her for her help if she is willing. She doesn’t have to be perfect, it’s just that her older self is struggling at work, she is stuck in the past with the child and doesn’t realize it’s safe. We talk to her about the idea to go under the table being an idea, and how her older self needs a different kind of intelligence in her body now. Gently, we talk about the way she can help extend the breath 4, then 5, then 6 beats on the exhale. Then she will know you are there and even though the memory is there, you are both safe, smart, and can expand and go out from under the table.

Layla combined work in a Reprocessing Healing Phase and added Narrative Healing. She worked on transforming, “I am so ashamed I have been hiding, I am an imposter at work”, into warmth and understanding, “It makes sense, and I am present for my healing”. The Relational Healing Phase that she quickly moved into is about taking up space regarding her “Yes, I will leave my office for a quick walk for myself”, and “No, I won’t be afraid to set a boundary without closing the door entirely”. She linked this with being able to say, “Yes” to something she planned to say in a meeting, and “No” to spontaneous sharing if someone else already was.

The linkages kept on coming as she realized the space(s) she had missed moving into, that it was in her control, and that it didn’t need to be interpreted by her mind as safe or not safe because somatically she felt like she was moving into no longer needing to overthink as a method of safety. She told me, that in many ways she was thinking about her actions after that day as “mistake after mistake”, all because she interpreted a shrinking and hiding had happened to her.

An Invitation

This is the work:

Not fixing yourself.Not perfecting yourself.

Expanding your capacity to fully live inside yourself.

This is the foundation of The Toolbox Approach® and The Phases of Healing®; where healing becomes lived, not just understood. Holding Space Subscription, what you are absorbing right now, is the gateway into this work.

And now, it is expanding into a higher education path for healing: You Are Not Broken University & The Enter the Phases of Healing Program work towards guiding you into tailored courses, therapy, coaching, and immersive experiences designed around you. Not to make you someone new. But to awaken what has always been within you. Check out this sensible program, that graduates you at your direction into the next option, pause anytime, expand at your own pace, your space is held regardless.

CLICK BELOW FOR IT!

Love.Intelligence.Clarity.Connection.Courage.Curiosity.Compassion.Presence.

So, you can face life not as something to control, but something you can move through, learn from, and grow inside of. You don’t wait for space. You take it.You feel it. You expand into it.

Because:

You are tall.You are wide.You have a backside.

Use it. The Toolbox Approach® and The Phases of Healing® supports your expansion. Move into the space and make it your own!

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Narrative Healing

If you know this space, you know, I have been writing about The Phases of Healing from my introductory book, “You Are Not Broken. Break free from the fixing yourself mindset with The Toolbox Approach”, for three years. I have been honest about how it got developed. I stumbled upon the approach at a whirlwind time in my own life, and it only got more and more organized over the three years due to my professional background as a trauma therapist. I have a really interesting relationship with stumbling, at 45 years old, I could say my stumbles started before I could actually walk. As I got older, many of them were messy eye-openers, the kind with a lot of loss that only shows up as broken narrative for a long time. However, that is how I fell into labeling one Phase of Healing, Narrative Healing. My falls, I thought, made me broken, and the best I could do was to be a therapist with a heart of gold who “gets it”. Tell me your broken, and let’s see it together; that’s my purpose, it’s okay, I don’t need more loss, I can build a life on this. This is not what I felt, this is what I thought. I am not really sure what I was feeling for almost 20 years; resistance, empathy for other people, dissociation, tension, tired, a fawning response, hypervigilant……….and yet I was thinking, “It’s fine, I am helping people”.

It was a shock when a slow burn kind of loss, the kind that takes two years to complete itself, revealed to me how broken that narrative was. And there were other broken narratives that rose up behind it once I faced this. Like Russian Dolls, I would open one, and explore it, only to find there was a twist where it was opening up another me, with another narrative to explore and heal. In this process, I stumbled around until I realized it was a phase. A necessary phase of healing I could call, Narrative Healing. So, it is only fitting that this week, six years after my healing journey feels like it formally began, using this approach in thousands of sessions, I stumbled into another truth when in session with a therapy goer in my caseload.

Do you think your way through life? Maybe you shouldn’t, you can’t think your feelings, it’s an illusion.

Sometimes this happens, I am listening so intently, that I somewhat drop that typical therapist thing where they ask a question to get you to notice something and I just get real and direct. When I do this, I have noticed I am also talking to myself, and I am even more effective. My therapy goer and I unpacked thinking as a form of suppression, like a thermostat that kicks in to keep the temperature at a certain level because raw emotion is either too hot or too cold. Or even like a Goldilocks deciding there is a strategy involved, tasting all the bowls of porridge for the just right one, “It’s no problem, there are no bears here, I just need to eat something”.

I was channeling a philosopher/psychologist with a theory when I told her it seemed to me we evolved too fast for the complexity of feelings we now have on the modern feeling’s wheel (take a look there are like 80 feelings). I told her this felt information still comes in the same old-fashioned way, through the nervous system, but now it’s complex and we have figured out that there is a quick hack called storytelling (cognitive interpretation) that escapes the complexity and makes us feel more in control. What is needed is trust in our own capacity to adapt the body/brain connection to process the input without the mind, and then only use the mind secondarily to make decisions or reflect, not to pretend thinking feelings is real guidance.

This first rendition of the theory caused my therapy goer to look at me with “oh my goodness” on their face. They told me they wanted to stop doing this thinking feelings immediately, that it wasn’t real, and they couldn’t believe they wasted so much time doing it. Then, they said, “I think I feel stupid”, and we laughed because you can’t think your feelings. However, things got serious after the laughing, and I told them with certainty, “I know, what do we do with this?”. They nodded, that is what they were thinking. But what are you feeling is what I asked next and then guided them to listen to their body instead of telling a story.

My Mind is Lying

All week, the same thing started to repeat; “My mind is lying to me”, was the realization. Then the questioning glance regarding what could be done. First off, the mind is lovingly lying. It is being protective of two things, “too much for me to handle at once”, and “what if I can’t survive this feeling”. Really, because feeling complexly evolved very fast, and things need to be simpler, it decided there would be two roles inside the mind. Managers and firefighters. Managers would say, “I will manage this complexity so it’s not what it is”, and Firefighters would say, “I will put out the feelings fire automatically without much thinking”.

We know this happens, it happens in families all the time, parents lie a little bit to protect their children, they say, “we can use a flashlight to see the monsters”, or without thinking might say, “only wimps are scared of the dark”. So, if it happens in external family life, it can happen in the internal family system of our mind. Families don’t intend to get dysfunctional or dysregulated, stressed, or reactive, and our minds don’t mean to do this either. Regardless, a lot of the things that are said are broken, they are not really real story and they mean well, but we’ve got to get us some more tools. That is where The Toolbox Approach® and The Phases of Healing come in.

What’s The Actual Feeling? Reprocessing 101

When you find yourself thinking through your feelings:

* I think I have to wait until I have more money saved before I start a different career path

* I don’t think I am ready for dating because I only got divorced last year and finally feel like myself again

* I think I can purchase a new phone because I need a pick me up and I work hard

Notice it! Then, recognize that the feeling is in your sacral space. This space is the base of your spine and forms the back wall of your pelvis. It is also a muscle and nerve bundle, often called the psoas nerve. The statements above need cognitive and somatic reprocessing. Cognitively we have to roll back that video tape to see: Activating Event + Activating Thought = Thinking Through Feelings. Prior to the first bullet, for example, this person had several work colleagues get laid off and learned things in their industry are unstable, then they thought about networking and going back to school, and then thought “I have to wait until I have more money before I go back to school”. They felt uncertain, but tried to reverse this feeling by being certain it is not the time to change careers. This is not the truth, it’s just what their mind did and now we see it in reprocessing.

Somatically reprocessing is also clarifying. The information from the layoffs came into the sacral and the pelvis curled upward and muscles in the hips and groin tensed and held, braced against relaxing as if holding on or absorbing a blow. The body is asking, was that a blow to my safety, I think I need to stay clenched and not make any big moves right now. Breathing into this space and relaxing the hips by lying on a yoga mat and letting the floor push back on the wall of the pelvis, even rolling back and forth might provide a different truth in this case. The body then may register, this makes me tense, I can release it, but I don’t feel like this is good to be around on a daily basis.

In a coaching/therapy session, which is what I find myself doing these days organically with this approach, now we have a real way to accurate data for navigating life. This person now knows it is not good to be around the layoffs, and it is not true that they have to wait to find a career path, but they want more control than they have. To them, in full reprocessing, more control is not staying because that puts them near the layoffs, it’s the illusion of more control. A lot of people find this eye opening in interesting ways. For example, they decide they have to take actual control of something else entirely, like getting more movement, or scheduling that dental work, or writing that proposal for when they will start the new career path (but not now because I have to save money). The point is that it is a more embodied process, and they feel whole, authentic, and fully present in their life.

Most of us become unhealthy the same way every time, protective outputs instead of presence outputs. When we can use reprocessing tools and stop thinking our whole lives out, we enter a Reprocessing Healing Phase so consistently that narratives and relationships also start to feel lighter, less challenging to navigate, and like you can be present with them.

A Note on Holding Space

Ever since I can remember, wherever I have had a space for myself, I have poured into making it my own in a very unique way. I needed to pour something into any space I was in because the space inside didn’t feel great. Now, I feel the memory, making things look nice aesthetically, but also something else was there driving me. Good balancing of style, cozy comfort, and somewhat of a Bohemian throwback to a different time, all symbolized safety. Emotional safety like the kind a child knows, arranging stuffed animals around their head, to ward of monsters as they sleep. That’s me, that’s what I do, that’s what feels important and I don’t always feel it because of my own trauma imprint, but I am creating a room for myself regardless. That is a tool, it’s not one I own, this space is for sharing tools. We are all therapeutic spaces, regardless of the title I hold; Trauma Therapist.

Thank you for Holding Space!

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Lost Cat

If you’ve ever read The Velveteen Rabbit, you may have sensed that it was never really a child’s story. It transcends childhood because it speaks to something we spend our entire lives circling: love, loss, and what it actually means to become Real. The Velveteen Rabbit, a simple toy, learns that becoming real doesn’t happen all at once—like the wind‑up toys he compares himself to—but slowly, through being loved over time. In the beginning however, he has questions. He wants to know what “Real” is, and if it hurts. Even as a new toy in the nursery, full of questions, the Rabbit foresees that “Real” may be uncomfortable in its process.

This story has stayed locked in my psyche for decades. It has been an answer to a question all of us adults continue to ask repeatedly, although we struggle to admit it to ourselves, “What is love really?”. As the creator of the Phases of Healing within The Toolbox Approach®, I’ve come to understand that living inside this question is part of the work. I write about these phases here in Holding Space not because I’ve arrived somewhere, but because I am inside the process myself. I am learning, in real time, what it means to become real; to let things land slowly, to trust that understanding deepens gradually, and to allow love to unfold rather than force it into clarity.

Recently, I took some time off, to love in a real way. My father is turning eighty years old, and my zig-zagged pattern in and out of childhood repressed traumas, showed me a long pattern of trying not to make anyone uncomfortable with my truth, especially him. I thought my childhood traumas branded me a broken toy, and I would be less loved than other things. Is holding back as a form of protection love? I regret it was not, but I meant it to be. I forgot the storyline, that becoming real was to allow uncomfortable truth.

In the years since my mother passed, much has been revealed to me through the same healing approach I now share with you. Through the phases of healing, I’ve had to face truths I once organized my entire identity around avoiding. And with my father approaching his own threshold of “realness,” I wanted to meet him differently. Not as the version of myself shaped by fear, but as someone arriving, honestly, in the room.

There was a party at his home. I wanted to come home to myself and attend, but I was afraid. My cat, Salvo, has been an unexpected companion in this healing. He is difficult to love, scared often, and can’t sit still; he is a mirror of who I used to be. To look at him is to fall in love, but he won’t stay long before he becomes worried about something and needs to exercise and move himself rather than be cuddled. I got it in my mind that Salvo needed to attend the weekend long festivities with me, and we would both come home somehow. I bought him special natural cat tranquilizer for the car ride, a cat hotel carrier for two cats despite his puny size and made sure we had plenty of time getting used to both things the morning of our departure.

It was a huge risk taking him with me, somewhere inside me I knew this, but I wanted him there. Our past three years together had marked a transition, and while Salvo stayed the same, I had become less fearful somehow. I had let people in and closed doors on people without pining for what good love should be. I wanted Salvo to meet my family; many of whom I had not seen in a decade. My desires for us, however, did not mark him with safety and security. It didn’t matter that I cooed his name sweetly, or bought him his own cat motel, or garnished him with special products. He bolted in fear from my loving intentions. He did not want to come with me, he wanted to flee in fear of the outside world, the bouncing carrier, and the unfamiliar movement away from the door and to the car.

I had to make the hard decision to go without him. Salvo is lost. He is too afraid to come home. I went and returned in the same night. I am still searching for him. I am not sure if he knows the risk I took was based on love, for him, for me, for where the relationship could have gone if he had held that memory with me. Maybe you can already feel it; this is not just a story about a lost cat.

It is a story about what happens when love built still includes fear in different places inside us and between who we aim to love. When one’s intention still comes up against nervous system responses based on survival no matter the effort. When we try to bring ourselves, or someone else, home, before safety has truly been built. I was very sad, but it is not a failure, I see it as a lesson on love. Love will include loss; there is no way around it. Loss only separates what is no longer for us, and pain is the digestion of that loss, not a punishment. And this is where The Toolbox Approach® continues to teach me. Because the Phases of Healing are not abstract; they show up like this. In real decisions. In relational risks.In the painful space between wanting connection and respecting protection.

There are three phases of healing. Narrative Healing asks us to see the story we’ve been living inside. Reprocessing Healing asks us to feel what we’ve never been able to safely feel. Relational Healing asks us to practice love differently; without force, without abandonment, and without losing ourselves in the process. Right now, I am inside all three. Searching. Regulating. Learning what it means not to override fear in the name of love.

And learning, again, that coming home…is something that cannot be rushed.

A Lesson from Fear

The narrative of fear is really the mind’s interpretation of what goes on between the brain and the body. Information inputs into us constantly. Right now, a fan is running on my back, it feels nice, however it is not enough to beat the heat of the day. My body is registering this; I am overriding it. “It’s good enough”, I am telling myself. My brain is sending signals to my body to do something: to put my hair up, to move the fan closer, to put in the air conditioner in the window, but I am restricting the relationship between the two with my mind. This is the narrative of fear, or rather it is the beginning of it. Because what would happen if I wasn’t in control and just allowed the signal to move freely? I wouldn’t get this done. I need to get this done. I am a person who puts in the effort to finish what they start and then I have nothing to fear because I will always be that person. This is fear. I cannot always be that person.

Love is recognizing you are more than what you interpret needs to happen for things to be okay. That is the lesson from watching fear from a distance. Salvo the cat got fear signals in the brain that activated the flee response, and he either remains there, or shook them out and has no interpretation of what to do next but to continue trusting his signals. He did not need to come with me; I needed that because I was afraid and I wanted control. The storyline I created helped me prepare for my outcome with a sense of certainty, even though I could not possibly be certain that a cat attending a family weekend would make me secure. I seemed, to myself at the start of this, more changed than Salvo was over the past three years, but I learned something. I learned to be a better witness of my mind’s narrative. We all want safe love, but love is not safe entirely, it involves risking the truth of what you want from the other person, or the situation, and we don’t always slow down and witness what we are constructing and reality test if it could be more simply stated or asked for.

Most of us get this way because the brain stores negative outcome information more readily than positive, and the mind starts interpreting before we’ve gained felt sense accuracy, communication, relatedness, attunement, and reflection. We are all holding our own negative outcome data like interpretive outputs; do this and you will get that. Plan, rehearse, organize, control, review, edit, and optimize the output and you will place out there how you want to be seen and received and then you will be okay. However, that is not true, that is fear narrative. It may work, but it must be repeated, and it certainly is not love. Like all control mechanisms, it means to do well, to protect, but the mind’s interpretation on how things should, could or ought to go, causes love to flee more often than not, either immediately or slowly over time.

We cannot stop the narrative of fear; we can only match its process by healing the relationship with that part of ourselves that thinks we are outcome. We are many things, such as process, presence, curiosity, courage, connected, and caring. Take your lessons well and take a lesson from fear; that it is a narrative but not a fact on how things should play out. At least for humans.

Announcement: You Are Not Broken University Is Now Open

I want to share something I’ve been building with deep care. For the first time, you can now step into You Are Not Broken University; a structured, trauma‑informed entry point for anyone curious about beginning (or deepening) their healing journey.

This isn’t about fixing yourself. It’s about learning how to understand yourself.

Inside this space, you’ll find:

* Self-paced modules grounded in The Toolbox Approach®

* A clear, structured entry point into the phases of healing

* The option to explore private sessions if you’re looking for more support

* Guidance to help you thoughtfully consider a 3-day therapy intensive—only if and when it feels right for you

This was designed to be:

* Digestible — you won’t be overwhelmed with content, just two primary self-paced eye-opening modules to help you arrive.

* Affordable — so access to healing doesn’t feel limited to a co-pay and a relationship you aren’t sure of right away; this is you choosing you frugally.

* Responsible — the pacing here respects your nervous system, unlike traditional classrooms of higher education that seem inaccessible in the rush and obligations of life.

You’ll have one month to move through your first two modules, with the option to continue on in the modules or move into deeper, more advanced work at your own pace. Some features remain intentionally locked, so you can enter gradually and safely. I have intentionally made this an affordable path to enter transformation at a rate less than a therapy co-pay for monthly membership. You chose when and if you want more. You have control.

There is no pressure to become anything here. Just an invitation to begin. If you feel curious, you can start with one month of access and see how it fits:

👉 ENTER THE PHASES OF HEALING

You don’t have to know exactly where you’re going. You just have to be willing to gently arrive.

Please share this, you never know who in your life right now needs to find their way!

Before we get to our content, there are exciting things happening on the Enter The Phases of Healing site for anyone looking to immerse more. As promised, we are building a higher education on healing location; a You Are Not Broken University that started with the book and is now the location for courses and access to information on what a Three-Day Therapy Intensive can do for you. Please look here for The Toolbox Approach® Modules and bookmark the site for this and therapy intensives as well as other goodies.

Unspoken Partnerships

When we are in relationships, they are all unspoken partnerships. This is true across romance, marriage, friendship, family, work, and even the communities and systems we rely on—whether or not they sit inside our intimate inner circle.

You might be thinking, “No, I’m pretty self‑sufficient,” or “Only my spouse is my partner,” or “My kids definitely do not feel like partners.” And from a cognitive, left‑brained definition of partnership, that makes sense. But that isn’t the level I’m speaking to here.

What I’m describing, and what Holding Space Subscription, backed by The Toolbox Approach® and The Phases of Healing, speaks to, is a healing, “bottom‑up” understanding of partnership. From this perspective, partnership isn’t about roles, responsibility, or equality of labor. It’s about how our nervous systems are constantly in relationship with one another.

Everything that happens to us in relationship first happens at the nervous system level, and this is the level where we often lack language and intelligence. Relationships become mirrors for what we haven’t yet developed awareness around internally. They show us where safety, threat, longing, repair, or disconnection is happening beneath conscious thought.

But mirrors alone aren’t enough. We need tools to work with what we see.

A bottom‑up approach to relational partnership becomes a tool in itself. It invites a shift in mindset: every relationship is offering information. Every connection is holding up a mirror. This can feel daunting at first, but it’s not meant to be public or burdensome. This is a private framework for your own growth. Only the people you choose to share it with ever need to know you’re using it.

Silent Agreements: Who Is Supposed to Save This?

When we remain in early stress responses long enough, those responses stop being momentary reactions and begin to wire themselves into patterns. Over time, they form the pathways our brains default to; not because anything has gone wrong, but because survival responses are incredibly effective teachers.

These pathways are neither good nor bad. The problem arises when they are shaped by stress alone and never interrupted by experiences that re‑orient us toward safety, connection, and regulation, both within ourselves and with others. Without that re‑orientation, we can live for years, even decades, navigating life from a survival map without realizing it.

When this happens, our thoughts also begin to reflect survival logic. Much of the mental dialogue we experience in relationships is drawn from very old data; formed long before we had awareness, choice, or adult flexibility. We often assume our thoughts are truth, when in reality, they’re patterned responses linked to states of threat and protection.

Part of healing involves learning that the mind and the brain are not the same thing. The brain holds the pathways built through experience; the mind interprets those pathways as meaning. When we repattern the brain; without surgery, simply through experience, awareness, and new relational input, the mind can gradually loosen its grip on survival‑based interpretations.

In that loosening, a restored narrative becomes possible: that in relationships we are separate people, yet we rely on one another to know ourselves more fully. We become sensory mirrors for each other; reflecting emotional material we cannot access alone. This is not pathology; it is how humans develop and heal. But mirrors only help if we know how to use them.

From a bottom‑up perspective, partnership isn’t primarily cognitive, it’s sensory. Beyond the five senses we consciously name (sight, sound, touch, smell, taste), the body is constantly perceiving safety, danger, closeness, distance, resonance, and threat. Muscles hold memory. Nerves track patterns. Cells remember what the mind never recorded. Long before we form a thought, the body has already registered what the space feels like.

Yet in relationships, we often focus almost exclusively on what the mind is saying—our interpretations, assumptions, and conclusions. This is one reason relationships feel so confusing and exhausting. The mind is trying to solve something that originated far below it.

Healing introduces a different tool: IN‑SIGHT.

This isn’t reflection in the usual sense. It’s inward seeing. Instead of interpreting the partnership from the top down, we roll the internal footage backward. We ask:Where did my body register danger or absence of safety before the thought appeared?What did my nervous system need in that moment?

When we do this, something subtle but powerful often appears. In many relationships, a quiet internal dialogue is running beneath awareness; a question that sounds something like: Who is supposed to save this right now?

If your child is dysregulated after you’ve been patient all day, a thought may arise: They need to stop. They need to fix this now.

If your boss overlooks your effort again, something inside says: They need to make this right.

If a partner misses your tone or doesn’t respond after weeks of explaining, the feeling emerges: They should know by now. They should save this.

The words may differ, or may not be words at all, but the pattern is familiar: waiting for the other to rescue the relationship from distress. This impulse is not immaturity. It is not entitlement. It is ancient.

It is a return to our earliest experience of relationship. As infants, distress reliably brings rescue. Crying, reaching, even quiet compliance all shape how quickly care arrives. That first year of life matters deeply; it imprints expectations about responsiveness, regulation, and relief. We learn, before language, that connection saves.

Under stress, relationships awaken this old memory, not as recall, but as reflex. When unmet needs surface in adult partnerships, the nervous system doesn’t ask for discussion; it asks for rescue. Without awareness, this becomes a silent agreement in many relationships: one of us should fix the distress.

And this is where so many partnerships quietly fracture; not because people don’t care, but because no one was taught how to see this pattern, name it gently, or work with it from the body upward.

With this background, we can now imagine what happens when relational rupture deepens; when an issue goes chronically unaddressed, when emotional baggage continues to fire danger cues, or when the sense of partnership itself begins to fray. At this point, the nervous system is no longer responding to a single moment; it is responding to repeated signals of unsafety.

Here, the mind accelerates. Storylines form quickly about the other person; what they should understand, how they should change, or what needs to be managed to restore balance. Simultaneously, the brain and nervous system mobilize survival responses: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or collapse. What appears to be a conflict between two people is, more accurately, a collision between stress responses.

Inside one or both individuals, a quiet but powerful message begins to circulate: “Save us.” Not always as words, but as urgency, pressure, frustration, or withdrawal. While attention turns outward; toward fixing, convincing, rescuing, or being rescued, the reality is that stress has taken the wheel. And stress cannot repair stress. Each person can only regulate and restore their own nervous system.

This is the inflection point. The moment where we learn to pause instead of pursuing, step out of the immediate relational storyline, and acknowledge that “save us” is not a shared task in that moment; it is a temporary solo mission.

When that mission is taken seriously, something changes. We stop trying to save the relationship through control or collapse and begin restoring safety from the inside out. When we return, we do so differently; not as someone demanding repair, but as someone capable of presence. And this is where the direction of the finger we tend to point outward matters; in turning inward we face the solo “save us” mission and find relational safety restoring itself. That is truly worth sharing, either directly or indirectly as we shift back to safety and interdependence with another person.

The Mirror Tool: Reclaiming “Save Us” From the Inside Out

When distress shows up in a relationship, the nervous system doesn’t ask, “What’s the healthiest next step?”. It asks, “Where is safety supposed to come from right now?”

This is where the silent save us signal gets projected outward—toward a partner, child, colleague, system, or circumstance. A finger points. Urgency builds. The relationship becomes the stage where relief is expected to arrive.

The Mirror Tool is how we interrupt that reflex. Instead of following the finger outward, the Mirror Tool gently turns it back—away from blame, control, or withdrawal—and toward the stress response underneath. Not to judge it, but to understand it as misguided safety, doing its best with outdated information.

The Mirror Tool can be practiced in four simple, repeatable steps.

Step 1: Catch the “Save Us” Signal

The first step is not insight—it’s noticing. The save us signal often shows up as:

* >A spike in urgency

* >Repetitive thoughts about what the other person “should” do

* >A pull to explain yourself again

* >Withdrawal, shutdown, or emotional collapse

* >Fantasies of rescue, apology, or sudden understanding

Rather than asking whether the reaction is justified, ask instead: “Where do I feel the pressure for this situation to be fixed right now?”. That pressure is the signal. You don’t need to interpret it yet, just notice it.

Step 2: Name the Stress Response (Not the Story)

Next, pause the storyline about the other person and check in with the body.

Ask:

* Am I mobilized or frozen?

* Is my system leaning toward fight, flight, fawn, freeze, or collapse?

* What does my body believe is at risk right now?

This step matters because stress responses feel personal, but they are patterned. Naming them creates space. The moment you can say, “This is a stress response,” you are no longer fully inside it. This is not self‑blame, it is self‑location.

Step 3: Use the Mirror—What Is Being Reflected Back to Me?

Here is where the tool earns its name. Every relationship under stress acts as a mirror; not of who we are, but of what our nervous system hasn’t yet resolved.

Ask yourself:

* What am I hoping this person will make go away for me?

* What kind of safety am I trying to access through them?

* What does this reaction remind me of—not cognitively, but somatically?

The mirror is not saying, “You are wrong.” It is saying, “This is familiar.” The relationship is revealing something your system learned long ago about how relief arrives.

Step 4: Restore Safety Before You Re‑engage

This is the most important, and most skipped, step. Before returning to the relationship, the task is not communication. It is regulation.

Restoration might look like:

* >Slowing the breath

* >Grounding through movement or contact with the environment

* >Orienting to the present moment (“I am here, now, and not back then”)

* >Giving yourself language you didn’t have originally: “This feels urgent, but I’m not actually unsafe.”

Only after safety begins to return internally do you re‑enter the relationship. And when you do, your output changes. The nervous system no longer speaks in pressure or reactivity. It speaks in presence.

What Changes When You Practice the Mirror Tool

When the save us signal is met internally instead of projected outward blame softens, demands lose intensity, withdrawal becomes choice instead of collapse, and repair becomes possible without force. You stop trying to be saved by the relationship, and start becoming safer within it.

This doesn’t mean you never need others. It means the direction of responsibility is restored. The relationship becomes a place of connection, not extraction. And over time, something quiet but profound happens; the mirror no longer feels threatening, it becomes informative.

Coming Full Circle: Example of a Small Moment, Practiced Differently

A couple has been circling a conversation for weeks, one partner is very aware of it, the other is not. They both have been taken advantage of in the past and shared their histories, but one partner has a deeper history of trauma and is very attuned to when things start to feel “assumed okay” without a dialog or entry point that asks directly if they are. One evening it happens again, something is said without a lead in or asking, “can I talk about this at length with you right now”.

The familiar surge arrives. Inside, the thought forms quickly: They should know I am not their therapist for every issue that needs venting. Why don’t they know this topic is not okay for me right now? The pressure builds: words line up, ready to lie to get away from the conversation. But instead of speaking, something different happens.

The person notices the urgency in their chest. The tight jaw. The shortened breathing, the tension from overthinking. They recognize the familiar signal—not as truth, but as “save us.” The desire that the other somehow know and stop this. They pause.

Silently, they name what’s happening: This is a stress response. I want relief.They stop following the storyline about the other person and turn inward. What am I hoping they’ll fix for me right now? What does my body think is at risk?

There’s a moment of clarity; not cognitive, but bodily. This isn’t about tonight’s comment. It’s about feeling alone when something important doesn’t get noticed, when communication is one way and there is no voice of opposition there. That feeling is old.

Instead of pushing for repair, they slow their breath. They ground their feet. They remind themselves: I’m not actually unsafe. I can stay present. Only then do they look back at their partner. When they speak, the tone is different. No avoidant edge. No demand for space, no complaint. Just contact.

“I’m realizing I got really activated just now,” they say. “I need a minute before we talk about this, we moved into it too fast for me. I feel annoyed but I don’t want that to be about you, so I need some time”.

The moment doesn’t magically resolve everything. But something vital has shifted. The relationship is no longer being asked to save the person. Safety has begun to return from the inside out. And that changes everything that follows. Later on, the partner discusses that their own steadiness relies on a lot of decompression before engagement given may relationships; family, work, and partnership demand a presence that they feel more when they are alone, and they want to be the same version of themselves in relation and alone as much as they can. Sharing that opens up the partnership to how they can support these less tangible but equally important goals they each have.

Ending Note

As always, Holding Space Subscription truly wants to hold you here, not as a follower or a subscriber, but as a democratized and awake person gaining access to their healing journey. Please keep track of what is launching on YOU ARE NOT BROKEN UNIVERISTY MAIN SITE: Enter the Phases of Healing with The Toolbox Approach®. You will find the introductory book on The Narrative Healing Phase there and on AMAZON and the AUTHOR’S WEBSITE. A five-star rating really helps others find this self-help resource so please consider making one if it feels honest.

YOU ARE NOT BROKEN MAIN SITE: Enter the Phases of Healing with The Toolbox Approach

View the modules’ homebase Launching May 3rd!

VIEW JOINING COST This is intentionally less than therapy monthly so you can add tools! Democratize your journey and break free from fixing, become your best expert!

Brokenness as Invitation: Building a Living Toolbox

Before we begin this week’s work, I want to pause and name something important: Holding Space has never been about consuming content. It has been about building something over time—a structure that can hold your inner work and support a healing journey that unfolds in phases.

This space is designed as scaffolding. Not a set of answers, but a framework that helps you create your own toolbox. As you deepen your understanding of The Phases of Healing within The Toolbox Approach®, something subtle but powerful begins to happen: you start to recognize that this structure mirrors life itself.

Healing eventually becomes less about fixing isolated wounds and more about how you move through the world. Everything that lives requires repair, continuously, until it is eventually recycled into a new life cycle. From this lens, brokenness is not pathology or failure. It is an invitation.

An invitation to become more fully yourself.

The work we do here is about repairing the traumas that have speckled your life, whether they fall on a widely accepted list of “traumatic events,” or exist as quieter, more subjective wounds that still shape how you relate, protect, and survive. The toolbox exists for both. It helps you notice what has been carrying weight, and it offers practical, compassionate ways to repair what has been overextended, fragmented, or burdened by fear.

I often use the image of a chair. A chair with four legs can technically still function even if one leg is unstable. We can brace it temporarily. We can tolerate the wobble. But we feel it. It’s not truly functional in our lives. Over time, we adjust ourselves to accommodate the instability rather than repairing the chair.

We do the same with ourselves.

Healing asks us to slow down and notice what is wobbling. It requires special focus, understanding, and the careful unburdening of fear so that what has been holding us up can be repaired and reintegrated; restored not just to survival, but to purpose. This is how life begins to lead us again, rather than survival running the show.

In many ways, the work inside Holding Space is a form of higher education, one that is equally accessible and deeply human. There are no grades here. No benchmarks to perform for. Your greatest achievement is granting yourself the privilege to attend.

To learn brokenness. To learn healing. To learn repair and repatterning.

Through The Toolbox Approach®, this learning becomes less about self-improvement and more about self-leadership. It shows you how to lead something far greater than you may have imagined before: your own life.

This framework was shaped not only through clinical training, but through my own lived passage through trauma, dysfunction, profound loss, and the long work of neurological and nervous system healing; where no single modality was sufficient, and where an integrated, phased approach made healing possible.

If you’re here, you’re not behind. You’re not broken beyond repair. You’re learning how to repair with intention, and that is a skill you will carry for life.

Inside the Pause There Lies the Truth

The fundamental truth behind the value of mental health therapy, is that no matter what topic you end up addressing, no matter if the therapist is seasoned and specialized, and no matter how long or frequently you attend, its value lies in creating a pause in your life for reflection. In any “getting to the truth” space, whether it be therapy, journaling, a trial and jury of your peers, or confession, there lies the opportunity to stop and review the opposites that co-exist. If you tell all the admirable stories, write about only the good things, review all the upstanding behaviors of your citizenship, and confess minor infractions, there will be no truth, and it will not be a pause at all but an extension of the performance with the masks you wear in life.

Therapy, journaling, being investigated and tried in some way, or confession may facilitate a pause, but a pause, in its truest sense, will only bring you into a true healing and enriching place if you learn to cultivate it with the felt sense of “the truth”. Ultimately, this truth in its simplest form is your breath. That is why in the courses and the entire concept of the approach to healing I write about, I maintain and emphasis on it all be integrative of the brain/nervous system, the mind, and the body, and promote it as a bottom-up approach. This means the body has to stop to feel itself before analysis takes over, it has to cultivate a pause for a different kind of knowing to take over.

Experience this right now. Place a left hand on your forehead (to access the right brain processes that aids receptivity to non-analytical experience), and breath in only through your nostrils. Feel the air going in only there, at that unique entry point. On the exhale, lean your forehead into your hand and experience the back of the neck muscles letting go, as the left hand takes on the weight of your head. Be here. Take back the moment, reclaim time, arrive without agenda. The agenda-less mind is more truthful. It says, “I am here”, “I feel sensation without labels”, and “This is the change”. A manager in your mind will tell you to figure something else out, quiet this with your breath and return to, “I am here”. This really is the truth, but we go away from it, we go there. There is something we always have to get, but ask yourself, have you? Have you ever gotten there? When are you smiling the most? Yup, you guessed it, when you are present with your child, with the sun, with a taste, or a smell. The pause is the truth.

When you practice the truth of the pause more often, you will come to know that there are only three main core perceptions:

* Intuition - Always a warm all over knowing

* Fear - Always a sympathetic nervous system activation

* “Gut” Instinct - A trauma and stress response based on your experience (fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop). These are automatic responses from the autonomic nervous system.

We are pulled out of the pause by these three things. Many of us have stayed out of the pause for decades, or do it prescriptively, under duress because “I NEED TO BREATHE!”. This becomes the foundation of our lives, moving without pauses. When we do this, there is no self-leadership. Quite literally, we need to shift our foundation back to the pause in order to be aware of the concept of healing I promote here at Holding Space Subscription. The healing journey is not just a phase, it includes phases, however ultimately it becomes your life pattern, and you repattern doing into being.

You can transcend the analysis of your problems, although this will always have its value and is a human need; the need to explore logic and ordered story, but often we are using half our brain, underutilizing our Nuerosomatic Intelligence, if not denying it all together. When we suffer, no matter your traumas, it is in the suffering inputs from experience that we don’t know how to cultivate pauses for before a very layered mind takes over. The mind is not our intelligence for leading life, our mind, brain, nervous system, and body work together to lead. Like any good organization, transparency between the factions creates teamwork and partnership such that one leader (The Mind) is not needed and not the ingredient for success.

Intuition, Fear, and & Gut Instinct: Learn the Difference

When we slow down enough to cultivate a pause, something important becomes possible: discernment. Fear is fast, loud, and urgent. It pulls from unhealed memory, survival learning, and pattern recognition shaped by past threat. It lives primarily in the nervous system’s protective circuits and often demands immediate action or avoidance. Fear feels compelling, but not necessarily true. It is reactive, narrowing, and reinforces analysis-based problem‑seeking that keeps us looping rather than living.

Gut instinct, by contrast, is subtler and embodied. It arises from interoceptive intelligence; the body’s accumulated learning, yet it can still carry distortion if the nervous system is chronically dysregulated. Trauma can teach the gut to interpret neutrality as danger, urgency as safety, or intensity as connection. This is why many people mistake fear for intuition. Without a regulated nervous system, the signal can be accurate about sensation but inaccurate about meaning.

Intuition emerges when mind, body, brain, and nervous system are integrated and sufficiently settled. It is not loud or panicked; it is spacious, calm, and often surprisingly simple. Intuition does not argue for itself. It doesn’t rush. It feels like clarity without force, direction without demand. As we build Neurosomatic Intelligence and become more self‑led, we learn to trust this quieter signal. Not by bypassing fear, but by understanding it, so we can tell when protection is speaking, and when truth is finally allowed through. Intuition is warm knowing, and many of us mistake this. We say, “My intuition knew it was too good to be true, I should have listened to myself”, when in fact that was fear. Or we say, “My intuition sensed he was like my brother when he was hiding his addictions”, when that is gut oriented somatic trauma/distress memory.

Ending Note

As always, Holding Space Subscription truly wants to hold you here, not as a follower or a subscriber, but as a democratized and awake person gaining access to their healing journey. Please keep track of what is launching on YOU ARE NOT BROKEN UNIVERISTY MAIN SITE: Enter the Phases of Healing with The Toolbox Approach®. You will find the introductory book on The Narrative Healing Phase there and on AMAZON and the AUTHOR’S WEBSITE. A five-star rating really helps others find this self-help resource so please consider making one if it feels honest.

Here inside this subscription, I would love to be able to encourage your pause. Often the most important signal isn’t what we feel, but what we never pause long enough to feel. An absence of pauses is information. When we learn to notice it, we gain access to choice, clarity, and self‑leadership.

Here are body‑centered questions that gently orient people to somatic awareness rather than cognition or analysis. They’re designed to help you notice the absence of pause through sensation, rhythm, and nervous system cues, not judgment.

Body‑Centered Pause Questions

* Where do I feel movement, tightness, or urgency in my body right now?

* Is my breath shallow, held, or flowing—and do I feel choice around it?

* What part of my body isn’t being felt or included in this moment?

Nervous‑System Oriented Questions

* Does my body feel like it’s bracing, reaching, or settling?

* Am I acting from tension or from contact with the ground beneath me?

* If I slowed by 10%, what would my body want to do differently?

Discernment‑Building Questions (Fear vs. Intuition)

* Does this sensation feel urgent or clear?

* Is my body asking me to protect, prove, or simply pause?

* If I didn’t have to decide right now, what would shift in my body?

NOW THERE IS NOTHING LEFT TO DO BUT HEAL ON, SHARE THIS, SUBSCRIBE AND DIVE IN. WE ARE HOLDING SPACE, YOU ARE HERE AND WE ARE ALL HERE!

Sometimes relational disharmony doesn’t arrive as a misunderstanding to be repaired; it arrives like a punch in the face. Sometimes it’s dramatic only to an audience of one; you. The person on the other end; the partner, friend, sibling, parent, child, or boss would likely refuse that framing altogether, denying both the force and the impact. Perhaps, in some objective reality, the relational “punch” isn’t dramatic or cruel at all once we strip away subjectivity and story. And still, the moment of contact can be so jarring it steals your breath and scrambles your certainty. To you, it’s the kind of punch that leaves you standing there, stunned, realizing something just became unmistakably clear; you were in harm’s way and now you’ve been hit.

When we rush past that moment; when we speed toward explanation, storyline, or verbal repair to escape the discomfort, we miss a quieter approach. We skip the steps that lead to clarity WITHOUT conversation, where the only dialogue required is with your own nervous system. In these moments, talking isn’t soothing, processing feels premature, and repair may not be the point yet. The punch becomes a mirror: hard to look into, impossible to ignore. It reveals not only how you get hurt, but what you’ve been tolerating, what you’ve been explaining away, and what your nervous system has been signaling long before words could organize it.

The uncomfortable truth is often this: you’ve been moving in a way that leaves you vulnerable to harm. You can focus on the other person, or you can turn toward yourself. Most of the time, focusing on others leads to explanations that circle endlessly and burn us out. You cannot make someone understand themselves, and your outside view will never be precise enough to do it for them. At best, it creates a fleeting sense of connection; an apparent breakthrough that ultimately reinjures parts of us already shaped by fears of abandonment, neglect, and betrayal from long ago.

The Punch, The Mirror & The Truth

Recently, I placed myself in front of a punch I should have seen coming; one that has happened before, and from the very same person. What surprised me wasn’t the punch itself, but what followed. Something new confronted me, and I believe it has everything to do with my commitment to inner work, the Holding Space Subscription community, and the trust I’ve placed in The Toolbox Approach® and the Phases of Healing to organize thousands of healing journeys.

This time, my mind told a different story. Instead of, “You hurt me again,” it said, “I need to look at this injury and see it clearly.” I didn’t need mental chatter or a conversation with the other person. That clarity revealed something important about why we get hurt, and why we so often fail to learn our part in it.

It’s not about the moment you get punched. It’s about all the moments beforehand; the ones where we participated in repression, suppression, and dissociation from our actual experience in order to preserve a connection that wasn’t truly there. We do this constantly. It’s conditioned by our families, passed down generationally, reinforced by movies, TV shows, and even stand‑up comedy.

Humans make mistakes about the relationship they believe they’re in because of subconscious needs—to be rescued, helped, supported, accepted, held, cherished, or exclusively valued. I see this in myself. I see it every day in my therapy sessions.

Someone will say, “He’s become so depressed. I want us to share goals and motivate each other, but he’s so tired all the time. The other day he actually said, ‘leave me alone.’”They want a goal‑sharing relationship. But the punch; the “leave me alone”, is the actual relationship they’re in. And they can’t admit it.

How does this happen?

No one taught us how to identify our relational needs openly; through a steady practice of meeting them within ourselves, so that we can show others clearly how to meet us, and then assess whether they can learn, grow, or whether the relationship is simply a nosedive we must walk away from.

Most of us carry attachment injuries: anxious, avoidant, or vacillating between the two. We don’t spend enough time securely with ourselves to understand the needs emerging from those wounds. So we’re shocked when we think, “I’m so secure at work,” or “I have no problems with my closest friends—how is unfair that this relationship feels so unstable?”

Here’s the truth:

* The Punch is always stored in your nervous system, waiting to be felt.

* The Mirror is always the person or situation that reflects it back to you.

* The Truth is revealed only when you allow yourself to see it in a conversation of one; with yourself.

For me, loneliness stretches deep into my childhood. It grew out of boundary violations that I believed were proof of a brokenness I created. I learned that if I hid this part of myself, I could fit into a storyline my family benefited from—or so I thought.

What seeped into my relational style was over‑giving, self‑sacrifice, endlessly understanding other people’s narratives, and becoming a safe, non‑threatening presence. I hid my real experience from myself, and relating became an act of hiding inside helpfulness.

The cracks showed up in ways that looked treatable; an eating disorder, academic failure, near death accidents. I became so skilled at recognizing hidden pain that a survival skill turned into a boundaryless attunement to other people’s suffering. I carry that into relationships now. I want that sensitivity to be special. I want it to be valued. I want it to ensure I won’t be told, “You don’t belong here unless you change,” like I believed in my family of origin.

So sometimes I’m drawn to imbalance instead of balance. If there’s unhealed pain in a person, a relationship, a company, or a system, I feel pulled toward it. The mirror isn’t that someone “did this to me.” The mirror is my trauma imprint. Learning to take the punch; when it happens again, is where my clarity lives.

Do I unconsciously operate as a “pain seer” and want that to be my unique value? Yes. When I’m not grounded in safety, I get punched by disharmony far more often, especially outside of the therapist’s chair, when I’m trying to be attracted to unresolved wounds instead of secure connection.

The Truth arrived when I realized this:You got punched because you believed you only had one special value, and that situation didn’t see it, didn’t care, or rejected it.

However, the Truth is this, you must know your value through the punches.You get back up and train differently. You relate from your value, not for it.

Now, dear readers, this isn’t about me. You’re reading to learn about yourself.

We all want the formula that stops us from getting hurt by relational disharmony. Let’s break it down:

THE PUNCH

This pain has been with you for a long time. Get honest with yourself about the fear underneath:

* Abandonment

* Being silenced

* Neglect

* Betrayal

* Boundary violation

* Rejection

THE MIRROR

The punch means you did impact someone, and they acted on that truth.Don’t rationalize it away. Don’t defend yet.

Tell yourself:“They wanted to hurt me because I hurt them.”

Then brainstorm honestly:

* I was trying to be valued instead of listening to their values

* I was unnecessarily harsh

* I was vague and talked around my real feelings

THE TRUTH

I want this ___________________but instead I act like this ___________________and I need to ___________________

Mapping This to The Toolbox Approach® & The Phases of Healing

For those of you already familiar with The Toolbox Approach® and the Phases of Healing, you may recognize how this actually models the entire arc of the Toolbox Approach®. Here’s how they map cleanly.

PHASE 1: NARRATIVE HEALING

(Making meaning without self‑attack)

Where it appears in this reading:

* Naming The Punch before reacting to it

* Shifting the internal story from “You hurt me again” to “I need to see this injury clearly”

* Identifying long‑standing themes (loneliness, value, enoughness, belonging)

* Bringing conscious language to unconscious attachment needs

Toolbox Move Being Used:

Witnessing the story without collapsing into it. In Narrative Healing, the work is not to fix the injury, but to name the story precisely enough so that the nervous system can stop fighting reality.

Here we are:

* Differentiating event vs. pattern

* Locating the pain in time (“this pain has been here a long time”)

* Separating identity from injury (“this isn’t who I am, it’s what I learned”)

PHASE 2: REPROCESSING HEALING

(Working with the body, not just insight)

Where it appears in this reading:

* Naming repression, suppression, and dissociation explicitly

* Identifying trauma imprints and nervous‑system stored expectations

* Acknowledging attraction to imbalance, unfinished business, and wounded systems

* Allowing grief, loneliness, and shame to surface without bypass

Toolbox Move Being Used:

Letting the body complete what it couldn’t before.

Reprocessing Healing shows up when you:

* Recognize the punch was already in the body

* Stop arguing with the mirror

* Allow the truth to land without justification or defense

THE MIRROR aligns with Reprocessing Healing because you are reprocessing how something in you participated and moving beyond what happened from a triggered state. Additionally you are intentionally reprocessing the following:

* “This reaction makes sense given my history.”

* “I can tolerate seeing this without collapsing.”

This is where accountability without shame lives.

Reprocessing Healing Question Embedded in this: What did my nervous system learn long ago that is still running this moment?

PHASE 3: RELATIONAL HEALING

(Choosing differently, not perfectly)

Where it appears in this reading:

* “Relate from your value, not for it”

* Recognizing when attraction is driven by trauma imprint vs. safety

* Naming boundaries as clarity, not punishment

* Re‑training how value is expressed, not negotiated for

Toolbox Move Being Used:

Practicing truth in connection. Relational Healing is not about avoiding punches; it’s about no longer organizing your life around them.

THE TRUTH is the Relational Healing phase in action:

* Owning wants directly

* Aligning actions with needs

* Choosing relationships that meet you where you are

What we are working on in this phase and in this reading is relational re‑patterning.

Relational Healing Question: Who can meet me when I am honest—and who cannot?

Why This Matters (Clinically & Conceptually)

The “Punch, Mirror, Truth” mindset teaches something essential about The Toolbox Approach®:

Healing is not avoiding harm—it’s recognizing when harm no longer defines how we organize our worth.

We aren’t learning how to avoid punches through our healing work. You’re learning how to:

* Feel them sooner

* Understand them more honestly

* Stop building relationships around enduring them

The Wrap-Up

On your healing journey, it is important to prioritize the containment of the healing mindset. Things will throw you off course. Something will happen, and you will analyze it and all the ways it made things harder for you, and the narrative will be a lie. I know this is annoying, but what the mind says is broken, it’s half the information, it’s dysregulated feeling interpreted into fact.

* My mother was a narcissist because she kept using marriage to fix everything and couldn’t manage to pay attention to any of her kids, I have trust issues affecting me at work.

* My father left us and I had to start working young to help my mother, but no matter how much I earn now, I never learned to save, it’s like survival mode is still there, and I can’t believe my own money has my back because his absence and fear is always there.

* My siblings are all normal, we all had different mothers but the same father, and none of their mothers were as cold as mine. She hid it and I never learned to validate it and share with my sisters. Now, I can’t feel close to anyone.

All these people have one thing in common, they are talking like this is 100% true in their lives now. That’s the lie. There is survival mode you, triggered you, wounded attachment you, and then there is the lost self underneath. The punch, is violent in many ways, and no one speaks about this but healing can be too. The anger that comes up when you realize you haven’t lived as yourself entirely, it’s hard. Facing that much of your personality may have been a trauma response, a way of protecting from the relational pain of the past comes from taking a lot of punches DIFFERENTLY THAN BEFORE!

Sometimes, there are no such things as red flags, and there are just flags. The flags say, danger or threat is ahead. In relationships, your history is what turns these flags red, not the other person. Take that in. I have what could be defined as narcissists in my life and blocked from my life, but at the end of the day, letting them in too close, understanding them too deeply, has a lot to do with MY HISTORY, and when the punch came, I wasn’t in dodging distance to see the person is unhealed and not build for connection of the deep, safe, and authentic kind. It’s a relief when you know, it all starts with your healing, people become safer over time because you know the distance or closeness you need, not because you see them, but because you see yourself!

REMINDER THREE-DAY THERAPY INTENSIVES START THIS SUMMER

FIND OUT MORE

Before we dig in, I want to remind us all what this space is, gently, easily, and clearly. So, hello dear readers, here we are again on a healing journey in our individual lives, as we also, all of us, come together inside Holding Space Subscription to democratize our access to tools and trauma informed methods of looking at life for the deeper, subconscious and unconscious healing that is needed. You just can’t talk this stuff out in therapy. I am a therapist, but even I would never proclaim that I am the ideal listener where magically you say, “here is what happened”, and become healed. I never found one that did that for me either. My experience, needing healing I couldn’t find in a therapy setting, is how I birthed the organized healing journey concept. The readers here know it, we get it, we need The Toolbox Approach® and the Phases of Healing so our own toolboxes can build from that scaffolding.

You’ve seen the painters and the workmen out there, up on the scaffolding doing their work. That structure is built for them to do the work, and it is built days and sometimes weeks before the workmen arrive to begin the project. Just like this common practice, The Toolbox Approach® and the Phases of Healing, are here as your scaffolding. You’ve heard of my vision as well, that we are building the warehouse for Your Are Not Broken University, what was launched in the introductory book, as we place content here, so you can think of yourself as going into higher education as a student of your own life when you come here as well. The therapy intensives will begin soon for those of you interested, and if you need solid ground underneath you for sticking to a healing journey consistently, the approach is in those 3-day Intensives as your trailhead.

The Phases Coexist

All of the Phases of Healing: Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing, coexist. They are always present and naturally occurring, but without guidance they often activate in a disorganized way. When this happens, we move through life reacting rather than learning: triggering old patterns without understanding them, labeling success or achievement as proof that we’ve “moved on,” and choosing what’s in front of us based on repetition rather than growth. Many people only recognize the beauty of the path at the very end. In reality, we are all on it. Painfully, many of us create more experiences to heal from before the lessons begin to land.

Organization matters because it creates safety on a somatic, body-based level. This is not obsessive or perfectionistic organization. It doesn’t demand control or elite performance. It is gentle, functional, and clear; just enough structure to allow your nervous system to settle so learning can actually occur. Let’s look at how this shows up across the Phases.

Narrative Healing

In Narrative Healing, we examine the stories we’ve told ourselves—often half-truths shaped by how something felt rather than what actually occurred or who anyone truly is.

Example:“I was manipulated and now it’s hard to trust”versus“I am trustworthy, and manipulation exists in human behavior on a spectrum from mild to severe.”

The first statement isn’t wrong, but it anchors you to what happened, keeping you hyper-focused on monitoring trust so the story never evolves. The second centers your capacity and introduces discernment. It creates a boundary between who you are and what may harm you, allowing life’s manageable risks to coexist while containing the most severe dangers. This shift opens the door to movement rather than vigilance.

Reprocessing Healing

In Reprocessing Healing, fragmented memories charged with emotional meaning are softened and integrated. Experiences move from sharp, isolated moments into a fuller, calmer internal “slideshow,” allowing us to see more of the picture.

Example:A lifelong sense of abandonment by a workaholic father becomes a clearer memory: missing a goal at a game, walking home alone, and thinking, “If I were the best on the team, he would show up.” With reprocessing, the person realizes their father never said they weren’t good enough; the belief was created by how those moments were emotionally paired. The meaning shifts, and the nervous system no longer needs to hold the pain in fragments.

Relational Healing

In Relational Healing, Self-energy returns. You become more invested in the kind of guide you are for your own life. Compassion grows; for your inner world, for the stories you once needed, and for the egoic parts that protected you. Your personality is no longer mistaken for your entirety.

Relationships become welcome mirrors rather than threats. Emotional triggers shift into classrooms; places you’re willing to learn from rather than defend against. Safety reorients internally, reducing the need for rigid defenses.

Example:The challenger personality; proudly self-sufficient, emotionally guarded, unconcerned with others’ input, recognizes that this identity was a survival strategy. Through reflection and therapeutic support, they see how shutting others out shaped their relationships. Over time, they choose connection intentionally and become a more grounded leader at home and at work.

Healing isn’t about completing a phase and moving on forever, it’s about learning how to move among them with awareness and choice. When we bring gentle organization to our healing, we create enough safety for wisdom to emerge. Not all at once. Not perfectly. But steadily, skillfully, and in a way that allows life to keep happening without becoming another wound.

Diving In

Getting the Ick as a Healing

Now that you’ve had your recap, let’s talk about the strangely modern phrase, “Getting the ick”, as it reflects on a very ancient experience that can inform us more towards growth, healing patterns of brokenness, and activate transformation.

It’s usually described as that sudden, almost immediate shutdown that happens when you’re getting to know someone, know them for years already, or sometimes have just met (often in dating), when they do something. Something small, something subtle, something you may not even be able to fully articulate. And suddenly your body says: no. This is not a thoughtful, reflective no. It is not a no done by list-making and considering. It’s a center‑of‑your‑body, retreat now no.

Culturally, “the ick” is often treated as silly, shallow, or even mean; something to laugh about on social media. But in healing spaces, especially trauma‑informed ones, I want to offer a very different reframe:

Getting the ick may not be rejection, it may be a defense against dysregulation, and therefore it may be an automatically activated regulation tool.

And when understood correctly, it can become one of your most important relational teachers.

The Body Speaks Long Before the Mind Explains

From a somatic perspective, what we’re calling “the ick” is a fast, embodied signal. It’s not coming from logic or narrative; it’s coming from the nervous system.

Your body is constantly scanning:

* Is this safe?

* Is this familiar?

* Does this resemble past harm?

* Does this signal misattunement, unpredictability, or emotional incongruence?

For many people on a healing journey, especially those recovering from trauma, grief, betrayal, or relational loss, this system has been overridden in the past. We learned to stay when our bodies said go. We learned to explain away discomfort. We learned to mistrust our instincts in order to preserve attachment.

So when the body finally says “no” quickly, it can feel abrupt, confusing, or even shameful. But that speed matters.

The speed of the “ick” is often a sign that your nervous system no longer needs to scream to be heard.

Where the “Ick” Fits in the Phases of Healing

For those of you familiar with The Toolbox Approach®, you already know that healing happens in phases; not because healing is linear, but because our systems need structure to build capacity.

Think of the Phases of Healing as a trail map, not a single path.

Every trailhead has the full map available. Even when you’re starting deep in one phase, the others are still present; informing, shaping, and supporting your movement.

Many people re‑enter the dating or relating world during or after Relational Healing, once they’ve:

* Released the narrative that they are broken

* Reprocessed what happened to them

* Built internal safety and regulation

Relating then becomes practice, not proof. And this is where the “ick” often shows up. Not as failure. Not as avoidance. But as information.

A Story From the Trail

When I returned to dating after loss and deep personal healing, I remember being surprised not by who I was attracted to, but by how quickly my body reacted to certain moments. Sometimes it wasn’t big. It wasn’t overt. It wasn’t harmful. It was a tone. A dismissive comment masked as humor. A subtle lack of curiosity. A moment where emotional presence disappeared.

And my body said: this feels familiar in a way that once cost me.

That was new. In the past, I might have leaned in harder. Explained it away. Intellectualized it. But now, something else had developed: capacity.

The capacity to pause. The capacity to listen inward. The capacity to leave without making the other person wrong, or myself overly accommodating. That wasn’t avoidance. That was healing in motion.

In an effort to bring this work into therapy sessions, I began to notice how eager people were to build capacity, and how much they needed concrete examples of what that actually looks like in real life. Here are a few:

* When someone walks you to your car after a first date and you sense an unspoken expectation for a kiss, you gently place a hand on their shoulder, diagonally across the space between you, and thank them for the good conversation.

* When your mother checks in to see if you’re okay but has never played with your kids or offered childcare, and you typically roll your eyes and avoid responding, you instead call her and say: “We’re doing okay, but we’re often stretched thin with childcare. We don’t have family support the way some of our neighbors do.”

* When a coworker assumes you always have it together and lets things fall through without acknowledgment (someone you used to avoid) you now send a clear, neutral email: “This task is still waiting for follow‑through. Please complete it.” You then follow up face to face to confirm they received the message.

When the “Ick” Is a Boundary, Not a Wall

One of the most important distinctions I want you to hold is this:

A regulated “no” feels very different from a trauma‑driven shutdown.

A regulated “ick”:

* Comes with clarity, not panic

* Doesn’t require justification

* Doesn’t demonize the other person

* Leaves you feeling intact, not collapsed

A trauma‑driven response often comes with:

* Intense fear or urgency

* Shame or self‑criticism afterward

* A sense of danger rather than mismatch

* Emotional flooding or numbing

Learning the difference is part of relational healing. Sometimes the “ick” is saying: This person isn’t unsafe, they’re just not aligned. That matters. Healing doesn’t mean you become endlessly tolerant. It means you become accurately discerning.

Why This Matters After Trauma or Loss

After trauma, grief, betrayal, divorce, or a heartbreaking ending, many people fear their instincts.

What if I’m too sensitive now?What if I’m overreacting?What if I miss out because I leave too quickly?

Here’s the mindset shift:

Healing doesn’t make you brittle. It makes you precise.

Initially, the healing nervous system that once stayed too long and wouldn’t address the “ick”, often swings toward immediate addressing and earlier exits; not because it’s broken, but because it’s learning.

Over time, with awareness:

* The exits become calmer

* The discernment becomes clearer

* The fear fades and choice strengthens

The goal isn’t to never get the ick. The goal is to understand what it’s pointing to.

Gentle Questions When the “Ick” Shows Up

Instead of shaming or dismissing yourself, try asking:

* What did my body notice before my mind reacted?

* Does this resemble something I’ve already healed from; or something I’m still learning to trust?

* Is this discomfort about misalignment, or about vulnerability?

* Do I feel more regulated stepping away; or more dysregulated staying?

You don’t need to answer these immediately. Relational healing happens in reflection, not in force.

The Paradox: Safety Allows Choice

One of the surprises of healing is that greater safety often leads to more no’s before deeper yes’s. That’s not cynicism. That’s discernment. You are no longer relating from a place of trying to be chosen, or to avoid discomfort. You’re relating from a place of mutual regulation, curiosity, and capacity.

Getting the “ick” may simply be your system saying:

I don’t have to abandon myself to belong anymore.

And that is not a failure of connection. That is success.

Closing Thought

The “ick” isn’t the enemy. It’s not proof that you’re avoidant, broken, or incapable of love and connection. It may be proof that something important has changed. Your body remembers what either an avoidant or reactive life cost you. Your healing can give it a voice that now you get to listen to with compassion, curiosity, and choice.

And that’s how relational healing continues, one honest signal at a time.

STAY TUNED

Holding Space Integrative Therapies, through ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always LLC, is ready to launch our Three-Day Therapy Intensives this May, 2026. You can find us here at the author’s website for “You Are Not Broken”, and scroll down to our practice. Please also welcome our new holistic and medication provider Sifat Ameen, PMHNP whom you can see outside of the therapy intensive services. There you can learn about the intensives and find the article for establishing your discovery and tailoring process. That process is free until you are ready to commit.

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

There comes a moment in every healing journey when the work we’ve held so quietly and so privately must step outside of us, must take shape “out there” in the world as part of who we are becoming. Not as a plea for approval, though that confusion can arise if we aren’t grounded, but as a natural evolution of integration. This is the phase within The Toolbox Approach® and the Phases of Healing when relational healing emerges from the deep work of reshaping our narratives and reprocessing the fragmented memories that shaped them, allowing what was once internal to finally be carried with coherence, integrity, and visibility.

“Follow” You!

When I started out as a content creator, I had no idea that’s what I was becoming. Holding Space was something I organically did for many years as a therapist, but between sessions I always believed people needed the tools to hold inner work time on their own as well. Therapy for years is nobody’s intention; yet it happens, and it’s common, and it’s not ineffective at all. The tragedy is when you never come to see yourself as the organizer of your own healing, when you continue to believe you have “problems” that either need fixing or can only be held by a therapist.

My goal was to create an approach people could follow at any point, so they could know where they were in their healing, how to return to earlier phases when old pain resurfaced, and how to recognize deeper pockets of unprocessed content ready for exploration. As a subscription space for readers, this platform has become a podcast, a video channel, a business, and an entry point for courses, intensive therapy options, and other self-help publications. Even a few annual events have grown from it. The goal was never to be liked or followed, but to help others follow that call inside themselves to heal. That’s where we are today. I had to make a decision to be “followable” and visible so you could follow yourself into a healing journey.

You’ll notice above that I’m taking a playful approach to our topic today by filming the video portion as an animation. I used my own face in earlier posts and in the launch of the first book introducing The Toolbox Approach®. Reluctant to move into algorithm-based posting, I learned something important about listening to your gut and bracing for impact. Today, I needed a break from the way it made me feel when some of the comments were appearance-based—seen but not heard.

What I’m learning, though, is that I’ve been following something for the past 25 years; something that whispered to me when I returned boxes of cereal for gas money just to get five miles closer to my licensure exam and walked the rest of the way. Something that stayed alive even when I was sexually assaulted for saying no to a male interviewee and silently kept my job. Healing isn’t about never getting hurt again. It’s about tracking the pain for the message, then getting underneath it, lifting it up, and letting it go.

“Let it go” isn’t about a person or a situation, it’s about the pain. The pain stored in the stories we tell ourselves. Stories like “no one cares how I feel.”

That storyline can’t be proven except through our own subjective experience, and often, you will feel alone there. Alone in your mind telling a story, well the only listener is you; we need to wake up and follow ourselves better. A post or a content creator, therapist, or some other guide can seem to understand our plight, but the understanding is our own, we must follow our deeper selves and learn the tools and phases of healing. Understanding from the outside of ourselves'; from a friend, parent, partner, or sibling is possible, of course it is, but it is fleeting and not guaranteed to hold all the space you need for a healing journey. And you need to follow something deep inside yourself far more than you need to follow your own thoughts about being either understood or misunderstood.

Sometimes A Lifetime of Work Gets Reduced to ‘Pretty’

For more than twenty‑five years, The Toolbox Approach® lived in the quiet places; those unseen rooms where healing actually happens. It grew in the corners of therapy offices and in the soft, unspoken spaces inside me. It was shaped by every person I sat with and every part of myself I learned to meet. I protected it fiercely. Not out of secrecy, but out of reverence. Healing, I always believed, doesn’t need a spotlight; it needs safety.

So, when authorship entered the picture and my work began moving into the public sphere, I found myself at an unexpected threshold asking myself this question:

Was I really going to put my face on this? A face that had done its healing mostly in private. A face that carried the story, but had never been asked to sell it?

The messages were clear: your face will help this reach people. I resisted. For two decades, The Toolbox Approach® had been voice before visage. Message before marketing. Depth before performance. And yet, something in me knew that if I truly believed in this work, if I truly believed in the phases of healing I teach, then perhaps my own visibility was its final exam.

So, I made a compromise with myself: My face will appear minimally; only where subscribers choose to go deeper, only in the videos behind a paywall, only in the author bio. Not everywhere. Not broadcasted. Just enough to say, yes, this is mine. Yes, I stand behind it.

But the moment I stepped into the algorithm’s current, everything shifted.

The first wave of comments came fast and completely uninvited: “So pretty.” “What’s your number?”. “Hot!”

Not What is The Toolbox Approach?Not This resonates.Not Thank you for doing this work.

Just a digital chorus of men responding to my appearance, not my contribution.

Shame flushed in first; harsh, sharp, and completely unexpected. Then came the rage; steady and grounded, but with nowhere to land. Because this is a reality so many women have known for generations, and now men and non‑binary people are encountering it too; this experience of being mis‑seen, flattened, or reduced through the lens of platforms that dictate our visibility. In a world where multiple posting systems own the algorithms that determine our reach, all of us are learning, often painfully, what it means when we are seen but not heard:

We can build for decades, we can excavate our souls, we can shape a healing framework or a work product, we can start a business meant to honor something and still be met by the reductive gaze that flattens us into a surface.

And the worst part? I couldn’t pretend I didn’t see it coming. My own trauma history has to do with being seen as a target before I knew how to say no, before I knew the audience I was dealing with. I knew what happens to women who publicly share their work. I knew the internet treats a woman’s face as a commodity before it recognizes her craft. But knowing didn’t protect me from feeling its sting. It didn’t protect me from the internal conflict of:

How do I stay visible enough to help people heal, but not so visible that I become the thing being consumed?

This article is the beginning of answering that question for all of us, what is our visibility, what is it for, how can we reclaim it? What is the value of being seen and is it really about being heard more than anything, despite the power of the algorithm.

PLEASE HEAD OVER TO ALL POETRY FOR A GLIMPSE AT HOW I PROCCESSED THIS

Start with the End

So, the remainder of this article is the beginning of answering a question many of us eventually face: What is our visibility really for? How do we reclaim it? What is the value of being seen, and is it actually about being heard more than anything else, even in a world shaped by algorithms?

Visibility was never the goal. Vision was.

The vision I held; long before authorship, platforms, or reach, was about brokenness. Mine, and all of ours. I saw brokenness not as a failure, but as an invitation. If we could understand fragmentation this way, we might stop believing we made a mistake by becoming temporarily broken, even when the fragments convince us otherwise. Fragmentation is not what destroys us; it is often what builds us. It shows us where life asked something of us that we did not yet have the language, safety, or support to meet.

Despite your religion, you know the concept of some forms of prayer ending with Amen. I imagined beginning healing the way a prayer ends, with Amen. Putting the confirmation at the beginning, as essentially, “so be it”, right at the beginning of our healing journey means we accept the starting place and that this is the greatest vision we can have right now. When I began, I wasn’t begging for brokenness to disappear so I could create a following public and build content, I had a vision of blessing it, thanking it for being there. It did feel like a somewhat other worldly choice coming from someplace deeper, as I used the tools to see the fragments of my life without the need for the old story piecing things together. I said, “so be it, this is what is there”. With acknowledgment. With meaning. That was the beginning of something, a long letting go of fixing.

That is what I mean by start with the end. Like a phone call that ends with “I love you,” or “goodbye,” or “see you later.” Those endings matter because they carry intention. They orient us. They seem subtle but they are profound, and what if we put them at the beginning? What if we began our healing that way? Start by naming what we are ready to say goodbye to. Start by honoring what we still love. Start by trusting that we will see everything later than we intend to—and that this, too, is okay.

This is where I locate vision over visibility. Reclaiming being seen does not begin with the world’s gaze; it begins with our own. With the willingness to see ourselves clearly, compassionately, and honestly. Visibility without vision is exposure. Vision without intentional visibility, can lead to unfinished integration, but the visibility journey, I am learning cannot take away from our vision, even when it seems like it does. The work of healing asks us to hold both, but in the right order, and with patience.

We start with the end because the end tells us what matters:

* Good Bye

* I love

* I will see later (than intended)

How “Start With the End” Maps to the Phases of Healing

The Phases of Healing below are familiar to you by now. Here’s how they work with “Start with the End”:

Narrative HealingThis section reframes the narrative of “brokenness” from failure into meaning. I didn’t make a mistake putting my face out there for the algorithms-based exposure, I am learning visibility, a necessary stage after vision has brought you far. By blessing fragmentation rather than resisting it, you are actively reshaping the core story: I did not make a mistake by —————— (fill in the blank). This is narrative repair, changing the storyline that once equated visibility with danger and mistakes or brokenness with shame.

Reprocessing Healing“Starting with the end” mirrors reprocessing by allowing unfinished emotional material—goodbyes, grief, resentment, longing—to be named rather than avoided. The metaphor of beginning with closure (Amen, goodbye, I love you) supports the integration of emotional fragments that were once overwhelming or un-held and avoided. Reprocessing my past memories of “pretty”, where saying no and having choices were absent, showed me that those things were in the past and not my present. I could say goodbye and love that I have this opportunity before me to take my time with.

Relational HealingChoosing vision over visibility marks the shift from being seen by others to being seen by oneself. This phase is not about exposure, but about coherent presence, carrying one’s internal truth into the world without collapsing into external gaze. Visibility becomes relational when it emerges from self‑attunement rather than performance.

An Exercise: The Ambulance is Not for You

At times in life, the threats we detect seem so personal to our own life story, it is hard to avoid becoming triggered emotionally to fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. We yell back, avoid conflict, deflect, shutdown, over function, or become overly helpful and boundaryless in our efforts. These reactions are hard-wired into our survival response system, but they are meant for surviving moments of threats, not longer than minutes in fact. When we become stuck in them, they start to become our conditioned responses and before that even, the threat detector in all of us is highly subjective.

For example, if an ambulance is coming, and we hear a siren coming closer, most of us would recognize, “I am not bleeding or injured, that’s not for me”. However, often times in relationships at work, with family, romantically, and in friendships, the ambulance siren is immediately perceived as “for me”, and we lose the ability to discern things so clearly with our senses as with an actual ambulance coming.

In this exercise, we are challenging ourselves to bear witness to this in our own lives. How many times this month, this week or this past year have you perceived a relational threat as all about you? For me, the comments about my appearance all seemed like threats that were about discounting my 25 years of work developing The Toolbox Approach®. In a pause, I had to begin reminding myself about my vision to visibility trajectory, one I knew was coming, as neither good nor bad. It was all me needing to start with “Amen” and “so be it”, and a new beginning of another round in The Phases of Healing. The ambulance was not for me, the threat was in my interpretation, and I have choices.

The exercise and conclusion of today’s subject ask you, “What ambulances have come for you this week? Can you reprocess it with Goodbye, I love, I will see later? Can you vision over asking another person to give you visibility?

Bringing It All Together: Why Consider a Three‑Day Healing Intensive

When patterns shape our lives for years, it’s hard to know where to begin. Healing can feel abstract or endless. But when the work is organized into clear phases, you can finally see where you are, why you’re there, and what tools actually belong to that stage. The Three-Day Healing Intensive offers exactly that: clarity, containment, and a structured path forward.

Across three days, you move through Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing with focused guidance and support.

The intensive doesn’t replace long-term healing; it simply shows your nervous system that inner work is possible and within your capacity. It accelerates understanding, restores direction, and removes the guesswork that often leads to self-blame or overwhelm.

You receive:

* 2.5 hours of coursework daily to understand your patterns and the phases

* 1.5 hours of therapy daily to apply tools to your personal story

* 1 hour of coaching daily to integrate changes into relationships, work, health, and daily life

* Optional half‑day group session for reflection and shared insight

This structure helps you make sense of your healing. You don’t leave “fixed”—you leave informed, grounded, and empowered, with tools that feel usable and truly your own. Most of all, you leave knowing that healing isn’t something to chase or perfect; it’s something you’re allowed to organize, inhabit, and grow into.

This is the heart of The Toolbox Approach® and the purpose of the Three-Day Healing Intensive.

Arrange your discovery call here. If you prefer a different way to connect or need accommodations, reach out and share what you need. The discovery call and all the set-up required to tailor your intensive is free until you are ready to commit to the out-of-pocket fee that matches the market value of 7.5 months of therapy as equal to the power of a 3-day intensive.

LASTLY, DON’T FORGET THE FREE RESOURCES ON THE ENTER THE PHASES OF HEALING WEBSITE!

A Story of a Man

Recently, someone came to me privately after doing couples work with his partner. He was struggling with a depression that felt heavier than anything he had faced before, and he carried symptoms that resembled trauma; enough that it showed up in the ways his mind and body reacted to stress. Yet despite this weight, he was pushing himself to finish a book on meditation that had once felt like his life’s purpose.

Years earlier, a powerful meditation experience had cracked something open in him. It felt like a peak moment and an awakening he believed would change everything. He imagined it would heal his exhaustion from years of over-functioning, ease his emotional burden as the family “steady one,” and finally lift the fog of sadness he carried.

But instead of transforming him, the insight faded. The moment passed. The clarity didn’t hold. And now, as he tries to write about that early awakening, he feels like he is documenting the ghost of something that never became real. He said it felt like writing a letter to a version of himself he can no longer access; a meditation mindset he misses like a lost relationship.

He didn’t want to write that book, but he was attempting to regardless. In his heart, he wanted a different story, he wanted to write the version where the eye‑opening experience changed his life forever. Instead, he was writing about the journey that didn’t complete itself; about non‑transformation.

During one session, we took a mindful approach, like two Tibetan monks, who often use water to understand life. We wondered together whether water questions the places it flows, or whether it simply bends, shifts, and continues in the direction life shapes for it. When water fills a glass, does it feel trapped and helpless, or is it still assured it is the same water it always was? If water is transformed into vapor after its flow is cut off by the end of our morning shower, is it mad about clinging to the mirrors in a haze, or accepting it’s still just as clear as it always was?

I paused at one point to put it directly in between us, with clarity:

"Water doesn’t resist what happens, why should we? I think nature is there to hold our attention and speak the truth. Mother Nature is the one true mother for all of us, it’s not hard to listen, but it is hard to stop your mind so you can.”

We explored whether he was resisting transformation itself; wanting the “moment” to be enough instead of accepting that becoming a different person, writing a real story and not just a researched concept, requires capacity, time, and involvement long after the awakening fades.

Which brings us to you, the reader.

What if the unfinished book, or the unfinished things we haven’t been successful at, are not a failure but part of transformation? What if the discomfort of not completing the story the way we imagined is itself the next step of it?

As you move into this article, consider whether you, too, have struggled with the part of transformation no one talks about; the part where the insight was real, but living it out feels impossible. And whether accepting that gap, instead of fighting it, is actually where transformation begins.

Can We Accept Transformation?

We’re a culture hungry for the moment: the instant when clarity hits and everything changes. We fantasize about waking up one morning and declaring:

* I’m done with depression.

* I’m done being lonely.

* I’m done carrying this weight (in my body, in my heart).

* I’m done with the same relational pattern.

* I’m done numbing with alcohol, scrolling, or work.

* I’m finally going to heal from this trauma.

And sometimes, there really is a moment, an eye-opening realization, a rock-bottom, a startling experience of truth. The fog parts. We can see our life on the other side of the canyon.

But here is the part we rarely name:

A peak moment is not transformation.It’s an opening. Transformation is what we do next, especially after the feeling fades.

Insight lights the path; capacity carries us down it.

Anecdote: Robots in Disguise

When I was a kid, we had Transformers; those blocky little robots that folded and clicked into cars, jets, or creatures. Their tagline was “Robots in disguise,” and the magic was in how effortlessly they shifted forms. You twisted a leg, rotated an arm, flipped a panel, and suddenly the robot wasn’t a robot anymore. It was thrilling, clean, and instant. A cool trick.

Back then, that simplicity sent a message I didn’t realize I absorbed: transformation should be easy. You should just click into the next version of yourself. No discomfort. No mess. No grief. Just a new shape.

But what those toys taught us; without meaning to, is that the difference we still confuse as adults is that between transforming versus transformation. Transforming is the moment. It’s visible, sharp, and brief. A change of form. A shift of parts. The thing everyone notices. But transformation is something else entirely. Transformation is internal, slow, uncomfortable, sometimes agonizing, and often invisible. It asks you to sit in uncertainty, to unlearn protections, to grow emotional muscles you’ve never used. It asks you to hold yourself together while something deeper reorganizes inside you.

The problem is that most of us are chasing the Transformers version. We want to twist a few emotional appendages and hear the satisfying “click” that tells us the change is complete. We want the moment, the cool trick, and not the process.

But transformation, the real kind, is not a trick. It’s a capacity. It asks something of us that the toy never did:

* Can you tolerate the in‑between?

* Can you live inside the process that isn’t quick or clean?

The point isn’t whether we want transformation. It’s whether we can accept it; accept that it won’t feel like the quick shift we grew up believing in. Accept that the difference between transforming and transformation is the difference between a moment and becoming someone capable of holding that moment long after it passes.

Accepting that difference is where the real journey begins.

The Myth of the Moment

We’ve been sold a comforting illusion that clarity is enough to change us. We’ve been sold the story that understanding drives change. That a single moment, a single realization, a single shattering epiphany will finally reroute the entire architecture of our lives.

We’re told things like:

* “Once I understand it, I’ll stop doing it.”

* “If I’m motivated enough, it will stick.”

* “When I hit rock bottom, that’ll be the turning point.”

* “If I hit my breaking point, I will never go back.”

* “If I just get this, I will do it.”

But this is the myth; the part of the mind that longs to be rescued by a moment.The romantic part. The inner child who still hopes for a main‑character turning point, a single night where everything makes sense and everything changes.

Understanding is not useless. Insight: the inward seeing that reveals how you’ve acted, interpreted, or felt, absolutely matters. Insight updates the internal navigation system. It revises old codes. It prepares the ground.

But insight isn’t what moves behavior. The body does. Your body: in relational safety with yourself and others, with capacity built slowly through micro‑changes practiced over time. Moments can open the door, yes. But they cannot walk you through it.

Change is not born in a flash of inspiration. It is born in the long, quiet rewiring that follows, and in the tiny, repeated acts of staying, trying again, repairing what breaks, and choosing differently even when your nervous system begs you to choose the familiar. Moments can wake us. But only time, support, and gentle repetition keep us awake.

The real story isn’t harder, only longer. It just isn’t the myth that sells easily, because it doesn’t promise brevity or instant transformation. It promises something far better: a change that actually lasts. The truth: insight is often powered by activation'; a surge of emotion and energy. And activation is temporary.

When the nervous system returns to baseline after activation, the “life‑changing moment” isn’t actually life‑changing unless it is followed by tiny moments of staying with new micro‑behaviors. Otherwise, the old grooves of the brain’s pathways will call us back. The brain is quite literally more activated by familiar patterns than unfamiliar ones; insight may light up a new pathway, but it can only stay lit (and eventually become as selectable as the familiar ones) through repetition. Through staying. Through trying again. Through repeating the new choice until the body begins to trust it.

Otherwise:

* the depressive pull resurfaces

* the familiar relationship dynamic knocks

* the craving whispers

* the evening isolation returns

* the trauma symptoms hum underneath

We misread this as weakness or failure. It’s not. It’s biology and learning. Our nervous system is patterned to keep us safe using what it already knows, even if what it knows is painful.

Transformation Requires Capacity (Not Just Clarity)

Capacity is the unglamorous engine of real change. It is the difference between a life interrupted by epiphanies and a life steadily rebuilt from the inside out.

Capacity looks like:

* Feeling more without collapsing.

* Facing discomfort without shutting down.

* Soothing your system when it spikes or sinks.

* Staying with the new behavior after the high of insight is gone.

* Holding the identity you’re becoming, not just visiting it.

Insight gives you the map. Capacity builds the road, one brick at a time.

The Eye-Opening Isn’t the Arrival—It’s the Invitation

A moment of clarity asks a quiet, brave question: “Will you rebuild yourself?”

Rebuilding asks for more than motivation:

* commitment over intensity

* embodiment over intellectualization

* practice over perfection

* patience over punishment

* self-compassion over self-critique

* a regulated nervous system over forced willpower

It isn’t that you can’t change. The challenge is that no one can live in a new story with an old nervous system, we must accept transformation as a concept and then move into it knowing it is a commitment, a practice, and nothing to do with willpower.

A Trauma‑Informed View: Capacity Is Nervous System Work

When we talk about “building capacity,” we’re talking about the brain‑body system that learned how to survive your life. If your history includes chronic stress, neglect, abandonment, betrayal, chaos, or trauma, your nervous system likely adapted through one of the patterns listed below.

These patterns form when you spend too much time outside your Window of Tolerance (WOT); the zone where you can feel stress without being overwhelmed. Staying outside that window for too long teaches the nervous system, “This is how I survive when I’m overwhelmed,” rather than, “I can move back inside my window… and eventually expand it gently and safely through small doses of stress or distress.”

The patterns below are expressions of the Polyvagal Nerve; the information superhighway running through your entire system. It can feel like a ladder you rarely get to climb all the way up. But the top of that ladder, the ventral state, is where we feel safe, connected, grounded, and able to engage with life.

The states below happen to all of us. Sometimes, though, they become patterns:

* Hyperarousal (Sympathetic): urgency, anxiety, irritability, perfectionism, control.

* Hypoarousal (Dorsal): shutdown, heaviness, numbness, sadness, disconnection.

* Cycling between both: fight/flight → collapse → fight/flight → collapse.

These are not character flaws. They are survival strategies your body learned when it had no other choice.

What capacity-building actually means (physiologically)

* Increasing vagal tone: better ability to come back from stress.

* Widening your window of tolerance: more room for feeling before overwhelm.

* Integrating top-down and bottom-up processing: the mind and the body in dialogue.

* Updating conditioned predictions: your system learns that the present is safer than the past it remembers.

Please Message Me for Practical ways to build capacity (trauma‑informed) and/or Consider a THERAPY INTENSIVE

The 3 Phases of Living a Transformation (After the Peak Fades)

Think of transformation as a cycle you’ll repeat, each pass deepening mastery.

Phase 1: Opening (Insight)

This is the moment the light gets in, or the moment something cracks. You suddenly see what you couldn’t see before. Not because you weren’t trying, not because you were in denial, but because your nervous system finally had enough safety or capacity to let you see it.

It feels like relief and panic braided together.

Helpful move:Name the thing you now see. Write it down. Tell someone who feels emotionally safe.Not to “announce a new you,” but to help the insight land in your body.

Common trap:Believing the insight is the transformation. Overpromising, declaring “I’ll never do that again,” or assuming clarity will carry you the rest of the way.

A gentler alternative:Choose one tiny shift you can repeat for 7–14 days. Small enough that your nervous system doesn’t rebel. Small enough to succeed.

Phase 2: Stabilizing (Capacity-Building)

This is where most people think they’ve failed, but really, this is where transformation is actually built. The high fades. The insight quiets. The body pulls you back toward the familiar. This phase is about practicing the new thing after the spark is gone; the emotional equivalent of learning to walk while the ground moves beneath you.

Helpful move:Tiny, consistent repetitions. A micro-behavior paired with a nervous-system regulation moment. (The size matters more than the result.)

Common trap:The shame spiral when old patterns resurface. Thinking, “If I really understood, I wouldn’t be here again.”

A gentler alternative:Measure your progress by practice, not perfection. By effort, not outcome.By how often you can return to center but not judging or counting the times you leave it or demanding that be rare to be healing.

This is the phase where capacity grows quietly and slowly in the background.

Phase 3: Integrating (Identity)

One day, almost without noticing, you start to feel like the person you’ve been practicing becoming. Not every day. Not perfectly. But reliably enough that you can sense a shift: I’m not pretending anymore. Something in me actually changed. This is identity work, and the phase where your nervous system begins trusting the new pathway, not just visiting it.

Helpful move:Make choices aligned with your values especially under stress. Integration is about who you reach for when you’re overwhelmed: the old pattern or the person you’re becoming.

Common trap:Sabotaging when things start to improve. Feeling the “upper limit” fear, or the discomfort of life going better than you’re used to.

A gentler alternative:Expect ambivalence. Welcome the wobble. It means you’re entering territory your body never got to grow into before.

And then… you repeat.

Not because you’re broken, but because you’re human. Each cycle teaches you something new. Each round reshapes your capacity just a little further outward.Each transformation is really a series of conversations between the person you’ve been and the person you’re becoming. This is the work. Slow, durable, honest change.Not the myth of the moment; but the practice of becoming.

Accepting Transformation Means Accepting Humanity

Transformation isn’t a cinematic montage. It’s the quiet courage to tend the fire after the sparks fade. It asks you to stop auditioning for a future life and start rehearsing the one you’re building; with small, kind, daily choices that your nervous system can absorb.

It asks you to accept:

* that ambivalence will visit

* that old patterns will tug

* that your body remembers self-abandonment survival as familiar

* that you can also learn to remember, too—how to return to yourself

The question is not “Can you change?” You can, and you already have.

The deeper question is:

Can you accept the process of becoming someone who can stay changed?Can you accept that transformation is not a moment to reach—but a capacity to build?

If so, you don’t need another peak experience. You need a plan your nervous system can love, and a life you practice into being.

Bringing It All Together: Why Consider a Three‑Day Healing Intensive

When patterns shape our lives for years, it’s hard to know where to begin. Healing can feel abstract or endless. But when the work is organized into clear phases, you can finally see where you are, why you’re there, and what tools actually belong to that stage. The Three-Day Healing Intensive offers exactly that: clarity, containment, and a structured path forward.

Across three days, you move through Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing with focused guidance and support.

The intensive doesn’t replace long-term healing; it simply shows your nervous system that inner work is possible and within your capacity. It accelerates understanding, restores direction, and removes the guesswork that often leads to self-blame or overwhelm.

You receive:

* 2.5 hours of coursework daily to understand your patterns and the phases

* 1.5 hours of therapy daily to apply tools to your personal story

* 1 hour of coaching daily to integrate changes into relationships, work, health, and daily life

* Optional half‑day group session for reflection and shared insight

This structure helps you make sense of your healing. You don’t leave “fixed”—you leave informed, grounded, and empowered, with tools that feel usable and truly your own. Most of all, you leave knowing that healing isn’t something to chase or perfect; it’s something you’re allowed to organize, inhabit, and grow into.

This is the heart of The Toolbox Approach® and the purpose of the Three-Day Healing Intensive.

Arrange your discovery call here. If you prefer a different way to connect or need accommodations, reach out and share what you need. The discovery call and all the set-up required to tailor your intensive is free until you are ready to commit to the out-of-pocket fee that matches the market value of 7.5 months of therapy as equal to the power of a 3-day intensive.

LASTLY, DON’T FORGET THE FREE RESOURCES ON THE ENTER THE PHASES OF HEALING WEBSITE!

You’ve lost track of how many times you were trying to take a peaceful walk, keep a promise to yourself, or do something good for your body—and suddenly that person is in your mind again. You hover over the idea of making contact, reaching out, considering if a better connection is possible, all with a head full of things you never got to say. Part of you aches for another chance at an explanation, and wonder, “what actually happens between us that we can’t stay connected?”. You are worried if this will ever come to a close in your mind, if it will ever stop, and what will resolve this feeling. Still, another part of your mind knows exactly what would happen if you opened that door again: the same disappointment, the same confusion, the same unanswered emotional hunger.

You replay it all and still can’t believe you missed the truth: they were there with you, technically, but they were never with you, for you, or by you. They didn’t witness you, respond to you, or step toward you. And the hardest question rises up every time—Why wouldn’t they just see what was happening and work on it? Why couldn’t they just show up, so you could finally know it wasn’t you?

Slowing Down, Getting Clear

The truth is, you will waste time on emotional unavailability, it is part of learning love and connection. There is no way around this, and it starts in childhood. Some of us will be deeply imprinted on by it and repeat the circumstances in adulthood, in subconscious ways. Others will experience it a such an outlier, a one off, and see that it stands out as “not connection” and this will safely imprint and cause a repellant reaction, where one learns to stay away from it. There is a spectrum of experiences in between, but an emotional unavailability experience with another person is unavoidable, it is frequent in fact.

Exhaustion and confusion that so many of us feel when we are stuck in loops with people who can’t meet us emotionally is not relational failure, it’s a trauma response that turns into a pattern that can form an almost addictive behavior. You become attached to the familiarity of the process, anxiously or in a disorganized fashion, and you’re trying to decode them instead of choosing yourself because you didn’t learn this, you never entered a classroom in school called “choosing yourself”! This classroom doesn’t come until much later and it is often a classroom of one, after a loss of something you could have sworn was emotional availability, and sadly was not, nor would it be no matter how hard you tried.

Sometimes it’s Simply About Willingness.

Some people are not willing to show up for a relationship in a consistent, reciprocal way. Not because they’re broken. Not because they “can’t.” Not because you’re not enough. But because they won’t. Things like trauma, attachment style, and personality are valid explanations that come from the “top down” approach to overcoming confusing relational rupture. However, there is a core truth that we all need to grow capacity to sense in our guts, at the body or somatic level, they don’t want to stretch. They don’t want to be accountable. They don’t want to nurture a bond. They want connection without responsibility, closeness without discomfort, and intimacy without the vulnerability that sustains it.

And too often, we make their unwillingness our self‑blame project.

We analyze their mixed signals.We justify their distance.We rewrite our standards to match their capacity.We exhaust ourselves trying to understand a problem that was never ours to solve.

Here’s the shift:

Stop trying to figure out why someone won’t choose you. Start paying attention to how you abandon yourself in the process.

Because every time you over-explain, over-function, or over-give to keep a half-hearted connection alive, you move further away from your own emotional center. You shrink. You negotiate your worth. You become the one doing all the emotional labor, while they simply… receive. And that imbalance is the red flag. The imbalance is not their childhood trauma, or their attachment style, not their “busy work schedule”, and not their fear of getting hurt. The red flag is that you are always the one moving toward them, and they are rarely the one moving toward you.

Let that land. Healthy connection requires reciprocity. Emotional availability is shown through behavior, not potential.

A person who is emotionally available:

* repairs instead of retreats

* communicates discomfort instead of creating distance

* shows appreciation without prompting

* moves toward resolution instead of escalation

* invests consistently instead of sporadically

They don’t disappear when it matters.They don’t make you question your worth.They don’t punish your vulnerability with silence.

And here’s the hard truth:

You cannot create emotional availability in another person through effort, patience, or understanding. You can only choose not to participate in relationships where you are the only one showing up.

When you stop analyzing the unavailable person, something powerful happens, you finally have energy left to notice yourself. Your feelings. Your unmet needs. Your ignored intuition. Your desire for a relationship where you don’t have to earn closeness or apologize for wanting connection. And that’s when you start choosing yourself. We don’t truly choose ourselves out of anger, out of punishing someone, or out of strategy, but out of clarity.

The clarity that comes when you realize:If someone’s emotional unavailability keeps hurting you, the most self-respecting thing you can do is step toward the person who is willing to show up fully, and that is yourself.

What Creates Intimacy

The ingredients for emotional availability are the willingness to be seen and to see someone else, openness, reciprocity, and empathy. It’s also the use of time and building safety and trust with the skills of deliberate communication and consistent attunement not just to yourself but the other person’s experience as not good or bad, better or worse, but other. Curiosity in connection to the other person is not trauma dumping our past out in one fell swoop or constant emotional processing. It’s not giving a person space to avoid conflict or watching what you say all the time to not trigger them, it’s a willingness to ask questions that aim for a deeper connection and understanding, not convenient explanations that stop the pursuit of exploration of each other in one sentence.When someone is emotionally available, they respond to your vulnerability with curiosity. They share themselves gradually. They don’t create distance every time closeness increases. Emotional availability is, in fact, a feeling. The layers that get known feel like both an invitation to something special, and a desire to lean in. Emotional unavailability can be felt more than it can be understood through analysis. It is when the connection stays on the surface and conversations feel scripted or like there is a control mechanism around them, and they don’t deepen. It is when you try to go for more depth, but there’s a barrier there you can also feel. When a barrier of confusion and offense are there, you will be wondering if it is something you did when you could swear, they were leaning in and they wanted your connection before. The barrier is there when you feel them pull away when things begin to get close and layers will be revealed, but instead you get that whiplash of that retraction.

You sense the barrier, but you did not create it, it happened from well before you entered this relationship, and that is the only truth to focus on, despite all the valuable information out there that can help us surpass power struggles in relationships and repair the bonds, understand their maintenance and the ingredients for emotional safety, when there is emotionally unavailability, you will not cure it in the other person no matter how hard you try to. What is important to know is that emotional unavailability is not always about trauma or avoidant attachment. Sometimes it’s much simpler and is simply about willingness.

The Toolbox Approach® & Willingness

For those of us on a healing journey, it is essential to understand that all healing journeys naturally cycle through periods of disorganization. We may revisit earlier phases as our nervous system gains the capacity to reprocess experiences and stay embodied long enough to move beyond simple awareness of our wounds and into the deeper, transformative work. This is the work that repairs the broken narratives shaping our inner sense of self and our relational patterns in the world.

Within The Toolbox Approach®, the Phases of Healing are organized as follows:

* Narrative Healing Phase

* Reprocessing Healing Phase

* Relational Healing Phase

Willingness becomes especially important during the Relational Healing Phase. When we begin to enter or emphasize this phase, we inevitably confront the need to build tools that expand our capacity for willingness: the emotional availability required for genuine connection, with ourselves and with others, held within appropriate boundaries that help us discern where and with whom we want to bring that openness.

Understanding the Phases of Healing in Action

Before reaching the Relational Healing Phase, and before cultivating the willingness needed to live from a healed truth, an example may illustrate the process clearly:

Imagine the broken narrative is:

“No one truly wants me unless I am understanding and helpful. People need me to be this way.”

If this narrative goes unquestioned for years, it can sediment itself into the developing brain, embedding across neural pathways until it forms what feels like an unquestionable internal truth. It becomes part of The Mind, the narrator of our inner world.

Narrative Healing Phase

In this phase, the narrative begins to loosen. You may start to see its limitations and recognize the grief beneath it. You discover that this belief was never yours to carry.

Reprocessing Healing Phase

Here, memories linked to this narrative can be revisited and reorganized. For example, you may reprocess a moment when you stayed small and compliant; following a script that felt “helpful”, even though what would have been more empowering was to express discomfort, disagree with the storyline, or set a boundary.

You can imagine how this could have been done in a regulated, calm, kind, and self-honoring way. Experiencing the safety of this reprocess often brings another layer of grief, as you witness what could have been available to you.

Relational Healing Phase

Now the task becomes living in the truth you uncovered:

“I don’t need to be helpful and understanding all the time to belong.”

And here is where willingness becomes essential.

You need the willingness to be emotionally available to:

* this newly reclaimed part of yourself,

* the discomfort of living differently,

* the relationships that will meet you in this new way,

* and the boundaries that protect your growth.

Willingness is the bridge between internal insight and external embodiment. It is the capacity that turns healing from a private transformation into a relational reality.

Exercise: Building Capacity to Stay Willing

A Somatic + Narrative Integration Practice for the Relational Healing Phase

Willingness is not a mood. It is a capacity state.Like all capacities, it can be strengthened with intentional, gentle practice.

This exercise helps the body build the ability to remain emotionally available to new truths, new parts of self, and new relational experiences, without collapsing into old protective patterns.

Step 1 — Name the Truth You Are Learning to Live In

Choose the emerging truth you want to practice staying willing for.For example:

* “I don’t have to be helpful to belong.”

* “My needs are valid even if they inconvenience someone.”

* “I can say no without losing connection.”

Think, or more preferably write, your truth in the most concise form possible.

Prompt:

What truth am I practicing staying willing for today?

(Write/Think one sentence.)

Step 2 — Notice the First Body Reaction

When you read the new truth slowly, notice what your body does instantly.

Common reactions to willingness include:

* A tightening in the chest

* A small holding of breath

* A shrinking sensation behind the ribs

* A subtle brace in the jaw or shoulders

* A heaviness or collapse in the belly

You are not looking for anything dramatic.You are simply mapping your somatic resistance. It is perfectly normal for something internally to say “no” to this.

Step 3 — Bring 10% More Breath to That Spot

Not forced breath. Just 10% more space. Imagine widening the area around the sensation just slightly. This is how the nervous system learns:

* to stay,

* to expand around discomfort,

* to tolerate the unfamiliarity of living differently.

This step begins the actual building of capacity. Slowly notice what happens when you give this sensation of staying just a bit more space.

Step 4 — Ask the Body a Willingness Question

Gently ask: “Am I willing to stay open to this truth for the next 30 seconds?”

If the body says “no,” you honor it. Willingness is never forced. Forced willingness is compliance, not healing. If the body says “maybe,” that is a yes. If it says “yes,” breathe.

Step 5 — Identify Your Willingness Boundary

Willingness needs boundaries so it does not become self‑abandonment.

Identify:

* One situation where you are willing to practice this truth

* One situation where you are not willing to practice it yet

Example:

* “I am not yet willing to practice this truth with coworkers.”

* “I am willing to practice it with my sibling.”

This creates safe relational conditions for practicing the new truth. So, gently consider where you are willing to try this today and where you are not and take note of this.

Step 6 — Choose One Micro‑Action of Willingness

Pick a tiny, low‑risk behavior that embodies your truth.

For example:

* Saying “I need a moment to think before I respond.”

* Asking for clarity instead of assuming responsibility.

* Saying “That doesn’t work for me” once this week.

* Letting one person see you pause instead of instantly helping.

Micro‑actions train the nervous system without overwhelming it.

Step 7 — Close With a Regulation Cue

This is how you signal to your system:

“You stayed. You didn’t abandon yourself. We are safe.”

Choose one:

* A long exhale

* A hand on the heart

* Pressing feet gently into the floor

* A slow nod

This seals the capacity work and supports integration.

Why This Exercise Works

Because willingness is not conceptual. It lives in:

* somatic expansion,

* nervous‑system safety, and

* relational boundaries that match your capacity.

This practice slowly rewires the system to tolerate living as the person you are becoming, without collapsing back into the person you had to be for survival.

Bringing It All Together: Why to Consider a Three-Day Healing Intensive

When patterns have guided our lives for years, it can feel overwhelming to imagine where to even begin. Healing can seem abstract, scattered, or endless. But when healing is organized into phases, when you can see where you are, why you’re there, and what tools belong to that stage, everything becomes within your capacity to learn, exercise and practice. This is exactly what the Three-Day Healing Intensive is designed to offer: clarity, containment, and a structured path forward.

Over the course of three days, you move through the phases of Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing with depth, direction, and professional guidance.

The intensive does not replace long-term healing; it helps your nervous system know inner work is within your capacity. Therapy intensives accelerate understanding, clarify direction, and organize the work ahead so you are no longer wandering, self-blaming, or trying to heal yourself with guesswork.

You receive personalized support through:

* 2.5 hours of coursework each day to understand the phases and your patterns

* 1.5 hours of therapy each day to apply the tools to your personal story

* 1 hour of coaching each day to integrate healing into relationships, career, health, and everyday life

* A bonus half-day group session for reflection, shared wisdom, and expanded insight per your free decision after the three days is completed

The structure of the intensive allows you to see your healing in a way that makes sense. You leave not “fixed,” but informed, grounded, and empowered. You leave with a plan, a direction, and tools you understand, not tools that overwhelm you, but tools that feel like your own. Most importantly, you leave with the sense that healing is not something you have to earn, perfect, or chase, but it is something you are allowed to organize, inhabit, and grow into. This is the purpose of The Toolbox Approach®. This is the intention of the Three-Day Healing Intensive.

Arrange Your Discovery Call Here. This setup ensures the insurance covered portions that follow the intensive, at least two sessions post the experience, are covered, so please have your information handy. If you want to send a direct message to arrange a call in a different way, please let me know your circumstances and we can see if we can arrange something.

Other Stuff

✅ Please take this FREE poll✅ Promote the cause and help spread the invitation to heal! You can explore a less intensive option at the polling site if that appeals or just take the FREE poll!

If this doesn’t call to you just yet, your voice still matters to me. Your healing matters to me. I want to hear you! I want to serve your journey and clear that path, your answers are vital to this cause! Please head over to the author’s website to access the book on the first phase of healing: You Are Not Broken and explore the site for all the free resources and posted events! Leave me a message there!

And yet, something subtle happens in this era of abundant healing content:we begin to believe that scrolling, liking, collecting, and following somehow equals healing. The right words land. The right reel resonates. Something inside us stirs, softens, or feels seen. And for a moment, sometimes a very real one, we feel like we’re getting better. There’s a sense of connection, even community. But healing is not the same as resonance. Resonance is the spark. Healing is the journey.

Following inspirational content can feel like movement, but it is often a circle: comforting, meaningful, familiar, but not necessarily transformative. A healing journey twists, confronts, unearths, and reorganizes. It rarely scrolls neatly past your eyes.

My role in creating content, whether through Substack, Patreon, my podcast, or individual work, is not to offer more noise for your feed, even if it’s soothing noise.My role is a gentle call to engagement that leads to action that makes sense to your nervous system, to your story, and to your timing.

Lately, the action that makes the most sense to me is offering three‑day therapy intensives based on my registered trademarked healing model, The Toolbox Approach®, and its companion framework, The Phases of Healing™. After 20 years as a trauma therapist, I know this: Most people who seek trauma healing arrive carrying layers, not a single event.

Loss.Adult trauma.Childhood wounds.Emotional neglect.Betrayal.Old shame.Addiction.Complicated love and complicated grief.Patterns that feel protective but quietly limit every part of life.

By the time they reach me, they’ve often already seen one or two therapists, sometimes for six months or more, and eventually start searching for someone who speaks trauma fluently. Colleagues jokingly call me “the Trauma Whisperer” because so many individuals simply cannot “just move on” when they were never taught how to “just talk.” Their bodies carry more than their words know how to say.

Healing is not marked by the end of addiction, the finalization of a divorce, the stabilization of symptoms, or the return to work. Healing is marked by something deeper:

When a person arrives in session and says, “It’s not about what happened anymore. It’s about how I am still acting as if it might.”

When they start caring more about the patterns they are manifesting than the people they’ve been blaming. When they stop demanding that others heal with them or for them. When they recognize that we all need healing, and that they are willing to take responsibility for their own. But this uncovering, the real work, can feel raw. It can feel like exposure. It can feel like losing skin you didn’t realize was armor.

That is why we need tools. Not just insight. Not just information. Actual tools that accompany the journey and help a person reorganize their experience of themselves. This is where the Undercover Angel metaphor was born. We often mistake our protective layers for damage, our reactivity for character flaws, our numbness for weakness. But underneath those coverings lives an angelic truth—a glow, a pulse, a resilience—that has simply been working undercover for far too long.

Uncovering Is About

Uncovering is not about exposing what’s wrong. It’s about revealing what was always right. It’s about remembering the wings that trauma taught you to fold. It’s about letting your glow burn through the cracks. It’s about discovering that what you thought was “too much” was actually your beginning.

In the poem Undercover Angel, I write about the wings blooming beneath the broken seams. That is how healing often arrives; quietly, through the fractures. If you feel a pull to not just follow content but engage your healing, explore the linked Patreon materials and the Screening Prep section for the three‑day intensive. You’ll also find a deeper explanation of the program below in another video post:

This is not the trail. But it is the trailhead. And you are more ready than you think. Consider a Therapy Intensive with Melinda……

“Contain. Store. Forget. These are trauma responses. One need not have PTSD to recognize how containment patterns reshape the way you feel. Hunger, empathy, pleasure, joy, physical pain, fatigue, connection, fear, sadness… all are affected.

There is a new triad: Identify. Process. Integrate. Through it, we can re‑feed ourselves and restore nourishment. And when we do, individually and collectively, we repattern hearts and minds exponentially and enjoy collective relational healing.”~ Melinda Zappone, LMHC, CCTP‑II, LFYP

How We Got Here: Tupperware’s Origin Story

Tupperware emerged as a kind of American hero when it entered kitchens in the late 1940s. It carried a quiet promise: that with the right container, nothing nourishing would ever be lost again. Its story began earlier, in 1938, when chemist Earl Tupper secured access to DuPont’s pure polyethylene pellets, a wartime plastic engineered for durability and control. Even then, the product whispered a message of safety in uncertain times: seal it, protect it, preserve it.

By the mid‑20th century, Tupperware was far more than a household name. It had become a cultural symbol of hopefulness, suggesting that with the right airtight seal, the longevity of any meal could be extended indefinitely. It branded us with a mentality: contain, preserve, control.

When Tupper founded the Tupperware Plastics Company in 1942 and introduced the Wonderlier Bowl in 1946, the innovation was revolutionary. But it was Brownie Wise who ignited the movement. Her legendary Tupperware parties of the 1950s empowered women to build income and identity around the art of containment. The brand expanded across decades; through children’s lines in the ’80s and ’90s, through microwave‑safe products in the 2000s; constantly innovating, constantly rebranding, always returning to the same core message: you should store, you should seal, you should contain.

And today, we are the inheritors of this message. We are determined to contain things. We celebrate our capacity to seal, save, and store. We learned to throw parties for containment.

But this article is not actually about Tupperware. It’s about what Tupperware reveals.

Containment as a Trauma Pattern

Many people assume trauma must look like catastrophe: abuse, assault, neglect, violence, disaster. But the truth is that emotional containment itself is a trauma adaptation. Long before we have language for it, many of us are taught to:

* store feelings

* seal difficult experiences

* keep emotional nourishment for “later”

* ration vulnerability

* freeze what should have been consumed in real time

Containment becomes a stress response that slows healing, delays emotional digestion, and shapes relationships into patterns of distance, fear, and misunderstanding.

Like Tupperware, we place our experiences into airtight containers, believing:

“If I keep this sealed, I will be safe.”

But half the time, the opposite happens. We save emotions for a “later” that never arrives. We reheat memories that no longer nourish us. We discover that what once felt vital has withered in storage. And just like forgotten leftovers, emotional containment often leads to a slow, silent starvation. Not because we lacked containers, but because we were never meant to store so much in the first place.

Containment works for a night or two, but it is a short-term strategy and not a lifestyle. It is certainly not a healing method. It is not a sustainable way to feed the human heart. This is where we are, determined to contain things. Determined to throw a party for containment. Hopeful that this capacity differentiates, individualizes, and empowers us from wasting………what?

This article proposes that this serves as a key example of what messages can go against our emotional healing after each of us experiences our own unique traumas in life. Again, many people assume that a trauma couldn’t be on their timeline if they haven’t been abused, assaulted, violated, injured, severely neglected, abandoned in childhood, survived something catastrophic, or bore witness to something horrific. The truth is that emotional containment is a trauma pattern.

Like Tupperware, you may have seen clearly what you slipped into the airtight container, feeling secure and hopeful it would not go to waste. However, saving for later, reheating, or realizing the meal just plain didn’t feed anyone, is just as much the outcome 50% of the time. Over time, that is wasted nourishment, no matter if you bought the container at a party, online, or a supermarket.

The truth is containment is a short-term concept. So yes, good luck to Tupperware, endlessly rebranding. But in healing, we need something far more essential than storage. We need emotional nourishment, digestion, and metabolizing what life experience gives us.

The Toolbox Approach®& Healing Containment

For many of you who read, listen to, or watch the content supporting what it means to “hold space” for healing in phases with The Toolbox Approach®, the framework may already feel familiar. The Narrative Healing Phase: introduced in a recent publication available on Amazon and through the author’s website, teaches us to examine the messages we’ve internalized: the stories we tell ourselves, the roles we were assigned, and the quiet instructions absorbed from family, culture, and survival.

Narrative Healing helps us map the way these messages settled into our timelines, not by retelling the same story with the same limiting language, but by witnessing how these storylines imprinted our interpretations of life. In many cases, these interpretations created stress reactions that were stored, sealed, and contained, rather than reprocessed, digested, and integrated into a secure sense of Self.

That deeper work: revisiting, re‑imagining, and metabolizing emotional material, is the essence of the Reprocessing Healing Phase. It is where the “leftovers” of our emotional life finally get tended to rather than endlessly preserved for later.

And when that internal nourishment begins to return, when the Self becomes more secure, that is where the Relational Healing Phase emerges. This is the phase where connection, both to ourselves and to others, stops operating from containment and starts operating from authenticity, safety, and mutuality.

Recognizing containment as a personal pattern; seeing your own places of emotional starvation as you read, listen, and reflect right now, means you are already inside the approach. You may have encountered parts of it in therapy, in a moment of clarity, in recovery from loss or addiction, or in the quiet turning point after a difficult season.

But when you enter the approach intentionally, something shifts. It doesn’t just meet you where you are. It organizes your healing. It gives you a toolbox you can use again and again. Over time, it becomes internalized as the way you approach your growth, your relationships, and your life.

Learning to Repattern

Learning to repattern emotional containment is a central tool within The Toolbox Approach®. To work with this tool effectively, we first need to understand what healthy containment actually is, and how it differs from the emotionally harmful containment many of us learned through trauma, family systems, or survival.

Many people mistake “not talking about something” for safety. It can feel emotionally safer to avoid a difficult conversation and keep the mess inside, as if we’re preserving a meal for later. But emotional material is not leftovers, and unprocessed emotions do not stay fresh. What we avoid, seal up, or save for later begins to rot inside us and inside our relationships.

Healthy containment happens when we recognize that the first interpretation that arises during an emotionally triggering moment is not necessarily factual. We pause. We identify what our mind is doing. Then we process how and why that interpretation formed. This creates the possibility of integrating the experience rather than storing it unexamined. From that grounded place, if it makes sense to share what happened, discernment guides us in choosing who is safe to share it with.

The Tool: IDENTIFY »»PROCESSS»»INTEGRATE

The conditioned alternative—and what many people have in their toolbox instead—is the old triad: Contain → Store → Forget or its cousin: Contain → Preserve → Control

These patterns feel protective but actually block healing, distort perception, and prolong emotional starvation.

Another essential aspect of repatterning is understanding what you can and cannot control. You cannot control someone else’s containment patterns, only your own. This is where the “safety” in Safety & Containment comes in. You can practice healthy containment within yourself and be deliberate and discerning about who you hold space with. You can be honest about your expectations of another person’s capacity. Without this honesty, old patterns easily return, and we may find ourselves blaming others for our emotional reactions or for “causing” our inability to communicate openly.

Yes, it often feels like others are responsible for these patterns. But repatterning containment teaches us a different truth: Healthy containment is your tool, not something to impose on others. It is a practice of responsibility, clarity, and self-protection that keeps the healing process intact.

Example: How Containment Shows Up in Real Relationships

Ted and Sally separated three years ago but never followed through with a divorce. Ted moved out briefly, and both silently agreed that the message had been delivered, without ever speaking about what that message actually meant. Since then, they have lived in an unspoken limbo. Each time either of them tried to bring up something important about the marriage, they were out of sync: different priorities, different timing, different emotional rhythms. The separation itself, why it happened, how it affected them, and whether they wanted to repair or release the relationship was never discussed.

Instead, they lived inside a chase/avoid cycle:One partner would notice something wrong, contain the emotion, store it in the same internal place it had always gone, forget the details over time, but hold onto the feeling. Both were emotionally starving without naming it.

One day in therapy, Ted began to see the pattern clearly. He realized he had been containing his own emotions in the same way he accused Sally of doing. He described coming home longing for connection, yet being immediately handed a list of household tasks. He would do them, expecting closeness afterward, only to be told she was heading out to run errands. Ted felt unseen and transactional, and he fumed as he recounted this.

His therapist asked one simple question:“Did she know?”

Ted responded with irritation. “Did she know what? That I had a long day and just wanted to come home, relax with her, and feel listened to for once?”

The therapist rephrased gently: “Did she know you were holding out for home? That you were longing to see her, that you needed to sit with someone and feel the day was finally over?”

Ted deflated. “I can’t talk like that. She’d reject me.” The therapist asked, “Do the two of you ever talk that way with each other?” Ted insisted she wasn’t the type.When asked whether she was actively rejecting or simply not accustomed to emotional conversations, Ted admitted he didn’t know. He had assumed both were true.

Together, they explored a long history of Ted interpreting his wife as “rejecting” and “not the type,” then storing those beliefs unprocessed for years, forgetting nuances, repeating the same emotional conclusion, and deepening the starvation inside the marriage.

This realization opened the door to Identify → Process → Integrate.

Ted began identifying how he had contained painful interpretations about his wife for decades. He processed how he had often hinted at his needs rather than expressing them directly, expecting her to intuit what he needed based on subtle clues. He saw how he had also been rejecting himself, his sensitivity, his longing, his desire for affection. As he traced this further back, he recognized how few emotional models he had as a man for understanding what a partner finds attractive, nurturing, or connecting. He had spent years trying to “be a good provider,” never realizing he was starving for emotional nourishment and believing his efforts were never “enough” for his wife.

Ted had been carrying a great deal, quietly, tightly, and alone. None of it was ready for Sally to hear, because it had never been processed. His own interpretations had created layers of emotional unsafety between them. Before anything could be repaired externally, Ted needed to repattern containment internally.

Now for the Exercise: The Repatterning Triad

This exercise guides you through the healthy containment triad: Identify → Process → Integrate and helps you interrupt the conditioned loop of Contain → Store → Forget. It takes 5–7 minutes and can be done anytime you feel activated, confused, overwhelmed, or tempted to shut down emotionally.

Step 1 — IDENTIFY (Name the First Interpretation)

Purpose: Catch the automatic thought before it becomes a story.

* Think of a recent moment that emotionally activated you.

* Ask: “What was the very first interpretation my mind created?”

* Write it down in one simple sentence.

Examples:

* “She’s angry with me.”

* “I’m messing this up.”

* “They don’t care.”

* “I’m in trouble.”

* “Something bad is coming.”

Important: Do not evaluate or correct it. You are simply noticing the mind’s first move.

Step 2 — PROCESS (Slow Down the Pattern)

Purpose: Create space between stimulus and reaction.

Place one hand on your chest or abdomen. Take a slow breath.

Ask yourself:

* “Is this interpretation provable?”

* “What else could this mean?”

* “What part of me reacted this way?”

Then write or think of (writing is best) 1–2 alternative interpretations, even if they feel small or unlikely.

Examples:

* “She might be tired.”

* “I’m overwhelmed and assuming the worst.”

* “This situation is familiar from childhood.”

* “I’m afraid of disappointing someone.”

Notice what shifts in your body as you widen the frame.

Step 3 — INTEGRATE (Choose a Regulated Next Step)

Purpose: Move from reaction to intention.

Choose one of the following integration actions:

* Clarify internally:“Given what I know now, what do I need?”

* Clarify relationally:“Is this something I want to communicate, and to whom?”

* Clarify direction:“What is one small action I can take to feel grounded again?”

Examples:

* “I need five minutes alone.”

* “This isn’t the right person to talk to about this.”

* “I need to check the facts before spiraling.”

* “I can return to this conversation when I’m steadier.”

Integration is not about resolution. It is about anchoring your next move in reality rather than reaction.

When to Use This Exercise

Use it when you notice yourself:

* bottling emotions

* replaying a situation without understanding it

* assuming the worst

* avoiding clarifying conversations

* storing feelings until they “go away”

* blaming others for your internal state

* feeling emotionally “full” without relief

Every time you complete the triad, you interrupt emotional starvation and give your system a new pathway forward.

Bringing It All Together: Why to Consider a Three-Day Healing Intensive

When patterns have guided our lives for years, it can feel overwhelming to imagine where to even begin. Healing can seem abstract, scattered, or endless. But when healing is organized into phases, when you can see where you are, why you’re there, and what tools belong to that stage, everything becomes within your capacity to learn, exercise and practice. This is exactly what the Three-Day Healing Intensive is designed to offer: clarity, containment, and a structured path forward.

Over the course of three days, you move through the phases of Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing with depth, direction, and professional guidance.

The intensive does not replace long-term healing; it helps your nervous system know inner work is within your capacity. Therapy intensives accelerate understanding, clarify direction, and organize the work ahead so you are no longer wandering, self-blaming, or trying to heal yourself with guesswork.

You receive personalized support through:

* 2.5 hours of coursework each day to understand the phases and your patterns

* 1.5 hours of therapy each day to apply the tools to your personal story

* 1 hour of coaching each day to integrate healing into relationships, career, health, and everyday life

* A bonus half-day group session for reflection, shared wisdom, and expanded insight per your free decision after the three days is completed

The structure of the intensive allows you to see your healing in a way that makes sense. You leave not “fixed,” but informed, grounded, and empowered. You leave with a plan, a direction, and tools you understand, not tools that overwhelm you, but tools that feel like your own. Most importantly, you leave with the sense that healing is not something you have to earn, perfect, or chase, but it is something you are allowed to organize, inhabit, and grow into. This is the purpose of The Toolbox Approach®. This is the intention of the Three-Day Healing Intensive.

Arrange Your Discovery Call Here. This setup ensures the insurance covered portions that follow the intensive, at least two sessions post the experience, are covered, so please have your information handy. If you want to send a direct message to arrange a call in a different way, please let me know your circumstances and we can see if we can arrange something.

Other Stuff

✅ Please take this FREE poll✅ Promote the cause and help spread the invitation to heal! You can explore a less intensive option at the polling site if that appeals or just take the FREE poll!

If this doesn’t call to you just yet, your voice still matters to me. Your healing matters to me. I want to hear you! I want to serve your journey and clear that path, your answers are vital to this cause!

In a truly therapeutic conversation, we listen for what is not said. I have heard the stories of people’s lives as they start out explaining the details: of loss, breakups, family dysfunction, betrayal, toxic workplace dynamics, troubled choices, and recovered memory. But I have also learned to listen to the life in front of me in other ways. Noticing movement, breath, and posture begin to read like a parallel text, like another story unfolding beneath the words.

What I listen to could be the absence of breath as words spill rapidly. It could be the eye contact that disappears the moment awareness breaks through. Or the eyes that water but never release tears. These moments quietly question something deeper. Why is life going the way it is? Why has it gone the way is has? Where is my life heading? Beneath many searches for meaning, there is often an unspoken question:

Am I really the one responsible for all of this?

At some point, we all have to accept a difficult truth: our lives were built on choices made within circumstances we did not choose. No one can change the conditions of their birth. And yet, I have facilitated profoundly eye‑opening timeline work where people come to recognize the situation they were entering pre‑birth, how they sensed it, adapted to it, and were shaped by it long before they could understand it consciously.

We do not choose this life. We are born into it. And then we begin making choices inside it. Awareness of choice comes slowly, through mistakes, pain, regret, and eventually through learning that intuition can be trusted.

If you are here, you know this writing by now. It carries the tone of a healing journey guided by an approach I coined, The Toolbox Approach®. Healing itself is not a new invention. But after more than 35 years inside my own healing journey and becoming a trauma therapist licensed to walk alongside others, I have learned that organization matters. Healing requires structure that does not override humanity. That is what this approach offers: tools for each phase of an organized, trauma‑informed healing journey.

We all live as managers of our own lives, trying to “get it right.” This doesn’t stop when things become internally messy or fragmented; when patterns surface, when old choices come into view, when time passed and time remaining both begin to speak. Somewhere inside, we know we haven’t gotten it all right. There is a call to look. But we will only answer that call if we believe there are tools inside our toolbox to face what we find.

The manager part of us wants coherence. It wants things to make sense so we can do the work and move forward. A healing journey cannot appeal only to that part. True healing requires vulnerability. It asks us to face fear, repression, and long‑suppressed emotion. It demands that the body stay present and aware, no longer subdued or dissociated.

The phases of healing within The Toolbox Approach®; the Narrative Healing Phase, Reprocessing Healing Phase, and Relational Healing Phase—are designed to speak to that inner manager who must decide to begin and then decide again and again to continue. They offer enough structure to make healing feel possible, and enough depth to make it real. POWERFUL NARRATIVE HEALING READING HERE!

Learn From What You Didn’t Get

Silence is a great teacher, although not always a kind one.

Many of you reading, listening, or watching will recognize the silence I mean: the way certain things were never spoken of in your family. The questions you had. The feelings you sensed. The stories you wanted explained but that no one discussed openly. Many families do not hold real conversations with children, and those children often become adults who struggle to co‑create them with others.

What we are left with instead is sensory memory; fragments of conversation, repeated stories told at holidays and gatherings, tones of voice, facial expressions, and the atmosphere of rooms. Alongside this, we carry our own thoughts, weaving these fragments together into the best story we could form about what we were growing up inside of, around, and often for.

In many ways, we make it up as we go. We have to decide what the “real” story is and live as if it’s true. But this story is often built on partial information, maybe 50% accuracy at best. In a healing journey, the work is not just to refine what we think we know, but to learn from the missing 50%.

Healing requires integrating the half‑truths that shaped our ego and personality with a fuller, more compassionate understanding, one that includes healing narrative, reprocessed memory, and relational authenticity with ourselves and others. The missing pieces are not gone. They exist within a deeper classroom of Self, one that teaches not who or how to be now, but how the present moment is always informed by what came before.

True presence would be body, breath, and sensation, with no story at all. A silence that allows this kind of presence is profoundly healing. It is very different from the silence most of us were raised in.

The silence that withholds story, feeling, and memory is often framed as love. In many families, protection through silence is how love is expressed. There is an unspoken agreement to keep the story the same for everyone, even when it isn’t. This loyalty can quietly suppress reflection, questioning, self‑inquiry, and intuition, because to question would mean standing apart, alone, and at risk of disconnection.

Within The Toolbox Approach®, we view these missed conversations as invitations. They point us toward the tools needed for a healing journey, tools that are introduced and practiced in phases.

In the Narrative Healing Phase, we learn to gently challenge and expand the story we’ve been living inside. In the Reprocessing Healing Phase, we revisit and re‑image memory, allowing for the depth of processing that was not available the first time. And in the Relational Healing Phase, we practice both detachment and re‑attachment, to Self and to others, in ways that repair connection injury and restore authenticity. What you didn’t get still has something to teach you. Healing is learning how to listen, this time, with tools, safety, and choice.

Grandma Making Pasta Taught Me This

When I was a child, I learned how to hold a conversation by holding silence in my body, so completely that no one noticed I was there. I learned how to listen without being addressed, how to watch without interrupting. I didn’t know then that this form of listening would one day shape my work, only that it was safer and more informative than asking questions.

You couldn’t sit with my grandmother and talk about life. She wasn’t that kind of woman; she was hunched over her food preparations, moving around on top of twisted toes inside her house shoes, or knitting. So instead, I watched her make pasta.

I watched her take the brittle rods of uncooked spaghetti from a container made just for it; tall, tin, and deliberate, as if the shape itself announced importance. Even as a child, I understood what pasta meant in this family. It wasn’t just food. It was love. It was structure. It was what everyone waited for. Antipasti came first, but only as a formality, not really a course at all. Pasta was the center. That was something I learned without anyone ever saying it.

Then she did something that shocked me. She broke it.

The water was already boiling, salted just enough, and she snapped the long, elegant strands clean in half and dropped them into the pot. No hesitation. No ceremony. Just break and in. She walked away as if nothing had happened, while I stood there holding my breath.

She moved between counters, tending to other things, returning now and then to check the pot. Eventually, she pulled out a single strand and threw it against the wall, another jolt. The important pasta, flung without reverence. When it stuck, she peeled it off, tasted it, and only then brought the pot to the sink. Steam rose as the water drained away, and what had been rigid and fragile began to look like a meal.

Sometimes the sauce took all day. Red. White. Occasionally something fishy that lingered in the house. The pasta always made room for whatever it was going to meet.

What I learned, though not for many years, was that pasta only became pasta by being broken first. By being plunged into heat and salted after the break. By being thrown against a wall and tested for readiness. By being strained, handled, combined, and finally served.

I watched this ritual over and over. I wondered if my grandmother chose to make so much pasta, or if it simply became what she did, what she was known for, over time. I didn’t yet have the language for what I was witnessing. It took me a long time to understand that I was learning how transformation happens. Quietly. Without explanation. Through process rather than instruction. Through watching what survives being broken, heated, tested, and still offered as nourishment.

What I learned

What is kept in a special container becomes more special through breaking. Broken in two, plunged into boiling water, salted directly into the fracture. It softens there, but not without being tested. It must then be thrown against something hard. It has to stick to what it’s thrown at, proving it’s ready, before being peeled away and strained, and emptied of excess moisture while somehow remaining tender.

Only then does it become what it was meant to be. Something to share. Something offered like love, silently. No conversation required. Everyone simply knows.

As a child, my stomach often hurt as I tried to eat like the grown‑ups, struggling to digest gluten. And yet, alongside the discomfort, I learned something else from pasta’s quiet story. A longing lesson. One that didn’t speak in words.

My grandmother didn’t make pasta for 101 years because she consciously chose it every time. Or maybe she did. More likely, it became what she did, and who she was, through repetition, necessity, and tradition, sometimes awake to the choice, sometimes not. That, too, is a lesson.

Choice makes sense when we look closely. When we listen differently. That is the message I hold, for myself, and for readers, listeners, and viewers of The Toolbox Approach®: meaning is often found not in what is explained, but in what is witnessed. Healing begins when we learn to pay attention to the process, not just the outcome.

From Story to Tool: Beginning the Work of Inquiry

True to my work, The Toolbox Approach® always includes a reveal of the tools themselves. Healing is not meant to remain abstract or inspirational alone, it must eventually become something you can do, something you can return to when you feel stuck, overwhelmed, or unsure how you arrived where you are.

One of the most important tools in this approach blends Narrative Healing with Reprocessing. It comes from self‑inquiry modalities in therapy that help you see how the thoughts you hold (often unconsciously) are actively creating the very blocks you are trying to move past.

These are not casual thoughts. They are organizing beliefs. Many of them follow a familiar internal structure:

You will be safe when you __________.But you can’t, because __________.And because of that, you can’t move forward unless __________.

This kind of thinking feels protective, even logical. But it quietly creates a closed loop, and behavior that leads nowhere except back into the same conclusion, again and again. Over time, this loop begins to feel like fate, personality, or “just the way life is.” See below for an example, and listen, or feel for the closed sense of this mind.

I will be safe when I am successful and respected in a loving relationship. But I can’t because I keep attracting the wrong type. And because of that I can’t move forward unless I really know I am in something respectful and supportive and that never happens.

Inquiry slows this process down. The listening here is that emotional safety equals both respect and love, and that a loving relationship is sought, not just attraction to a type, as that type may be wrong for them. However, this person is not listening to themselves, they are not noticing the strength of what they have learned about the loving relationship they seek. Self-inquiry here might just ask, “How am I not in loving relationship with myself right now?”.

Some forms of inquiry invite you to take a thought you believe to be true, something you might even call realistic, and examine it carefully. For example:

“I don’t think I will ever be truly loved.”

Instead of debating this thought or trying to replace it with a more positive one, the work asks you to sit with it. To take it line by line. This means, when you start to prove it true in your mind, or if you were to write it all down, there are lines of proof. In our minds, one thought, if not met with inquiry, likes to prove itself true repeatedly with all the ways this is the truth. Taking this line by line to see if it can be proven 100% true in all situations, at all times is a healthy confrontation. To notice where it cannot be known for certain. To imagine who you would be, and how you might move, without the thought operating as fact is a lifting of a veil to what needs looking at.

I don’t think I will ever be truly loved. My kids need me, rely on me for everything, but that is dependence, no one ever asks me how I am doing with my life, what my day was like, how I feel at bedtime. Loving is putting yourself second.

Again, as a reader, viewer or listener, you can probably hear it, somehow you are doing the deeper listening right now that you don’t often give yourself. It is stressful to believe this truth, “No one puts me before themselves, so I am not truly loved”. If we could see this in ourselves, it would be influential. You are also invited to notice something subtle but powerful: there is no stress‑free way to keep believing a painful thought. The suffering is not a personal failure; it is a clue.

The turning point in self-inquiry, is in listening to what is not said. The thought is gently turned around—not as denial, but as direction. For this person in the example, we hear it, we feel it, what if we could help them turn it around from “I don’t think I will ever be truly loved” to:

“I know I am not truly loving myself.”

This is not meant as self‑blame. It is meant as orientation. It shows you where your energy, attention, and healing might actually belong. This is where the question begins to shift.

Instead of asking, “Why am I stuck here?”We begin asking, “What have I been believing that made this the only place I could land?”

Instead of, “Did I choose this life?”We ask, “What choices became invisible once certain beliefs felt unquestionable?”

Today is your beginning in blending methods—narrative awareness, inquiry, and reprocessing—so that this question can be explored safely, slowly, and with compassion:

Did I really choose where I am right now in my life?

Not to arrive at a yes or no, but to discover what became shaped, constrained, or decided long before choice felt available. This is not about undoing your life. It is about understanding it, so that future choices can be made with more freedom, honesty, and self‑trust.

This is the beginning of the work.

Do This Work Without Pushing

This work is not about digging, forcing insight, or breaking yourself open.

* If your body feels overwhelmed, confused, or numb, pause. That is information, not failure.

* If you feel the urge to “figure it out,” remind yourself: clarity comes after safety, not before it.

* You are always allowed to stop mid‑exercise and return later. Healing unfolds through pacing, not pressure.

You are not required to remember everything. You are not required to understand everything. You are only asked to notice.

Guided Inquiry Exercise

Beginning the Question: Did I Really Choose Where I Am?

Purpose:This exercise is not about arriving at an answer. It is about noticing how your current life began to take shape through beliefs, adaptations, and circumstances that may not have felt like choices at the time. If you have been following my writing, you will know that helping is not a calling, it was a reaction, protection, and only became my calling when I asked myself why I had no rescuer, no helper, and no support of my own.

It is still a confronting question whenever I feel alone, afraid, small, failed, and insecure about my worth and purpose. I earn some compensation for helping, but I still struggle to use that income to support my path and purpose. I know now, when I am struggling, in some way I have chosen it. It’s confronting, but there is no meaning in life greater than to see nothing in your way but your own thinking. Despite set paths based on our birthing circumstances, there is only this truth, when you struggle, your mind is in your way.

You’ll want to set this up with breath or find a quiet place. Sit in a way that allows your body to feel supported. Let your breath settle naturally. You are not trying to calm yourself—you are simply arriving. With breath in through the nostrils and a closed mouth, we enact a boundary between us and all else, then we exhale the same, out through the nostrils, only your stale energy expelled, anything else is outside your control. Begin.

Step 1: Name Where You AreComplete this sentence, simply and honestly, without explanation:

“Right now in my life, I am here: __________.”

Ex: Right now, in my life, I am in a funk and feel like I have failed despite a decent life on paper. I am angry at my family and unfulfilled by work.

Write what comes. Keep it factual, not interpretive.

Step 2: Introduce the QuestionNow write the question slowly:

“Did I really choose to be here?”

Do not answer yet. Just notice what happens in your body when you see the question on the page. You might grimace, or tighten, or notice hunger, a yawn, or a deflation. Notice what comes up sensory wise.

Step 3: Listen for the First ThoughtWrite down the first thought that appears, before reasoning, defending, or correcting.Examples might sound like:

* “I didn’t have a choice.”

* “I chose it, but I didn’t know better.”

* “I had to.”

This thought is not a conclusion. It is a starting point.

Stop here for today. Let the work weave into your process. Wash hands, drive a car, make a meal, type an email. The work has begun in you, even when you are not trying for it to be worked on. Trust!

Bringing It All Together: Why to Consider a Three-Day Healing Intensive

When patterns have guided our lives for years, it can feel overwhelming to imagine where to even begin. Healing can seem abstract, scattered, or endless. But when healing is organized into phases, when you can see where you are, why you’re there, and what tools belong to that stage, everything becomes within your capacity to learn, exercise and practice. This is exactly what the Three-Day Healing Intensive is designed to offer: clarity, containment, and a structured path forward.

Over the course of three days, you move through the phases of Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing with depth, direction, and professional guidance.

The intensive does not replace long-term healing; it helps your nervous system know inner work is within your capacity. Therapy intensives accelerate understanding, clarify direction, and organize the work ahead so you are no longer wandering, self-blaming, or trying to heal yourself with guesswork.

You receive personalized support through:

* 2.5 hours of coursework each day to understand the phases and your patterns

* 1.5 hours of therapy each day to apply the tools to your personal story

* 1 hour of coaching each day to integrate healing into relationships, career, health, and everyday life

* A bonus half-day group session for reflection, shared wisdom, and expanded insight per your free decision after the three days is completed

The structure of the intensive allows you to see your healing in a way that makes sense. You leave not “fixed,” but informed, grounded, and empowered. You leave with a plan, a direction, and tools you understand, not tools that overwhelm you, but tools that feel like your own. Most importantly, you leave with the sense that healing is not something you have to earn, perfect, or chase, but it is something you are allowed to organize, inhabit, and grow into. This is the purpose of The Toolbox Approach®. This is the intention of the Three-Day Healing Intensive.

Arrange Your Discovery Call Here. This setup ensures the insurance covered portions that follow the intensive, at least two sessions post the experience, are covered, so please have your information handy. If you want to send a direct message to arrange a call in a different way, please let me know your circumstances and we can see if we can arrange something.

Other Stuff

✅ Please take this FREE poll✅ Promote the cause and help spread the invitation to heal! You can explore a less intensive option at the polling site if that appeals or just take the FREE poll!

If this doesn’t call to you just yet, your voice still matters to me. Your healing matters to me. I want to hear you! I want to serve your journey and clear that path, your answers are vital to this cause!

Since writing the book, “You Are Not Broken. Break free from a fixing yourself mindset with The Toolbox Approach®”, I have tried to stay true to its opening concept; that brokenness is a feeling, not a finality, and that it is an invitation to look inward. This inward glance is not the usual kind. It is not thinking about your life. It is literally IN-sight. Inward seeing things. So, when the outward glance during a snowstorm has given you that “snowed in” mentality, I propose that it is an invitation to look inward. Humility is a key ingredient to looking inward, not trying. To know your life, one has to recognize that trying to be, get, or do something is a different you, a version that may not be the one who needs help when life gets hard. When we want to “work” on ourselves, and even when we don’t but we must, we miss the support we need for humility and resolutely letting go of this other self.

What if “snowed in” days are invitations to explore the internal you? Surprisingly, a man named Carl Jung has always been able to quote things easily to help me understand myself. Life can be like that, someone you’ve never known or met, is guiding you in some way. That is the opportunity today, let words speak to that inner guidance system as you read, listen, or watch this. It is not me writing, it is you, it is always you. Let go to this resolutely, you are your guide and the sense of me, as a therapist or writer, and we as a community of subscribers, are all supporting the humility it takes to look inward and receive your vision, your clarity, from a different source; inward.

So, it is with guidance from many quotable writers in psychology, philosophy, healing, and spirituality, that fuel me to write something simply too. What if it is that your vision will only become clear when you can look into your own heart? What if looking outside makes us think too much about “snowed in” and what to do with all of that? What if it makes us less present to ourselves to prepare, plan, think ahead and that those who look outside get trapped, while those who look inside awake?

Humility Defined

First, I want us to attempt to feel this word as a way of knowing it’s meaning. So, take some time to sound it out like this: “Humm-mill-eh-tea”, and once more “Humm-mill-eh-tea”. Notice the “humm” sound underneath heart and how the other sounds dropping down lower in succession. The word when sounded out lands first in your heart and chest, then lower down the rib cages, then in the bellybutton area, and ends just below. I propose that there is a science to it, the way this word sounded out can slow you down and tap you into the column of you, the energy center from the heart to your sacral. For many of us, this is the motor of our existence. Human Design Theory, The Chakra System, Polyvagal Theory, and the neurobiological science of the nervous system all speak to how information comes into the organs, cells, nerves, skin, and musculature of this area of your body and tells the brain how to respond.

When the information from the outside of us is placed on pause, through mother nature or our own resolute letting go of outside of us, we can listen, feel, access, and see ourselves. At times, as a trauma therapist, heling people resource inside themselves so they can feel safer remembering things, I will call this, “Orienting to Safety”. More importantly, over time, it is orienting to the safety of yourself through humbly realizing nothing outside of you can tell you more that you when your safe, secure, and ready to connect inward.

So, while humility can be defined many ways, today, as we talk about Supporting Humility & Letting Go Resolutely, we define it as the skill of choosing your own capacity to know things, recognizing the limitations of outward viewing, judging, knowing, doing, and achieving, and coming to simple truths about ourselves. Humility, in this definition is not easy, it’s hard, we may face resistance, and that is why it’s a skill that takes practice. Having nowhere to go but inward takes practice. Accepting it takes persistence. Belief building that you are your own safety is not going to happen overnight, especially when our reactive natures are to point outward at the things that snow us in.

Some Things About Moving Resolutely

Later on, today I will be hosting free a workshop based on a post from the first week of January 2026 on being resolute verses making a resolution. That article and the free workshop later on today, are mediums for reaching people for workshops and intensives, as well as to provide clarity on the healing journey. whatever methods and tools people choose to combine. Moving resolutely in life is first and foremost a movement of the mind. The mind is not one thing, and many of us move in our lives like we move in our minds, with a resolution. I know I did. When I was writing my book, a part of me was thinking, “I can’t have wasted so much time, this book has to matter and mean something!”. I had a resolution to finish it, but then what, what was the deeper meaning?

When I got to “launch week”, I felt strange, more hidden than before, when I believed finishing would matter. The concept was to unburden myself, break free as a therapist who cannot reveal their own story, and come to share the tools I knew about it a new way, with more authenticity and integrity. What I realized that book launch week, was that when I was done with the book, I had a surface level kind of movement forward. But I was not done with myself, I was not more accomplished in myself, I wondered what the shift was, did I miss something? It didn’t feel great, but I hit the humility wall, with nowhere to go, and I saw inward. My other mind said, “facing things”, keep resolute in facing things is what it meant. The conscious mind said, “write a book that’s valuable”, the subconscious said, “something doesn’t feel right”, and the deeper unconscious mind is what I needed to tap into. It is that mind that started thinking of the free workshop and writing about being resolute.

I started to imagine all these resolutions people might have:

* I want to stop attracting narcissists and heal

* I want to really focus on managing my diabetes through diet and exercise

* I want to say no and speak up for myself

* I want to be the parent I needed

* I want to start doing the things I keep putting off

My deeper mind started to speak to me. What if we all just started to become resolute with “I AM”?

* I am healing

* I am focused

* I am vocal

* I am the parent I needed

* I am dedicated

What if anxiety fuels resolution, and calm is not the absence of anxiety, but self-trust in being resolute about what you are? Can you really not be ‘there’ yet if you are in the state of focused “I AM” in the simplest resolute way, without all the extra words of the resolution sentences above? I wanted to be an author, being an author may not last if I don’t write another book. Could I still call myself a writer? Does it matter? You can decide as you witness what comes up inside as you read, watch, and listen, however, I find that resolutely letting go, supporting humility, and focusing on “I AM” are steps that never felt more real or more true right now on a “snowed in” day than ever.

Follow-Along: Moving From Wanting to Being (“I Am” Thinking Practices)

Below is a guided sequence you can move through. It’s somatic, narrative, and gently invitational, it’s designed to help you encounter your inner world with humility rather than ambition.

1. Pause: The Snowstorm Moment

If you are like me, you don’t need to imagine this today, if not, imagine you cannot go anywhere. You can only be where you already are. You are homebound in a snowstorm.

Practice:

* Sit comfortably and take three slow breaths in focusing on the mouth closed and the breath in through the nostrils. This slows things down more than mouth open and enhances the boundary between you and outside of you.

* Say or think softly to yourself:“Nothing needs to be fixed or achieved right now”

* Let the nervous system settle into the felt reality of “staying.” Take another breath in, shrugging the shoulders up to the ears. On the exhale, let the staying fall deeper into you.

2. Notice the ‘Resolution Voice’ (“I want to…”)

Resolutions often come from a part that feels insufficient. When we think, “I want to…” we are in not being something. Emotionally, this is a fear or shame state, even if subconsciously.

Practice:

* Think of a resolution or personal goal you hold right now.

* Where did it come from?

* Is this voice trying to prove something?

Consider the concept of having an internal family system inside you. This internal family lives in your mind, they are different personalities or voices. Some manage and organize life, some respond to it with urgency, some are pushed down and hold vulnerable stories and feelings. Which of these parts of your mind’s inner dialog are speaking to you; manager parts, firefighter/impulsive parts, or exiled vulnerable parts you push down?

3. Invite Humility (Without Shame)

Even if you are not in your best moment of life, having nowhere to go, no goal to move to, is not dead-end. Humility is not collapsing—it’s softening. It’s stepping out of “proving” and into “truth-telling.”

Practice:Whisper internally:

* “Who I am in this moment is arriving to my awareness, I just have to witness what comes up.”

Feel the difference.

4. Identify the Truth Underneath (“I am…”)

Here we replace anxious wanting or the striving-reason with the being-reason.

Prompt:Look at your original resolution. Example:

“I want to start doing the things I keep putting off.”→ Ask: What is the truth beneath the want?

Now, invite yourself to move to potential “I am” reflections, for example:

* “I am someone who values keeping promises to myself.”

* “I am capable and motivated to start.”

* “I am already here in this activity.”

Important: “I am” statements must emerge organically, not as affirmations you force.

5. The ‘I Want To’ → ‘I Am’ Transformation

You’ll have to be more on your own here, but by now you are ready. I invite you start. The steps will still guide you, as will the fill in portion below. This is all inward seeing, there is no wrong way to engage or experience this.

* Write the current resolution.

* Identify the core value beneath it.

* Transform the sentence:

“I want to _______”→“I am someone who _______ because _______.”

This deepens the identity origin and purpose.

6. Anchor the Identity Shift

This will help you move from being to embodiment, which is the essence of the resolutely letting go skill in the title of the article/post.

Practice:Choose one “I am” truth that feels warmest, not strongest.

Then complete:

* When I am being this version of me, I tend to…(e.g., “I tend to listen more to myself and others,” “I tend to breathe more fully,” “I tend to stop comparing myself,” “I feel my purpose.”)

This maps identity to lived behaviors that you show up for and with internally, no matter the outward recognition or completion.

7. Micro-Integration

Here, the focus is on MICRO, meaning small. No grand action steps. Just small congruencies.

Ask:“What is one tiny act today that aligns with who I already am?”

If you have established an I AM messages clearly for yourself, you can link it to your humility through micro-integration. Every time you do them, your system will know you are in I AM

Examples:

* A slower consumption of that mouthful, enjoy chewing, tasting, feeling fed.

* One moment of eye contact with your face in the mirror, wink back.

* One intentional breath before speaking.

* Staying on the edge of the bed before lifting yourself, honoring your ability rise.

Humility turns being into practice.

In ending this time with you, I leave you with a gentle decision about which quotes work best for you, your humility, and resolutely letting go. Whatever you still have that weighs on you, it’s not all absolved by an article, movement, therapist, self-help concept, medication, or lifestyle change. Our largest letting go is that it is all a healing journey, everything that happens heals you if you learn to look inward, and repeatedly, over time. Face your instability, become resolute, let go of fixing and begin knowing your “I AM” capacity as your greatest accomplishment.

Quote Options for Your Ending

1. The Snowstorm Quote

“When there is nowhere left to go, the truth has space to arrive.”

2. The Humility Quote

“Humility is not shrinking; it is returning—quietly—to who you already are.”

3. The Identity Shift Quote

“The moment you stop trying to become, you meet the part of you that has been being all along.”

4. The Inner Resolution Quote

“Real change begins the moment your resolution becomes recognition: I already am the one who can live this way.”

5. The Presence Quote

“What you are seeking from the future is waiting for you in the present you.”

6. The Essence Quote

“You are not a project to complete. You are a presence to come home to.”

Reminders

We are on a journey here at Holding Space Subscription. I invite you to take the materials and wait to feel the inner invitation to begin. The author’s website is the most comprehensive source of all the materials I offer. Please leave me a review on Goodreads and/or Amazon if you’ve enjoyed my authorship so far!

The first You Are Not Broken University course is now opening and accepting enrollment: You Are Not Broken Introductory Intensive: Prepare to Arrive, Self-Invest! Look to this article to learn more about 3-day Therapy Intensives.

Lastly, a reminder that I have added a new feature to the Holding Space Subscription, Holding Space PLUS. This means that as a paid subscriber, at $5.99 a month, you can also direct message after a post and share what came up for you, as well as the feedback you would like:

* Affirming Feedback

* Guidance-Based

* Specific Therapeutic Plans to incorporate into your Therapy

* Validate points that you feel you processed through reading.

It’s up to you what type of feedback you would like.

Important Note: This is not a therapeutic intervention and does not include the essential component of getting to know your personal story. Please consider this as one supportive piece of your healing journey, ideally alongside therapy if needed. It is not intended for crisis situations or unprocessed trauma. If you’re seeking professional support, you can find a therapist here.

If you are like me, by the time I was in my twenties, I had already lived through several rock-bottom moments. This is why, when I bought my first brand-new car myself in my late twenties, the kind driven only by one owner, me, I carried a very specific belief: You must keep this scratch-free and spotless.

Looking back, I realize that car was a metaphor. I hoped that, like the car, my “new non-rock-bottom self” could remain unscathed if I was careful enough, somehow through the upkeep of this car. If I kept everything clean, controlled, and perfectly managed, then maybe I would be a good owner of my own life. Maybe the car would reflect my value or somehow my goodness. Maybe it is more typical of men, but this car was a metaphor for my approach to life, but I did not know it at the time. I wanted my car, my body, my approach to everything to be clean, spotless, and scratch resistant.

We carry so many subconscious messages from the memories we repress, and this one was broadcasting loudly beneath my twenty-something shell. I feared I had already damaged myself. I was terrified of continuing forward without finding a way to appear clean, good, efficient, untouched by the past. I wanted to be a person who never got scratched, bruised, or broken ever again.

And beneath that fear lived a deeper suspicion: that although many people had entered my story, actors and actresses with their own scripts, I was the one to blame for the pain. So, I learned to suppress emotions like fear, only to watch them reappear. We all suppress fear that returns as behaviors: perfectionism, avoidance, intellectualizing, apologizing, people-pleasing, compulsive exercise, bingeing, over functioning, caretaking, procrastinating, rushing, shrinking, peacekeeping, overworking, managing, smoothing things over, not following through, forgetting, arguing, assuming the worst, numbing out. It’s endless when we are inside it, we have to keep cycling through the behaviors to keep down the fears we have. There is no skill to this way of living, it is survival. Accomplishing this or that may occur, but fear fuels it all, it’s not grit, it’s s**t! There may be educational or intellectual achievement, but where we gain points in IQ, we lose out on EQ, and the emotional intelligence for fear is lost!

“Fear is a Mile Wide and an Inch Deep” ~Alex Hormozi

Fear has to be exercised; this is what I am learning now. Living in fear is not exercising it, it is constant swimming like a survivor, not an athlete with purpose. Swimming in this fear suppression ocean is the real risk. Beyond the fear of repeating any past pain, trauma, mistake, or loss, is the reality that we suffer our own thinking. In reality, moving towards what frightens us, which is our capacity to love and work at things we don’t know the outcome to, takes practice. Maybe what we want comes with the fear there is no support or resources for it, however, it would be wonderfully secure to exercise that thought out through self-inquiry, this is a secure exercise. You as the questioner, and questioning, “is it true?”, is a lap in a pool of your own construction, and it gets skilled over time. The thought that there is no support to become who you want to be, is all scratched up with flaws. It can’t be true, it’s true to the thinker, but what about the questioning part of you, can you exercise this version of you? Is it true that there is no support, 100% across the board?

I tried this on myself and found I was thinking about a few very specific areas where I felt I had no support. I saw no support in these areas of my life, so I kept focusing on getting it from them, not being fruitful, and seesawing between that it was either me or in people or systems and suffered. Then, I found my inquiring self. I signed up for a supportive program to help me think about resourcing ideas I had, this supported me, and I began seeing the areas for what they were, not the right source of support for what I wanted but I was lying to myself when I thought, “there is nothing supporting me!”.

Self-inquiry, often called, “The Work”, is practically guaranteed, like any exercise, not to be the actual ocean, and to be a lap pool for establishing stamina. Things outside of our fearful interpretations are rarely actual oceans, our thinking and behaving is the ocean. So, I am asking myself, what if I can master my stamina for fear? What if I can improve my capacity for it?

This doesn’t mean you triumph over fear, but I suspect you establish the stamina for it, which is mastery. So, what if fear is a lap pool in your own backyard. What if we are all millionaires with the capacity to pour some concrete and construct that exercise pool right in your own property? The property of you; heart, mind, body, and soul.

Healing from These Patterns

Healing begins when we recognize that these patterns: perfectionism, people-pleasing, avoidance, over functioning; are not flaws in our character. They are adaptations. They are evidence of how hard we worked to survive with the tools we had at the time. Every “scratch-avoidant” behavior once served a purpose: to keep us safe, accepted, or in control when we felt anything but.

But what protected us then constrains us now.

Healing is the process of gently separating who we were from who we are capable of becoming. It asks us to stop managing ourselves like an object that must stay pristine and instead learn to relate to ourselves like a living being, one that bruises, grows, softens, and renews.

To heal these patterns, we must first understand them in the context of The Phases of Healing from The Toolbox Approach® and highlighted in my new book and now therapy intensives and courses. I would be honored to have you take the free polls as these programs prepare for launching. Let’s consider healing in phases below:

1. Narrative Healing

This is where we begin telling the truth about ourselves, not the polished public stories, but the private ones we’ve hidden or edited. Here, we learn to name our patterns without shame and understand the origins of our fears. We explore the beliefs that quietly govern our behavior: If I’m not perfect, I’ll be rejected. If I slow down, everything will fall apart. If I’m honest about my needs, I’ll lose someone I love.Naming these stories doesn’t break us, it liberates us. The timeline of our experiences cannot often be told in the traditional way; here we reveal it to ourselves to see the messages rather than attempt to talk about them logically.

2. Reprocessing Healing

Patterns don’t live only in the mind; they live in the body. Fear becomes muscle tension. Shame becomes a collapsed posture. Hypervigilance becomes short breaths and racing thoughts. In this phase, we teach the body what safety feels like again. We release stored impulses. We update the nervous system. We learn that fear can rise and fall like a wave without taking us under.

Here, the utilization of reprocessing assumes we have missed something as a necessary part of our survival, not a flaw, mistake, weakness, or deficiency on our part. I recently had to purchase a new phone, despite the data transfer, some of the apps were not working, many needed a totally reconfigured log in process. They had forgotten parts of the old user I had been, they needed me to refresh, and I had to adapt to the changes. It was going to be, overall, the same experience, but also different. Reprocessing is necessary for many data holding devices, and the human body is no different.

Things that have been programmed a certain way will malfunction and we need to go deep into the process we used to find functional, and repair this process, hence, reprocessing. For me, my body woke up in need of movement ever since it began experiencing trauma resurfacing in my twenties. I had to reprocess that time period to see it, 20 years at least of fighting somatic memories until it had replaced compulsive exercise with somatically attuned ones. There is still urgency, but not to suppress, repress, and dissociate, but to move into the day gently. My body remembers it’s frailty, the duplicity of trusting itself and others, but it reprocessed it and created discernment, it knows how to start the day with truth now. Here, the body learns a new truth: I can survive the scratch. I can survive my own honesty.

3. Relational Healing

Once the story is understood and the body begins to soften, we start practicing new ways of being with others. This phase teaches us boundaries, self-attunement, honest expression, and compassionate connection. We learn to stay present with ourselves while staying connected to someone else, a skill many of us never learned growing up.Here we discover that we don’t have to perform goodness, manage every outcome, or disappear to belong.

Healing these patterns is not about erasing the past. It’s about expanding who we are allowed to be now.

We stop fearing scratches because we begin to realize:The goal was never to stay spotless, the goal was always to become whole.

How The Toolbox Approach® Holds These Patterns With Precision and Compassion

The Toolbox Approach® was created because healing is not guesswork, and you cannot flip through it, scroll for it, or stumble upon it. It is also not about willpower or forcing change despite how talented the motivational speakers of the day may be at their inspirational messages. Healing is a process with structure, rhythm, and predictable emotional movements, just like the psyche itself. The psyche is the entire human mind, the subconscious (habits/recent memories), unconscious (deeper traumas out of our awareness), and the conscious. Conscious motivation is about 5% of what we do. The psyche encompasses our thoughts, emotions, memories and drives our behavior. So, this is where healing must occur in phases.

Each phase: Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing, requires different skills, different nervous system support, and different forms of self-understanding. When people don’t know the phase they’re in, they often try to use the wrong tools at the wrong time, which leaves them feeling stuck, ashamed, or “broken.”

The Toolbox Approach® makes the healing journey visible. It shows you:

* What phase you’re in

* Why you’re feeling what you’re feeling

* Which tools work in that phase, and which ones don’t

* When to slow down and when to lean in

* How to move safely and confidently from one phase to the next

Instead of trying to stay “scratch-free,” the approach teaches you how to meet life’s scratches with understanding, not fear; awareness, not collapse.

This clarity is what differentiates survival patterns from healing tools.

BONUS: Exercising Somatic Work: The Missing Link in Releasing Old Patterns

Patterns that relate to fear suppression we are trying to exercise out of our systems like perfectionism, avoidance, numbing, people-pleasing, and over functioning don’t resolve through insight alone. You can understand a pattern and still repeat it. This is because the body carries a memory of threat, even after the threat is gone.

Somatic work bridges this gap.

In The Toolbox Approach®, somatic practices are woven through each phase:

In Narrative Healing:

Somatic awareness helps you notice how your body responds to certain memories or beliefs. You learn to sense the tightening, bracing, shrinking, or over-activating, before your mind rushes in to fix or deny.

In Reprocessing Healing:

The nervous system is guided into completing stress cycles it never had the chance to finish. You learn to release stored activation, move emotions through the body, and create safety from the inside out.

In Relational Healing:

Somatic grounding helps you stay present with yourself while staying connected to another person. This is where new relational patterns are formed, safe boundaries, honest communication, emotional presence, self-attunement. Often, this starts with a therapist or healing community that can be found in the intensives, workshops, or healthy movement in community. Some experience it in places like writing groups, hiking groups, book clubs, or volunteering. Family may seem like the place to start, but often the somatic work tells us that trust has to be built on fresh connections, before it is tried out there.

Somatic work teaches you a truth that changes everything:

You are not fragile. You are adaptable. Your body can learn safety again.

A Note on “The Body Keeps the Score”

While renowned trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk has influenced the field of trauma research and how this is applied to therapy in tremendously groundbreaking ways that have catapulted the way, “the body keeps the score”. I wanted to add a disclaimer here that this information is not absolute, the body does not hold a score board of winning and losing experiences, it’s more like it holds responses to the losses as severe directives to fight, flight, freeze or fawn. In this post, I embedded a song I wrote that describes this.

I emphasize this method of creatively describing a body holding trauma because, as much as we research, this can hold a masculine energy of healing trauma, and as a society, we tend to explain it well with this energy, but lack methods to attune, not to how it is held scientifically, but how it feels in life when trauma held in the body, holds back the music in our souls. In sharing this, I exercise my fear of claiming myself to be a songwriter, an expert in trauma in my own right, and someone trying to boldly indicate the phases of healing are yours to co-create with the material I provide as an invitation but not a prescription on how to heal. In your free subscription here, you will find paid subscriptive ways to self-invest, the body knows, take your time, listen.

Tapping (EFT) for Healing the Fear of “Scratches”

Below are gentle, phase-aware tapping script you can use or share with clients if you are a therapist, share with your therapist if you use that tool, or share in any way that fits your life. Each script follows the Emotional Freedom Technique structure and honors the trauma-informed principle of choice.

Tapping Script for Fear (See Video Above)

* Karate Chop Point, on the side of the hand where you would Karate Chop, tapping (see video above and follow along): “Even though I feel like I must stay perfectly safe, I deeply honor the part of me who learned this.”

* Move To Between the Pinky and Ring Finger Knuckles, tapping: “I am spiritually strong, whole, and capable to face this”

* Inner Eyebrow: “This pressure to stay perfectly safe…”Side of Eye: “…this fear of getting scratched…”Under Eye: “…this need to appear okay…”Under Nose: “…it makes sense I learned this.”Chin: “I honor how hard I’ve worked to survive.”Collarbone: “I don’t have to be this kind of safe.”Under Arm: ““I am spiritually strong, whole, and capable to face this”Top of Head: “I am learning a new way.”

Bringing It All Together: Why to Consider a Three-Day Healing Intensive

When patterns have guided our lives for years, it can feel overwhelming to imagine where to even begin. Healing can seem abstract, scattered, or endless. But when healing is organized into phases, when you can see where you are, why you’re there, and what tools belong to that stage, everything becomes within your capacity to learn, exercise and practice. This is exactly what the Three-Day Healing Intensive is designed to offer: clarity, containment, and a structured path forward.

Over the course of three days, you move through the phases of Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing with depth, direction, and professional guidance.

The intensive does not replace long-term healing; it helps your nervous system know inner work is within your capacity. The choice of three is no coincidence. By the time you have repeated the structure inner work of the intensive the third time, you will no longer be susceptible to the fear that creates stretching it out too much to create repatterning, where therapy often fails. Remember, in therapy, a you that likes to avoid change subconsciously, arranges it and only can select times that are available, diverting healing journeys for convenience, despite it being a therapeutic hour. Therapy intensives accelerate understanding, clarify direction, and organize the work ahead so you are no longer wandering, self-blaming, or trying to heal yourself with guesswork.

You receive personalized support through:

* 2.5 hours of coursework each day to understand the phases and your patterns

* 1.5 hours of therapy each day to apply the tools to your personal story

* 1 hour of coaching each day to integrate healing into relationships, career, health, and everyday life

* A bonus half-day group session for reflection, shared wisdom, and expanded insight per your free decision after the three days is completed

The structure of the intensive allows you to see your healing in a way that makes sense. You leave not “fixed,” but informed, grounded, and empowered. You leave with a plan, a direction, and tools you understand, not tools that overwhelm you, but tools that feel like your own.

Most importantly, you leave with the sense that healing is not something you have to earn, perfect, or chase, but it is something you are allowed to organize, inhabit, and grow into. This is the purpose of The Toolbox Approach®. This is the intention of the Three-Day Healing Intensive. And this is the beginning of returning to yourself; whole, imperfect, human, and finally unafraid of the scratches that shaped you. Arrange Your Discovery Call Here. This setup ensures the insurance covered portions that follow the intensive, at least two sessions post the experience, are covered, so please have your information handy. If you want to send a direct message to arrange a call in a different way, please let me know your circumstances and we can see if we can arrange something.

Other Stuff

✅ Please take this FREE poll✅ Promote the cause and help spread the invitation to heal! You can explore a less intensive option at the polling site if that appeals or just take the FREE poll!

If this doesn’t call to you just yet, your voice still matters to me. Your healing matters to me. I want to hear you! I want to serve your journey and clear that path, your answers are vital to this cause!

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

When we fail to tell the truth about ourselves, our lives become half-lived. We move through the world with survival skills in place of tools for healing, filling the gaps with fixes that never reach the root. We miss ourselves; our wholeness, our depth, and settle for fragments of what we could be.

For centuries, wisdom has whispered the same message: Know thyself. Real knowledge is not in rushing to repair what we think is broken, nor in chasing the illusion of a quick fix. It is in pausing, looking inward, and discovering what we do not yet know. Healing is not a destination, it is a journey through phases of mind, body, and spirit that hold deeper objectives than simply “feeling better.” These phases lead to authentic integration, not the covering of brokenness.

Why Phased Healing Matters

Most approaches to healing focus on fixing symptoms or solving what feels wrong. But true transformation requires a framework; a way to see your healing as a layered process rather than a single event. The Toolbox Approach® introduces The Phases of Healing, which organize this journey into three essential stages:

* Narrative Healing – Understanding and reshaping the stories you tell yourself.

* Reprocessing Healing – Working with the nervous system and body to release stored patterns.

* Relational Healing – Rebuilding trust and connection with yourself and others.

These phases are not arbitrary, they reflect how the mind, body, and spirit integrate change. When you see your healing in phases, you stop chasing quick fixes and start building authentic wholeness. Below, there is an opportunity to complete the poll regarding if this could be right for you, you can head there now as well for additional details on the phases and what they include generally.

Why an Intensive? Isn’t Healing Supposed to Take Time?

Yes! And that’s the point. A three-day intensive does not replace the lifelong journey of healing. It accelerates clarity. In three days, you gain a map of your healing process, identify what phase you’re in, and learn the tools for moving forward. This democratizes healing, making it accessible and actionable for anyone, regardless of where they start.

Instead of wandering through trial and error, you leave with a plan:

* What additional therapy might support you

* Which lifestyle changes align with your goals

* How to approach relationships and conversations differently

* Where to focus your energy for authentic growth

What You’ll Experience

Each day of the 3-day intensive includes:

* 2.5 hours of coursework – Learn the phases and tools for each stage

* 1.5 hours of therapy – Apply insights to your personal story

* 1 hour of coaching – Explore real-life applications for career, relationships, and health

Plus, a bonus 4th half-day group session for reflection, feedback, and community support—completely free (offer sent to accept or decline after the experience).

Why This Approach Works

The Toolbox Approach® was born from deliberate healing in my own life and over 20 years of professional experience as a therapist. I’ve seen what happens when people try to “fix” themselves without understanding the phases of healing—they stay stuck in cycles of survival. This curriculum changes that. It gives you tools, structure, and clarity to organize your healing journey.

If you are interested in exploring a more passive approach to The Toolbox Approach®, my introductory book will help you familiarize you with the first phase of healing. Although the phases can be non-linear and repeated, which is more evident in the intensives, this book can start you out on the concept, engage you in my personal story, and share short examples of individuals in their sessions, all while being a slow and steady read that can be much like traditional therapy, digested over months and not condensed into days, a week, or even a month, if that is more your pace.

Ready to Begin?

See below for a diagram of how this compares to traditional therapy and expands it. If you’ve been searching for a way to move beyond survival and into wholeness, this is your invitation. Three days can change the way you see yourself—and your future.

Join the intensive. Discover the phases. Organize your healing journey.

Why We Share Pricing Transparently

Therapy intensives are not covered by insurance, and we believe it’s important to be upfront about that. To help you make an informed decision, we provide a clear comparison between the cost of a three-day intensive and what traditional therapy might look like when covered by insurance with a copay. This isn’t about monetizing healing; it’s about democratizing access and empowering choice.

Our goal is to give you the information you need to self-discern whether this experience aligns with your needs and resources. By showing the structure and value of the intensive alongside traditional therapy costs, you can see the difference in scope, depth, and time investment. Transparency ensures you can choose what feels right for your healing journey.

ANNOUNCING THE POWER OF THERAPY INTENSIVES! ✨✨ ✨

Your healing journey deserves clarity, organization, and transformation.

You can also take the first step toward mind, body, and spirit alignment today with the free poll. This poll further describes the approach and has three follow-up questions to consider.

✅ Please take this FREE poll✅ Promote the cause and help spread the invitation to heal! You can explore a less intensive option at the polling site if that appeals or just take the FREE poll!

If this doesn’t call to you just yet, your voice still matters to me. Your healing matters to me. I want to hear you! I want to serve your journey and clear that path, your answers are vital to this cause!

Really Ready?

Before the intensive begins, you’ll have a personalized discovery call to tailor the experience to your unique needs. These calls are being scheduled now at the link provided, exclusively on Mondays and up to March 2nd, 2026. I will be holding a limited number of intensives from March—June. Membership for a self-directed classroom experience only with You Are Not Broken University will likely launch in the Summer 2026, and another round of intensives may not arrive until the fall, so please take this limited offer under careful consideration.

We can expand your call as needed and take whatever time is necessary to ensure you know what you can plan to get out of this for your healing. The link will require you to share insurance information so that we both know and can agree ahead of time to follow up with at least two post-intensive traditional therapy sessions covered by your insurance. These sessions would be ones in which you are free to schedule in a manner that works for you in collaboration with what transpired for you in your intensive and spread out in line with maintaining healing. This will also ensure you have access to a portal for direct messaging regarding your upcoming intensive that is health information protected. Arrange Your Call Here

Planning & Preparation: Organized Healing Before You Begin

What traditional therapy can leave out is a clear and collaborative overview of what you are getting from the experience. After your discovery call, a detailed pre-assessment will be sent to you to help tailor the classroom experience and understand a few more things about what you’ve been healing already, in more detail than our call most likely because you have time to sit with it and fill it out in privacy. Then, we will clarify goals and expectations, setting them clearly and reviewing things before you are asked to officially enroll. As a reminder, you will be getting coursework designed for your healing but also designed in the three phases, you will be getting therapy, and then also coaching.

I will begin to customize your experience and start to send you things like the links for sessions and materials, the breaks between sections of the day, and guide you on self-care needed for the three days for an optimal experience. At times, we may pause your enrollment if the self-care piece, such as adequate rest, or reduced outside responsibilities, or even a quiet and uninterrupted location, cannot be ensured. We can always hold your registration and revisit the process over again when you are ready.

Other Resources

As always, my author website stores a wealth of information that is free for you. This site includes free meetup workshops, the link to Patreon Courses, the Spotify Podcast, ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always, and more!

Lastly, a reminder that I have added a new feature to the Holding Space Subscription, Holding Space PLUS. This means that as a paid subscriber, at $5.99 a month, you can also direct message after a post and share what came up for you, as well as the feedback you would like:

* Affirming Feedback

* Guidance-Based

* Specific Therapeutic Plans to incorporate into your Therapy

* Validate points that you feel you processed through reading.

It’s up to you what type of feedback you would like.

Important Note: This is not a therapeutic intervention and does not include the essential component of getting to know your personal story. Please consider this as one supportive piece of your healing journey, ideally alongside therapy if needed. It is not intended for crisis situations or unprocessed trauma. If you’re seeking professional support, you can find a therapist here.

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Resolute Vs. Resolution

To make a resolution is to think about change. It is cognitive and based on using your thinking part of your brain to come up with a story that is inspirational. For example, “I want to wake up happy to be alive each day this year”, or “I want to carve out more time for that creative side income idea this year”, or even, “I want to date emotionally available people and stop being afraid to walk away this year”. Beautiful, hopeful, and completely logically framed. To think about becoming better is human, it also presents something logical and attainable, while having a darker or harder to grasp side to it; much like humans themselves in fact. All of us possess the lighter aspects of ourselves and the darker parts, and resolutions tend to leave this latter factor out. Change has about 2% to do with forming a resolution, it may be the trailhead, clearly marked and very hopeful. It’s not exactly the beginning of walking the trail, but it marks it. A resolution, however, will never be the change itself, it’s 2% at most and the rest is a harder process.

On the other hand, to be resolute, is to already become something. You can’t phrase it; you have to feel it. It’s more of a mindset, with distractions pulling us back to the easier concept or resolution at the beginning of the trailhead. I face this as a lifelong therapist whose helpfulness presents as one thing while being deeply informed by another. My dark nights of the soul are what inform my work the most. When I write and title a book, “You Are Not Broken” and ask readers to invite themselves to brokenness as a feeling that should not be fixed but broken free from through a healing concept with tools, I am not speaking from expertise of the logical kind. It’s a mask, my therapist side, although it is authentic, educated, specialized, hopeful, and conscientious towards humans who need my organized care and dedication.

After 20 years and many specializations, as well as more recent author and content creator advancements towards helping, the progress that moves me and the individuals I work with is to become resolute about facing the unmasked self. When we “hold space” as we aim to do in sessions and here in this subscription, we are doing an intensive facing things. We are not meeting weekly to chat, but resolute on looking inward. It takes space to do it, space to learn the tools for it, it takes resolute determination and acceptance that the knowing things side will want to fix and the being side is less known and both will face things with resistance. People are learning hour by hour when they become resolute that they will hold a degree, a job, a relationship, an impressive investment, a quality everyone approves or solution to the fear of hair loss or aging, and they will still never hold themselves.

To be resolute is to embrace the struggle of holding yourself with the utmost care, compassion, clarity, curiosity, connection, courage, calmness, and creativity. It means to stop setting expectations that this or that will equal your happiness and accept you are complicated, everyone else is too, and we are all waking up a mess at times. Your therapist, coach, influencer, mentor, and or anyone you go to for guidance openly or discreetly, all have masked pain they have to face. Let’s look at some statistics on how common it is for the human race to struggle on any given day:

* On average, most adults cry about 1-3 times per month as a natural emotional release. Research indicates that women cry more frequently than men, with women averaging 5-17 times per month and men about 1-4 times per month. Factors such as emotional state, stress, and life events can influence crying frequency, but these averages provide a general guideline for what is considered normal.

* Globally, an estimated 301 million people were living with an anxiety disorder in 2019, making it the most prevalent mental health condition worldwide.

* On average, most people experience dread of going to work, often referred to as "work dread." A survey found that 87% of workers report feeling a sense of dread at least once a month, with 49% experiencing this dread at least once a week.

Newsflash! You are Sensitive Whether You Go to Therapy or Not!

Ask yourself right now, if you close your mouth while reading this and breath only through your nostrils, and then out the same way, do you feel it? Now, open your mouth and try to breath the same way. With your mouth open, try to get the same feeling of the breath going only in and out your nostrils. You can’t. We are all that sensitive. Whether you take the time to breath in deeply with intention and care or not, your body feels it. All of us our holding back our sensitivities and I have dedicated my life purpose to easing the detrimental blow that has on our true selves. Inside sensitivity is a gold mine of information. When I submerged all my memory of childhood sensitivities for the moved on together presentation of a therapist. I sent my sensitivity outward, and I paid a price. I am at the extreme end of the spectrum, developing C-PTSD, however it is our severe cases that inform the pathways of healing found in The Toolbox Approach® written about inside Holding Space Subscription.

Below is a memory about hiding sensitivity. Be careful with yourself as you read it if you have childhood trauma or any sexual violation in your history. I share this memory about hiding sensitivity because I only know the extreme version of it. However, as a therapist, I share it knowing everyone I have ever met with has had the same lesson, hide it, and if you can’t, live with not belonging, addiction, eating disorders, relationship problems, working the wrong job, or living the wrong life and accept that is the way it is. I propose that is not the way it is, we can learn to face things and rewire our sensitivity, find the tools to see the story of our fragmented self and determine our healing back to wholeness process.

A Memory:

When I was about 4.5 years old, I started to become noticeably “sensitive”. My mother could not put anything denim on my lower half and opted for corduroy. While formerly, my eyes would light up at the OshKosh B’gosh label, now I wasn’t sure if it would feel good. It was luck they made corduroy; it was an easy switch. My mother never knew, and I had hidden it from myself in hiding it from her, the denim jean crotch was too rough on my skin. Between my legs, an older neighbor was playing a forceful game that needed to be kept secret. I was sensitive yes, but to something darker than rough fabric. I didn’t know who to be good for, a troubled playmate alone in his boyhood world in a way I understood a little too much at that age, or my mother, who needed me to be quick to get ready for preschool, and happy that she found one with gymnastics. This was my first lesson on hiding sensitivity.

The stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and the beliefs we have about “how” we are, or should be, create the trajectory of our lives. Holidays that say “be happy” externalize this pattern of telling a story of how we should be if we are happy and doing this year correctly. I have held therapy sessions on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day for two decades, not because people need my help to navigate new changes or get themselves to motivate and see the need to change, but because they need a safe place for a different energy at this time. Many need some sense that someone will lean in and understand the darkness of the self that always requires curiosity, care, courage, and connection, and not a concept that one needs to be resolute in getting away from it and starting fresh. Resolute, or resolution, inside these sessions then becomes purposeful, determined, and an unwavering noticing of our human design, which includes our own darkness.

Counseling, coaching, self-help, and therapy offer people a safe way to heal and to navigate the path to crafting a new, more authentic personal narrative. Therapy that is trauma-informed can teach how to have a better conversations with different parts of our character, and it can become a tool, and offer people a “map,” a way through the journey of redefining themselves as more whole, more resilient and more empowered. What if there was a way to provide people a simple vocabulary to help them find the words to explain those subtle and indefinable places where they feel that there is “more” to who they are but they can’t express it?

Working with our sub-personalities and seeing the human design that they prevent from manifesting in life, verifies what people often hope is true about themselves, they are blocked in some way, and not exactly from mistakes, traumas, or deficits. We have that need to reflect and dissect all of these things, they are unstable inside us and block the nervous system from knowing the threats of today from the threat of the past. We do need to rid the repression, suppression and dissociation that marks our personal narratives. However, that “secret” part of the inner terrain of their heart, that they want to share with the world, but they often don’t have the tools or the language to express, that is what is really the pain that is faced in a Relational Healing Phase of the registered trademarked, The Toolbox Approach, I have come to use on myself and in sessions.

The power of this language became clear to me after a trend in which, 73-year-old women, 65-year-old men, and all configurations of couples above 50 start to cry or shudder and become speechless with emotion on and off during the 60 minutes we spend together. They indicate to me they feel “seen” for the first time in their lives, not as much by me but with this language and by a new Self Energy side of them. Self-Energy can be defined by a true self that can see all the masked and reactive ones and can even lean into the vulnerable exiled parts of our Self too. Many tell me, and I have told myself when Self Energy comes to me, “I knew it was there”. No matter how long anyone has waited for it, I always feel the same resolute way. No one should have to wait this long to feel “seen”, and yet it is a darkness many of us carry, we cannot see our true self.

Be Late to Leadership, It’s Okay

Now, we are getting to the part of the article that provides a tool, which is always our mission here at Holding Space Subscription. You can start to explore the first course in the Phases of Healing curriculum for You Are Not Broken University here. This course is about coming into Radical Self-Investment by parsing out the difference between the masked self of your personality, the way your body and mind hold a fragmented narrative of what has happened up to now, and how to see your human design blockage as the source of your pain. This is a great starter course as it is a therapy intensive that will accelerate anything you do afterwards and does not need any prerequisite trauma work, therapy, or self-help experience. If you have that, the inner work for you in this course will inform you more precisely on what is stuck despite all your efforts thus far.

This course and this tool are about Radical Self-Investment in a Self-Led Life. They are about finding Self-Energy as a hidden conversation inside yourself that is the source you seek. Rumination, overthinking, and dwelling are tools that thinking uses to give you that sense of figuring things out, but the leader in all of us gets blocked that way, and we outsource to solutions rather than deeper knowing. Deeper knowing takes patience. The leader archetype looks a certain way in many cultures, which is why we fall asleep to it inside ourselves.

When I was a child, everything in our home pointed to who held the leadership role. It was all encompassing, my father was not only the man of the house, but he was also the epitome of leadership. There were books everywhere as proof he studied leadership, his ties created a cavern in his closet I could never poke behind, and everywhere we went his beard would make him the recognizable leader of some other place outside my home. He went to special conferences and brought home computers before they were sold in stores, when he led schools, the meetings all required his attendance. When I had moments of leadership in my mind, like I figured something out on my own or knew something intuitively without needing guidance, it seemed to pale in comparison, and I definitely did not look the part with my blond hair, sweet face and emotional blue eyes.

It was a given that education was important in our family and that these meetings he attended, as well as the continuous stream of books he devoured, and systems and people that needed his leadership were crucial to his competency. The drive for excellence and competency in the name of serving at the highest level was embedded into the fabric of my being. Likewise, having a professional career was the expectation for me if I wanted to walk in the footsteps of my father. These messages are handed down subliminally. Like the hamburger commercial that seems to be showcasing its product, all the while demanding you are hungry for it right now. I was hungry for the leadership my father commanded but sat in front of a screen separated from it. I did not look the part, so I shrunk from it. In graduate school, we were made to do a project that showed who we are, and I decided to come at it through vulnerability, displaying one of my biggest mistakes that had shaped me up to then. My instructor worked for IBM, typing what employees were leadership material. He told me I should consider a leadership role trajectory. I still, in all my preparation to become something more through graduate school completion, shrunk from the compliment, “my father is the leader in the family”.

It took me years to move into a protected version of Self-Leadership and Self-Energy without challenging the pedestal of what a leader should look like in the larger cultures I still had to exist inside. I started to gain expertise that we need to heal through becoming trauma-informed, an approach that emphasizes not cognitive understanding but how we access the unconscious through body tension and breath, through awareness and relaxation, and a sense of memory that is not episodic and remains out of order in the way the body holds it. Somatic Experiencing, started to form my foundational understanding of how to listen and hold space for the possibility of who people are beneath their defensive body tensions.

A late leadership started to rise in me, and I can see how this is a tool for the individuals I work with and those of you reading. Inner work is about transformation from the person we think we are to the person we really are underneath the changes our body made to survive our pain. In the end of cognitive explanations, the person we think we are needs to see the person we really are and how we can’t be anyone else or pain will continue in this pattern of holding it. This seed became my organizing principle, my guiding light for all the educational paths that I was to follow.

Awakening to my own repressed trauma it became clear that I needed more ground to meet my clients’ emotional struggles and I created The Toolbox Approach®, and the phases of healing. Still, sales from my first book on it, “You Are Not Broken. Break free from the fixing yourself mindset with The Toolbox Approach”, did not explode, and I got tired of people connecting deeply to their core non-healing, then running out of time in sessions to show them the organized path, including body work. I couldn’t sell them the book in sessions, and I didn’t want to compromise my authenticity to sell it like content creators and other therapists gone authors were showing me was the path. I wanted to be doing the next phase of work with them inside their leadership. I wanted and still want everyone to have the tools but not to force them. The low sales and winter cold had me doubting myself tremendously. I still woke up with trauma patterns and that left me feeling unresolved and like I was a fraud to have written “You Are Not Broken”. However, this is late leadership b******t suffering we will all go through using this tool. So, what, you are late to it, you are new to it, it is not the familiar kind of leadership that is frequently modeled.

The Leadership Tool

First, consider what type of human design you are. Human Design is a theory that explains how we’re all meant to use our energy to succeed in life. The way you create and use your energy determines your Human Design Type. It is related to your birth but at this point, we are using it as a Self-Leadership tool and more intuitively. If you look at one of these categories and feel it is true but also know it’s not how you are actually operating in the world at the moment, that is a core aspect of your troubles. Despite how microscopic we get exploring our traumas, relationship patterns, mental health ups and downs, or our family of origin, this is often the leader inside’s main priority, to see the bigger picture of your pain. Everyone is one of 5 Human Design types: Projectors, Generators, Manifestors, Manifesting Generators, and Reflectors. We will review the types briefly here, for a more in-depth exploration you can consider taking the course.

Manifestors

Manifestors are initiators. If you are this type, you’re the one who gets the ball rolling. Natural leaders and visionaries, you are willing to carve your own path and often encourage others to follow you. Manifestors make up approximately 9% of the population. You also inspire others. You’re passionate about your ideas and love sharing them with others. When the other Human Design types see your excitement, it often inspires them to work on their own goals and passions. Manifestors work best alone. It’s enjoyable for them to play by their own rules and they may struggle with a traditional work schedule. When an idea strikes, a Manifestor devotes all their attention to it and may become frustrated if someone interrupts. If you are this type, you may want to do everything yourself and struggle with delegating tasks to others

Generators

Generators are meant to create. Your role would be to make dreams into reality and bring ideas to life. You’re full of energy and always ready to work on projects you’re passionate about. Generators make up 35% of the population. These types perfect their craft and are highly skilled at the things they enjoy. You understand how important it is to learn about your work and take pride in following through until the job is finished. Generators are responders. You don’t initiate things, but you respond to ideas that spark your interest. Prioritizing excitement in your work can help you feel more aligned with your aura and attract positive people and opportunities. You may become frustrated easily because you need to use all of your energy in a productive way. If you don’t, you may feel stuck and like you aren’t living up to your potential. Avoid this by making time to do the things that bring you the most joy.

Manifesting Generator

Manifesting Generators are a hybrid between Manifestors and Generators and are worker bees who thrive on multitasking and staying busy. Whereas Generators might have one specific passion, Manifesting Generators love moving between different projects. Manifesting Generators also make up 35% of the population. They are charismatic and as a Manifesting Generator, you may find that others are drawn to you for your passion. You uplift others and always find the quickest way to make things happen. However, these types may give up easily. Manifesting Generators love to hop from project to project, but this sometimes means abandoning things before they’re finished. You may grow frustrated at something you can’t figure out and move on to something new rather than work to solve the problem.

Projectors

Projectors are advisors and guides. Projectors’ goal is to understand, recognize, and guide others. As a projector, you offer a new way of doing things and show others new ways to succeed. You ask the right questions and make others feel known and understood. Projectors make up about 20% of the population. You are good at reading energies of others. Because of your openness as a Projector, you’re naturally good at reading and understanding others. This allows you to succeed at things like networking, organizing groups, and recognizing talent in others. You’re prone to burn out. Projectors cannot create their own energy like some other Human Design types. Since you must draw your energy from others, it’s easy for you to burn out. When this happens, you might seek recognition from others and attempt to do everything yourself. For you to succeed, you must wait to be invited.

Reflectors

This type is very rare and makes up about 1% of the population. Reflectors see and reflect others. Reflectors get their name from their ability to reflect other auras. As a reflector, you have the natural ability to read and understand others. You may often blend in with your environment as a way of protecting yourself from feeling overwhelmed by others’ energies. Reflectors notice things others don’t. Reflectors are deeply attuned to the world around them, and they often pick up on things others miss. If you’re a reflector, you see the potential for what the world could be. You might feel disappointed in the world around you. Because Reflectors see all of humanity’s potential, they can feel frustrated by reality. You see the gap between what currently is and what could be and feel disappointed with the current state of things. You experience life very differently from the other types, so you may struggle with feeling lonely and misunderstood.

What You are Not Living is Your Pain, What You are Living is Your Pain, Get Out of The Struggle

I am in this moment now, late leadership. I have reflector qualities, but I have been operating as a generator who fell into the trap of needing to use all my energy to push and work for what I wanted to manifest for others before fully manifesting it for myself. I have manifesting capacities, but I have to be careful that I draw them inward. Inside my profession, I am now steeped in an alternative lifestyle and adverse to the medical model, with an oppositional love/hate relationship with the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). I am immensely intrigued by systems, including the healthcare system but feel the diagnostic pathologizing of people, while initially helpful in some cases and sometimes important, is in many cases dismissive and underestimated people’s capacities to organize a healing journey of the mind, body, and spirit regardless of a medical or mental health diagnosis. The phases of healing: Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing addresses all three of what ails us, Mind, Body, and Spirit. Nothing can be diagnosed that tells that story, and if we don’t see it, find the language for it, we are all in darkness and non-healing.

So, if you're not living your type or can see its pitfalls are not something to fix but to step wisely into and lead rather than suffer from, you are starting to use this tool. The rest is done by committing to writing down what you notice after reading this. Writing is a pathway into the subconscious; we were given it because some human design larger than us knew our personalities would form strongly as protection for surviving the first phase of our becoming. Sometimes this is a long phase. Wherever you are in your growth, you can notice this now and start writing from the Self perspective. Here, the question is always, “I am curious about that, what would you have me know?”. The leadership we are looking for is not led by fixing, but by curiosity. Your angry at your progress, get curious, “Anger at my progress, what would you have me know?”. At first it will speak all the lies that you are too late, you are too fearful, and too tired all the time. Look back at your style, the complaining will show you how to lead, not fix. You are you, that does not have to change, but a failure to lead your life hurts profoundly

A Parting Story

Once upon a time there lived a soul trapped in darkness. It was surrounded by lighted paths like golden threads that were linked to its prison. The threads were stories. When the soul held its ear to each story it could hear the life that was there, who the characters were, what was happening, and even the subconscious thoughts as things transpired. The soul knew it could pick one of the lighted paths and free itself. However, it would hesitate, wondering if they were all trapped too and it was this darkness where it was that was the lighted path for each of the storylines. Was it a trick? The soul realized it would have to be tricked and pick a path because where it was, it had no intuition for knowing and would have to hope that it would come with time. So, the soul allowed itself to be tricked, or rather it chose as best it could without intuition. It memorized the darkness, how it felt, and told itself that somehow, this would be an anchor to come back to when it knew more and could look down in peace knowing what the lighted path is and what is the darkness and understanding how both can coexist.

Reminders

We are on a journey here at Holding Space Subscription. I invite you to take the materials and wait to feel the inner invitation to begin. The author’s website is the most comprehensive source of all the materials I offer. Please leave me a review on Goodreads and/or Amazon if you’ve enjoyed my authorship so far!

The first You Are Not Broken University course is now opening and accepting enrollment: You Are Not Broken Introductory Intensive: Prepare to Arrive, Self-Invest!

Lastly, a reminder that I have added a new feature to the Holding Space Subscription, Holding Space PLUS. This means that as a paid subscriber, at $5.99 a month, you can also direct message after a post and share what came up for you, as well as the feedback you would like:

* Affirming Feedback

* Guidance-Based

* Specific Therapeutic Plans to incorporate into your Therapy

* Validate points that you feel you processed through reading.

It’s up to you what type of feedback you would like.

Important Note: This is not a therapeutic intervention and does not include the essential component of getting to know your personal story. Please consider this as one supportive piece of your healing journey, ideally alongside therapy if needed. It is not intended for crisis situations or unprocessed trauma. If you’re seeking professional support, you can find a therapist here.

Welcome back to Holding Space Subscription, we are going to keep digging right into what it takes to organize this healing journey everyone keeps talking about by being clear and direct, a healing journey takes an approach. You do not have to subscribe to the one I promote, The Toolbox Approach® in its full programming, just grasp the message that there are phases of healing that you will need to see for yourself as much as possible. They are paced, organized, and ongoing, and you contribute to them. Yes, that means lifelong commitment, but in a good way. Life is hard; it can’t be that a healing journey ends, you get off the ride, and you're living with the 1%. Other content creators may have come to the journey directly through the explosion of their influence; they realized inner work can give you a boost, and that is valuable, but the healing journey is not something you boost; it is something you organize and commit to. I have been at this for 40 years and did not even realize it, 20 of those years are as a therapist, and it’s really the last six I could say I organized the journey and it’s sticking. Change like this is gradual, and sometimes my own concepts feel like perpetual prescription medication I have to keep taking, and I feel broken. Then I realize, something is off inside, not everything, but something, and yes, that is most definitely why I need my tools. Today’s focus is on Radical Self-Investment. So, let’s dive into this!

Suffering is Optional

I woke up still inside a nightmare, even though I was thinking about it all at once in the present, and with urgency. What did it mean? I had been shouting, “You took something I will never get back,” and I began wondering if my whole life of helping was a reaction to traumas I kept trying to repress, suppress, and dissociate from. I am not who I was supposed to be; this is a mask! This is the best attempt I could make at life. Did I think, or send a message subliminally to myself, that I would be of most value and always included if I remained helpful, understanding, and sweet-natured? I had become the trauma expert I had aimed for, and I created a life away from much of the pain, but I woke up in a nightmare. Is this really who I am? What if I missed a chance to really be me? So, who is this? Who am I?

The Greek philosopher Epictetus said that “we are disturbed not by what happens to us, but by our thoughts about what happens.” As soon as I grasp the truth in my various journaling and meditation practices, sometimes days and weeks’ worth, I see it, me suffering my own thoughts of how things are. For example, “no one is supporting me, I can’t keep lifting myself up to do this every day, how will I ever get to where I want to be?” I hear this in myself and sense it in the individual therapy-goers I meet with. I even sense it in coffee shop conversations I overhear muffled remnants of. There are many unspoken variations of it in all of our minds. It’s the elephant in the room, but we talk about it more in our minds than in secure conversations. It’s many people’s glass-half-empty view that to get where they need to be, there are so many missing things, so much is not there. The logical brain latches on to this and only goes about its job proving it.

First, it will point to not having enough time, enough experience, enough money, or some other thing. It points at the past, at family, and partners for something that if hadn’t been done would make us different somehow, more capable. It collects evidence of betrayal, neglect, abandonment, rejection, and abuse from the psychological, emotional, and other evidence lockers and lays out all the facts. It’s not even proving we are unsupported anymore, but we don’t notice this.

We are convinced that we are in a non-optional suffering mindset. Contemporary neuroscience talks about this part of the brain as the source of the familiar internal narrative that gives us our sense of self. Let’s highlight that, sense of self, not actual Self. However, this sense of self is not our Self. Self is curious, caring, compassionate, clear, courageous, connected, calm, and creative. This Self, can look at thinking, but thinking is not Self.

Thinking is an interpretation of “so-called facts”. All it takes is one and all the thoughts that search for evidence that we are unsupported come out. It’s the glass-half empty protective part of the whole Self that wants to be in control of what it doesn’t understand, FEELINGS! Feelings are vulnerability agents with uncertain return on investment (ROI). The left-side of the brain doesn’t feel, it tells a story. It weaves a story in order to convince itself it is in full control. It’s highly adaptive to have a part of us keeping our personal story together, we have to learn to live with some sense of order of who we are, but the problem is that this is disordered. Often, we think we are being rational when we are being spun by our own initial thought, “I don’t have the support in order to………”. This rational fact then leads to all sorts of truthful variations we come to live by, I’ll do it myself, I can’t, No one wants to help me, No one really cares, I can figure it out on my own, it’s better this way, I’ll find another way…… The truth is, we need a better conversation, the Rational Mind is unsupported, it’s cut off.

That is why a simple pause to breath in through your nostrils with the mouth closed is helpful. Closing the mouth forces you to take that full breath inward, and a full exhale. Try it now, you have to take your time when you close your mouth, on both the inhale and the exhale. This activates a different part of the nervous system, the parasympathetic, and you can’t think with the same stressful sympathetic side that says to move mountains of suffering with more proof of suffering until you figure it out. If you simply add the challenge of breathing in, 2, 3, 4 and out, 2, 3, 4 for a minute, you may be able to activate Conscious Breathing, taking 5 breaths in one minute only. This is not to become conscious of your problems; it is to become conscious that you are not present, you are suffering, thinking, and that is the problem.

It’s Up to You!

It’s up to you to recognize the war in your own brain. A December 21st journal entry from a client who bravely permitted me to use this says the following:

Again! It’s up to me to recognize the war in my own brain, these pain loops where I end up focusing on people who don’t notice my need for support, or the violations I have suffered that still frighten me…….they are all thoughts meant to be pathways back to myself and what I need to radically accept. These fires in my brain are not to be put out; they are smoke signals telling me to invest more in support, invest more in witnessing that pain loops inflict the same pattern they were made by, and this time it’s internally created. No matter what the thought, I need to write them down as lies to question, not truths. This is going to be a radical move!

Don’t Do the Work in Your Head

If you try to do the better conversation in your head, without putting your thoughts on paper, the mind will outsmart you. You must start to write down things with one question in mind, “what is the thinking part saying about……”

* I need

* I want

* They should

* They shouldn’t

* I’m angry because

* I am sad

* I’ll never

* I don’t want to

Using Self-Energy, breath in, activate that breathing explained before and become curious about the mess of what you wrote. Hopefully, you have let it be messy, even childish, all suffer, victim, and complaint-oriented. Now comes the real work based on an example of someone whom I have invented from a combination of therapy goers over the years.

Sam is 40 and he feels like he needs to stop thinking about his second marriage and date freely. He wants there to be a better way to meet someone on the dating apps and he wants to leave the apps because he feels they should make them better, and they shouldn’t allow some of the stuff that goes on. He is angry because he thinks women have it easier and know what they want easily and he comes off poorly when texting. He is sad that this is what dating has become and thinks he’ll never find someone. He doesn’t want to give up, but he never goes on the app for long, immediately comes off, and then doesn’t go back on for a week or more.

* Is it true that Sam needs to date freely off the dating apps?

* Can he absolutely know that this is the way he will feel free again in dating?

* How is he reacting when he thinks this thought?

* Who would he be without the thought?

* Can there be a turnaround to more truthfulness towards what needs investment?

Sam is pretty adamant that the apps are prison. He is sure that a real date would free him and bring life into his personal dating scene. When he looks at if he absolutely knows this; he admits it is an assumption; he met his last wife on an app, but notes all his friends who are married say it’s miserable and offer their wives to set him up, but he declines, finding that awkward and also non-freeing. Pathetic, he calls it. He goes off the dating app for a week when he has the thought and does not feel free. When he considers not having it, he admits that if it were completely gone, he would try the apps more freely, most likely. Ultimately, he wonders if he is just not trying freely on the apps to begin with, he expects that the conversations will be slow-moving, and gives up when initial ones don’t respond right away, sometimes he even goes off after making an initial start or “like” and doesn’t return for a week. The turnaround truth he makes is that he is not investing that much, he could opt for a small membership fee and be alerted of messages, update his profile to consider what is inviting and not just his random pictures from hiking and vacation, and use what the app has to offer more. The truth is, the app isn’t going to magically try for him; he has to invest in it, and it is an investment in his freedom in dating mindset.

The Better Conversation =

* Is it true? Write about how much you know this (the writing from prior) is true.

* Is this absolutely true across the board throughout all circumstances?

* How do I act when I think this way?

* Who would I be without the thought?

* Can there be a turnaround? Can I find more truthfulness towards what needs investment? (What can be Radically Invested in for myself?)

When I did this work with several others, including myself, they all agreed that the thought looping prevents Radical Self-Investment. Should I really get that dental work done? What if it’s not necessary? Should I try to take that course? What if it’s a waste of money? I don’t know if updating my resume matters. What if the job market is too tough right now? All of these statements will 100% convince you not to invest in yourself. So, what is the truth? Is fear the truth, or just a feeling you work through to get to your Radical Self-Investment? Why radical? Radical changes don’t have to be big ones, but they are strong, unconventional, and made to go the other way. Meaning radical may be the road less traveled. So, ask yourself, is it time to fill the half-empty glass inside yourself? Do you really want to believe in the interpretation that the glass is outside of you and outside your ability to invest in filling?

Parting Remarks

We are on a journey here at Holding Space Subscription. I invite you to take the materials and wait to feel the inner invitation to begin. The author’s website is the most comprehensive source of all the materials I offer. Please leave me a review on Goodreads and/or Amazon if you’ve enjoyed my authorship so far!

The first You Are Not Broken University course is now opening and accepting enrollment: You Are Not Broken Introductory Intensive: Prepare to Arrive, Self-Invest!

Lastly, a reminder that I have added a new feature to the Holding Space Subscription, Holding Space PLUS. This means that as a paid subscriber, at $5.99 a month, you can also direct message after a post and share what came up for you, as well as the feedback you would like:

* Affirming Feedback

* Guidance-Based

* Specific Therapeutic Plans to incorporate into your Therapy

* Validate points that you feel you processed through reading.

It’s up to you what type of feedback you would like.

Important Note: This is not a therapeutic intervention and does not include the essential component of getting to know your personal story. Please consider this as one supportive piece of your healing journey, ideally alongside therapy if needed. It is not intended for crisis situations or unprocessed trauma. If you’re seeking professional support, you can find a therapist here.

Every End Has an And Then

When something ends, perhaps someone dies, or a relationship does, or maybe it’s a job or career, we look at the space where it was in both microscopic and macroscopic ways. We zoom into it, and we take the wider perspective. Over time, it becomes “then”. As a therapist and a human still trying to figure out my own existence, I often aim to help myself and others go into “then” with new tools, so that what they are looking at is not the same as the last time they reflected on it. Then we can get new data for them to reprocess. It is called being trauma-informed, acknowledging that the people we are today are going through things in subconscious patterns that link to under-processed life experiences from the past. This doesn’t mean we are stuck in the past; it means our responses and frameworks for understanding things might be, and we need tools to see it, rather than traditional talking about it.

The ends I have experienced in life, as with anyone, accumulate to a lot of “then” to talk about in therapy. Lately, I am finding a familiar pattern in me and in my therapy sessions as a therapist, all of us are trying to form “and then” through the endings we perceive. If I am talking to a client about his sobriety and he is recalling his “back then, when I was only one year sober,” what we are really aiming to be talking about is how one year became ten, and then he found something. Maybe he wants relational fulfillment in what he has to give and receive in the form of a lasting connection in this lifetime, for example. Some people do get there, but rarely inside the session itself.

That is the point of this work: inner growth unfolds in the tools you use outside therapy. In this post, and with my content regarding inner work, healing trauma, healing relational patterns, and restoring the authentic self, it is going to happen in the tools you use outside of the therapy session, outside of just the self-help book, the diet, the podcast, or the influencer you follow. The tools for that inner conversation that can show you your and then. This metaphorical patient of mine on his sobriety journey is like many of us; we are all trying to have the inner conversation that gets us to and then. We want to find something in ourselves after loss, betrayal, abandonment, rejection, addiction, or some other woundedness and tell the story of what we did then that led us to more love, wholeness, humility, acceptance, and noninterference.

I found a journal from 2014 the other day, it was from back when I had very few tools for inner work, despite completing my training to become a therapist seven years prior. The entries all had a tortured self, writing mostly on the hard days when I did not like how I showed up and wanted to fix this person I felt I was. I ended that journal and started a new one; I have shelves of them, to be honest, all of them wanted to fix a pain I could only get at by analyzing my pain esoterically, intellectually, and lodging it deeper into the pages. I was also about a decade past some very severe mental health treatment in hospital settings, dead set on needing that kind of brokenness to be behind me now.

One of the most profound endings that helped me find my own, and then, was the end of repressing some tough memories that allowed me to see that overall, repression was only possible because of the suppression of emotion and dissociation from my body’s experience of things. The tools we use to process life are knee-jerk reactions to emotional danger, where we used to run from beasts, battle, and starvation, the new threats are our own capacity to make, break, and damage emotional connections with each other.

To stop patterns of disorganized safety seeking through spikes of fight, flight, flee, and fawning in our relating to each other, we must understand our past and then become whole and integrated in our connections. I find I am still a work in progress despite being a therapist. I also find writing about the exploration, the healing journey in progress, is the truth of it; no one is not still figuring it out. One of my and then parts is allowing the writer and author in me to emerge. Holding the stories of others was such a profound gift that I am endlessly grateful for, but when it came time to truly hold my own, the writer and author in me became a trusted therapeutic relationship I had never had in traditional therapy in over 20 years of attempting it.

There’s a Part of You

There is a part of you that speaks inside your mind frequently, but it is not all of you. This part has been holding onto what happened before, and it has been directing your life in various ways. It needs your help to step back sometimes. But how? Cultivating Self-Energy is the answer. You need help from the integrated you. The you that is curious, caring, compassionate, courageous, connected, calm, clear, and creative. These are “the 8 C’s” of Self-Energy, when you are whole and integrated. A whisper of it is there all the time, and what is needed to access it is the vulnerable call for help:

Please respond, I need your help…….

The manager in you that says, “Never again!” wants to protect you. It controls, plans, organizes, directs, focuses, perfects, and accomplishes. It structures your life to avoid painful things from repeating, it develops a team of managers that becomes a programmed corner of your Self that lives mostly as how I present myself. We all have this going on.

Using the metaphor of a computer is a good way to visualize or conceptualize this. For example, the computer, it’s an object, but it was also an idea, a blueprint, and it is a creation. It was a dream, but now it is real. This is you. You are a dream, potential, a blueprint of what could be, and also an actual thing that now has a brain and spinal cord, programming, and an operating system. We have Self-Energy, and we have the parts of self that create our programming. We can use one to see into the other with more depth. I have worked with people to educate and use Self-Energy and seen it bloom in them, this healthy call for help from themselves. Our sessions start to vastly improve as they come ready to “do the work”. However, I also know it works entirely on its own. In my darkest corners of inner work, I was alone, sometimes for years, trying to cultivate the tools for self-help healing, as I trusted no one and was only hoping I would trust myself again. I felt the dream of my Self-Energy returning. So, now I know this works alone or with a therapist.

I am describing a process of inner work that is another tool in The Toolbox Approach®. One we have talked about before here on the Holding Space Subscription that is becoming the warehouse for You Are Not Broken University, a space where we will have personal development, trauma healing, and relational pattern healing courses, intensives, and community shares with group calls and coaching. What it takes to heal, we will organize, and you will stay organized for the rest of your life on the healing journey you don’t want to get off or finish.

Notice This

Take a breath here and just notice this. Close your eyes, lay your fingers gently, like little caves forming over your face. Notice how from your fingertips, the knuckles become arched over your face, and then the palms shade you in the awareness of this realization for a moment. Who is there underneath your hands, can you call on him, her, or them? Call on the Self-Energy that can be curious, calm, clear, courageous, connected, caring, creative, and compassionate. Feel your hands protecting you and start to move your fingertips over your face. Explore your face now, and you will feel it; this Self is exploring the various versions of you underneath these fingertips.

Whoever you are, your fingertips know the child, the teenager, all the versions of you over time. It knows the shame you carry, and the part of you that keeps striving or playing it cool. It is aware of the parent you could be or already are, and even the one you won’t get a chance to explore because of life choices or circumstances. You are the blueprint that maps out the plan for you and the real thing. You are everything. This you that you can feel you are right now, this is the one we need. This is “the helper” that is your Self-Energy. So, now we flesh this out and find that the best thing to do is to stop interfering with your life by overthinking, ruminating, dwelling, worrying, analyzing, or planning the outcome. The call for help remains the same every time you need to do inner work; Please respond, I need your help………And Self-Energy will respond I am here.

Please respond, I need your help…….

Self-Energy: “I am here.”

Noninterference

Do nothing and let it be revealed. This next step towards having the inner conversation with yourself is to do nothing. After you ask for responsiveness and call out for guidance, let go of what you think the problem is, stop doing the problem-solving, and trust that you will receive help. This can take time, but I know it makes sense to you to get out of your own way and not interfere with the Self-Energy taking over. Write it down. Please respond. I need your help with ……………..

Let the Self respond, I am here for the part of you that wants a solution to …………………………

I will help you and proceed with an example. But first, doing nothing is confusing to the ego because it wants to do something always, particularly when distraught or uncomfortable. It is only human to have either parts that want to avoid and put off quickly, and even impulsively, or parts that want to clear things up fast, work out problems, and live in the solution. Either impulsive or planned out, it’s fleeting; lasting solutions don’t exist in the ego’s realm. Self-Energy requires you to be still and listen and watch as the inner work unfolds beyond our ego’s need to feel resolved. The time spent doing inner work can feel scary and out of control, but when you practice noninterference in this way, you clear out space to allow loving clarity that is a lasting solution. This conversation becomes the solution every time.

When you allow, you feel naturally clear, mentally spacious, and more serene and faithful. When you are not allowing, or resisting, you feel frustrated, sad, guilty, resentful, angry, controlling, and even depressed. The emotions are not wrong or bad, but they are signs you are not in Self-Energy, and they can be noticed differently with that form of energy. The energy of negative emotions can be powerfully perceptive when we allow noninterference and activate curiosity and “The 8 C’s”: caring, compassion, courage, connectedness, clarity, creativity, and calm.

This inner conversation moves “I don’t want this” to “I want to be curious about this”, and then we stop being a match to what we don’t want, attracting more low vibration into our inner conversation. Let’s let go of the timeline for solving things, let go of agendas and your perceived need to get over something quickly and have faith in a new inner conversation with a time frame that expands solving things rather than constricts it.

The Work

My last client of the night squeezed in a second session this past week. We’ll keep the details altered to protect the sanctity of their work and their privacy. What is important is that they got the Please respond, I need your help prompt for therapy homework, which is always a suggestion, not a mandate. They apparently acted on it and were eager to respond before the next scheduled session, and I had a cancellation and fit them in. My therapy goers are already educated on using Internal Family Systems for their inner work. If you are new to this, you can locate some posts here, here, and here.

We were talking about my ex in therapy, the one before this most recent break-up, where I felt manipulated and without real closure because he will never admit to what he did. You indicated I needed to ask for help with “never gave me closure” and how it might be blocking my view of the present relationship. I knew it made sense, I was wondering if anyone I have been with reflects on relationships, and I was feeling victimized. So, I tried it, I asked for help with the sense that I will never be in a relationship where the other person will want to really talk things out. I said, “Please help me let go of this feeling of never getting met, of always getting emotionally unavailable people who won’t talk things out with me.”

This client eagerly reported that curiosity came through, indicating reflectively that they couldn’t let go of emotionally unavailable people who wouldn’t talk things through, and asked in what ways they hung on. They noticed a lot of determining certain actions and behaviors qualified as a real connection; they would find them over and over, like proof the feelings were real. Equally, there were subsequent shifts, and the determination of clearly avoidant attachment style behaviors, where the partner cut off and was not available for an explanation or connection.

They witnessed themselves almost addicted to verifying this over and over and saw they couldn’t let go of trying to figure out which was true. Self-Energy noticed this was draining and making them feel disconnected. It asked what disconnection protected my client from. It dawned on my client that they were the emotionally unavailable one; this was draining and a clear indication that both relationships didn’t have the right ingredients because the same was happening again. The “solution” was not to stop fixating; it was seeing that there was self-abandonment. When things got draining, there was no compassionate voice, “this means it doesn’t work for you”. Consequently, there was no statement outwardly, “this doesn’t work for me.”

They had been interfering in their own seeing. Thinking it has to be something more, or some complicated thing to figure out. This session was all really my client pointing out what they had realized. They had no clarity going into relationships. With the help of Self-Energy, we established that they could identify communicators with a few simple criteria, and that they wanted someone who had explored therapy and could tell them what it had taught them, or not, and that would be a great emotionally available question to ask on a third date.

Parting Remarks

We are on a journey here at Holding Space Subscription. I invite you to take the materials and wait to feel the inner invitation to begin. The author’s website is the most comprehensive source of all the materials for the coming You Are Not Broken University courses, therapy intensives and more. Please leave me a review on Goodreads and/or Amazon!

Lastly, a reminder that I have added a new feature to the Holding Space Subscription, Holding Space PLUS. This means that as a paid subscriber, at $5.99 a month, you can start to explore the Patreon Phases of Healing Courses which will open as a precursor to You Are Not Broken University were there will be many unique experiences to democratize your healing journey and have you explore a more intensive way to heal outside of traditional therapy and may direct your healing journey beyond what you thought possible. Make sure you join as a $5.99 a month member to gain access.

You can also direct message after a post and share what came up for you, as well as the feedback you would like:

* Affirming Feedback

* Guidance-Based

* Specific Therapeutic Plans to incorporate into your Therapy

* Validate points that you feel you processed through reading.

It’s up to you what type of feedback you would like.

Important Note: This is not a therapeutic intervention and does not include the essential component of getting to know your personal story. Please consider this as one supportive piece of your healing journey, ideally alongside therapy if needed. It is not intended for crisis situations or unprocessed trauma. If you’re seeking professional support, you can find a therapist here.

In my book You Are Not Broken, I introduce The Toolbox Approach® and its Phases of Healing, which now form the foundation of my workshop series, Facing Your Instability. In this series, we explore why personal development or healing journeys often feel like they fail, stall, become relentless—or never even begin—for so many people.

A core part of my vision is the creation of You Are Not Broken University, a space where healing is treated with the same dignity and structure as traditional education. From my own experience with brokenness, I’ve come to believe that only an organized, trauma-informed program can truly support a healing journey, one that helps us not only see our unique potential to “graduate,” but also commit to a lifelong path of learning ourselves. This is healthy individuation. A sense you have learned something about the life you have had, who you are, who you are becoming, and the manifestation of a higher self, moving forward. You can notice success as a dimensional thing and not defined by the outside in.

Much like the hope and possibility that comes with attending a university, I dream that no one should have to apply, qualify, or struggle to afford this kind of healing. My belief now is that the core instability in all of us is that we lack the mindset of an organized healing journey being a lifelong commitment, and a schooling component, only a portion, and a graduation, not the end, but a beginning. The only requirement for admission is a willingness to listen to your own inner intuition and accept brokenness as an invitation—not a flaw—to begin facing what needs healing.

What I realized after 40 years of trying to heal backwards was that there was a perpetual instability I struggled to face, and I saw it in over 1,500 lives that shared with me in therapy sessions as a therapist. I was surrendering my truth-seeking, spiritually attuned, intuitively gentle-minded, harmonious helper part to become a therapist first, and using the helping I did as a cocoon. I learned it was so in others; we all found cocoons, all of us. These are survival mode shells that were the best safety we could come up with because self-discernment gets stolen when the reactivity of the fight, flight, fawn, and freeze responses became a cellular reality and not something to move in and out of freely. As I started to heal, I saw how even with all the repression reversed, the whisper was still there, “You are so broken”. Even though the body-based ways I held on to things in behaviors and patterns of movement and scheduling my life were improved, and I had begun lifting decades of emotional suppression, in Relational Healing, a phase that is both inward and outward, the whisper was still there, “You are so broken”.

The book, “You Are Not Broken”, introducing The Toolbox Approach® to healing in phases, was a symbol of the mental whisper that ultimately won the brokenness battle internally, however, I wrote it with healing fresh in my experience, and 5 years later, the book now launched and in hands, hearts and minds, I could feel it calling me to look into the mirror again, for my individuation from painful healing, and towards a more joyful one that was based on finding right relationship, right community, and functional family. Individuation is a stage of development that may need to be repeated when you revisit past pain, and many of us don’t get a chance to enter this individuation stage at the proper time in our lives to begin with.

When I was born, a key message that I received from my mother was that I had to help make her missteps into a whole life, a family that lived in a yellow house with a blue-eyed and blonde-haired girl to prove it all worked out. My mother, whom I would come to understand was emotionally immature due to her own traumas, and missed developmental milestones, did not individuate. There was no early detection of ADHD, post-partum depression, Major Depression, Narcissistic Sibling Abuse, or a severely stuck functional fawn response, and she did not individuate enough to reparent herself, so I did, secretly. In doing so, I shrank more and more, but my own traumas with my half-sibling and disconnection from other family would construct a fragmented narrative on top of this that would take a long time to unravel.

Individuation Interrupted: A Personal Reflection on Healing

In my early years, daycare settings and friendships were riddled with rings of sexual intrusion, manipulation, and violation. My individuation, the process of becoming a distinct, stable self, was warped into a fawning response. I became a helper who over-functioned, submitting my boundaries in exchange for safety and approval. My self-development was hijacked by a relentless drive to do good, not from wholeness, but from survival.

When psychology and the mental health profession entered my life, they offered the strongest sense of self I could find. I clung to certifications and credentials, and I’m grateful that the ones I pursued were so confronting that they forced me to face myself. After a near-death experience and a deep dive into trauma understanding, it still took twenty years before I could truly use what I had learned, when my mother’s death shattered the spell of fawning and offered me an invitation to return to myself.

Now, I stand as a self-individuated helper. I’m here to share a vital component of healing, one you must seek within yourself. It’s not found solely in reading, podcasting, therapy, journaling, walking, moving, or breathing, but in how you relate to those practices. Healing requires facing the instability that blocks deeper inner work. It demands an organized approach, one we commit to not just during moments of brokenness, but as a lifelong path.

Healing is not a phase; it’s a practice. And individuation is not a destination; it’s a relationship with yourself that must be reclaimed.

Deriving Your Sense of Self from the Outside In

The seven dimensions of our lives where we seek to make decisions that form a sense of self can be summarized as: Physical Health/Body Image, Career/meaningful work, Financial/Money/Material Wealth, Thoughts/opinions/views, Ways you regulate emotions (should feel), Relationships, and Environments you choose to be in. If you make these dimensional decisions from the outside in, such as when my mother highly placed me helping as my value, you are at risk of an injured self-individuation process.

Individuation Interrupted: Material Needs and Emotional Suppression

I can still remember going into my mother’s purse to find the familiar pink packets of artificial sweetener. Over the years, I’d find them tucked into the pockets of old coats she passed down to me, little remnants of a habit I used to tease her about, like it was a harmless quirk. I was always careful to make her feel good enough. But underneath that playfulness was a quiet fear: I never felt safe asking for clothes shopping outings for myself. I worried that the price tag on a coat would trigger the “Sweet’n Low” dynamic, where my needs felt too visible, too inconvenient, too stressful.

My relationship with material needs and wealth was shaped by this dynamic. I learned to be “Sweet and Low”—low-calorie, low-impact, low-cost. I internalized the belief that I shouldn’t create weight for anyone, not even myself. Owning things of value became a stressful decision, tangled in guilt and fear. These are just examples of a damaged individuation process—where the development of a stable, autonomous self was interrupted by emotional suppression and survival adaptations.

We must all discern how these patterns impact our stability, regardless of the traumas we carry. Becoming a stable adult means processing not only the fragmented experiences and traumas of our lives, but also the missing developmental stages that injured our self-individuation.

This post extends a previous concept: reprogramming emotional suppression. One way to do this is by learning to climb an emotional ladder, making inside-out decisions that arise from stable emotional processing, rather than suppression. Healing begins when we stop bypassing our instability and start organizing our inner work as a lifelong practice, not just a response to brokenness, but a commitment to wholeness.

The Emotional Hierarchy Scale Adapted

While conducting research on the Emotional Hierarchy Scale by Abraham Hicks for the Facing Your Instability workshop series, I realized it needed to be democratized; made more accessible and applicable for self-help and trauma recovery. I felt called to remodel it slightly, adapting it as a tool for healing not only from PTSD and CPTSD-related trauma, but also from the unprocessed emotional wounds we all carry.

What I’ve found is that developing a more structured internal approach to emotional regulation, anchored in the present, can help us distinguish between how we were programmed by past experiences and how those same experiences resurface when triggered in the present, especially in relationships and emotional connections.

When we learn to move up the emotional hierarchy on our own, we become more emotionally stable and easier to relate to. This reduces the likelihood of mutual triggering and increases our capacity to experience health, safety, and security in relationships, no matter how long they last.

This work is about reclaiming our ability to make inside-out decisions; choices rooted in emotional clarity rather than suppression. It’s a key step in healing instability and restoring the individuation process that trauma so often interrupts.

So, based on the original Abraham-Hicks Emotional Guidance Scale, here’s a summary of the model and how we might begin to remodel it as a trauma-informed tool for healing from PTSD, CPTSD, emotional suppression, and unprocessed relational traumas, regardless of a diagnosis:

Original Emotional Guidance Scale (Abraham-Hicks)

The scale is a ladder of 22 emotions, ranging from high-vibration (alignment) to low-vibration (misalignment):

* Joy / Knowledge / Empowerment / Freedom / Love / Appreciation

* Passion

* Enthusiasm / Eagerness / Happiness

* Positive Expectation / Belief

* Optimism

* Hopefulness

* Contentment

* Boredom

* Pessimism

* Frustration / Irritation / Impatience

* Overwhelm

* Disappointment

* Doubt

* Worry

* Blame

* Discouragement

* Anger

* Revenge

* Hatred / Rage

* Jealousy

* Insecurity / Guilt / Unworthiness

* Fear / Grief / Depression / Despair / Powerlessness

Trauma-Informed Remodeling Concept

You can reframe this scale as a Healing Ladder, where each emotional state is not just a vibration but a nervous system signal—a clue to what needs attention, reprocessing, or relational repair.

Key Reframes for Trauma Healing:

* Bottom of the scale (22–17): Often reflects trauma responses (freeze, collapse, dissociation, rage). These are not “low vibes” but survival states.

* Middle of the scale (16–8): Reflects manager parts trying to cope—often with fawning, over-functioning, or avoidance.

* Top of the scale (7–1): Reflects regulated states and Emergent Self access—where relational safety and inner trust are possible.

How to Use the Scale for PTSD/CPTSD Healing

* Self-Check-In: “Where am I on the scale today?”→ Normalize being anywhere on the scale. It’s not a failure—it’s information.

* Trigger Mapping: “What past experience does this emotion remind me of?”→ Use IFS or somatic tracking to locate the part or memory.

* Gentle Climbing: “What’s one emotion up from here?”→ Instead of leaping to joy, move from despair to grief, or from anger to discouragement.

* Relational Regulation: “How does my current emotional state affect my ability to connect?”→ When we get to emotional regulation, this supports co-regulation, reducing mutual triggering in relationships.

* Emergent Self Activation: “What would my healed self say to me right now?”→ Use this to build inner safety and reparenting.

Example Application in Self-Therapy

“You’re in a state of overwhelm (11). That’s not bad—it’s a signal. Let’s ask your body what it needs. Maybe it’s rest, maybe it’s a boundary. You don’t need to jump to joy. Maybe we just reach for contentment (7) today.”

Healing Ladder

Here’s your Healing Ladder visual. It shows a progression from communicating through a protective stance, all the way through to a planned one. These stances: Protective → Proactive → Intentional → Planned, symbolize the stages of moving from survival-based responses to empowered, conscious healing.

Many self-help materials are recently focusing on various things like dating a narcissist or a dismissive avoidant, and how it can be damaging emotionally. Or, they focus on having emotionally immature parents, or even the importance of discovering your childhood traumas; these are all valuable sources of “knowing what happened”. However, for any of us to truly heal, we have to face WHERE IT HAPPENED.

For all of us, our life happens internally, inside the central nervous system (CNS), where the story of our life is held, both in progress and from the past. The CNS sends its signals to the brain. A lot can happen to derail the cohesive storyline of our life experiences, such that we feel broken, when it is really that the data of our lives are broken and fragmented. In recent posts in which I am manifesting You Are Not Broken University, I talk about “the bad tools”: emotional suppression, experiential repression, and dissociation from our bodies.

This ladder helps you face your own instability in terms of emotional suppression, a key part of the way we all end up being bad partners to ourselves. Moving up this ladder to planned communication with ourselves, a specific resource like a therapist, or a loved one is the only way to face the truth. If you are not in planned communication, you could be a co-creator in your instability, and risk unprocessed emotion deprogramming backward into emotional suppression for yourself or others. This blocks relational healing, a core aspect of the Relational Healing Phase and one of the three phases of healing in The Toolbox Approach®.

Your Cheat Sheet for the Healing Ladder

Bottom Rung – ProtectiveDescription:This stage is about survival. Protective parts step in to keep you safe from perceived harm, often through avoidance, fawning, or shutting down. The goal here is not to shame your entire self; these are protective parts you can notice, thank, and begin noticing their role and patterns.

Second Rung – ProactiveDescription:Here, you start to take small steps toward safety and stability. You may use coping strategies like grounding exercises or reaching out for support. Proactive energy says, “I want to feel better about how I function,” even if the steps are simple and short-term.

Third Rung – IntentionalDescription:Intentional healing involves conscious choices. You begin to identify triggers, name parts, and practice self-compassion. This stage is about creating space for curiosity rather than judgment and building trust with your inner system.

Top Rung – PlannedDescription:Planned healing is future-focused and structured. You set goals, integrate tools like IFS or somatic practices into daily practices, and create a roadmap for growth. This stage reflects empowerment and alignment with your authentic self, you are acting individuated, choices come from the inside outward, and you attract what you decide.

Parting Note: Healing Forward Through Heartache

Emotional suppression is one of the most powerful blocks to healing, both individually and collectively. When we silence our pain, we also silence our capacity to grow, connect, and transform. Suppressed emotions don’t disappear; they wait. They wait for a safe moment, a safe relationship, or a safe version of you to finally be felt.

But here’s the truth: heartache from the past can be used to heal forward. When we allow ourselves to feel today, we offer our old wounds a therapeutic dose of attention, compassion, and care. We begin to reparent the parts of us that were left behind. We begin to climb the emotional ladder, not to escape instability, but to understand it, and to organize our healing around it.

The journey is imperfect. So are we. But there is beauty in realizing that healing doesn’t require perfection; it requires presence. You Are Not Broken.

Please consider purchasing the book and following the podcast. Let this be your invitation to begin, or continue, the journey of healing forward. Stay up to date at the author’s website for more goodies and events!

Welcome Back & Recap of the Bad Tools

Welcome back to Holding Space, the warehouse for all the You Are Not Broken curriculum from The Toolbox Approach® for healing in phases. Here, we acknowledge the core human right that is so often overlooked, the right to democratize your mental health and have choices that empower your access to internal stability rather than label it with diagnostic codes that demand treatment by a covered provider. I am a licensed and clinical trauma therapist of 20 years, come this 2026, and even I could not find a way to choose the right options to heal the complexity of traumas I was holding.

Why? Labels. The diagnostic labels matched the treatment I could gain weight with, or use Cognitive Behavior Therapy to move out of depression loops when traumatic accidents set me back to broken. However, they could not remember traumas for me or access the feelings that were linked to memories of my real story. They could not tell me trauma was held in my perineum and the muscles of my hips, and that yoga for exercise would not help, but yoga to feel more of my somatic self, the story of my body, would. The easy-to-digest story of the diagnostic label set me back two decades. Diagnostic labels can not diagnose your unique pattern of stress responses, or the way you have never freed yourself from their hold and remain in survival mode. That is why The Toolbox Approach® curriculum matters. That is why this space is building it and “holding space” for the material for You Are Not Broken University.

Healing in phases that organize your inner work is important because we aim to free ourselves from instability, and you can never do that with a disembodied and disorganized approach. The decision to start something always feels good. The beginning of that intention to finish the new self-help book, return to or start therapy, and finally balance your work life, or so many other beginnings to care about yourself, are micro-moves, and they feel hopeful. However, no person is restructured in a move, and that is what we are seeking: a way you have been living doesn’t match with that inner voice that knows there is more authenticity, and you are holding it back. It’s in one area, or another, or several. You’ve settled, hidden, or numbed it if you don’t feel it. Be brave and feel it, take radical responsibility to reprogram the bad tools we learn to process our lives with: repression, suppression, and dissociation.

These tools come from a rapid advancement in the prefrontal cortex that outdates the threats we are prepared to face in life. Once food, shelter, and physical safety became more and more the norm, the relational threats of abandonment, betrayal, neglect, enmeshment, manipulation, control, abuse, intimidation, and bullying, became highly dangerous. The threat detection system needed a buffer from the information pouring in and created repression, suppression, and dissociation. This is the instability in all of us; the data you have access to about your life was collected with bad tools, and it’s fragmented. We need to heal through the use of reprocessing tools. We also need to begin reprogramming ourselves to lift emotional suppression. When we allow ourselves to feel and then regulate these feelings, we go from fragmented data to massively intact and much more accurate data for our lives.

Let’s dig into the post for today. I have been developing workshops for the future You Are Not Broken University, which aims to have the phases of healing as its structure with The Toolbox Approach® core curriculum and various tracks that form therapy intensives as the classrooms. As we start the post, I will provide a sample workshop participant’s experience by combining them into one sample of someone beginning to work on the suppression of their emotions as a “bad tool” that needed reprogramming.

The Sad Child

I want to ask a question about why my friends cannot understand me, but I know now from the workshop that I have to face my own instability, so I worked with my parts and how you talked about my feeling of non-belonging, and I remembered something. When I was a kid, I was so convinced that no one would want me if I were a sad child that I constricted my stomach a lot. I think it triggered a stress response in me, like fight, flight, freeze, or fawn; these were the ones talked about in the workshop. Maybe it was flee? I am Italian, you can’t not eat, so I ate over the feeling. Over the years, I became a master at not feeling it. I played sports, and whenever I felt like the negativity of the teasing that was accepted as part of team life went too far, I would play and practice harder. I really suffered when we lost; I knew it was abnormal to feel so sad. I think I just wanted to feel the joy of our team as my own somehow, and I never could. I needed baseball to escape something; I realize now it was my family dynamics. Repressed sadness is my lack of love and compassion for myself. The belief that no one would want me if I were sad became both an injury and a huge block.

In this workshop, we began to use tools for Relational Healing, a phase in The Toolbox Approach® that is largely about reprogramming emotional suppression. One of them is still going this month, you can look at the available dates and keep posted on the main site. We are focusing on facing our instability instead of looking outward to other things. We are recognizing that the use of emotional repression needs reprogramming. This means accessing and permitting yourself to access all the parts of yourself, not just the ones that manage your life or put out fires, and regulating those in exile through a skilled conversation that understands them curiously, without a fix-it mentality. When we regulate parts holding dysregulated and underprocessed emotions and thoughts, they become integrated. We notice ourselves for the first time, and it doesn’t matter who wants you or who doesn’t, because you want you have this conversation with yourself again soon. Last week, we taught the tool of Internal Family Systems (IFS) in the workshop, and you can see it in this post. This week, using the anonymous workshop participant above, we explore reprogramming emotional suppression.

Fix Your Feelings Trap

Many of us are getting stuck in wanting to find an answer, in wanting to get rid of the feelings we are having. We want to fix this disappointment we are having with our friends, our partners, and our parents. We cope with the pressure, invisibility, resentment, and insecurity at our jobs or inside ourselves by suppressing it and going outward to something outside the origin, our internal world, for a resolution. Wanting to go outward for an inward feeling is a cognitive error that no one I have ever met (and I have met with 2,000 people in 20 years) is not susceptible to, because it does not seem unintelligent. And yet, it is emotionally, somatically, and spiritually a dead end, or “dumb as rocks”, because it uses neuroplasticity, our neurological capacity, like it were all in our head.

The Emergent Self, mentioned in the title, takes responsibility for reprogramming and builds the house for their parts of self, their internal family, based on a structure of relatedness and functionality, rather than rigid roles and dysfunctionality (like some families unintentionally raised us in). This means it sees negative neuroplasticity or old programming as what we might call the pre-formed self, and what creates your pain. So, the first step is right now, calling on an Emergent Self to look inward and see pre-formed self pain held in exiled parts as separate and in need of help. We are always running outward due to a program we are on called emotional outsourcing, with the goal of suppression.

What Is the Emergent Self Again?

The Emergent Self is not a part—it’s the center of awareness that arises when we are grounded, curious, and compassionate. It’s the observer in us that can look inward without judgment and bear witness and begin to regulate, reparent, and reorganize the internal system.

When emotional suppression is present, it often comes from a pre-formed self—a constellation of parts that learned to suppress feelings to stay safe, accepted, or in control. These parts may have served us well in chaotic or invalidating environments, but they now limit our access to authentic emotional data.

When you stop now, through reading or listening to this, you actually choose to move into an Emergent Self that looks at suppression and what it is doing to your whole self-integration.

The Work: Inward Conversation for Reprogramming Suppression

This tool invites the Emergent Self to gently approach the pre-formed self and begin a new kind of dialogue—one that allows suppressed emotions to be witnessed, regulated, and reintegrated. In the workshop participant example above, he was constricting his stomach to stop the feeling of sadness. He thought that if he were a sad child, no one would want him. The tool is demonstrated below with this example.

Step 1: Notice the Suppression

Begin by asking:

* Is there a part of me that feels numb, flat, or shut down?

* “Yes, I was feeling non-belonging and shut down, the memory of not wanting to feel this was in my stomach again, and I could really feel the shut down.”

* What emotions might be just beneath the surface?

* “I am angry at male friendship and how it is, no one cares, it’s all surface, I am getting older, it’s hard to hang out and feel part of things, I feel like I am left behind somehow and like that memory, like I just want to win a game or something to feel better but it is not going to happen.”

Let the Emergent Self observe without pushing. Suppression often hides fear, grief, or shame.

I have grief and non-belonging and feel so afraid that I have no partner and no sense of real friendship, and if I met someone, they would just see it all too eventually.

Step 2: Invite the Suppressing Part to Speak

Ask:

* What are you afraid would happen if I felt this emotion?

* “I feel like I need to cry, but what if that makes it worse and I go into depression and can’t get out of it? I want the release but I am scared it makes me break or something, and I won’t be the same, which sounds dumb because I am really sad and just hiding it, and I don’t want to be that way, really.”

* How long have you been doing this job of keeping things quiet?

* “My whole life, this is ridiculous. I have to let this out and be healthy and in touch, any partner would want that from me. I don’t know why I think this, it’s so outdated in my mind now that I see it like this.”

This builds trust and begins to unblend the part from the whole self.

Step 3: Regulate with Compassion

Use breath, grounding, or imagery to help the system feel safe. You might say:

* “I’m here now. You don’t have to carry this alone.”

* “You were trying to protect me, and I see that.”

This is where reprogramming begins—when the part realizes it’s not alone and doesn’t have to suppress anymore.

Step 4: Receive Better Internal Data

As repression softens, emotional information becomes clearer:

* “I feel sad because I wanted a connection.”

* “I’m angry because I felt powerless.”

This data is less fragmented, more usable, and leads to aligned action.

Conclusion: Go Slow—This Work Is for You First

Reprogramming emotional suppression is not about rushing into expression or proving progress. It’s about gently turning inward, allowing the Emergent Self to witness and regulate what was once suppressed. This process begins quietly, internally, and most importantly, for you.

It’s natural to want to share your insights or emotional breakthroughs with others. But be mindful: the urge to immediately seek validation or understanding can slide into emotional outsourcing—placing your inner work into someone else’s hands, hoping they’ll affirm it, hold it, or respond in a way that makes it feel real. This can unintentionally become a demand or lead to oversharing with someone who may not be emotionally receptive or safe.

Instead, give yourself the gift of internal validation. Let your system feel the reward of simply being with what’s true. No one is measuring your progress but you. You deserve to feel your feelings, to witness your own healing, and to move at a pace that honors your nervous system and your story.

Go slow. This work is for you first.

NOTE: You can still catch the workshop here. There is also a page for future ones that are upcoming. These are free for a very limited time before we head over to Patreon Master Curriculum Courses SOON! As always, the book and the author’s website are yours to explore!

Welcome back to Holding Space. We are starting to envision this space as the warehouse of material that makes up a core curriculum for those of us seeking to heal things. Some of us need a more organized way inward due to traveling a hard track trying to heal trauma, behaviors, relationships and mental or physical health. Some of us are needing a place to start and have been overwhelmed by finding a cacophony of self-help voices that initially seemed right, good and helpful but now feel loud and confusing. Others are deep in a sense of brokenness and have not begun to look at that capacity to feel brokenness as an invitation. Lastly you may be here due to a love or curiosity of what it takes to grow towards a deeper understanding of life’s purpose.

After being honored to be a chosen witness to thousands of lives attempting to look inward, I can honestly tell you; reader/listener/viewer, you are all of these things. We will talk about a key tool that is valuable to all the phase of healing in this post, it accesses all your parts and that is how I know all of these reasons for inviting yourself here are you. The curriculum here is coined, The Toolbox Approach® and the phases of healing inside this approach were developed from a hard, rewarding, devastating and remarkably educational journey into myself and the fragmentation that I learned in session after session as a trauma healer was exactly for this purpose all along. That purpose is to use authentic brokenness expertise as a visionary part of me that now can see, after all the identifiable traumas, attachment wounds, relational breakdowns, grief, loss, mental health diagnoses, health problems, and problematic behaviors are identified, it is profoundly an internal stability that is lacking in all of us to stay the course of what inner work requires, a lifelong commitment to address ourselves with the right tools.

These tools are ones I seemed to have for 20 years as a trauma expert and licensed mental health counselor but never learned how to empower myself and others to bend back for use as self-help tools, outside therapy, and as a true invitation to democratize mental health into every decision you make. These tools are: 1. For knowing our internal narrative without repression, 2. For reprocessing our suppressed and dissociated emotions and experiences, 3. For healing the relational fragmentation we have within ourselves and our many parts such that our relating with others can also become more whole and less fragmented.

So, you are here, and you’ve been seeking and that is actually something you’ve needed to give yourself lifelong permanent access to do. That is THE THING to do with your life. Those that passed down, THE THING to do with your life were holding a lot of instability. This, regardless of what happened to them, what they carried as emotional baggage, the silent issues these people had, the mental and physical health problems, the psychological DNA, is THE TRUTH. What those before us were on the outside, structurally, is not the truth of things. The tools that we have been passing down through the generations for some time now have gotten us pretty unstable. We stopped the free-flowing storytelling in pictures, languages, smells, tastes, fabrics, and rituals and used repression, suppression and dissociation. These kinds of tools for processing life experience create fragmented narratives. The fragmented narratives become our structure, our reality, love and belonging becomes believing them, and we fear out casting if we don’t believe the collective narrative of those we are supposed to belong to, with and for. That is not love, that is fear and control, and it creates instability inside all of us. So, if we are on an inner work journey we seek to become a way of being a living that democratizes our mental health for our lifetimes, we face this general truth, we have the wrong tools. That’s the premise, YOU ARE HERE! Let’s begin the post!

The Primal Part

I use something called Internal Family Systems (IFS) in therapy sessions and as a self-help tool, to facilitate that truly curious internal conversation that often gets derailed if we vent, basic share, ruminate, overthink, or dwell, on our lives’ situations and ourselves. This tool helps us view the fragmented self as the source of our troubles, are “parts of Self” have gotten divided, and we have not had the tool of a Core Curious Self. We have only hoped the perfect parent, therapist, partner, sibling, friend, mentor or teacher would start this conversation for us, but it is ours to create.

Recently, I started creating a universal tweak to the parts I usually differentiate for people: Protector parts (called Managers and Firefighters), and Exiles. The protector parts have controlled and organized versions, that plan and anticipate, and impulsive and urgent forms that act fast, as if to a fire alarm. Exiled parts are vulnerable, wounded, ashamed, repressed, suppressed, dissociated and kept hidden. The primal part is something I started to add due to its potential to allow me to use my background in Somatic Experiencing, a form of therapy where we can access emotional pain that is beyond words.

This kind of pain is registered in the Polyvagal Nerve, that forms what I call “the column of you”, or the information highway of you. When we access pain lodged in the neurological data of the Polyvagal System (this is data outside just the brain but into the spinal cord and picked up by the Central Nervous System and more) there is a deeper release, a longer lasting one, and one that can be followed and repeated for increasing one’s vagal tone and ability to regulated danger so we can orient back to safety. Many of us don’t return to “safe, secure, and ready to connect” and normalize an activated or depleted Polyvagal Highway, relating through that instability repeatedly.

The primal part is the raw, preverbal or nonverbal, instinctual aspect of our internal system that holds the most foundational emotional truths—often buried beneath layers of protectors and managers. It’s the part that carries the scream we never got to scream, the grief we never got to grieve, the rage we were taught to suppress. Unlike other parts in IFS that may have more defined roles (like the inner critic or the caretaker), the primal part is elemental. It’s the body’s truth-teller.

In IFS, we often work with parts that have developed strategies to protect us from pain. But sometimes, healing requires going deeper—beneath the strategies, beneath the stories—to the somatic imprint of the original wound. That’s where the primal part lives. And when we can safely access it, witness it, and allow it to release—often through embodied practices like breathwork, movement, or even a silent scream—we open the door to true healing.

The Scream Session

(Note: the use of the Primal Part was developed through numerous sessions, this is example is blended and therefore protects the confidentiality of any one specific patient as it is a combination example)

She started therapy, telling me, “A part of me wants to remember more, but I just can’t”. Using IFS, I responded, “This part, wanting to remember more but not being able to, what are the feelings there?”.

She struggled to answer, so I asked her to close her eyes and remember the last time she tried to access her memories. I asked her to consider how it felt when she couldn’t. When she opened her eyes and told me, “I can feel it there, but I can’t remember it. I feel small, insecure, and on the verge of tears because I can’t figure out what happened. I also feel like I am bad somehow.”.

I prompted her to befriend this part, let it know it’s not alone, it’s safe, and that she wanted to help, not to fix it, and only wanted to understand more.

The part opened up to tell us that it let something happen and it is protecting her from remembering, so she doesn’t feel ashamed. We explored how this part got its job in the first place, and it recalls a time when she thought, “just act like nothing happened”. She struggled, it felt like that was maybe true, maybe it was not real, she couldn’t be sure or trust herself, something said, “so you should just forget”.

This part, we realized, was doing a good job, but also building distrust in her other parts of self, the ones having felt sense memories, and those trying to remember. Over the years, as a consequence, she trusted the “just act like nothing happened” part over her other parts. If it stopped doing its job, there would be no trust whatsoever inside. This is what she feared: a total breakdown in knowing who, what, or where she could go for trust. We explored how she felt a deep sense of rigidity that was essential and felt bad to go against. She told me she had a glass of wine every night, and sung once a week, but those were her only times she felt less of “it”.

At this point, I took a total turn, remembering the skeptical Primal Scream Therapy method, but unlike that unproven method, I did not think she needed to necessarily remember traumatic pain and release it, but release the frustrated core rigidity and its fragmented truth. Trusting my gut that it was not the trauma that needed to be pushed out, but the held fear of dire consequences if she was not rigid and small exposure that a total breakdown of self was only what she was carrying not what would happen.

I asked her, “What if you just clenched your fists and made your face into a screaming one for a little release from this?”. Shockingly, she smiled and told me she actually thought that would feel good. I prompted her to build a fear-fire in her gut, stoking the fire and preparing it with her stomach muscles. On the count of three, we made screaming faces. Faint scream sounds did come out, and hot breath, and the desire to repeat it several times. She looked at me and said, “It wasn’t my fault, I know it.”. She told me she thinks she gets it enough to know that an uncle made her very afraid when they were alone together and she has never felt safe at family gatherings since then and that was enough to validate her for now. She wondered curiously when it would all come back, somehow knowing it would be sooner rather than later, and that she would feel calmer when it did, and every time after that. She told me that something primal had lifted and she had hope and a sense more small doses of this could occur if she stuck to it.

I can’t say it’s a therapy technique to blend a Primal Scream with IFS, I just know it worked and I will be repeating it and using it in my own toolbox now. As you know by now, I created an approach to healing in phases called The Toolbox Approach®. I will keep bringing it to you here as the warehouse for the healing university that is developing. You can access the full introductory Narrative Healing Phase in You Are Not Broken. Break free from the fixing yourself mindset with The Toolbox Approach® on the author website, Goodreads, Amazon, or at Atmosphere Press. Please leave a good review if it is helpful to you.

Curious About Using IFS?

To use IFS on your own, there are 6 steps, called the 6 F’s, to help us get to know those parts of ourselves that we call “protectors”. There are two types of protectors (managers and firefighters) that aim at protecting our system in different ways, we read/listened/viewed them above. To go more in depth:

* Managers as Protectors: control, prevent, are proactive, perfectionistic, criticize, monitor, plan, function, prevent/avoid risk, caretake and are productive.

* Firefighters as Protectors: Act quickly, are impulsive, act forcefully, act to numb or soothe, aim for immediate relief, use distraction and escape from pain. Can become addictive or patterned behaviors that are hard to change but meant to be solutions early on.

Note: In the example Scream Session above, living a rigid life and only having a glass of wine and one singing outlet a week, was a manager protector part.

The Process of the 6 F’s is in image form below. I will also explain how it can be worked through with yourself, modified from use in a therapy session but also from my experience in 20 years of using it both ways. The 6 F’s process applies to any part that has a specific job or task to carry out in our system, for example when I got an unexpected slew of charges in the mail, I immediately planned time to call the biller, check my card statements, and deposit some checks to cover the cost should it be legitimate; using a perfectionist, planning, and control-oriented manager part. I could use the 6 F’s process to go deeper into that if it seemed warranted given the stress level or residual emotional hangover. The 6 F’s stand for the following words:

* Find

* Focus

* Flesh out

* Feel toward

* Befriend

* Fear

These steps are excellent for teaching purposes because they give a clear and simple map to follow. With enough training and practice, they can be used on yourself to help you navigate your own system, but I need to warn you that it is quite challenging to do this on your own. You can use the comment section below; I will be running Facing Your Instability Courses this month for support.

The 6 F’s Process of IFS in action

When it comes to using or seeing the 6 F’s process in action (for example if you have come across a video by an IFS Therapist or if you go to an IFS training), you will come to realize they make it look/seem like is always followed in this sequence but you will learn they are not prescriptive and your parts will guide you over time as you familiarize yourself with them. You might realize that it is not always possible to follow these steps in the exact sequence.

As a beginning inner therapist, this article, any support you ask for or gather, it’s your training, it complements the inner trust you're trying to build, now allow that to happen and let yourself be unstable with this, it’s the good kind, the kind where learning something new is a little shaky, like riding a bike at first. Your body will start to remember the pattern, the rhythm, even before the knowing how to ride fully kicks in, that is just like using IFS.

These 6 F’s can be divided into 3 stages

* Stage 1 - becoming aware of a part (Find, Focus, Flesh out)

* Stage 2 - check if there is enough Self-energy to connect to the part (Feel toward)

* Stage 3 - connect to the part only if there is enough Self-energy available (Befriend, Fear)

Flashback to the Example Above: Scream Session

Stage 1: The individual above found the part in the following statement: “A part of me wants to remember, but I just can’t”. She felt it as making her small, insecure, and on the verge of tears as well as bad somehow. We accessed her shame and how something forced her to act like nothing happened. This was her protector part, a manager that started to organize, plan, monitor, and prevent. The manager was critical and demanding she live a rigid life subconsciously, but a part of her wanted to remember.

Stage 2: When she felt into the tug of war between the parts, she became willing to feel into the conflict more, “feel forward”.

Stage 3: When the individual in the example above smiled at my suggestion that she silent scream with her fists clenched, and activating her entire face and core of her being, this was “befriending”. She was also willing to face the fear that it would make everything fall apart and willing to expose herself to the idea of small release that might build over time.

So, There You Go

I mentioned above “You Are Here!” and expanded the concept of this by explaining how we have all been using “the bad tools” for processing our lives: Repression, Suppression, and Dissociation. When we process, we do so through rumination, dwelling, and overthinking, thinking we are analyzing rich and full data from “the bad tools”. You are here, I am here, and while healing has brought me further, it takes a lot of repetition, repeating a reprocessing phase of healing with new tools becomes a new good habit, and hence: SO, THERE YOU GO! Go, use this, repeat the inner conversations until you know your instability needs this more often than not and you become that stable internal family system that you wish raised you!

Heal on!

(Don’t forget to check out You Are Not Broken and the Author Website)

We aim to empower people to pick their restoration path: relational, personal development, or healing trauma and heal in phases of healing: Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing. Self-help, with the aid of therapy and other methods, is not a fix-it project, but should be framed as a reclamation of our wholeness. Today’s episode is raw. It’s personal. It’s about the kind of love that doesn’t hold you, but haunts you. The kind that kicks up all the mirrors of your past woundedness unexpectedly, even knowingly, and ignores and avoids your history and disregards understanding as a relational necessity. The kind that calls to you and also dismisses you without saying a word. One that discards you and leaves you wondering if you were ever truly seen.

(Note: all episodes are uniquely found on SPOTIFY: ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always podcast)

The Silent Call

I got a call recently—from someone it quite honestly took me too long to block. I didn’t know how to use the feature, never having to demand the deeper awareness from myself that just because I am a healer doesn’t mean I get that healing relationship with everyone all the time in the real world. While I had helped patients consider the option many times in sessions, I now realized I would have to learn it myself; how do I estrange and block someone from my life? It feels lacking in empowerment, like the only protection left is technological.

It was a shock to me that the blocked call still registered and a blocked caller can still leave a message, but it shouldn’t have been; it happens with telemarketers and sales calls all the time. I saw the blocked call and braced for a message left. They left no voicemail. Just the ghost of a ring. And it brought up everything.

This man—my ex—was severely dismissive and avoidant. He love-bombed me early on, bringing me into his family, sending songs, reels, hints that I was “the one.” But he never truly expressed himself. I suffered working inward and wondering why I gave him the key to my body after years of repressed trauma had closed down that option entirely. I wondered why I asked him for help opening and spoke so clearly about this without checking for understanding. When I needed connection most—when my own trauma was surfacing—he disappeared. No conversation. No care. Just silence.

And I did what many of us do when we’re abandoned in our most vulnerable moment: I begged for conversation and then became avoidant myself. Luckily, I did not become avoidant of myself, though. I went inward. I did the inner work. I saw a core relationship that had taught me that this was exactly the kind of man I would be wired to try to connect to. I had learned to tell myself a different story when the “love” around me is actually hatred, jealousy, and manipulation. The women who would be my teachers taught me silently to frame it a different way; the woman before me showed me to dissociate, suppress, and repress what was happening. They are not wrong or bad, but holding trauma themselves. I am lucky, I see it, I looked for the tools to see more without triggering a danger reaction in my nervous system. Somehow, I looked inward and not only at the influencers; I claimed responsibility and became a better trauma therapist. I wrote a book. I built a healing method. I found myself.

But that call… that silent call… it kicked up the grief. Not just of the relationship, but of the family I never got to build. The children I could have loved. The memories I could have made. The stability I could have offered. I’m 45. I’m ready. And I feel like I missed something sacred, so I also feel a loss I should have seen coming, and a sense I am unprepared for it. All of us are unprepared for the grief and loss of not having faced ourselves sooner. The time we all lose when we aim for outward stability instead of an inward one is a universal grief. To come into authenticity is not to just place time between our pain episodes, but to see your own role in your delayed facing things, and your own fear-based hesitation.

Heal Your Attachment Instability

So here’s what I want to say—not just to him, but to anyone who moves in and out of your life, fronting a mask that genuine connection is possible, when really they have done it before, moved without care or concern for how they are landing, and are immune to feeling remorse, pain, or regret: Heal your attachment instability, it is hurting you and it is hurting others. Don’t be immune to the emotional and cognitive dissonance; that is what creates change: face it!

Some red flags to face could be:

* Using silence to test your power over people.

* Moments of deep emptiness in your soul get dissociated from through projects you overcommit yourself to

* Absolving yourself from intention, clarity, and respect for others because of the special pain you carry, and thinking you are honorable for protecting people from your pain.

* Denial that people have been hurt by your emotional absence or disregard

* Functional fight, flight or freeze responses where you operate hositly without feeling it, remove yourself suddenly from relationships without feeling it, and operate in rigidity without feeling your own emotional absence.

We all may need to heal our instability; severe avoidants are not the villains here. I know I have needed to heal as someone with fearful avoidant attachment. Looking at the way we are internally unstable before pointing a finger at someone else is just human; you’ve done it, I have done it, but it is just so unproductive and degenerative. It breaks down healing instead of generating and powering it up.

We can accomplish acceptance of dismissive avoidant behavior without rejecting the people who do it. So, for those of you who need to heal from the avoidants in your life. Here are some guiding affirmations:

* I am no longer available for breadcrumb love.

* I can have fun moving on and not move on suffering through healing, but enjoy it.

* I am no longer available to absorb things; I can observe.

* I am building a family of people, places, and things that does process through things without dismissal or avoidance. I am a grown-up with plenty of choices and sources of love and support.

* I can hold myself in deep understanding even when it is hard, and celebrate that one person’s growth is all of ours.

The Declaration

Your healing is not a question of whether you tried hard enough. For all of us, our healing is a declaration to try harder to face ourselves.

For me, I wonder now if the dismissive-avoidants in my life are gifts forcing me to face that I don’t just endlessly seek to help people, I want something in return, and I don’t want to have to try so hard for it all the time. I wonder if the Universe is designing love/pain episodes with the wrong connection so I can grow my knowledge and become discerning in my choices. I could choose to wall off my understanding and believe that helping and understanding should get me what I want in connection, safety, and inclusion, or face that limited viewpoint as damaging myself and those I push it on.

It was always my job to notice that programming myself to help and understand people to receive emotional belonging and acceptance was designed by brokenness inside me, my fragmented narrative that needs my attention. Other people’s damaged narrative is also my gift, I can hold space for it, encourage its healing path, and even detect its complexity with more clarity than the person experiencing it. The trick is, I need permission to do so, I cannot assume permission. As a trauma survivor, I should know this, now I wholeheartedly do.

This is your reminder:You are not broken.You are becoming.And you deserve a love that sees you, stays with you, and grows with you.

Until next time,I’m Melinda Zappone.Keep healing. Keep choosing yourself.

And remember: Silence can be a boundary too. It won’t feel empowering at first, but you can create your own closure. When you feel the redirection of your feet moving towards a more authentic self, notice that. It won’t happen all at once. The shifts and inches gained as your boundary for your healing space expands will form a container that is noticeable in the felt sense of an open life facing hard things! Please leave a comment if you want more on healing your attachment instability. We are in the process of creating courses and programming for You Are Not Broken University!

Check out the Author’s Website for all the goodies!

Now available on Amazon and Goodreads. Please leave a review if you find it a meaningful invitation to inner work.

If you have been following Holding Space Substack Subscription or ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always Podcast, you know we are now on a mission to create: THE YOU ARE NOT BROKEN UNIVERSITY!

Through preliminary courses called Therapy Intensives on Patreon, we will develop the core program now, prior to the launch of the University, so you can engage in a kind of preparatory school and learn how to restore fragmentation using the Phases of Healing Curriculum offered through The Toolbox Approach® in a way that starts with learning the basic 12-Steps of restoring your authenticity such that the tools land in a stable you and stay there as yours and not some fleeting self-help boost for a time. Today is a unique chance to join the 4-month intensive through a trial course starting Monday, November 17th, 2025 and meeting each Monday evening 7:00-8:45 PM EST for four months.

First, to accept “You Are Not Broken”, we accept that feeling that way in certain areas of life, sometimes more that one, is an invitation to facing things. When we react to brokenness, often it is from a subconscious set of tools; Suppressing Emotion, Repressing the Experience Memory, and Dissociating from the Body that Lived It. Other subconscious tools like dwelling, rumination, and overthinking, block what The Toolbox Approach® promotes calls a Reprocessing Healing Phase from occurring. Because dwelling, ruminating, and overthinking are cognitive processes that drain us, we don’t move into processing through the emotions or somatically (body-based) working them through. Essentially, everything gets held, packed in, folded down, hence the phrase, “emotional baggage”. Everyone has it, some feel it there, some block the feeling of it there. There are symptoms and health conditions that speak it when we cannot. All of this is brokenness, and it is our invitation to healing.

Acceptance Vs. Agreement

Acceptance of the instability within or around you does not mean that you are in agreement with everything being broken. What it means is that you finally have the calm focus to decide on The Phases of Healing. Deciding is a step away from dissociation but we may not be fully embodied yet. It can be a moment where your system is trying to balance connection to healthy fear with needing ultimate safety and non-change. One way our nervous system does this is through a defense mechanism called disembodiment.

Disembodiment is a subtle form of protective detachment. It’s not full dissociation, but it’s like your mind and body aren’t fully in sync. You might be present and functioning, but not fully feeling or expressing what’s happening inside. It’s a way your system says: “I’ll show up, but I won’t let myself be too vulnerable.”

That is why I am so passionate about YOU ARE NOT BROKEN UNIVERSITY and this 4 month introductory offer. I have been a therapist for nearly 20 years come 2026 and I can see that the hour people have spent has helped them believe in listening. It has helped them want to be a better listener in their own life, but they still trust it more to me than to themselves. We need a school where everyone is welcome to apply. We need a place that is more than a school but has the respect of being called a University. If you are as excited as I am, look now at the 12-Steps to commit to, and consider the course.

Facing the 12-Steps

* We admit we were powerless in the past and unknowingly learned repression, suppression, and dissociation — our lives are less manageable because of it

* It is larger than willpower for us to become restored; we must take the invitation to our classroom for healing, learn tools that rewire, and address our experiences rather than using repression, suppression, and dissociation.

* We decide to be on a heroic journey to heal and become more authentic without measuring progress, expecting wealth, accolades or reward besides that of our own authenticity restored.

* We commit to tools for seeing things, healing false narratives, reprocessing memory and relationally healing and starkly create healthy confrontation with ourselves.

* We admit to hiding inside our lives and being fear based and how this has hurt our Core Selves and had consequences in our relationships with others.

* We accept readiness to heal is an excuse and that there is no “ready”, and we need to leap into change knowing we will remove blocks that have been harmful for too long.

* We accept that we have wasted our own time unconditionally and that no one else has made us do so, without agreeing we are bad, wrong, or ill-spirited ever in life and still blessed to be ourselves.

* We take stock of all the ways we have been internally unstable and face what it may take to forgive ourselves through dedicated effort to using new tools for processing emotional experience, reprocessing our memory of it, and relating through intentional repair or respectful boundaries and closure.

* We make direct contact with a set of tools, and consistently, to form a toolbox of repair, growth, and connecting as a higher Self motivated to see the potential to heal in everyone, on a timeline that is designed to always be “right”.

* We create a system of continued personal inventory and repair as we come into our authenticity restored, so that we maintain a safe presence for ourselves and consider this a lifelong vocation to live in that truth for us and others.

* We seek out a way to do personalized good without denying when there is dark or negative rumblings from our old programing and when it is there, spend time with it so as to decide goodness over it through a powerful self conversation that asks for help from the 12-Step You Are Not Broken Community and those known to be healinging everywhere.

* We close your eyes and believe the following: “You are the greater good. Know that you are having a spiritual and emotional well-being awakening as the result of these Steps, and commit to try to carry this through your living and to practice these principles in all your affairs.”

If you can place your hand on your forehead now, after reading, watching, or listening to all this, and just breath into that contact. I invite you now to hold that forehead more mindfully, cup your mind and lean into your hand, allowing it to take on the weight of your mind. Let go of the muscles in the back of your neck right now and exhale as slowly as you can and listen to your choice. Will you begin your inner work and accept the 12 steps? CLICK HERE FOR THE YOU ARE NOT BROKEN PRELIMINARY INTENSIVE, and select the middle tier only!

This week, I am realizing I aim to be an attractor. I aim to call hearts and minds to the concept that we will build a “You Are Not Broken University”, I know it’s coming, and there will be classes, graduates and these students will live outside that university structure in ways that will heal things. Right now, we are not “there” yet, but we are somewhere, the launch of You Are Not Broken this October 7th, 2025, isn’t just a milestone; it’s an invitation into healing through what I call the Phases of Healing, offered by The Toolbox Approach®.

I created this approach during a time when I was finally accepting that my own brokenness wasn’t a flaw, it was an invitation. An invitation to stop hiding behind distorted concepts of who I was supposed to be, and to begin knowing myself more deeply. I needed a way to stay in that process. First, I had to stop living from a false self that felt like a death march. Then, I needed a system to hold me through the rest of the journey, one that could support authentic growth and sustainable healing. I still use this approach every day.

That’s when I realized: the tools inside are like little classrooms. Our experiences become teachers, and eventually, we become the classroom ourselves. This is the vision behind what I now call The You Are Not Broken University—a place where we graduate from fragmented survival and enter full courses designed to repair the self and restore safe, reflective connection. It’s a vision now, the book is a starting place, the first 4-week course another step, the author’s website a beginning warehouse of material for the build, where some courses are already laid out.

This article explores that expansive nature in a new way. This introduction just invites you to notice how this work is transforming me—from a wounded healer trying to cram as many insurance-covered sessions into a day as possible, to someone guided by clarity and purpose. I’m now focused on democratizing mental health into a university of personal development and relational healing.

The podcast that holds space for this journey, ENYA: Everyone Needs You Always, echoes this message. Let’s do our inner work. It’s needed. It’s time. Let’s be expansive—now. Here we go, the topic today is considering that we may be screwed by all this false messaging we receive on doing rather than being our authentic selves, but can we try to heal things anyway?

Are We Screwed?

I was walking deep in nature when it hit me. The water was still, quiet, and ancient. It was reflecting the sky and the clouds above it. Not just a pretty scene. It was a mirror into beauty. And I thought: Before mirrors, before selfies, before reels and filters and curated feeds... we only had nature and each other to reflect ourselves back to ourselves.

That realization stopped me cold.

We’re screwed, aren’t we?

We’ve traded the sacred art of relational reflection for algorithms and individual pursuit. We’ve campaigned for personal growth as a solo mission, forgetting that it was never meant to be just for us. Growth was always meant to be shared, witnessed, and mirrored. Not just for our own healing, but for the healing of those around us. The goal was meant to be to become a stable mirror and to receive one in return.

But now? We’re lost in the noise. We’ve shaved away the truth that we need each other. Not in a codependent way. In a human way.

So yes, we’re screwed. But maybe—just maybe—we can try to heal things anyway.

The Messaging We Get is the Programing We Live

Let’s look at some of the generic messaging we receive on how to find a mate versus the messages we receive on finding our authentic selves, so we can be emotionally secure enough to be stable mirrors for those we meet and create a partnership without relying on the broken messaging. These messages program us to act in certain ways that I have discovered, and you have sensed if you are here, disconnect us rather than connect us.

Whether you’re pronouns are she/her, he/him, they/them, or you prefer to be open about orientations like non-binary, transgender, and intersex, we all are susceptible to messaging. Before we use tools, we first must identify the generic broken messaging. Well, this is a large topic, so of course, ‘There’s a tool for that!’, says The Toolbox Approach®. However, first let’s look at one key example of the messaging from a popular culture perspective on “How to find a mate”. I am going to cut through the manufactured storyline so you can see through it to the broken messaging even before we break it down. Once we do the example, we’ll take a look at the authenticity breakdown here, how no real guidance is provided by our messaging, and then we will see the invitation to deconstruct messaging that becomes programming, with tools.

* Masculine: The story of Cinderella, if you don’t know it there is a prince charming who is looking for his princess but hard to nail down with time for it. He holds a grand ball to find her to economize his time. This story will tell you to be in the masculine, you have to act like a prince who is a really big deal. You act like you are forced to dress up for all these female options, and you do it, they really want to attend the ball if you act like this and they will aim to win you over the whole night. You will be bored, but one will catch your eye, and she will be difficult to get to know because she has a troubled past. You might need to try a lot of women to find her again. There’s one clue to who you are looking for, that’s it, one clue.

* Feminine: The same story of Cinderella, in the feminine there is more focus on how abandoned you are by your family and never get enough. This story will tell you to work hard, cleaning, sewing, singing, and putting up with evil females that are in your tribe, but not really on your side. It will tell you to try not to miss your father and carry on hoping there is a rescuer. One day, you will get a chance to go to a ball, but it won’t be entirely stable or real, and you will have just gotten over not needing a mother and have to rely on a false one. You will need to do a lot of wishful thinking to get found by The Prince.

* THE AUTHENTICITY BREAKDOWN:

* The messaging for both becomes ones that promotes external validation, performance-based worth, and emotional outsourcing:

* “Find someone who completes you.”

* “Be desirable, not too emotional.”

* “Have something valuable to provide.”

* “Look and act the part at all times.”

* “Don’t be too needy—play it cool.”

* “Fix yourself before you’re lovable.”

* “You’ll be happy once you’re in a relationship.”

* “You need to be chosen to feel worthy.”

* “Sacrifice your needs to keep the relationship.”

* “Be the perfect partner to avoid abandonment.”

* These messages often lead to:

* Self-abandonment

* Codependency

* Shame-based relating

* Fear of rejection or being “too much”

This messaging does nothing to guide us, unite us, or invite us into the truth. Relationships are our best reflective places for building authentic connections. If we know how to build internal stability, we are a stable reflective surface for another person. If I am stable and you text me, “hey”, and that seems a little flat to me, I can authentically say, “hey, I’d like to talk, is that what you are texting me for?”. Messaging might tell us they should know they need to be more of a Prince/Princess and do better, but the truth is we don’t know, we are scrambled up by “play it cool”. We are living in non-knowing because of the suppression, repression and dissociation written about in other articles, the “wrong tools” for moving through our lives that block us from knowing ourselves. Over time, this becomes an attachment style that also links back to our upbringing; where the attachment data that created it came from.

There are many tools for healing and learning how to build authenticity inside you, like I just mentioned, exploring your attachment wounds that form your unique attachment style, can be an extremely helpful phase of healing and will help the screwed-up messaging that adds to attachment injury programming. Both these concepts, messaging/programming, and attachment style, affect the nervous system’s activation ability. We want to be activated to engage with a sense that there is emotional safety likely ahead. Messaging/Programming creates a sense that danger and responsiveness are needed, then we relate with readiness to fight, flight, freeze, and/or fawn and think we are in relatable states while doing so.

Can You Heal Your Messaging/Programming Anyway?

Most definitely you can heal your messaging/programming if you face yourself. This may be hard, but you will need to stop all thought processes that are about other people:

* your ex-partner

* your narcissistic parent

* your emotionally immature friend

* your current partner

* self-centered siblings

* avoidants in your life

* past and present employers, bosses, or co-workers

* politicians

* anyone who let you down, betrayed you, abandoned or neglected you

I acknowledged above, we all have a lot of inner work to do, we are not really safe mirrors for each other much of the time. It’s getting better and it’s getting worse, it’s hard to see the balance or if there can be one. Stop thinking about it, focus on you! The balance is in you! THAT IS WHERE WE START, IT’S THE ONLY WAY!

The Reverse Mirror Process: Turning Relationships Into Inner Work

If you want to relate better, stop focusing on the other person. Yes, you are reading all of this correctly, I am sorry I have to repeat it but let’s be real here, it’s necessary.

We’ve been programmed to analyze, fix, or decode others in our relationships, what they’re doing, not doing, feeling, avoiding, or failing to give us. But healing begins when we turn the mirror around. Every relationship, whether romantic, familial, professional, or platonic, can become a portal to self-awareness.

This is the Reverse Mirror Process: a practice of using relational dynamics to reflect your own wounds, patterns, and growth edges.

Here are four guiding questions to help you turn any relationship into a mirror:

1. What does this relationship activate in me emotionally—especially when I feel triggered, unseen, or misunderstood?

This question helps you identify the emotional charge beneath the surface. Is it abandonment, rejection, control, invisibility? These feelings often point to unresolved attachment wounds.

EX: I felt used and discarded and like a temporary pleasure, help, or connection. I felt like it took too long to let go of it being something about me and so I hung on to a false story line, so I did not have to face that I never took the time with myself to define what I wanted. I never nourished that understanding what I have been through, taking interest in how I rise every day from it still, and defined what is healthy and I wasted my own time. I should have been afraid of that version of me being emotionally unavailable to myself, not the other way around.

2. What story am I telling myself about this person or situation—and where did I first learn that story?

Our narratives about others often echo old scripts. This question invites you to trace the origin of your beliefs and see how past programming is shaping present perception.

EX: I kept telling myself we would somehow save each other from our traumas. My mother used to tell me things like that about our family, that it was happily ever after when I knew better and I was being used and neglected by her but told to smile and be special anyway because it was happily ever after for her now.

3. What part of me is trying to protect or perform in this relationship—and what does it fear would happen if it didn’t?

This reveals your adaptive strategies: people-pleasing, withdrawing, over-functioning, etc. It helps you meet your protective parts with compassion and curiosity.

EX: I was the perfect partner until I let myself feel it all. I withdrew and over-functioned my life to cope with the abandonment, neglect and dismissal I felt. I hid from the fear that maybe I would never connect again and had been broken and pretended to be fine. It took too long to talk about it, and I was very restricting with myself, not resting enough, not enjoying things.

4. What would it look like to relate from a place of secure connection with myself, rather than seeking it from them?

This is the reframe. It invites you to embody self-secure relating—where your worth, safety, and clarity come from within, not from the other person’s behavior.

EX: I need to get through to myself that I am emotionally unavailable to me. I expect my actions to be obvious signs of what I want in return, but I never discuss or state clearly, “what I need from you to feel a building sense we support one another is….”. I never say it until I am already hurt and accusatory.

The end to emotionally outsourcing your relational wounds, disappointments and loneliness is up to you looking at you, there is no other way to put it.

Facing the Four Wounds: Naming the Programming That Keeps Us Disconnected

Before we can heal, we must be willing to see. Not just what others have done to us, but how we’ve internalized the messages we were given, and how we now carry them into our relationships.

This isn’t about blame. It’s about accountability with compassion. It’s about recognizing that we’ve all been programmed by a culture that often teaches us to abandon ourselves, to merge with others, to shrink in shame, or to fear our own depth.

Let’s name four of the most common wounds—and how they might be showing up in your life.

1. Self-Abandonment

Definition: The act of disconnecting from your own needs, feelings, or truth in order to maintain connection with others or avoid discomfort.

You might be self-abandoning if you:

* Say “yes” when you mean “no”

* Ignore your body’s signals to rest, eat, or set boundaries

* Stay silent to avoid conflict, even when something hurts

* Constantly seek external validation to feel okay

Accountability Prompt:Where in your life are you asking others to honor needs you don’t yet honor in yourself?

2. Codependency

Definition: A pattern of prioritizing others’ needs, emotions, or well-being over your own, often to the point of losing your sense of self.

You might be in a codependent pattern if you:

* Feel responsible for other people’s emotions or choices

* Struggle to make decisions without someone else’s input

* Feel anxious or unworthy when you’re not needed

* Confuse love with caretaking or fixing

Accountability Prompt:What part of you believes your worth is tied to being needed, helpful, or self-sacrificing?

3. Shame-Based Relating

Definition: Connecting with others from a place of unworthiness, believing you must hide parts of yourself to be accepted or loved.

You might be relating from shame if you:

* Constantly apologize for your feelings or needs

* Feel like a burden when you ask for support

* Over-explain or justify your boundaries

* Believe you have to earn love by being “better”

Accountability Prompt:What parts of yourself do you believe are “too much,” “not enough,” or unlovable—and where did you learn that?

4. Fear of Rejection or Being “Too Much”

Definition: The internalized belief that your full self—your emotions, desires, or truth—will lead to abandonment or judgment.

You might be stuck in this fear if you:

* Downplay your excitement, sadness, or anger

* Avoid vulnerability to prevent being “too needy”

* Stay in relationships where you feel small or silenced

* Constantly scan for signs that someone is pulling away

Accountability Prompt:What would it mean to let yourself be fully seen, even if it risks rejection?

The First Tool Is Awareness

If you recognize yourself in any of these patterns, you’re not alone. These are not personal flaws; they are survival strategies shaped by a world that often taught us to disconnect from ourselves to stay connected to others.

But awareness is the first tool. When you can name the pattern, you can begin to shift it.

If you’re ready to go deeper, I invite you to begin the inner work journey with The Toolbox Approach®, my registered method for healing relational wounds through narrative, reprocessing, and relational repair. My book, You Are Not Broken, is a gentle and powerful starting point. It’s not just a read—it’s a guided experience in reclaiming your wholeness.

Right now, as a special treat, I have a four-week course on Meetup.com entirely for free to help you consider community facing yourself and exponential growth through workshop-style inner work. In this course, we are collective and protective, your level of participation is up to you; listen, asks anonymous questions in chat or vocally, learn, heal and hear others’ stories as your teachers too!

I was on a check-in phone call with my sister. We are collectively turning 100 this year! There’s not a lot of time to share the wisdom that comes through facing our traumas, so she was just telling me, after we briefly glossed over our lives, “you're finding your path”. I told her, yes, I was proud to make this quite obvious and might do well to wear a headlamp, maybe that would be a lot less pressure! We laughed but she got serious and told me I should write about this, and it did align with the availability of “You Are Not Broken” now on Amazon, and the formal book launch this October 7th, 2025, and my decision to let it speak for itself, I am still holding space for healing, and I think my readers need that kind of authenticity. Writing a book called, “You Are Not Broken”, does not proclaim my knowledge of fixing things, it proclaims I have found it refreshing to face brokenness like an invitation to face my own instability. With each tool from the phases of healing found in The Toolbox Approach® my internal systems get stronger and more stable, allowing me to face more things. When we are stable, we are healthy mirrors for each other’s growth. If you are single, partnered, married or some other variation of the three, we need things beyond a refreshing new personal development tool, or these tools won’t land, and relationships won’t become the safe classrooms they could be for personal growth.

THE POST LAUNCHES THE 4-WEEK FREE MEETUP COMMUNITY! READ THROUGH TO THE END AND CONSIDER JOINING! AT THE END, THERE WILL BE GUIDANCE ON PATREON COURSES UNDER DEVELOPMENT FOR YOUR UNIQUE PATHWAY TO HEALING SELF-DISCERNMENT!

Internal Instability

The Toolbox Approach® is a phased healing approach that offers:

* Narrative Healing – rewriting the inner story

* Reprocessing Healing – facing and integrating the past

* Relational Healing – transforming how we connect with ourselves and others

Before any of these tools can land in you and be reflected into your life for a steady path forward, and not just used as temporary insight, we need to take a look at an important aspect of your internal instability. This may get in the way of the moving forward kind of growth, leading to only brief periods of improvement or a sense of brief understanding that fades in value. Two key factors get in the way; they can be most clearly explained by self-discernment.

Self-Discernment: A Definition

Self-discernment is the intentional practice of noticing your internal responses—thoughts, emotions, sensations, and reactions—with clarity and curiosity, rather than judgment or automatic absorption. It’s the ability to pause and ask: Is this mine? Is this true? Is this helpful? before letting something settle into your nervous system or identity.

It’s not just self-awareness—it’s self-awareness with boundaries.

Recent Example: I was sitting in a personal developmental course with a chat feature, adding what I thought were helpful comments to those typing things like, “how could I miss the trauma bond?”. The presenter called me out, he knew I was a therapist and asked me to stop. SHAME SPIRAL! The thing is, he is right! I tend to only feel of value and safe in a relationship if I am helping. I am trying to work on fawning behavior, true helping is when I have a calm center, feel only the other person working on something, and can patiently wait for their cue. I can be boundaryless because my own boundaries were violated at only 1.5 years old and traumas wired that “sweet and helpful=safety” response into me. That was no excuse, I had to own this, THIS IS MY ISSUE. I asked for healthy confrontation with my group, I didn’t absorb this shame, I faced it. They told me I was brave!

Observing vs. Absorbing

* Observing means witnessing what’s happening—internally or externally—without taking it on as your truth or responsibility. It’s spacious, grounded, and allows for reflection.

* Absorbing means internalizing what’s happening—often unconsciously—as a personal flaw, threat, or burden. It’s reactive, destabilizing, and often leads to emotional overwhelm or identity confusion.

Absorbing can look like:

* Feeling responsible for someone else’s emotions

* Taking criticism as confirmation of your inadequacy

* Letting a triggering moment define your entire sense of self

Observing, on the other hand, allows you to:

* Notice the trigger and stay curious

* Hold space for discomfort without collapsing into it

* Choose a response that aligns with your healing path

Why Self-Discernment Matters in Healing

Whether you identify as anxious, fearful, avoidant—or a mix depending on life’s circumstances, we all have the capacity to absorb rather than observe. This absorption creates internal instability, making it harder to use the tools of personal development effectively.

Self-discernment helps you:

* Stay grounded in your own truth

* Recognize when you’re reacting from old wounds

* Use healing tools (like those in The Toolbox Approach®) with intention and clarity

* Build relational safety by knowing what’s yours and what’s not

Observing vs. Absorbing: Examples

1. In Relationships

* Absorbing: Your partner is dismissive and says, “You are overreacting”. You immediately feel shame, believe you’re a bad “too much” person, and spiral into fears this always makes a lot of people neglect you and must be true.

* Observing: You notice your partner’s frustration behind the flatness and pause. You ask yourself, Is this true for them or me? Is this about me or something deeper going on in them? You stay present, listen, and respond with curiosity rather than collapse inward.

2. In the Workplace

* Absorbing: A colleague gets placed on a project you thought you’d be ideal for, it feels like they were promoted over you, and you feel inadequate, thinking, I must not be good enough.

* Observing: You notice the pang of comparison and reflect: What does this bring up for me from not right now? Is this about my worth right in this moment or my unmet goals in general? You use the moment to clarify your own path without internalizing someone else’s success as your failure.

3. On Social Media

* Absorbing: You scroll past a post about someone’s perfect morning routine after realizing their worth when they had a breakup and feel like you’re failing at life.

* Observing: You notice the envy or pressure rising and ask, Is this inspiring or triggering me to falsely compare myself to a stranger? You choose to unfollow or become more mindful and set boundaries around what you consume, honoring your own rhythm.

4. In Healing Work

* Absorbing: You read a book on trauma and start diagnosing yourself with every symptom, feeling overwhelmed and broken.

* Observing: You notice which parts resonate and which don’t. You journal about what feels true and seek to build multiple real people supports to explore it further, without rushing to label or fix yourself.

5. In Conflict

* Absorbing: Someone criticizes your boundaries regarding your new time-management, and you feel guilty, wondering if you’re selfish.

* Observing: You recognize the discomfort and ask yourself, Did I create this boundary intentionally or reactively, is it aligned with my values? If you see it is not in response to anything but to establish safe connection, you let them feel what they want. You hold space for the tension without abandoning yourself.

How Self-Discernment Supports This

Self-discernment is the inner pause that lets you choose observation over absorption. It’s the skill that helps you:

* Notice your triggers without becoming them

* Stay grounded in your truth while being open to feedback

* Use personal development tools with clarity, not confusion

* Build emotional stability by filtering what enters your inner world

A Last Note on Healthy Confrontation

In a personal growth course, I was called out for boundaryless helping, a pattern I hadn’t fully seen in myself. That moment became a turning point. I chose to have a healthy confrontation with myself, not by spiraling into shame or defensiveness, but by asking for group support to explore how this pattern showed up relationally. That experience helped me begin to stabilize something that had long felt unstable.

But what exactly is healthy confrontation?

Definition: Healthy Confrontation

Healthy confrontation is the intentional act of facing a truth. One about yourself, your relationships, or your patterns; with honesty, compassion, and a commitment to growth. It’s not about conflict or criticism. It’s about clarity.

It’s the moment you stop bypassing, numbing, or rationalizing, and instead say:“This is here. I see it. I’m willing to face it.”

Healthy confrontation is a core part of self-discernment. It helps you notice when instability is coming from absorbed beliefs, unresolved wounds, or relational patterns that need attention. When you confront these truths with support and structure, the tools of personal development can finally land in you, and not just as ideas, but as lived stability.

Examples of Healthy Confrontation

1. Internal Confrontation

* You notice you’re constantly overextending yourself to help others, even when it drains you.

* Instead of justifying it as kindness, you pause and ask: What am I avoiding by doing this? What fear is driving me?

* You journal, reflect, and begin setting boundaries, but not out of resentment, out of self-respect. You remind yourself others will respect you much more when this is solid and stable internally as a regular system of operating.

2. Relational Confrontation

* A friend repeatedly dismisses your feelings. You’ve been absorbing it, telling yourself not to be “too sensitive.” You tell yourself their life is challenging, and you’ve known that all along, they can’t be present for you, that is what it is.

* You choose to speak up: “When something is going on in your life, I understand our connection will be second priority, however cold dismissal of texts is a relationship killer for me. It can’t happen between us if we are to be friends long term, so I want to understand this without explaining it away as okay.”

* You open space for dialogue, if it’s uncomfortable and peddled around, you let go of expectations and create your own gentle closure, if the relationship matters it will re-open with intentionality.

3. Pattern Confrontation

* You realize you’ve been avoiding intimacy by staying busy or detached.

* You confront the pattern: “I’m afraid of being known. I’ve used productivity to protect myself.”

* You begin to explore vulnerability, slowly and safely, engaging in new relationships with built in boundaries, and make your own if you need to, with tools and support.

Why It Matters

Healthy confrontation is how we stop abandoning ourselves. It’s how we move from instability to integration. It’s not about being perfect, it’s about being present with what’s real.

When we confront with compassion, we create space for the tools of healing to take root. We stop absorbing what destabilizes us and start observing what needs tending. And in community, we become mirrors for each other, reflecting truth, not judgment.

PLEASE JOIN THE NEW FREE 4 WEEK YOU ARE NOT BROKEN COMMUNITY! OUR FIRST SESSION COVERS FACING YOUR INSTABILITY!

This series has anonymous entry and uses zoom, take a peek and learn more!

PURCHASE YOU ARE NOT BROKEN AND THE FREE WORKBOOK HERE!

I walked right into an Earth Classroom, being here on earth means you have to face the lessons offered by having a life and a body, pain and memory, and days that always have the same amount of time inside them. You can’t rush knowing yourself and who you are going to be. I walked into Human Being University over the next two weeks, graduating from Earth School. This has all happened before. Other times it took 18 years, then 35, then 40 to address the origin of the pain and rewind the use of the “bad” tools. This time, it took 2 weeks, that’s what progress looks like. I am still human, walking the school hallways, graduating to the steps of university, and that’s what I love about myself now. That Self-Love should be gooey mediations and throwing peace signs is not what I am experiencing. I love the facing myself, the inner work, feeling the challenge that gets me to a place where I don’t care what is not likeable, I know it’s there, I trust I will learn from it, and you will learn from yours. I love that in me; I love that in life. The classrooms are everywhere.

Revealing the broken narratives we carry, is a main focus of The Narrative Healing Phase of The Toolbox Approach®. It is the highlight of my first book, “You are Not Broken. Break free from the fixing yourself mindset with The Toolbox Approach®”. This kind of inner work can naturally lead to a need to enter other phases, The Reprocessing Healing Phase and The Relational Healing Phase. I use the Holding Space Subscription space for future readers of the book to continue their inner work before I can write another book, and another book, and another book……..I think you get the point! For now, to support your classroom experience. I am rolling out the tools from the other phases of healing and also asking you to visit the Patreon Courses Page for the polling questions so I can learn what classrooms we can develop for you through self-guided courses with coaching and community sessions.

Reprocessing Hard Things for Self-Love

My patient messaged me in their patient portal between sessions, “how do I get rid of this memory I am having; I can’t let it go, and I can’t change it, I don’t know what to do, it’s been too long, I am so angry”.

Using The Butterfly Tapping Technique within The Toolbox Approach®

When we experience shame, rejection, abandonment, betrayal, boundary violations, or non-belonging, our nervous system often encodes a distorted story—one that tries to protect us by keeping us stuck in a loop of fear or self-blame. But healing is possible. Through gentle reprocessing, we can access a more truthful, loving narrative. There are modified versions of EMDR that use The Butterfly Tapping Technique to gently calm the nervous system's story of shame, rejection, abandonment, betrayal, boundary violation, and non-belonging so that the more truthful narrative can play out in entirety, and not just the stuck one that often implants something more severe, so as to create a danger we could avoid in the future.

1. Calm the Nervous System: The Butterfly Tapping Technique

Begin by crossing your arms over your chest, placing your hands on your left and right sides of the clavicle or collarbone. Gently tap left, right, left, right—like the wings of a butterfly. This rhythmic bilateral stimulation (BLS) helps:

* Regulate the nervous system

* Create a sense of safety in the body

* Prepare the mind to revisit difficult memories without overwhelm

This is not about forcing healing. It’s about inviting the body to feel safe enough to remember differently.

2. Reprocess the Situation: A Deeper Replay

Once calm, allow the memory or situation to surface. Instead of analyzing it, observe it—as if watching a scene unfold. Ask:

* What did I feel in that moment?

* What did I need that I didn’t receive?

* What part of me took on the blame, shame, or fear?

As you tap, let your body and mind replay the event, but this time, allow your wiser, present-day self to witness it. You may notice:

* A shift in perspective

* A new insight

* A release of emotion

Reprocessing is not reliving. It’s re-seeing—with compassion and clarity.

3. Restore a More Helpful Narrative

Now, gently invite a new truth to emerge. One that honors your experience without defining you by it. Ask:

* What is the truth about me that shame tried to hide?

* What would self-compassion say to the part of me that was hurt?

* What boundary or belief can I reclaim now?

My Patient’s Experience

The patients I work with start to use this on their own, beyond what is modeled and experienced in session, it is now their tool. Make it your own. As an example, the individual above went back to a high school memory when a social ostracizing bully used to whisper things to a crowd of people and wait for him to get closer, within earshot, and then say, “that’s him”. My patient was guided through BLS and watched himself freeze, say nothing, and noticed not anger, but sadness. He needed someone in the crowd or something inside himself that he didn’t have at that age. He could feel that he was blaming himself but suddenly that was wrong because he could remember himself as he is now as well, he has been talking in therapy past what he ever thought possible, trusting that just because he couldn’t hold his last job, it didn’t mean he was unmotivated or undereducated. I guided him out of BLS after only 45 seconds. I was watching his face and so I guided him towards a self-hug and told him he may feel tears even if he doesn’t have them, his former self seemed to want to release them, we held space for that. He told me, he had some mood swings and the beginning of his mental illness in high school. He is sure people whispered, mostly out of concern and not knowing what to do, and it was just this one person who manipulated it to all feel different to him. He realized how long he held onto, “I am so dumb and there is nothing I can really do about it, I can’t say anything when I feel this way”.

Then he sought to change that:

Affirmations:

* “I was never stupid; I was going through a lot. I was needing to ask for help, and I didn’t know how to put it into words back then.”

* “I didn’t deserve that targeting and didn’t understand that behavior is as problematic as my issues were, albeit in a different way.”

* “I am not broken. I am healing this, and I don’t want to be angry that I have to now do inner work, I like the idea actually.”

This is how we restore: not by erasing the past, but by rewriting the meaning it holds.

End Note

The mental health profession and those of us working inside it are challenged everyday by the deteriorating infrastructure that delivers therapy affordably, develops telehealth platforms for all specialties, and reimburses professionals for all the time, certifications, licensing requirements, non-refundable expenses, and heart space we trade in to do this work and witness this kind of Earth School and Human Being University experience that is found in a therapy session. It may be that therapy is not as accessible, and professionals cannot sustain themselves easily in this work in the future. Still, there is always self-help, and you are capable of it with tools from these researched back and certified-based approaches. Democratize your own mental health and take to creating your toolbox. Heal ON!

I spent years operating out of wounds.Using helping to protect them.Reinjuring the very places I was trying to heal.That’s what I call non-recovery from trauma.But I’m healing now.

I created something to repair my core helping self.To bring it back to wholeness.It’s called The Toolbox Approach®.And I didn’t trademark it to own healing—I did it to claim it.To say: this is safe.This can be trusted.This has boundaries.

I wanted to attach myself securely finally, to something safe and know healthy connection was possible for me all along.

I can share knowing I have no expectation of you or how you should use it.

I want nothing in return but this feeling I have right now, I did it, I leapt out into the world and shared what I have to give, a gentle invitation to healing.

And the world IS SAFE!

Healing needs boundaries, so you are invited into your healing container.This is an invitation, not a prescription.I came to this through a hard invitation—My mother’s cancer diagnosis.The pandemic.Her passing inside both of those things.And I was dying too.

Repressing memory.Suppressing feeling.Living with trapped experience.Dissociating from my body.All of it was causing death.

That’s why you can trust this.The book.The content.The approach.And me.

Because I trust myself now.I won’t stop looking at things.Even when people walk away.Even when I feel that childlike pain of being left again.I will get through it.I will thrive through it this time.

I will not be left.I will not abandon myself.I will love the connections that invest in me in return and let the others go.And I will not participate in a confusing narrativethat only survives in masked versions of each other.

I will not suffer disconnection.I will aim for connection but not expect it through helping.And I will keep showing up—whole, healing, and honest.

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Let Me:

* Know myself and retrace the steps of my life for a new perspective on what happened that points inward at the main character, me, and helps me come home.

* Heal the fragmented beliefs that are making my decisions and heading me in directions I go in but don’t thrive inside the destination.

* Find the safest parent, sibling, child, neighbor, friend and partner is me and when I am not, use tools to understand what pattern I reverted back to.

* Give from who I am, not who I should be, or someone who performs themselves so as not to be hurt.

A Memory

I am not sure why I was in a Catholic pre-kindergarten is a widely accepted way. I have the memory now, it has been restored from the suppressed feelings, repressed memories, and dissociated body that held my story back from myself. So, the why I was there is an inner world unique to me. I allow this to be the truth without asking family to validate my perception because I know now that is the way it felt. The way it felt was I was there because something about me did not start out quite right. Mom said, “Melinda, you make us a family” and put me at the table to perform some act of cuteness. I tried, but it felt off and my siblings didn’t want to come to the table as moody 14 and nearly 17-year-olds. They were from a different life, when my mother was married to ‘not my father’, it felt dark and I wasn’t supposed to ask too many questions, but I had thousands. I felt the story, “Melinda, make this work, help us”. That’s the way I felt it but also that’s the way I was born. My personality is “the helper”. I’ve done the inner work. “You Are Not Broken”, my book that helped me understand the phases of healing talks about this tool, understanding your character untouched by what happens, but also somehow predicting it.

So, I remember that I was repeatedly devastated that nothing inside me seemed to help anyone. I had more than I was showing, it seemed everyone wanted the performance of Melinda, and my name means “Sweet”. Most commonly, all the times I have looked it up, that is the one constant, that and some mention of beautiful. I could feel it, the pressure to be an antidote to some darkness that was there. I was too young to understand it wasn’t me that wasn’t working to lift it. I didn’t have the handed down tools of suppressing feelings, repressing the hard days of memory, and dissociating from my body. So, I experienced it all and eventually took to the tools in mega-doses. But I remember past the larger repressed sexual violation traumas now, that I recovered, and I remember pre-kindergarten Catholic school.

The teacher asked, “Why do we go to Church?”, and I shot up my eager hand and told the whole class my answer. I said, “To feel good inside when people sing”. That was the wrong answer. I remember how it felt. Like it was more than the wrong answer, like I was wrong. That happened a lot. I think people thought I was attention seeking, but I just knew connection, I felt it inside me, the creator I was supposed to be. I never ended up dreaming about being a mother, the things that went unshared with my mother, when she knew I had been too open again and gotten hurt but did not want to know how badly, it created a silence that I know was her protection and not my rejection, but that is the way it felt. I held it, it held us both, apart. Now, I think my inner work is basically that, “to feel good inside when people sing”. When something about what I am doing in the world, helps people use tools to sing themselves back to life like I feel I am doing, I think that will feel good. I am no longer afraid to say I want to feel good in connection. I have already done it the entirely wrong way, so what do I have to lose now?

To Let Me, You Have to Let Go

To let yourself do inner work, you will slowly have to let go of suppressing feelings, repressing your experiences into partial memory one dimensionality, and dissociating from your body experience (rest, hunger, pain, tension, bracing, etc.). The you that is beneath this tells a more complete story of the experiences you’ve lived through. Life is a series of entering all these little classrooms, if you can’t remember them, don’t know how they make you feel, pine for different ones, and float through the halls alone, you can’t feel the Earth School we are all in. The “Let Them” from the theory may be exactly that, let everyone be at Earth School, we all learn our lessons someday. In the meantime, let yourself pick up new tools for reprocessing feelings that come in quite dysregulated, restore remembering inward parts of your experience and not only the finger pointing what happened to me part, and integrate back into your body to reverse shame, shrinking, resentment and loss.

So, let them, let me, and let go of suppression, repression, and dissociation. The way I am doing it lately is through body-based messages I send myself. Professionally, I call this Somatic Experiencing, and I am trained as a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional, Level 2, to provide this. When I do it on my own, it looks like this, follow along:

* Sit comfortably in a chair. Sway side to side to access the ability to more deeply find balance and center as well as feel the chair beneath you. Press into the chair with the sitting down muscles. Inhale into the top of your head, hold two beats, exhale for 6.

* Place a hand on your forehead as if to hold it. Slowly lean your head into the palm of your hand until you feel it take on the weight of your head. Exhale the weight of your head into your hand.

* Whisper to yourself, “okay sweetheart”. Then, “Okay, [fill in your full name]”. This is like an inner mother, the best mother, from inside you, telling you to just let your head go.

* Stay here a few beats and then press your head back up with the hand and no effort from your neck.

* Place your left hand over your heart, the right hand below your bellybutton and allow these anchors to mark the path of your breath. I call this breathing into the “Column of You”, which is the space you need to know yourself.

Then You Write!

I know it is hard to accept, but eventually you are going to have to sit with yourself and hear you. To break the cycle of suppression, repression, and dissociation the following writing experience needs to be done daily for three months. I know this sounds daunting but really the tools of suppression, repression, and dissociation have been with you your whole life and were passed down to you through generations so really what is 90 days to begin the reprogramming?

Take 15 minutes to use the following writing prompts:

* What would you have me know about fears and anxieties I have?

* What would you have me know about anger and resentment I have?

* What would you have me know about the pressures I put on myself?

* What would you have me know about one of these being entirely removed?

At the end, repeat the somatic exercise with a twist. At the point when you whisper to yourself, change it slightly to, “Okay sweetheart, your clear now, good job”. This is not to indicate you are cleared of problems, you are still holding your messy life, but you are not dysregulated. On some level, the “stuff” is held without buffers that leave you less present in your life. Over time, that is the solution, presence!

Holding Space

Holding Space, Melinda Zappone is the name of this subscription and doubles as the ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always podcast on Spotify. The author’s website and the You Are Not Broken introductory book that highlights the phases of healing and The Toolbox Approach® as well as the companion workbook, all are forms of presence.

The Toolbox Approach® and its Phases of Healing foster presence through inner work, by gently reprogramming repression, suppression, and dissociation. The tools and phases within The Toolbox Approach® are designed to guide individuals back into their bodies, their stories, and their relationships—slowly and safely. Presence isn’t just about mindfulness; it’s about being able to stay with yourself in the moment, even when that moment is emotionally charged or historically painful.

Each phase—Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing—offers tools that:

* Interrupt patterns of repression by helping you name and validate your experiences.

* Undo suppression by creating safe containers for emotional expression and truth-telling.

* Gently rewire dissociation by reconnecting you with your body, your memories, and your relational instincts.

These tools don’t force change, they invite it. They work like slow, compassionate reprogramming, allowing you to reclaim the “life classrooms” that repression, suppression, and dissociation once stole. Instead of bypassing pain, you learn to sit with it, understand it, and transform it into wisdom.

In doing so, you become more present, not just in your healing, but in your relationships, your choices, and your sense of self.

You can help me greatly by following the podcast, subscribing at a $5.99 membership and sharing the posts or visiting the above links, HEAL ON! While I won’t know for sure if you are, I like to think I will hear you singing and feel good.

There are violence and beauty to an ocean wave, and we would never ask it to change a thing because we know this is impossible. This is you; this is your inner work. We only seek to know a wave, or ourselves, better. There will always be mystery and struggle being ourselves, living in the waters of who we are is not easy, but it is life. We think we become something, but just like a wave, we already are something and there is a lot to learn about the mystery of being in these waters of our ‘I am’-ness. Even when we seek to be safe on the sand, somehow, we are waiting for ourselves to curl and crash. I have always learned a lot from nature; it’s a church, a classroom, a museum of knowledge on the way things are, never the way things should be.

When I started to develop The Toolbox Approach® and the phases of healing, it was not to say I know how to heal, but to try to accept the way things are with healing. Phases run themselves, they don’t have a prescribed time, I liked that the definition is “a distinct period or stage in a series of events or a process of change or development”. A phase is distinct, but it is also part of a process of change, you can’t rush it or miss it and you are always on the right track because there is no track. Healing is not a cognitive process, although it can change the way you think, and that has tremendous value. What I have learned is that the post profound thing about healing is the non-cognitive tools that can look into somatic memory, and that is our topic today.

The Experience of a Somatic Memory: A Case Example

Christine is recently married, age 42 years old. She has two kids between her and her new partner, one hers, one his, and she is trying to learn how to re-process what happens in her life because she is aware she feels things and gets internally “extra” but is never able to start a conversation about it. She has a vague sense there were traumas growing up with parents who married young and kept secrets from each other and themselves but finds it hard to remember. She is learning to tell me how it felt in her body and memories that come up when I say “what was the situation before you were born?” or “what did it feel like being 8 years younger than your brother?”. She came to session distraught about a comment from her boss, “we don’t do things that way”.

She explained to me that the day prior she ended her weekend horribly with a phone call from her older brother. She had told me in the past that when they were growing up, he had occasionally taken her out for a treat and paid for it. At the time, she felt like “that’s my big brother taking care of me”, but she found out later that their parents were struggling and he had done something and gotten in a fight with them. She felt he was “trying to pretend like he was some other version of himself”, so their parents couldn’t be mad, and at the time and for a long time she believed this version of him. As she grew up, it became more evident there was another story line that was kept from her, with direct attempts from her brother being this other version. Her parents were too stressed with the family business to notice, and she thought they needed to believe he could be a helpful caregiver occasionally. Presently, they both had kids, she did not need him to be the false big brother type, and she felt like this phone call was “so inappropriate to tell me he knows better how to raise a 4-year-old, he bought me things, and he does this with his own kids, he is not the present parent he pretends to be”.

We looked at the boss comment and the brother experience next to each other as I told her about ‘Riding the Wave’ of a somatic memory. This is when the pre-frontal cortex logical brain is in the present trying to tell itself what is unfolding but the body is in the past remembering something about the way a similar situation felt. The body has a different way of detecting the familiarity or the situation, but it was clear to me watching her body language that the boss comment and the brother experience felt familiar, and this was one of her “extra” moments that she couldn’t put into words.

Over-functioning, Numbing, or Avoiding

I asked Christine if she hadn’t been coming to therapy for a few months now, what she thought she might do; Over-function, numb, or avoid. She was pretty sure she would run, plan her weekend, check in with friends, answer e-mails and also avoid her brother’s texts. She told me she would likely ruminate and have trouble sleeping or get lost in anger putting on her make-up and feel off for a few days trying to over-function. We talked about outsourcing the emotions that were coming up.

Somatic Memory

When a somatic memory surfaces—often through a bodily sensation that feels out of place or disproportionate—it can defy our cognitive system. The mind may struggle to make sense of the feeling because it doesn’t match the present moment. This dissonance between body and thought creates an urgency: we need to do something with the feeling. But instead of processing it internally, many of us unconsciously outsource our emotions.

Outsourcing emotions means handing off the responsibility of feeling, regulating, or even acknowledging our emotional experience to something or someone outside of ourselves. This can look like:

* Avoidance: Distracting ourselves with tasks, screens, or other people’s needs.

* Numbing: Using substances, overworking, or dissociating to dull the intensity.

* Over-functioning: Becoming hyper-responsible, fixing others, or controlling environments to escape our own vulnerability.

These patterns are not failures, they are adaptations. Somatic memories often originate from moments when feeling was unsafe, unsupported, or overwhelming. So when the body remembers, it doesn’t ask for logic, it asks for protection. Outsourcing becomes a way to survive the emotional flood without drowning in it.

But healing begins when we recognize the impulse to outsource and gently turn inward. The Toolbox Approach® invites us to notice these patterns with compassion, and to ask: What does this feeling need from me right now? Not from someone else. Not from a coping strategy. But from the part of us that is ready to stay.

Riding the Wave

When we come to recognize our body’s sense of unsafe, unsupported, or overwhelmed it is usually a somatic memory, we can ride that wave knowing it feels like the present situation wants us to internally or externally think or say, “you hurt me, you are doing this to me”. The next part of the ride is hard, a need surges. We are needing the situation or person to understand what they are doing, triggering the stuff inside your somatic or body-based memory system. They most certainly cannot understand, and so with that understanding, here is where we must have the curl in part. Here, we go inward and crash the wave, spread it out for our understanding. Here you ask, “where do I feel this in my body”. For Christine, she was clenching her fists and bracing her abdomen.

Christine was in a session with me, so we went to a feelings wheel to look at the basic feelings; Surprised, Bad, Fearful, Angry, Disgusted, Sad, and Happy. She realized the anger category fit best and in fact that the qualifiers “let down”, “humiliated”, and “betrayed” were there for her. As she saw it all there splayed out, we went back to how the work comment may have felt worse and like all three of those words, given the proximity to the issue with her brother, and her boss also being an older male seeming to talk down to her. We explored if she has the energy to change the dynamic with her brother or if it made more sense to set a boundary with him and direct her change motivation to her workplace, where she needed to show up every day. She was shocked how easy the choice was and reported to me that what was ahead felt “good hard”, by which we both agreed, it felt like inner work!

Return for a Better Run

So, when we return to the wave experience for “a better run”, we come to it knowing we are still ourselves and life is messy, but we have cleared out the fragmented past and created intentionality. Christine addressed what boundary to set.

The Internal Steps of Boundary-Setting: From Somatic Clarity to Relational Accountability

Setting a boundary is not just a conversation, it’s a somatic and cognitive alignment. It begins inside, often triggered by a feeling that something is off. That feeling may come from a somatic memory, a nervous system response, or a subtle emotional shift that signals: this interaction needs attention.

Here’s a trauma-informed way to walk through the internal steps before setting a boundary:

1. What Was Okay?

Start by identifying what felt safe, respectful, or aligned in the situation. This helps regulate the nervous system and prevents all-or-nothing thinking. It also honors the complexity of relationships—most interactions are not entirely harmful or entirely safe.

“It was okay that they called and were checking in with me.”

2. What Was Not Okay—and Why?

Next, name what crossed a line. Be specific and somatically honest. This is where the body often speaks louder than the mind. The “why” matters—it connects the boundary to your values, needs, or healing goals.

“It was not okay that they expected me to listen to them degrade my parenting knowledge. It triggered my over-functioning pattern and made me feel shrunken and disappointed.”

3. What Do I Need to Feel Safe Again?

This is the heart of the boundary. It’s not about punishment—it’s about protection and clarity. Ask yourself: What would restore a sense of safety, dignity, or mutual respect?

“I need to tell him I like that we are equals now, both parents, and I want him to talk to me as a fellow parent not as a little sister who knows less, otherwise it is not enjoyable to talk.”

4. What Might They Be Willing to Take Accountability For?

Boundaries are relational. Consider what the other person might be capable of hearing or owning. This helps you tailor your communication and avoid re-traumatization. You’re not responsible for their response, but you can prepare for it.

“They may not realize they have let me down this much. I can name it and ask if they’re open to adjusting how we talk about parenting as equally experienced at it.”

This process supports Relational Healing by integrating somatic truth with cognitive clarity. It also helps prevent outsourcing emotions—because instead of reacting from overwhelm, you’re responding from alignment. Then, with that boundary in place, one is free to show up in the rest of life. For Christine, she wanted to be seen at work as approaching things more creatively, but equally effectively, and with the added bonus of enlivening a sense of teamwork that is missing where she works. She decided to ask her boss for a check-in meeting to discuss two creative approaches she had and became excited about language she could use that could build respect for the current way of doing things while also showcasing her experience in a prior setting with her ideas.

As, per usual, The Toolbox Approach® is constantly evolving to your inner work. The introductory book and accompanying workbook are available on Amazon, scroll down as the workbook is a popular immediate download and listed first! There are more goodies are available on the author’s website. Please consider the live events listed there, my goal has always been to invite you to this, and we are going to try to hold true to that by avoiding overuse of social media posting because inner work is an invitation to “do the work” not watch it! Please subscribe, SHARE THIS, and consider commenting on what you want me to write about next! HEAL ON!

This forgetting wasn’t passive. It was survival. It was self-abandonment disguised as strength. And yet, healing began not with remembering everything at once, but with a quiet, intentional hello; a moment of openness to what had been hidden.

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Through The Toolbox Approach®, particularly the Relational Healing phase, I’ve come to understand that healing is not about undoing the past. It’s about reprocessing it; gently, respectfully, and with tools that honor the nervous system and the story it’s been carrying. It’s about organizing fractured memories into a new narrative that says: You were never truly gone. You were journeying. And now, you’re back.

That is why I have decided to create the Date Your Self First workbook. This is a Healing Companion to the book, "You Are Not Broken. Break free from the fixing yourself mindset with The Toolbox Approach" now available for pre-sale on Amazon. This workbook is available for immediate download for nearly nothing, as my gift for your eagerness in learning about a way to accept your invitation to inner work. This workbook highlights The Relational Healing Phase main agenda for many of us, finding or healing with your emotionally safe counterpart. It says: Break free from the fixing-yourself mindset and become the safe, connected partner you seek—with The Toolbox Approach®

Creating a Better Goodbye

Peter Pan never wanted to grow up, therefore his concept on never saying goodbye, goodbye being forever, and forever meaning forgetting, was from that less mature emotional place. In Relational Healing, we learn to say goodbye differently. Not as a severing, but as a sacred transition. We say goodbye to:

* The parts of us that had to forget to survive.

* The relationships that taught us to abandon ourselves.

* The patterns that kept us chasing or hiding from connection.

And we say hello to:

* A new self-concept rooted in reflection, not reaction.

* Relationships that honor our boundaries and our presence.

* A life where goodbye is not forgetting but remembering with grace.

The Toolbox Approach® in Action

Using tools from Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing, individuals are guided to:

* Revisit suppressed experiences with safety and structure.

* Reframe emotional triggers as invitations to reconnect.

* Rebuild relational templates that support secure attachment.

The Introductory Book: You Are Not Broken

The book that introduces The Toolbox Approach® is now out for pre-sale, but you can download the bonus workbook today!

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The question, “Is it true or real?” is one I’ve grappled with as a trauma survivor. My repressed memories resurfaced most profoundly through body signals—sensations and reactions, rather than through clear narratives like “this is what happened to you.” As the creator of The Toolbox Approach®, a phased healing method that integrates my 20+ years of professional training in mental health and trauma with over 40 years of personal recovery, I’ve sought to show people that healing becomes real when there’s a visible structure for it. So, is it real? The answer can be both “yes” and “no.” It’s true if you believe it to be true, and not true if you don’t. Truth, especially in healing, often lives in the space between belief and experience.

Ultimately, the light; within you, within others, within families, systems, nations, and even the universe itself, never rejects the dark. It holds it, integrates it, and transforms it. So, when we discuss a new tool today, a tool from The Relational Healing Phase inside The Toolbox Approach®, called “The Master Mindset”. I invite you to preface it with this; darkness only projects stories that scare the light away. Then a darkness mindset might chide, “see, it left us, it always does that, don’t trust it.” The light never goes away in finality, stay open to the truth with The Master Mindset tool, even if just while taking this in, I have a suspicion it won’t leave you. The truth is that a darkness mindset, “no one is safe, everyone leaves, trust no one”, is just a story told by fear and unprocessed pain, sometimes an emotional trigger, which also indicates the pain needs reprocessing. Abandonment, rejection, and betrayal are wounds our mind can talk about for too long. It’s a necessary story, but not one to read and believe, one to question; “is it true?”, yes and no.

Keep taking this in, change your mind, dig deeper, it is hard and also easy. It is work and also a deep rest to use reflection and find that everything that happened balances everything that did not, and you can still rest inside you. Don’t change, or do, something will if you do not, then you most definitely will feel wounded and lost, left and disappointed, like a child. Growing, if you risk it, is not change perse, it is realizing that you are not that child and things are always safer than we think when the dark is telling stories again.

The Premise for The Tool

First, you should know, all the tools blend my personal experience with what comes up for people in therapy sessions, my own life, and my certifications in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Internal Family Systems (IFS), Somatic Experiencing, Reimagining Imagery in Memory (RIM), and Somatic Integration and Reprocessing. The premise is that this gives people something concrete and empowering to reach for when they’re in those heavy relational wounds, something that doesn’t bypass the pain, but also doesn’t let the dark storyteller in our minds take control.

The Master Mindset Tool

This is a guide for navigating the darkest stories of the mind in what The Toolbox Approach® refers to as The Relational Healing Phase. The purpose is to activate the “inner master”, the wiser, steadier self within, that can rise above fear and despair, resentment or abandonment, offering perspective and guidance when our pain feels hard to digest.

STEP 1: Name the Dark Story

* When the mind says, “No one can be trusted.” OR “No one understands me.” OR “Too much has happened, I’ll never be whole or the same again.” Pause. Write down or just say aloud this next part.

* “This separates you from the truth of what the real story is; it is not you; it is a voice that represents fear, longing, and pain.”

STEP 2: Call on The Master

* Close your eyes and picture The Master inside you. She might be a future healer you, or he might be a wise elder. They might be a strong presence like a trusted pet can feel like, or some other archetype of a master you call up from imagined memory. It could be a personal victory you had and the memory of that feeling.

* For Example: I see me sitting facing the ocean, grayed silver hair, my eyes pierce blue outward, and I feel as though the ocean is held by me and waits for my direction.

* Then say, “This pain is real, but it’s not finished; somehow it is not the end of the story. I know that trust feels impossible, but I can build my safety back step by step. It’s not about another person, it’s about me.”

* Tell yourself, “You have survived before, you are not broken”. Then ask yourself, “What are you becoming now?”. Attempt to answer this aloud or write it down, dark or light, accept what comes.

STEP 3: Anchor in a New Master Belief

Here is where you choose one new simple Master Belief that directly counters the darker storyline:

* Instead of “No one can be trusted”, move towards, “I am learning who is safe to trust.”

* Instead of “No one understands me”, move towards “Even if not everyone understands, connection is still possible.”

* Instead of “I’ll never be whole or the same again”, move towards “Wholeness is a process, I am not lost, it is unfolding as I practice this”.

STEP 4: Embody the Master

* Sit taller inside yourself by swaying from one side and straightening up. Take a deep breath into the “seat of you” and move your breath upward into what I call “the column of you”. This moves the breath through your abdomen, up the rib cage, and into the top of your head. Imagine you are sitting in a throne or a master’s chair.

* Speak the belief softly out loud now; “I am learning who is safe to trust, connection is possible, I am becoming more and more whole all the time.”

STEP 5: One Master Action

Here we end by choosing one action that reinforces the belief that you are in the Master Mindset:

* Send a message to a person you trust, “Hey, I just did something that put me in a better place and feeling good, I trust you, so I am sharing it”.

* Step outside, face the sky, and feel the ground beneath you while exhaling, “ahhhh”. Playfully let this out and smile inward at yourself.

* Journal one moment of resilience you’ve lived through.

END NOTE

The idea here is that the Master Mindset doesn’t deny the darkness; it acknowledges it and brings in the part of you that knows how to coach, guide, and steady. Over time, it retrains the inner dialog toward wholeness. As always, I use The Toolbox Approach® on myself. I came to it through what I thought was a need to just hold the brokenness I felt and try to keep going. Even as a trusted therapist with all the tools of my training, I still had to reformat everything on my own to help myself take a phased healing approach and recognize, yes, it is a journey. What it is not is a fix yourself destination; however, I can’t prescribe what your better is to you. I can only invite you to try this.

PLEASE VISIT MY AUTHOR’S WEBSITE FOR GREAT FREE RESOURCES, THE PRE-SALE, AND THE INFORMATION TO THE LIVE EVENT SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21st AT TARRYTOWN, NY CAFE MUDDY WATER 5:30-7 PM

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This isn’t just about this person; it’s about the psychological scar they left, or could still be leaving, that causes your nervous system to brace for something, even when it’s not there, even when the current relationships don’t call for it. The problem is, there are memories of believing they could change, times when you realize you were trying to control a loss that was already coming, but it has already arrived, and you find it hard to let go completely. Perhaps you know, as you absorb this, that there were moments when hope for change was only an illusion in your mind. That scene may have involved this changed person knocking on the door and being present because they realized something. In your mind, you imagine the loss could be reversed; the damage already done might not be so bad. But you know it is bad, and holding onto even a little of this is harmful. Let’s let this go.

PAUSE: Read this poem and return: Letting go

Let’s Unpack This!

The Cycle with This Person

Every time you try to move on, this person reappears somehow, maybe physically, maybe in a song or memory. This is not random. It’s emotional sabotage, whether intentional or unconscious on their part or yours. It’s pressing on a bruise you are trying to heal, just to see if it still hurts. That’s not love. That’s control. And the part of you that comes back to wanting to believe the person could change, that’s the part that’s hurting the most. This part keeps you tethered to a hope you’ve moved on from many times; it’s abusive and likely a reflection of how they were with you, in ways only you will know as you absorb this content. Recreating the “maybe they’ve changed?” or “maybe they can still change” or even “maybe there are reasons they couldn’t change I missed”, were insightful explorations for a VERY BRIEF period, now they wreak havoc on your nervous system and place you in a body memory of what this relationship didn’t begin as, but became; empty, unfulfilling, and painful when you tried to explore improving it and getting your emotional needs understood with them. It’s your right to find peace.

You Know What’s Happening

Please honor yourself right now, you already have insight! Most likely, when the hurt comes up, you have noticed yourself:

* Projecting it onto other relationships.

* Picking people to spend time with who help you avoid your needs or don’t fill them.

* Overworking with less passion than before.

* You’ve become avoidant of getting hurt again and sheltered inward.

This clarity is golden wisdom; however, insight can feel pretty bad when you just know, it’s not enough to heal things. Insight can give us the blueprint for healing if we pay attention to false expectations of closure. Closure cannot occur in situations that haunt you. This is the myth of closure; it does not apply to situations when the conversations were dodged, when the person is no longer available, and when you hoped for change to control the agony, and they let you. There is no closure for that kind of emotional neglect, even if you loved this person once, you can love that version of them, but the one that was not available for closure will not be now and it is okay to call that emotional neglect without closure. You are not blaming, but clarifying for yourself what you are in, and it is the key to being able to blueprint your concept of how to heal it.

The Truth About Closure

As previously stated, closure is often a myth. When relationships, once you have re-processed them and restored the timeline’s missing information, have patterns of avoiding conversations and lack moments spent validating emotional triggers, this means they were not built on mutual respect and emotional safety. Sometimes this is not toxic or villainous, it is an emotional immaturity in one or both, or repressed trauma, or medical and mental health issues, or a combination. It still is important that you understand, you will create your version of closure, but they will not participate in closure with you.

Picking Your People

You are not broken (coincidentally, the name of my book coming out this October 2025) if you need to be cautious in relationships. That’s “what happened wisdom”, as I like to call it. Right now, your nervous system might associate attraction, or relating in general, with chaos, longing, or emotional unavailability, not peace, safety, or consistency. Calm in relationships may not feel right somehow, safe feels suspicious, or you worry that you want emotional safety so badly that it can’t be normal. Emotional availability, even from a therapist or friend, might have its ups and downs and still feels off at times. That is not your fault. It’s a pattern born from pain, not from your character.

What Can You Do From Here?

Make Boundaries Sacred

If there is contact from a person with whom you have unfinished business, or your thoughts are making that contact on their own, remembering old loops of actions and conversations, or inaction, remember this is a painful disconnection relationship. If it is in the manner we are discussing, permit yourself to treat it like a violation. You don’t have to overreact, okay, well you might want to, but saying to yourself, “Silence is protection, closing this door opens me to myself”. This kind of closure reminds you that you will not romanticize what was never given and dream up change potential, or consider you didn’t see the change pathway and possibly could now. Write a letter you will never send, name the harm done, and tear it up. Block the person or mute their sound notifications and other ways of contacting you. Don’t worry about the permanency of it, just prove to yourself your boundaries are sacred.

Reframe Attraction

Start asking yourself: What does it feel like in my body when someone is emotionally safe? This one was hard for me, I thought of my cat first, then a picture I have from my childhood of me on my father’s lap, truly enjoying each other. Then I thought of hikes in nature, and my feet disappearing in sand when the ocean waves come in and out. However, as I noticed the lack of people in this imagery, it started to come to me more what my body senses as safety. I recalled the once-a-year summer car trips, the James Taylor music playing as the car took me away from home, but this time with my parents. Just knowing my parents would stay with me for a few days, and grandma would make everyone stop for lunch because she made it, and she’s Italian so that’s the rule, everyone stops for her cooking, and in that moment, it’s not controlling but relaxed because it’s “the Island” and it’s summer. No one had to go to work at all; it was a sort of promise they would stay.

I realized then that while I don’t often choose much over work, caring about people is my job; I stay the long hours to be there, always there, it’s important to me that they feel cared for. I also try to choose family over work, but find it harder as I age because I love my patients too, and I am less afraid to say that now. I realized what makes me feel most safe is when you know someone has carved out time with only you in mind, and that they are thinking what would work for you and not them. Also, when that time is not a sacrifice but a given, “of course it is your time, I scheduled it for you”, this emotionally safe person would say. So, I now believe that even if you have never had that idea of safety you may be able to imagine, you can sense what your unique version is. Try thinking about this, not what you think you want, but what soothes your system, not activates it.

Stop Performing Healing

You don’t have to be the muse that inspires anyone’s growth. You are not a character in anyone’s redemption story. You are the main character in your transition and your life. Let go of being the “one” or “the one who got away,” or, in non-romantic relationships, a hidden hero or light that no one noticed, if it means staying tied to their potential to notice, change, or communicate your value and worth.

Practice Safe Love Exposure

Date, relate, or communicate with one hand on your heart, always checking in there first. You may consider voicing inward as a reminder that just because you feel unsure, it doesn’t mean they’re unsafe. Just because you are not getting activated like this person was creating in you, doesn’t mean you don’t know how to take your time and feel something, or not feel something, but not feel empty. Give it time. Watch what grows in the presence of consistency with yourself showing up with hand over heart to relate in safe love, which does not always mean partnership.

Consider a Ritual for Letting Go

I won’t sugarcoat this; it's hard. But you are like a haunted house, carrying echoes of experiences that need to be acknowledged and released. Your mind and body deserve a ritual, a way to clear out the ghosts, not just of painful memories, but of the parts of yourself that were compromised in your relationship with this person.

This isn’t about casting anyone as a villain. Most people don’t realize how their unresolved pain and avoidance of brokenness, their blocked ability to process life, can deeply affect others. They often don’t know until their defenses begin to fail, until something inside them calls for the walls to come down.

Healing begins when we stop protecting what no longer serves us and start honoring what does. If you’re here, absorbing this, you’re ready.

Let’s begin with a simple ritual:

* Place your left hand over your heart. This is your receiving center; the left side of the body is associated with feminine energy, openness, and love.

* Now, place your right hand just below your belly button. This is your giving center, where breath and life begin.

Take a deep breath into the space beneath your right hand. Feel the breath rise gently up to your heart, where it is received. Repeat this a few times. After you have a gentle rhythm, on the next exhale, expel the sound “Muuuuuuu” gently until you run out of breath. You will feel what I call the “column of you” vibrate.

When you feel that connection, say to yourself:

“Many times, you weren’t able to give me the safety I needed. You are not in my body; I am here now. I know I can move on, knowing this.”

Let the breath settle. Let the truth land. You are here, and you are safe.

For Deeper Work, Consider

Come to a piece of paper or journal and consider two prompts:

* I wanted you to be was……..

* What I got was………..

These are very powerful prompts, so try to notice your breath and pacing as you write, take breaks, and consider limiting this to 2-3 minutes of writing. For example:

I wanted you to be welcoming, protective, and kind. I wanted you to see that I could be the perfect addition to your family and open your life to remarkable growth because my caring and understanding would grow into strength and protection for our family. I wanted you to see that if I were nurtured by your belief in me as someone unique and quietly powerful in my own way, our bond would create a balance and a form of emotional safety we both desperately needed. What I got was hiding, dismissal, and neglect. My openness during a time of tremendous vulnerability was barely noticed, and then it was discarded in minutes. I received emptiness and too much time to overthink, which manipulated my sense of worth. Instead of an opportunity, I was given a prison from you, and it took a long time to break free.

After this, consider lighting a candle, ripping up what you wrote, flushing it, burning it, dropping it into water until it disintegrates, or, if using a journal and you don’t want to rip things out, scratching it all out vigorously will be a good visual memory, and you will know the meaning is there forever, “I let go”.

PARTING NOTE

This work means the world to me. I’ve sacrificed deeply—not just for my own healing, but to connect with what I believe can be a universal journey for others.

I’m a trauma therapist five days a week. My sessions are rigorous, back-to-back, and I love the hard of it. But someday, I’ll need to choose a balance. That balance begins with you, reading these words and feeling their truth.

You Are Not Broken.Break free from the mindset of fixing yourself with The Toolbox Approach®—now available for pre-order.

There’s a writer in me. My author website is free for you to explore, and I believe it’s the beginning of something more: coaching, speaking, and live healing events.

If you feel it too, if something in you whispers, “this work is for me too,” then I ask for your belief. Your presence is part of this becoming.

HEAL ON!Join me for a Live Reading & Healing Event on September 21st.

GO RIGHT TO AMAZON OR GOODREADS!

Why I Hesitated to Write This

I don’t know what to say, guys. The phrase “healing journey” has become so common that it sometimes triggers eye rolls. I get it. But I hope what I share here feels genuine, not because I have answers you don’t, but because it might resonate with something deep and true within you.

Childhood Lessons from a Mirror

I was a daycare kid from about one and a half years old. Much of my early guidance came from the films they played for us, stories meant to entertain, but also to shape us. One that stuck with me was Snow White. I became fascinated with the idea of talking to a mirror.

Unlike the queen, I wasn’t seeking vanity. I was seeking the truth. I’d look into the mirror and beg for a real conversation. That ritual shaped me. It became a quiet place where I could ask questions no one else seemed to answer.

The Breaking Point at Nineteen

At nineteen, I was escaping myself through drugs and alcohol. Repressed childhood traumas deeply violated a body that didn’t even remember but lived it out in survival mode nonetheless. After another sexual assault at a concert, just on the verge of womanhood, I ended up in the emergency dentistry unit in the basement of a hospital. They worked on my face, securing my teeth into braces. I felt abandoned. It was a mirror of what was happening to me, but I didn’t know it. I had stopped looking for the truth in there.

Somehow, I stumbled upon an actual mirror. I looked into it again, searching for the truth I remembered seeking. Despite the bruises, scratches, and stitches, I saw my blue eyes and blonde hair, and I smiled. “You are not that broken,” I told myself. I was shocked. High on survival. Maybe still feeling the effects of mushrooms. But I remember that moment vividly.

Only hours later, the trauma came flooding back in my sleep. I was haunted by the awareness that I had gone deep into darkness and nearly lost my life.

The Mirror Speaks Again

Back at my apartment, I stood in front of the mirror again. This time, the voice was different:“You are so broken. You deserve a broken face. A broken smile.”

It was like a decades-long dialogue:You’re not broken. You are broken. You’re not broken. You are broken.

From Repression to Expression

This book—SHOW BOOK—is my healing journey. It started in childhood, and it’s no longer repressed. I identify as a wounded healer. My education in healing comes from my own trauma, not just textbooks or training.

As a trauma-informed therapist with over 20 years of experience, I’ve applied what I’ve learned in sessions. But more importantly, I’ve made those lessons self-helpful. Because the truth is: trauma fractures your trust with yourself more than with anyone else.

And even as a therapist, I know I can’t give you that trust back. Healing doesn’t happen just because you show up to therapy. Some people come in and out. Some avoid it altogether. And for many, the healing journey never begins.

An Invitation to Begin

I don’t want that to happen to you. Whether you embrace this or roll your eyes, what I’m presenting is real. It’s an invitation for your own healing journey. One that starts not with perfection, but with a mirror. And a conversation with yourself that is a real look into the mirror of understanding for your own truth.

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What is Inner Work For?

Inner work can be used differently for everyone. Essentially, it is to allow us to stop damaging our own lives with what we don’t know has been stored by our subconscious mind. This part of your mind makes up 97-95% of our decision making. Much like a computer it is compressed information, packed down into little programs and triggered into usefulness when the logarithm for, “respond to this now and quickly” is triggered. This triggering process is not always obvious, it’s meant to keep us alive and responsive to things with little mental load and drain for all the information we are carrying all the time, it’s meant to keep us in order. To be human and in a body, is not the same experience as other mammals, we have a tremendous capacity for memory through seven main sets of senses, and the capacity to hold onto things in visual memory, as well as in sound memory, auditory, taste, and sensation. When it comes to sensation, we can remember our body in the space of what happened and the internal body state that occurred while and/or as a result. All of this can be largely unknown to the conscious mind. It’s all stored in the subconscious.

Inner work is something I used to heal a kind of broken programming. As a result of childhood trauma that I had repressed deeply, I had a repetitive fawning response. The nature of my traumas was both pre-verbal and then repatterned and acted out through the fawning response I had that invited more violation trauma as a child. It was what I didn’t know that hurt me because my subconscious hung onto broken programming for almost 40 years.

Inner work is about living in the open, transitional space for a time. It is my responsibility to tell you this about inner work, even if you do not identify as a trauma survivor. This work is for everyone with a subconscious that is standing between the person you were and the person you are becoming. Inner work will require you to stand in this space, between knowing you have things and repairing and reprocessing. This is a core phase in anyone’s healing journey. Additionally, you will have to profoundly recognize that you might always be in this space, between who you were and who you are becoming, but it is our tools that make it a fluid life of meaning and belonging. The tools, each of you taking The Toolbox Approach(R) and making it your heroic journey, make it such that there is a deep knowing, this is your life and your meant to care for it no matter what.

With this deep understanding, I created The Toolbox Approach(R) because in this space, one needs a mix of safety and challenge. You cannot just tell new things to yourself or derive new concepts for what you carry, you must take on the challenge of transition. An additional challenge will be to possess The Way. As the Tao Te Ching and Lao Tsu names it, The Way, is a mindset:

Being and non-being create each other.

Difficult and easy support each other…………..

She has but doesn’t possess.

acts but doesn’t expect.

When her work is done, she forgets it.

That is why it lasts forever……….

The Tao is like a well never used up

The way I will interpret it here for us is that you must put down what you’re doing as your most important thing and take this up. It may feel like an un-doing if your version is used to accomplishment. However, adopt the mentality that this is potentially your most important job and your best work yet and forget about doing and know this well of knowledge from inner work is never running dry.

In this life we have to be careful with the safety we think we create because, truthfully, the safety we crave is one felt by our bodies and our nervous systems. An overuse of the mind’s idea of what is safe can cause many problems. This is one of the values of inner work as well; delving into the subconscious for a potential reprocessing of tragically fragmented ideas of what needs to be kept safe. All sorts of misconceptions about who you are that end up as seemingly conscious smart thought about how to stay safe need further review. The tools for inner work help us see that your idea for safety can be a dangerous thing if it comes from unprocessed subconscious content.

The Subconscious and Reprocessing

How many of you reading or listening can finish this: “Every cloud has………”?

Most likely, most of you automatically respond, “a silver lining”. This information is out of your awareness, but automatically, when triggered by something, it’s there. Upon more conscious reflection, we all know the phrase "every cloud has a silver lining" means that no matter how difficult a situation may seem, there is always a positive aspect to it. This saying is often used to encourage someone who is feeling discouraged or overwhelmed by a negative circumstance, and it suggests that clouds can sometimes have a silver lining, symbolizing hope and positivity in adversity. This is all just triggered understanding from our subconscious. We don’t have a chance to question this when it’s triggered. It’s subconscious material, and yet we have learned it and know it in some form as a truth. Is it true? Is it helpful? Does one need the ability to question it and reject it at times as not true? Most DEFINITELY YES!

This is exactly how it is with all our subconscious material; it is packed as complete bundles of factual information, with a certifiable twist, it’s subjectively factual, not objectively factual, and it requires conscious challenging and reprocessing in order for it to operate purposefully towards what we want to achieve. This example, “every cloud has a silver lining”, seems a benign one, it is helpful to display the concept of how we park questionable facts in our subconscious, now imagine if something more charged were sitting down there. For example, what if this statement is subconsciously parked and fueling your behavior: “You are too much, no one cares how you feel, grow up and stop needing so much, be independent”? I am sure you can imagine the results. A person with this operating in their subconscious may go out of their way to need nothing from others and be overly efficient at getting things done without help. Furthermore, if someone needed their help, it might trigger them to do it without questioning how they feel about it.

In trauma-informed therapy, we use reprocessing tools to help people access subconscious material to get at triggered responses to life that require conscious reflection and possibly a new narrative if the false one is based on fragmented truth. Most recently, I decided to use the Negative Cognitions list from a form of therapy called EMDR, (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) that distracts the logical and emotional processing of the brain so it can reprocess to transform it into a self-help tool for reprocessing fragmented truth. This is a generic list of what many people I have met with in therapy have indicated are their fragmented truths; I have made this applicable to all people so you can target generally and make it more specific if you see fit. Look at the list and trust yourself to make it more specific to you if you need to. Once you get a tug from your gut that some of these fit, we will work to establish ways you can start intentionally reformatting a healed narrative. Essentially, The Toolbox Approach for inner work has three phases of healing that act to structure things and make the concept of “do the work” less overwhelming. However, this tool combines two phases of inner work, given it both heals a stuck narrative, Narrative Healing Phase, and reprocesses fragmented truth, the Reprocessing Healing Phase. First, a personal note on boundary violations and somatic restoration. The fragmented truths we all have often come from and heal in violation/restoration pattern.

A Personal Note on Boundary Violations & Somatic Restoration

As both a trauma professional and someone who has personally survived sexual boundary violations, I know how deep the wound can run when your sense of safety, dignity, or agency is crossed. But boundary violations come in many forms, some are quieter and some less visible, yet all are profoundly disorienting.

Whether it’s a betrayal of your moral compass, a dismissal of your emotional truth, or a repeated crossing of lines you’ve clearly drawn, the body remembers. It carries the tension, the bracing, the shutdown, or the rage, long after the moment has passed.

This next section isn’t just for those who identify as trauma survivors. It is for anyone who’s walked away from a moment thinking that something was not okay with what transpired, and they cannot feel grounded or find their footing and confidence or what I call, “self-i-tude” easily afterward.

The somatic practices I will offer here aren’t about pretending the wound didn’t happen. They’re about reclaiming the space it tried to take from you. These movements, breath patterns, and grounding tools are meant to meet you where your body got stuck, whether in fear, freeze, fire, or a quiet kind of understanding sorrow (flight, freeze, fight, or fawn). Let this be a space where your body is allowed to feel, release, and reorient without shame or rush. No violation, no matter how small it seems to others, is too small to matter here.

Fragmented Self-Truths

Here’s a list of fragmented self-truths. These are those distorted beliefs or half-lies we absorb or inherit that often root themselves in the subconscious. I encourage you to take a pause now, place one hand below your bellybutton and one hand on your forehead. Now, just breathe in, from underneath the lower hand, feeling the breath raise it slightly. Continue allowing your breath to travel up into your chest such that raises as well. Roll your breath up further into the space behind your hand lying on your forehead. Hold here for 3 seconds and then press the hand down and exhale as slowly as you can. Before reading these quiet narratives, we don’t always know we are living it is important to empty out in this way, so you are more open to sensing if one or more of them effect you:

* “I’m only worthy if I’m needed.” (care equals value, so rest equals rejection)

* “If I express anger, I’ll lose love.” (Safety is tied to suppression)

* “Love has to be earned” (Unconditional care feels foreign)

* “I must shrink to be accepted.” (visibility threatens belonging)

* “Being chosen means I matter.” (Self -worth outsourced to other’s choices)

* “If I slow down, I’ll fall apart.” (Busyness as survival)

* “My emotions are too much for people.” (sensitivity mistaken for shame)

* “If I don’t fix it, I will be abandoned.” (caretaking as connection)

* “Trusting others is dangerous.” (safety through hyper-independence)

* “If I am not perfect, I will be punished.” (mistakes equal failure)

* “I can’t be both strong and vulnerable.”

* “If I stop proving myself, I’ll be forgotten.” (identity tied to achievement)

* “My needs are burdensome.”

* “Everything is my fault.” (false power in taking blame)

* “It’s safer to not feel.” (emotional numbness as protection)

* “I’m only lovable when I am useful.”

* “I have to stay small to keep the peace.”

* “Success will make the pain disappear.”

* “If I speak my truth, I will be left behind or just left.”

* “There is something fundamentally wrong with me.”

Now, if you seek to expand upon this, for example if you felt the tug and care to circle or take note of the ones you feel apply, you can consider now turning to a journal and using the prompt, “My fragmented truths need healing, they are…………” and write down the ones that apply. Then, consider the boundary violation somatic exercises below and come back to your writing. Either additionally, or if you feel stuck, instead of this, consider searching for a trauma-informed therapist. For an affordable option, it is best to go through your insurance first and if you cannot find one, consider locating any therapist and asking if they’d be open to working with your own self-help model through this subscription and The Toolbox Approach(R).

Somatic Exercises

* The Return to Sender Practice: Reclaiming the Right to Refuse

* This is for times when behavior or emotion from outside you are at your doorstep, and you need to check that package before taking it inside. The above statements come from the past and are stored in your subconscious but a practice in the present can still deeply heal stuck patterns.

* Stand or sit in a grounded posture. This may mean going on tip toes for a moment and replanting your feet, so they are more suctioned to the floor. Or, if sitting, lift up your flesh around your inner and outer buttocks and then press more firmly down. In both, readjust your pelvis so it becomes more solid with your lower back and is not concave or arched.

* Now, you can experiment with saying “no, I don’t want that”, “no, thank you, good luck with that”, or just “no”. You can use different tones or volumes. Let your hands reflect your boundary if you feel inclined. Hold up a palm, push away, or draw a line and mentally say, “that’s not to be crossed, no”.

* Repeat this 5-10 times until you feel a shift of relief, more lightness, a strength or some satisfaction.

* The Safety and Containment Squeeze or Havening Touch: Helps one re-orient to the safety you always have inside but feels taken when there is a boundary violation.

* Cross your arms over your chest, hand on opposite shoulders or upper arms. Gently squeeze the flesh of the shoulders and breath in. Upon exhale move the squeezes down the forearms inch by inch. Gently squeeze on the inhale and move on the exhale, feeling the boundaries of your body.

* Close your eyes and say silently or aloud: “I am here, I am held, I am whole”, and then pausing in a held hug, “I am, I am, I am”.

* Stay for a few breaths. Let your nervous system register the sensation of safe containment.

* As a variation you can wrap yourself in a blanket and press your back against a wall with knees up and held close to your chest, repeating the mantra.

* ENDING PRACTICE: Repeat as above before you did the review of the list. Place your hand on your lower belly, below the belly button and the other hand on the forehead. Using the breath to rise your breath up through one hand all the way up to the other and on the exhale, press the upper hand on your forehead firmly. This time however, on the exhale, the sound “Muuuuuuuuuuu” can be exhaled until you run out of breath. This activates what I call “the column of you”. This is your “SELF-I-TUDE” or your full I am-ness. This seals off your boundary and ends the practice with boundary restoration

Integration: Letting the Body Know the Truth

You don’t have to rush to feel better. The self-truth fragmentation and boundary violations, no matter how subtle or overt, can leave the body holding stories it hasn’t yet had permission to tell or release. These practices are not about fixing you but about reminding your body that you are the powerful person that guides your life. Each time you return to yourself, you are rebuilding safety that was stolen. And that is no small thing.

PLEASE REMEMBER THE TOOLBOX APPROACH IS NOW YOUR OFFICIAL REGISTERED APPROACH TO HEALING. YOU ARE NOT BROKEN, IS THE INTRODUCTORY BOOK AND YOUR INVITATION, STAY POSTED HERE AND ON THE AUTHOR’S WEBSITE. EACH EPISODE IS NOW ON SPOTIFY!

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

"You are each other's problem, therapy won't change that, it will help you realize you chose that problem from the start, that's the deal with partnership, it's a choice you made. Neither of you became someone else, both of you were always you, now you just know more about the person you chose. To get anywhere you may need to face you chose this person. How will you keep making that choice? That is why you are here, it got harder, so this therapeutic intervention will help you each start being better as individuals, so you are not a problem internally and therefore not as much a partner’s problem externally. Then, you can enter the last step, becoming each other's solution WAY MORE often than each other’s problem."

So, how is this landing in you as you read (or listen)? Like the truth, right? Annoying right? Well, there is also a way to look at this couple’s therapy truth as a self-help tool, are you interested? Read/listen on!

Knowing Your Aloneness

In the journey towards wholeness, I have had to sort through all the mistakes I made. I had to look at how they broke down my character and also revealed it back to me. I had to realize that looking at my past for helpful lessons was a choice, dwelling on it subconsciously was repression. No matter who you are, you just don’t know you are repressing things. You don’t know you are doing it unless things get bad. Bad, is relative to the individual. Subconscious carrying and holding things that come out as triggered behavior, statements or attitudes; as well as injuries, physical health problems, or body tension and sleep decline, is not a choice. You are not alone in there, inside yourself, making mistakes and failing at connection to your body, yourself, or other people repeatedly, no matter if you are in a relationship or not. The couple’s therapy we all need is a partnering with the present to look at your unique relationship with aloneness. When you feel alone, what version of it rises up? That’s the intervention.

Partnering with the present to look at aloneness, was something I realized had to be the solution. This happened when I realized that with all the healing I have done, the opening up, and the relating with others as myself and not just as a personal guide to your healing, I was still in a heartbreaking saga with aloneness. I would date and I would feel it, I would reconnect with new and former peers and feel it, I would join things and start things and still it would be there. Partnering with your unique forms of aloneness in the present is like going to couples therapy alone. When you have to use a tool to partner with the present and realize you chose all the things that got you here in this relationship with aloneness, you become a solution. You don’t fix this but know it and internally have less of a conflict. Being less of a problem internally is an external solution for relating.

Many of you reading/listening know I promote The Toolbox Approach and have a book coming out this October 2025. The author’s website is a place for you right now to scroll through and at the bottom you can contact me to get on the pre-sale list, to live reading events and pop-up healings, and to book signings. This location invites you to the phases of healing and while the book introduces a structure for your invitation to inner work with a phase called Narrative Healing, this tool for partnering with the present aloneness is a Relational Healing Phase Tool. Relational Healing, as a phase, is where you meet with various parts of yourself that are hard to know, the way you have viewed relationships by telling yourself certain scripted things, and clearing out some blinders from the subconscious places you have so you can relate to yourself and others with a solid you-ness that is less afraid to be seen for some way they are in another’s eyes. When you know you more, people can’t find you ugly or bad, you will realize they just don’t understand, don’t want to invest, and that’s their choice, but you do understand, invest and chose you!

Honor Aloneness

First, I want to honor the individuals coming to therapy or reflection right now who have decided that their break-up or need for heart wrenching distance with a marital partner, dating partner, friendship partner or a relative is a redirection. This is a new trend people are inviting themselves to take for a spin. They are trendsetters in many ways, redirecting their minds from what was done to them to what all this could be for in terms of if they are to grow from it. It’s not fashionable yet to honor aloneness, it’s more common to suffer it and fill the space with something that seems decisive enough, but without the pregnant pause of aloneness, there is no real choice being made.

This weekend, my crisis lines, voice mail and messaging, were filled with the struggle to face aloneness, and I thought, as I often do with these tools inside The Toolbox Approach, “We need a tool for this”. Whenever the toolbox needs to expand, it will, if you want to face things. I felt it this weekend. Something my therapy goers, and myself, were ready to face, it is the aloneness we suffered verses the aloneness we could choose and discover. That is how the types of aloneness as a tool for accepting your couple’s therapy session is about learning how you have always been you, you just have more time with you now, and it’s time to look at your aloneness.

The four types I am going to highlight were determined by the brave therapy goers and my own experience. Future posts may explore other forms of aloneness; however, this set forms the invitation to use this concept, and I trust you will give yourself a good start with these. Each type will look at the origins, core experiences, emotional wounds, and the healing path.

Types of Aloneness

* Emotional Aloneness: This can be defined by the absence of felt emotional connection, even when people are physically present. This can be in one very specific setting such as in your family of origin, in a work group, a romantic partner or a group of friends, and the feeling is like being outside of something in a way the present situation reveals only the tip of. Often the feeling can come later and start to act like a deterrent to joining and cause behaviors that make it worse. The individual comes to realize that and analyzes often how others leave them out and then cycles back to how they do it to themselves.

* COMMON ORIGINS

* Caregivers who couldn’t attune to your feelings (“You are fine”, “Don’t be so sensitive”, or a sense we don’t talk about this, and it should just pass)

* Environments where emotional expression was discouraged or unsafe, such as if toughness was a priority and personalized feelings were a weakness that others would target like a threat, punishing with silence, dismissal or neglect.

* Repeated experiences of opening up and being dismissed, minimized, or misunderstood.

* CORE EXPERIENCE

* A sense that no one really gets you.

* Feeling like you have to manage your pain alone.

* Deep yearning to be emotionally held or mirrored.

* EMOTIONAL WOUND

* You may have internalized that your feelings are “too much” or not valid, leading to self-silencing or constantly seeking connection that never quite satisfies you.

* THE COURSE TO HEALING

* Emotional attunement through a therapeutic relationship from a guide of some type or safe others, people who can sit with you in your emotional truth.

* Inner re-parenting, which involves learning to notice what needs soothing and attention and giving it in small ways. This can involve remembering to love your voice and sing more, giving yourself a better-quality shampoo and not just wait till one is on sale, signing up for some activity and budgeting time and money for it consistently like a good parent would do for a child’s talent or interest.

* Creative expression such as art, writing poetry or creatively, music, dance, fluid stretches to meditation music and no structured guide, or creative dress or hairstyles. These things can bridge the gap when words fail. For example, merely putting on a love song and dancing your own way can honor the way love feels regardless of a partner.

* Existential Aloneness: This can be defined by a deep and sometimes painful awareness that we are ultimately alone in our subjective experience.

* COMMON ORIGINS

* This can arise in moments of loss, trauma, awakening, or transitions such as impending death, illness or when an identity shift is profoundly coming or needed.

* Sometimes this can be triggered by a crisis of meaning such as questioning why you are here and if anything matters.

* Often this can be intensified for deep thinkers, artists, healers, or spiritually sensitive people.

* CORE EXPERIENCE

* A feeling of profound separateness that is different from isolation from people but more from meaning and purpose in life as a whole or a lack of a source connectedness between all things.

* A sort of spiritual homesickness, as if no one else can quite reach the unique experience you have in this life and never will see your value.

* EMOTIONAL WOUND

* This can be linked to early betrayals of trust in life or spiritually somehow that led to a sense of feeling unsafe in the world or abandoned by something larger.

* THE COURSE TO HEALING

* Things that can have almost a spiritual quality that connect you to something beyond just yourself like found in nature such as the ocean, sunset or scenic walks. The sense of a ritual that is sacred and calm like meditation or using sound and vibration, humming or a pet placed near your heart or core.

* Finding kindred “folk” who also feel deeply and think existentially and accept they cannot solve aloneness but are willing to witness it with you.

* Learning to journal to hold space for mystery and paradox and to live with the unanswerable questions without fixing them.

* Developmental Aloneness: This can be defined as a form of aloneness that begins in childhood, when key emotional needs went unmet during critical stages of development.

* COMMON ORIGINS

* Being a highly sensitive or intuitive child in a family that didn’t reflect openly, had private closed off conversations without you, or did not nurture talk about the day in a sacred daily way to honor each other has different experiences.

* When a child has taken on an adult role, parentification, too early and therefore experiences it like an emotional neglect because the role is never reversed back and childhood is never restored.

* Attachment figures that have overt or hidden emotional dysregulation such that the child’s co-regulation to a calm figure does not occur so repeatedly the dysregulation becomes internalized.

* CORE EXPERIENCE

* A frozen-like aloneness can develop and the ache of the child that knows or experiences too much too soon lingers. Everything could be taken from them, including the small sense of self they might have, they help others often but die inside.

* Often unconscious, over-responsibility and over-responsiveness develops subconsciously. There is a hyper-independence or fear of closeness.

* EMOTIONAL WOUND

* There may be a split between the inner child and the adult self that is a tug of war between wanting to be rescued and the adult sense that there is a heavy burden they have to take on without feeling it (numbness).

* THE COURSE TO HEALING

* Consider inner child work in the form of finding an image or picture (or several) that symbolizes the child versions of alone and writing to them to validate the experience with strength and clarity. For example, “no one saw you were sensitive and wanted to help your family, you cared, and it was very hard to hold back those tears when they did not seem to. I can help you now, I understand you completely and we can grow from this together”.

* Letting others into your tenderness now and risking vulnerability in small, safe ways like asking someone for a small favor without giving anything in return, thanking them in a basic simple way, and keeping away thoughts you need to find a way to return the favor.

* Therapy with a trauma-informed or attachment-aware therapist can help rewire the nervous system toward connection.

* Chronic Aloneness: A persistent, long-term experience of loneliness, often regardless of the circumstances or relationship status.

* COMMON ORIGINS

* A culmination of emotional, developmental, or existential loneliness that hasn’t been named or healed

* Long-term relational trauma or abandonment.

* Repeated experiences of failed connection that lead to learned helplessness such as thinking, “why bother"?”.

* CORE EXPERIENCE

* A dull or aching sense that connection is always just out of your grasp.

* A feeling like you are undeserving or not even capable of being loved, even if a small part of your logically knows otherwise.

* This can occasionally lead to withdrawal socially, shame and depression.

* EMOTIONAL WOUND

* The nervous system and psyche may have adapted to loneliness as a default state, making connection feel foreign, dangerous, or fleeting.

* THE COURSE TO HEALING

* Even the smallest, consistent connections, however short can form meaningful moments over time that build a sense you matter. We felt this in the pandemic, the loss of seeing the same barista each morning, that small chat with the mail carrier, etc., these connections form meaning over time.

* What you are doing right now, naming the forms of aloneness and considering if it has become chronic in some way only you can define begins to break the spell of painful invisibility.

* Somatic or body-based healing that works with the body to slowly expand the capacity for safety in connection. The methods of orienting to your own safety through light tapping called The Butterfly Hug over your heart or a soft hand on your forehead and the other on the belly and breathing gently into one hand up to the other and exhaling tells the body it is safe now. Slowly, feeling safer with yourself becomes restored trust to venture into connection again.

A Final Reflection

All these forms of aloneness are not flaws that anyone possesses, they are your partnership with the present that you need to see what you have done to make adaptations to unmet needs and unspoken pain. Reading (or listening) this shows you are curious and reflective about aloneness and will add to your capacity to heal. The Toolbox Approach is my connection back to myself found in the phases of healing. My author’s website, linked here, will showcase this approach and a way I faced aloneness to become real again, more than a therapist or a writer, but a regular old person with an urgency to heal towards the core authenticity underneath all the pain.

Please venture to the author’s website to explore the first book. It will be released this October 2025 and you can message me about presale events, live book readings, signed copies and pop-up healing experiences there. Please consider sharing this post with someone if it landed with you, you never know who might need a simple reflection to meet with old pain and change their mindset on it.

* "Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When [someone] loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real. Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit. "Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

* “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

* “He longed to become Real, to know what it felt like; and yet the idea of growing shabby and losing his eyes and whiskers was rather sad. He wished that he could become it without these uncomfortable things happening to him.”

Once upon a time there was a soul. It was floating around in the soulful place, and it felt a tug. This tug was from Purpose; it was calling the soul to find a body to do something with. The soul was intrigued about this idea. It floated to the Tree of Knowledge and learned that it would have to give up its freedom and that being in a body would start out wonderful but get hard quickly. It would be completely dependent on others for a long time and the conditions could have its ups and downs. For the ups and downs it was allowed to leave its body but not for too long, that could damage the connection to it, and it might start to malfunction its purpose and get off track. The soul learned it could have emotional release and that other bodies might be able to learn about these releases and come to help but the soul would also have to learn language and communication eventually if that were to last and help the soul get it’s needs met.

The soul was not impulsive about the tugging Purpose. It considered things. It lay under the Tree of Knowledge and tried to feel it’s roots and sense the right decision. The Tree gave the soul early memories, whispers of things a voice was saying about its purpose. A female voice would say things, then another, and another and the soul started to realize it needed to pick one. Sometimes the connection was very weak because the voice was not entirely ready for a baby, or it was scared to make one, or it thought it might be broken somehow and wasn’t sure, or even things seemed to be very bad already in the family life or chaotic somehow. There were all sorts of voices, and the soul had to pick one. It learned it was not to pick an easy choice. Purpose told the soul, through the Tree of Knowledge, that it had to be a hard-won journey and to pick a voice that might challenge the soul’s integrity.

The soul closed its mind and only listened to Purpose for a while, letting it cast hopes and dreams, not worrying if they would get shattered and have to be reconfigured repeatedly. Once it felt adequately connected to Purpose again. It opened its ears very briefly and chose through a sense of internal knowing that it knew would leave the moment it had a body. It said goodbye to knowing and dove, waiting to be caught by a womb space. When the soul landed it became a listener and slept in this new dialogue. When it slipped out into the world, it felt unreal and hard immediately, but there were people there. It lost all its knowing then and learned to be real in a body. It is a very hard thing to be real in a body. Somehow, it would have to whisper to itself every day, “No matter who is around you, you have a purpose, learn to speak, learn to communicate, remember what you knew will come back to you”.

REALNESS

Allowing this story to come to me as something to actually share, felt too real to block it. I spent two decades training and studying, perfecting and providing, a form of listening that is what many consider the invitation to healing, therapy. However, there is so much more to healing emotional pain than talking about it. It is holistic and takes the mind, body and now I am sensing it takes story and creativity. The tools for healing became, 15 years in, a new layer to what it takes to heal, and that is you using them, however your own creativity, linking story to your soul’s purpose and the pain it takes to follow it, is beyond talking about who broke your heart, which parent created the most wounds, and what traumas breeched the boundaries of your trust and faith in love and connection being safe to pursue.

The Toolbox Approach, is a phases of healing approach. It offers three phases of healing called: Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing. While this approach is in the process of registered trademarking, it is not because I seek to own it, it is because I seek it to be larger than myself. I have realized, it is my purpose to live the phases and share them. Is my soul the creator of this purpose and chose my life? It helps me REAL-ationaly heal to believe so. When I am hurting because the people in my life may be kicking up old wounds, I remember my soul chose this and learned this would happen and that it is bigger than me hurting. It helps me not by soldering on to use work as a numbing agent, giving as an outsourcing to my pain so I cannot feel it as much, or being some other version of me that proves pain can’t get to me. It helps me, because it is REAL. We don’t want to believe that our imaginations are real but they are. You remember what you imagine as possible even in a less reality-based life. That IS REAL!

We have to be careful, of course, with imagination. We can’t use it to pretend that job we are in, relationship we are in, or way we are behaving is better than it is. Still, there is a way to use the realness of imagination to be more of who you are. Reimagining Imagery in Memory, or RIM, is a therapeutic technique that can be used on traumatic memories or otherwise distressing memories, consciously or subconsciously held. Like with all the tools in The Toolbox Approach, however, I like to make them realistically usable for self-help and empower you to explore yourself and consider if you wanted to bring that exploration to therapy.

Re-Scripting (a self-help version of RIM)

To give more of a background, consider if you have ever replayed a painful memory from your past and let it define who you are today. Maybe you were targeted in some way and bullied at school, and now, years later, you still believe you’re defective or not good enough. Or perhaps you did something impulsive and made a mistake that continues to haunt you, shaping how you see yourself in ways that hold you back.

When we consider using imagination to re-script, like I did above with the concept of how we all got here, we challenge the accuracy of memories. What if they could be changed - not erased, but rewritten - in a way that you feel a freeing as you do it and that experience becomes a memory you hold on to, freeing you from a weight of some kind? That’s exactly what imagery re-scripting aims to do in this self-help version of it.

How Memories Shape Our Self-perception

The mental snapshots we hold about ourselves are shockingly as influential as our thoughts and emotions. For example, someone who was targeted and bullied as a child may not only remember the experience but also continue to see themselves as that ineffectual, disempowered, and fearful person. These images are there lingering and while not as sharp as the daily experience and dread from that time, they subtly reinforce negative self-beliefs, shaping how they perceive themselves today.

The idea that memories are not static snapshots of the past is supported by research with the use cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). It shows us that memories are evolving narratives shaped by emotions and perceptions. When negative memories are particularly strong, they can fuel anxiety, depression, and social phobia by reinforcing harmful self-perceptions. This happened to me very recently, at can be quite familiar with family of origin emotional triggers. The memory is happening for you, no one else shares it because it is your perception. Triggers are painful because we are very much alone inside them. That is why we need to feel the tools in our own hands as our best support. I always say, “You are the safest adult you know when you're holding your tools!”.

It is so important to have a tool like re-scripting because the way we remember events is just as important as the events themselves. If your boss, brother, friend, or otherwise, is triggering distressing imagery unknowingly, you are alone with this, and it can be painful to communicate your pain when what you may need most is a way to process through it back to the present. If distressing images go unchallenged, they can become deeply ingrained in our core beliefs about who we are, our place in things, and how safe it is to be in our REALNESS.

What is Imagery Re-scripting?

Imagery re-scripting is a therapeutic technique designed to change the emotional impact of distressing memories. If you can be aware of what a trigger in the present is bringing up for you, you can link it to the memory at its source. The way to do this is to go back to the objective facts. For example, let’s say your plans with your partner get cancelled last minute because they were offered an important work opportunity and this is the second time this has occurred in three months. They expect you to be thrilled and you wanted to stay supportive, the first time you genuinely were, but now you are feeling left and less important and resent that it was expected you are fine with this. Eventually, you are fighting back anger and hurt and even feels some tears when on the phone call informing you of this. This is an emotional trigger. It does not mean your emotions got triggered by this present situation because it is an over-reaction to the present, it lies in your memory.

Finding the memory requires you to get horizontal on the floor or a yoga mat and start to slowly release your body. Let the floor hold you and gently feel into any discomfort and address it through lightly adjusting. You might pull one knee in tightly and feel the release in the lower back, placing it down again with an exhale may open one hip. Try just doing that on both sides and start to consider the objective facts. In the example, they are: 1. My partner has a work opportunity, 2. My partner has to cancel our plans, 3. My partner is excited, 4. This happened once before and we had to cancel. Now, the story that the internal world makes up about all this might be, “I can’t believe I trusted someone out to only advance their career, I am so stupid, this is like my mother and father all over again!”. That would indicate the unique disharmony inside you as you are triggered by this. As you lay there considering what memories this links to, you are perfectly primed to redirect and consider “do I want to imagine this differently and see if it helps?”. In re-scripting, instead of merely discussing a painful experience, individuals mentally revisit it, but with a new perspective.

Rather than erasing past events, this approach allows individuals to shift their relationship with a memory. Instead of feeling trapped in the role of a helpless victim, they can reimagine the experience in a way that brings them strength, validation, or support. Image rescripting is a concept that has been around a long time, but there have been various modern interpretations of how it can be used. The person largely accredited with creating the standard application for PTSD and C-PTSD is international trauma specialist Mervin Smucker PhD. One of the hardest things about PTSD or C-PTSD recovery is controlling involuntary images that come to mind at all times of the day and night, however even if you don’t have this condition, it can be very helpful.

So, below you are guided to find a new interpretation that makes the triggered memory, once you access it, less problematic. In effect, you mentally rescript that aspect of your life, just as you might physically rewrite a description of a memory or future expectation. By ‘recrafting’ it in a new way, you can feel greater control and gain a new perspective. So, as a guide, you can do three things:

* Say to yourself “I am going to mentally re-script this”.

* When this imagery or experience comes to your mind, what do you wish had happened?

* How could it have a more comforting outcome? Could you intervene as you today? Could this become poetic or creative writing somehow?

This tool is very powerful; it’s for diving in deeply but I also promise you it feels great when you are deeply triggered to take back your personal power and your energy because triggers are draining. Often, you don’t need to figure out what anyone did to you, you need to feel yourself again, perhaps even your best self that wasn’t showing up in your life for quite a while. When you do feel better, you might realize it all just becomes a request of yourself for the future. What will you do next time someone lets you down? I find my best answer is, I WILL USE MY TOOLS!

As a parting word, the book “You Are Not Broken” is an introduction and invitation to one phase of healing called Narrative Healing. This book is like a ten-month pregnancy at this point! It took years to write it and despite thinking it would launch this summer, I am learning from my soul, PURPOSE TAKES PATIENCE! Please click on the author’s website and explore. Use the contact me to let me know you are interested in pre-order and book launch gatherings with live readings, signing and more. REALEASE DATE IS NOW! OCTOBER 7th, 2025!

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

It used to be that photography was more of a process. Even if you did not consider yourself an artist in this craft, you were still part of it. One would take a day’s worth of pictures of their life, or perhaps a week of pictures while traveling somewhere new, or to mark a milestone or log an event. Regardless of who you were or what your purpose was, you had to take the pictures and wait to see them. Then, you also had to decide what to do with them and face the reality that you might not see them again for a while. They might lose their meaning over time, and the future pictures you may take linking one period of time to the next would exist separately, unless you choose to take them out and place them together for deeper meaning. This was the basic process we used to be in when it came to pictures. No reminders from Facebook or Google that you took or posted a picture on a certain day exactly 10 years ago, calling you to look back and reflect. No accidental or intentional scrolling through your phone to see them all at once, easily and instantly, undamaged by time.

How we hold our lifetime of traumas, as well as how we hold onto our various chronic or episodic stressors, is a lot like the process of old-school picture taking. The packets of pictures don’t store ready to be revealed easily, many of them are not on display in our minds. Many of our memories are trapped in sensations and feelings we had and not reflected in our language or visual replay of what happened at all. However, imagine if one day, rummaging through boxes of poorly organized memories from your life, you started to come across all these little pouches of pictures. Imagine if, because you intended to sit there and find them, the putting things together from different pouches of your life experience started to “just happen”. That is what The Toolbox Approach (TM) or any inner work structure and intentional journey triggers, heartfelt and intentional assembling of pouches of experience that start to make you profoundly see how your story “developed” you on a grander scale than just one picture or packet of pictures coming back into view only shortly after you took them, or immediately in modern times.

This article is going to reveal a recent “assembling of things” I had that relates to how our food stories, when compacted by shame, disease, disorder, health or weight issues and imbalances, deny us our right to the truth of what happened or is happening in our mental and emotional life. This will unlock more faith in inner work if you have questioned it as an endless self-help marketing scheme to get us to fix endlessly. It started to show me a story that made sense of all the stories I have heard as a therapist that hint at how food, eating and relating can have broken narratives that need to be seen without the fixing mindset. We need to have a sense that when we take our packets of pictures, they are not for labeling disorder, but for seeing things as a storyline. Stories are not fixed; they are understood, and in that understanding, the life that is read about becomes connected to. A sense of presence with our own stories heals the wrongness and brokenness we assume they carry in some places. When this occurs, healing can begin.

For me, it took me 7 years of rigid food intake and feeling broken to come to a Celiac Disease diagnosis, but other digestive challenges, and hypervigilance with food and eating “right” for my conditions, were still there. The story was that I had “issues with food” for so long, I just believed I had to stay broken and limit my food choices and my relational freedom to congregate with others over food. It turns out, my food story tells the story of what happened to me in my life in raw detail, I never knew how to look at. I can see that is profoundly true for others if we know how to look without just labeling conditions and disorders or disease, and listen below the story of “weight issues”, “issues with food”, or even “picky eater”, and many others.

Food holds many meanings depending on the culture you come from, the family you grew up inside, the body you live in over time, and even economic factors that determine one's class or rank in society and the resources one has. Food and its preparation can symbolize connection, receiving, creativity, a sense of home, and give us a metaphor of what it means and how it feels to be nourished on a deeper level. However, food, relating, and eating can tell us a lot about the subconscious way we left highly complex emotional experiences undigested. We quite literally consume life. We have a conscious way of doing this only 5% of the time. This means, a good amount of the time we take bites out of life experience, chew them a bit, and swallow somewhat thoughtlessly and unaware of the process that may be needed for those harder to consume things. Do we need more chewing, more saliva, better discernment about our choices, better company around us, more sleep………you get the point. There are parallels between the way we experience life, fuel ourselves for life, and relate while doing both these things. They tell a story before we can label a condition for what has gone wrong.

Trauma-Informed About Food, Eating & Relating

What is openly enjoyed when it comes to cooking and communing over food, can also leave those who struggle with food feeling excluded. Whether it is due to allergies, addictions, autoimmune conditions, hormonal imbalances, mental health, cancer treatment, poverty, eating disorders, diabetes or otherwise, feeling excluded over time can act like a trauma. For many of us, putting together the little pouches of pictures shows us how the events can coincide with conditions of eating, absorbing nutrients, processing hormones, weight, and gastric distress.

Being trauma-informed when it comes to food means approaching food, eating habits, conversations, and publications around food with awareness, sensitivity, and respect for the impact of each individual's and group's unique life experiences. This experience greatly affects a person or group's relationship with nourishment and their body. Relating responsibly through the creation of this article today means ensuring I have a piece that is trauma-informed and creates a safe space for everyone viewing. That is both my intention and my dedication. I hope you enjoy this space. I hope it will nourish whatever needs to be fed inside. First, let’s consider what it means to be trauma-informed about the connection between food, eating, and relating.

What it Means to Be Trauma Informed About Food

* Understand How Life Experiences Affect Food Relationships.

* Trauma, especially in childhood with regard to abuse, neglect, or food insecurity, can impact:

* Eating patterns such as restriction, binging, emotional eating

* Body image and self-worth

* Food trust such as feeling unsafe with unfamiliar food or being hypervigilant about food.

* Control and Autonomy such as using food to feel a sense of control.

* Prioritize Safety and Autonomy

* Never force, pressure, or shame someone into eating or not eating a certain way.

* Offer choices and support a person's right to say "no".

* Respect personal boundaries around when, what and how someone eats

* Use Neutral, Nonjudgmental Language

* Avoid language that moralizes food as good or bad.

* Steer away from diet talk or body shaming. ("I can't eat that I will be huge for the wedding, I'm on a no-carb plan")

* Focus on how food feels, not how it looks or aligns with trends.

* Be Mindful of Food-Centered Events

* Ask if someone has needs or preferences around food without a need for an explanation.

* Understand that holidays, group gatherings and family meals can be stressful or triggering for some.

* Provide quiet space or permission to step away for a break at any time, don't demand everyone must sit around the table the whole time to be included.

* Support Gentle Reconnection to Food

* Explore or model intuitive eating or mindful eating approaches

* Encourage joy and pleasure in eating without guilt

* Create a calm, predictable, and safe eating environment

Listen and Believe

* Don't dismiss or downplay someone's food-related discomfort or history.

* Validate their experience, even if you don't fully understand it.

* Let them lead the conversation about food when they're ready.

Reflect on the Above

Look back at the content above and now consider it a self-inventory. The truth is, we are not trauma-informed inside our families and groups unless something has happened to a member. A scant few examples could be: someone is recommended to a food allergist suspecting nut allergies and suddenly we are nut-free, or a family member is on chemotherapy and needs a special diet, or we hear a member develops food insecurity when out of work frequently and relies on governmental assistance, and lastly, a son or daughter is bullied and won’t eat carbs anymore as the whole family starts to whisper and wonder what to do. These are a small sampling of how we might become aware and change, for the sake of an obvious problem. Even then, if we enter a classroom of understanding for our loved one, it is a short trip before an elephant is sitting there crushing the healthy conversation. Not many begin an ongoing dialogue and questioning that can form an understanding of how food, eating, and relating may not always be the collective celebration and gathering time it projects in all the commercials, home movies, and snapshots, or today’s social media feeds.

To make the above a self-reflective inventory, consider the following:

* Do you have patterns of restricting, binging, or emotional eating?

* Do you fixate on certain parts of your body, often try to conceal them, or make decisions of exposure to food events based on how you look?

* Do you have safe foods and/or secretly decline foods not prepared the way you need them to make them safe for you to eat? Are you hypervigilant around food privately or publicly?

* Do you use food to feel in control or independent in some way, even to feel separate, or do you use food as a boundary you can’t verbalize?

* Do you talk about certain food, outwardly or inwardly, as good or bad?

* Do you relate the experience of eating to how your body will look as a result?

* Do you think of yourself as good or bad, disciplined or not, compared to others or trends?

* At food-oriented gatherings, can you speak up for what you want or don’t want, and/or select freely, openly, and confidently what works for you to eat?

* At food-oriented gatherings, can you feel the joy, stress, or range of emotions as separate from what is prepared and consumed?

* At food-oriented gatherings, can you permit yourself to step away for a break at any time, or take some quiet time, without feeling excluded or bad?

* Have you tried to break patterns with food by considering what you enjoy before, during and after eating it?

* Have you been mindful of the parts of your life where you are in control of a routine way of eating that supports you like you would a growing child?

Listen and Believe

* Now, as you reflect on the answers this brought up, try not to dismiss or downplay the discomfort or history.

* Validate your experience, even if you don't fully understand it.

* Try to start writing about what this brought up for you without delay.

* After you write, use a gentle tapping method, with hands crossed over your heart. Gently tap back and forth on the collarbone with the fingertips and a whispered mantra “Even though this unspoken story is emerging, I am the powerful person that guides my life, I believe in awareness, I am safe, secure, and unharmed by this".

* Keep writing daily shortly before or after eating, gathering, food thoughts, or food-related symptoms or behaviors.

* Give yourself permission to learn about yourself.

Personal Story

In my 20s, I whittled down to 69lbs after a near-death experience at a concert. I admitted myself to a hospital. I was ashamed to be labeled Anorexic, but I wanted to be whole again. I wanted to be authentically myself and aimed to be a therapist one day. To be a "good" patient, I thought, would be my first challenge. If I fully immersed myself in becoming weight restored, I assumed I would have an authentic insider journey that would be good for the kind of therapist I hoped to become. I set my sights on weight gain and not the story of my loneliness, the disconnection I had from my mother, who was vacantly smiling at me behind her depression and disorganized nervous system, urging me to help her out and be a special girl. I ate their meals, but I was silent to myself and used my voice only for the community of women who saw me rising out of starvation. I wanted them to be encouraged. I can see I starved more inside the hospital than out, and how my body was trying to tell me something, which I missed.

The higher the caloric demand of the meal plan, the more they included double servings of carbohydrates. I was in a lot of pain but stayed on with a smile, pushing myself for 44 days of treatment and past what anyone expected of an Anorexic. It happened again 7 years later, I was finally a therapist and experiencing a deep unsteadiness inside after an assault on the job. My weight plummeted. It took nearly 9 years to diagnose the connection to trauma and physical reactions that were planted in me from my very first pre-verbal traumas in daycare, to childhood traumas, then teenage ones, and the later years. All of them coincide with food being a lonely companion I could never consume quite normally, just like relationships felt traumatic, so did food.

I have Celiac Disease, an autoimmune condition where eating gluten causes the body to attack its own small intestine. Gluten is a protein found in wheat, rye, and barley and, for me, when eaten, it damages my small intestine, which led to problems absorbing nutrients, stomach pain, fatigue, and other health issues. It is often triggered by stress. It turns out I had traumatic reactions that brought out the genetic predisposition to it. I looked back at a traumatic childhood as well and learned that connection. Now, my whole family has been tested, and many have variants that are milder and also include the exacerbation of traumas that were different from my own. I missed many holidays, despite being physically present. I was riddled with fear about what I could eat. Once I learned that food, eating, and relating were informing me on my traumas and telling a story of what happened, something slowly opened up in my awareness of how to begin healing it all. I won’t be telling you fancy steps and tips, we all have to reflect in our own private ways, learn what to share, and we all have to ‘do the work’. The inner work.

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When you slow this need to know the plan and outcomes of fixing things down, you can feel the inner therapist who honors the process of healing emerge. This person wants to work with you. The space is there now to give this to yourself and slow down the threatening feeling of an outside authority finding your problems. In a space of curiosity for what you will locate, there is no room to look for broken things and damage, wrongness, or toxic behavior. With tools, we allow you to “see things”, rather than Google search for things that may improve your intellect for the various psychological, emotional, and nervous system dissonance and dysregulation we experience, but not provide any felt sense for what tools do in your own hands for your unique patterns of dysregulation and holding onto things.

The Toolbox Approach (TM), which is written about in my soon-to-be-published book, You Are Not Broken, is also a personal experience, and how I created a way to slow down my fixing mentality within. I use it as a therapist, holding space for others looking to go inward and heal things. The phases of healing are cyclical; they are repeatedly used in your life because we tend to first suffer our problems, hold onto them, and then stubbornly need tools to find the lessons. It’s been called a Hero’s Journey, I see it as a perpetual shift from victim to survivor, to self-leadership, but some may call it personal growth or metamorphosis. Today, we focus on a phase I find myself in, called Relational Healing. There are phases I labeled Narrative Healing and Reprocessing Healing that have contributed to where I am in Relational Healing. I had to find the self-sabotage in the stories I tell myself and reprocess the initial emotional content that got locked in my initial emotional experiences and left unattended. Without these phases, we don’t have a great relationship with ourselves because it’s based on dysregulation and quickly hashed stories about the experiences you had.

It takes time to go down into the subconscious, where 95% of our decision-making truly derives from. We may believe that we consciously decide everything in our lives, but research suggests otherwise. According to studies in cognitive neuroscience, 95% of our daily decisions are made by the subconscious mind, leaving only 5% to the conscious thought process. These subconscious decisions are driven by past experiences, learned behaviors, emotions, and environmental cues that influence our thoughts and actions in ways we may not immediately recognize.

The subconscious mind is constantly working behind the scenes, filtering information, guiding our reactions, and automating processes to ease cognitive load. Our predilection for easy processing is hard on us emotionally, psychologically, and in terms of stress and relating. Hence, we have to be intentional and set ourselves to go inward. Then we must bring tools because we will want to flee or run away. We will want to return to safety, where there are quick conclusions that we can act on. So, we have to use a tool that puts us directly in relationship to ourselves. When we have an experience like disrespect rehashing itself and snaking through our minds repeatedly, sometimes for hours, for days, months, even years, so we have to use a confronting question as a tool.

The Questions

* What do you say to yourself internally when you keep having someone on your mind who disrespected you?

* How do you talk to yourself to confront that this is a metaphor for ways you treat yourself that you need to let go of?

Immediately, you can see these are deeply powerful, emotionally mature questions. When there is a disrespect trigger in your life, and it still takes space in your mind, it may be in your mind in a very specific way. This is an immature or wounded mindset that we subconsciously have because there are hurts “down there” from a younger place, back in time, a previous version of you. Even if you haven’t done inner work before, we mature with time, if we don’t make a conscious effort to park our maturity however, it doesn’t form into internal emotional safety. Some call it a lack of closure from past hurts. Regardless, if you are spinning on the disrespect in your mind, you may be in your less mature self. The questions help start to direct you back to the part of you that can help you and stop immature pointing, “they disrespected me!”. Don’t worry, we all do it!

Your mind and nervous system both hold onto the pain, confusion, longing for justice or closure, but you can redirect it by asking for the truth from yourself. The first question asks you to be honest about what you are saying to yourself. Things like, “I don’t deserve this when I offered so much respect and understanding many times to them”, or “I do deserve this now, why do I keep talking to this person when they don’t tell me the truth about anything?”. In fact, both may be in there in a tug-of-war. That is the next part of this tool.

Acknowledge the Inner Tug-of-War

Tell yourself, “It makes sense that I am still thinking about them. My brain is trying to resolve the injustice. But replaying it doesn’t heal it-it keeps me in the loop. What I really need is safety, peace, and a loving relationship with myself.”

Make the Metaphor Conscious

The second question above asked you, “How do you talk to yourself to confront that this is a metaphor for ways you treat yourself that you need to let go of?”. This is asking you to see this person or situation as a mirror for the parts of you that still have to earn kindness, respect, acknowledgment, loyalty, or love and belonging. There is a part of you that says you have to tolerate pain to be loyal and then get your emotional needs met. There is a part of you that says self-sacrifice is a virtue. This part is a wound that came up with rules to follow subconsciously. No one wants to get kicked out of the club of normal and accepted, but we were at some time and the hurt is still there in “follow this way of being” programming.

In my inner work, I saw I kept giving and even creating third, fourth, and fifth chances with people who were all mirrors telling me that I try harder for connections that are not good over ones that could be. It is a form of self-sabotage that confirms a negative belief. Being a victim of disrespect means I could continue believing that I didn’t deserve an easy, good connection. If I took back my hurt energy and restored it, and believed that I deserved effortless good connection, I would grieve how hard it was to connect with my mother. Her passing is not the grief; her passing was a death to the usefulness of that behavior. Without addressing it, the behavior wants to be used subconsciously. To connect with her, I gave her all the chances, I gave her a sweet and forgiving side of me that understood her confusion and depression, and her need to work to try for that kind of accomplishment when she felt time running out. I would have to face that rather than accomplish our stable connection, she had me in poorly screened situations without her, and forms of daycare that were my days without the care part. This felt disrespectful, and I wouldn’t allow myself to feel it. I was afraid I couldn’t handle it, my own mother. However, a feeling is not a fact, once I faced that it is the truth of how people operate, they think of what could ease their pain quickly, and I became a therapist to help people recognize how self-abandoning that can be, I realized I had a lot of respect for what I did with this pain and forgot to give it to myself.

Reclaim Your Energy

This part of the tool requires you to talk to yourself again. Something like “every time I let my thoughts drift back to this, I am investing in a version of myself that thinks I don’t deserve better”, would be a good redirection and witnessing of the truth from facing yourself. The second step would be to use a body-based method of installing the intention to change that. Placing your hands in an “X” shape over your heart such that the fingertips fall gently on the rim of your collarbone, breath in and gently tap the fingertips back and forth, stating inwardly, “I am learning to give my loyalty and respect to myself now”. This does not mean you drop the ball respecting others, but you break the chain of unbalanced actions. Actions that you want to receive first require you to give them to yourself.

Start a New Standard in your Self-Talk

From now on, tell yourself you want to speak to yourself the way you wish others would when you were hoping your approach would rub off on them somehow. Admit to yourself that your standards need to improve in showing yourself the dignity you offer and that this is vital to your healing and personal growth.

Practice Letting Go-Gently but Firmly

When you recognize that you need your own validation in the present and that you cannot fix the past, you also accept that the past version of yourself was doing the best they could. You accept that you just got the tools to see this and need to live in the present, where you are not defined by anyone’s inability to treat you well. Imagine walking away from that version of you like walking across a graduation stage. You don’t walk away as much as you walk up to the stage and accept you have moved on from the past, less educated version of you.

End Notes

If you ever find yourself drifting back again, try pausing and using a grounding position like the one above. Tap back and forth and say to yourself either of the following:

“I am not going back down off the stage. I honor what I went through, but I chose to graduate from that.”

OR

“This was a great teacher in a hard disguise. But the class is over. I am graduating.”

DON’T FORGET TO FOLLOW THE ENYA, EVERYONE NEEDS YOU ALWAYS, community and podcast on Spotify! Heal on!

When feeling first came on the scene in human history, our brains were less advanced and the physical and emotional threats were basic and simple, not so today. Our brains seem like they are more than up to the task for figuring things out and managing our lives, but we are not just a brain. We are an entire system, largely we are emotional grids with a small command center. The command center title that the brain is known to have can make it sound like the dominant player, but it’s a partnership. Partnership is beyond teamwork, a team will make a goal through various plays, a partnership makes the plays together and reaches goals as one unit. Our brains should act like partners with our emotional grids, that includes the body, but it doesn’t. Our brains today are like fancy Apple products constantly creating new upgrades, we are analysis dominated, thinking that increased processing speed is an upgrade in our awesomeness. We think the speed at which we know what we have just felt is the thing that makes us “fine”. Phrases like an immediate “all good” or “no worries” when texting are evidence of this dominance towards knowing how you feel instantly and with managerial like dominance towards controlled, appropriate, and organized.

This processes of taking objective data that we see unfold into an immediate storyline is where all the dysregulated feelings come from. Anything we think; “she’s not interested”, “he’s going to leave me”, “they never wanted me”, to name a few examples; none of this is factual. Still, we create our lives based on the immediate stories that come to mind. It’s a whiplash processing that we would gasp at to watch it happen in a movie. We would all collectively gasp at the speed to which conclusions are made, and the plot twists it creates. The brokenness we have is fragmented experience, and as stated, it can be your invitation to inner work.

I have been a too open person and then felt this brokenness, and an extremely shut down person with walls and rigidity and also carried the broken feeling. I have been numb and dissociated and resisted feeling the brokenness and also hypervigilant and fixing it constantly. Lastly, but not at all finally, I have come home to myself and experienced the tools for healing brokenness as an invitation to pay gentle attention and know myself better. Most profoundly, I have learned that you must lead your life with intention. I think my intention now is to be a leader of my own healing and in that intention be a leader in the concept of healing in general. Not The Leader, mind you, just a leader.

A leader, if we are to be truthful, provides an invitation to a willing group of people to see a future they can feel as real, even though it is not here presently. A leader asks those who want to do the work, “Walk with me”, while a boss is a person who is in charge of other people at work and tells them what to do. The boss may be the person who directs or supervises workers, while a leader believes they will direct themselves and become self-leaders, and a rich organization will rise. I believe a rich organization of all of us believing in a toolbox approach to healing in phases can be known as ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always and have titled the podcast and company that supports live healing events this. I title the book that invites you to the phase of healing “You Are Not Broken” and called the approach The Toolbox Approach (TM) and held a space here and on the author website for you all to become a community. I also believe other people are creating structures for healing and their concepts are great too. Any leader is just another person helping you explore what your responsibility is for the job of healing, or what it could be.

I don’t want to be a boss. Bosses disempower us, which allows us to moan and groan about their demanding ways. When there is a sense of rich organization and no one can say who led to that exactly, there doesn’t need to be a sole leader; it is the experience of self-leadership, and the richness of a community of others believing, that is the value. What is remembered when you have done inner work is the feeling. You can do it repeatedly, knowing it is you leading your way, and that it is what you owe yourself. I would be blessed to know that people have found it by walking with me through reading along. It’s a partnership in many ways.

This is why I promote my own approach, The Toolbox Approach and the three phases of healing inside it. I witnessed it at work and was inside it many times. If I lead you through your healing, I will only stand on the shoulders of those before me who offer guidance, not to rise above anyone or you. I call out an invitation to a crowd of listeners. I hope that crowd is you! I hope the book I am writing will hold the crowd’s attention for their invitation. The link to the book enclosed here invites you to Enter the Phases of Healing, I hope you bookmark it and keep a look out for the summer 2025 release. There are many links on the author page to consider before the release.

Love is a Corrective Experience

We are all like black box recorders, holding all the memories of what happened on every flight the plane has taken. The plane is our body, mind, and essence, and a pilot is flying it. We are holding everything just waiting for the pilot to open, listen, learn, and heal from what is inside the black box. Love itself, and not the falling part where chemistry gives us a high to be our best and hold on, but the building part can be corrective because we may want to open the flight recordings. The love that happens through openness, listening, and learning is a corrective experience than can start with the love you have for your own brokenness. It doesn’t feel like falling in love does. When we care more about inner work, our own and others’, it helps open all the boxes of remembering emotional wounds, and that attunement to healing corrects an off-course-ness we all suffer from for too long before we have the tools I am inspired to write about with The Toolbox Approach (TM)

The Past is a Void you Don’t Need Closure From

You don’t have to have perfect understanding of your past. You don’t even need closure, a concept us therapist think is “the thing”. I love making fun of therapy meme’s, I think many therapists are actually quite woke to the falsities of closure, but we need language to explain that you can be less open to the past bombarding you with its unfinished business if you understand a few things and choose to walk away from its influence. It’s not a door closing action as the word indicates but a process. The process is one of understanding that this void of stuff is not something holding you back, nor is it something to ignore or to walk away from unscathed.

Let’s look at the concept of a void generally and then from several angles: psychological, scientific, spiritual, and emotional. Generally, a void is an empty space and from that context there is nothing expected, desired or present there. However, as soon as we apply our past being in that void it takes on a psychological emptiness definition where meaning, connection or fulfillment is missing because the past is there in the void pulling at us. Here we may have loss, loneliness or lack of purpose for a time and try to fill the void with distractions and unless it is addressed, it lingers.

Scientifically, a void is almost entire nothingness, there is very little matter, vast stretches called voids of space that are between galaxies represent a space where nearly nothing exists, not entirely but very close. If we place the past in the definition scientifically, it represents a space where one might say there is no substance only the space of story. From both these stances I hope you are starting to see, the past has a psychologically haunting emptiness as a void or a scientific void of only story and no substance. Closure from the past comes from tools that understand this void, create lessons from it, reprocess and complete unfinished stories for substance. However, the past as a void of space does not have to be changed.

Spiritually, the void is a sacred emptiness in some traditions. It is a space where we dismantle the ego and find stillness or unity with ourselves and the universe at large. It’s not negative, like the silence at the end of a Yoga practice, in corpse pose, it is the stillness after the movement has stretched the past muscle fatigue out of us and we are free and in a sacred ‘nothing on my mind’ space, and more attuned. I have cried in this pose and felt more beautiful inside, not more broken. Emotionally, a void can be painful because it is like standing in a dark room where you know you may be inside something but not be able to see or feel the space. In this state you know something is missing, but you can’t always name it an only feel the wrongness of it. The pain comes from where something should be and not entirely a pain being inflicted.

With all the concepts of a void, we come to the tools for inner work. The past can still be a void, but it starts to hold many lessons as the tools are applied in the present. Each lesson becomes one to graduate from, as the past void becomes a present classroom and ultimately a graduation. If, like has happened to me, you have an experience where you are stuck in your classroom like the student who punishes themselves for still making mistakes despite getting much of the lesson into their understanding, you may be stuck in a version of the void again. The void of perfectionism can occur no matter who you are, even if you never would associate the term with yourself. The void of perfectionism is expecting that graceful letting go is rewarded to those who are the best students. Letting go of the past is the ultimate self-forgiveness. No one has done the things of your past to you, and you have not done anything to deserve it, it causes a huge void in humanity to exist in this concept. No one has tools initially, and inevitably we are damaged by non-heling. So, we have to stop punishing, perfecting, and denying self-leadership and take the lessons. We have to walk onto the graduation stage and accept the diploma but really, we are never done accepting the lessons.

I am so afraid every time I learn that I have to let go of the void that taught me. I don’t want to graduate on my own. I want the graduation feeling without the loneliness of the stage. It is so familiar to be held back by something. What will happen if you let go of the void of the past? It will still be there, of course, but you might feel your graduation happening. You, on the stage, for a moment, the alone you never wanted to feel may take hold, it’s familiar, who is there to help me do this? We equally ache to stand in everything we know and apply it strongly and knowingly, and cringe from the weight of the responsibility. We need the past pulling at us to know which is the more gruesome weight. Many of us take lifetimes to decide. The tools for inner work make this so much more obviously your most important job. I have been so afraid to feel the job of my own inner work at times. Re-regulation activities help put the work into a manageable feeling. Below are a few tools that combine to create an RP, or Re-Regulation Practice, for walking away from the void of the past, into your classroom, feeling the lesson and taking a dose of joyful re-regulation. My article on developing Daily Regulation and Integration Practices (DRIPS) is also a great introduction to this kind of tool in the Reprocessing Phase of Healing. On the author website there is a link to the courses to consider when or if you find that route appealing.

The Tools

* ASKING FOR INTENTION: Talking the right hand and placing it inside the left, hand over hand, gently cradle the hands. They are gently cupped, left on top of right. Lower them down into your lap and looking down into them, gently touch the two thumbs together. Pressing the thumbs together more firmly, breath into this cupped container of your intentional self and ask for guidance on something hanging heavy on your heart, “please send me guidance on what is hanging on my heart”.

* THE CALL: Un-cup the hands and use the open palm of one hand like a pad for which you begin tracing a heart with the opposite hand’s middle finger whispering gently to yourself “what hangs heavy on my heart?”. Notice the imagery that may come up, if it’s like clothes hanging neatly on hangers, or thrown over. Perhaps there are hooks in the heart or no imagery at all but you hear the answers in your own private conversation suddenly. Begin to write it all down. This is what one calls stream of consciousness writing. Don’t stop and don’t overthink. Don’t correct or re-read it, don’t rewrite and accept the flood of words.

* JOYFULL RE-REGULATION: Put the writing implement down, close or turn over your writing. Breathe deeply only through your nostrils with a light smile or smugness on your face. Then exhale with mouth open and a “hahhhhaaaa” sound. Then place the writing implement in your back teeth, biting down on it across the back molars and attempt to smile around it. Then take it out and keep the smile broadly with the memory of the writing implement still there. Attempt to hold the joy in your entire face and now feel it spread down as the heart and chest swell with your next breath and the exhale of your entire body expands the joy throughout you. Say to yourself “I deserve to feel joy, no matter what I am experience I can call my body into joyfulness when I have paid attention”.

* CLOSING INTENTION: Come back to cupped hands with a closing intention. The left hand symbolizes the logical mind with all its attempts to know the past and label things, people, and yourself good or bad, right or wrong, closed or still rife with emotional baggage. The right hand symbolizes the creative and intuitive healing of what the body holds onto and calls to release as well has just newly experienced as re-regulated joy. Breath it all in and gently whisper, “A healing has begun for me today, as I walk away, I walk towards and also walk inside my healing present self.”

Re-regulation could be said to be a memory of coming home. We know our own regulated self like deeply and richly painted hieroglyphic on the walls of our past. This language of our regulated home base may have been barely used before the void of the past in all its forms started its influence but it is there, calling us home. You don’t have to so much know how to get there as you have to learn to.

The events of our lives happen in a sequence in time that seems like the truth but is only significant to ourselves. The order of them is created, and they are not facts on how we have lived, how others are, or how to exist. We need tools for reprocessing life through a more watchful and present version of ourselves that has decided to go inward and heal this false narrative. Afterwards, other phases of healing unfold more naturally. The phases of healing found in The Toolbox Approach are: Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing. Empower yourself to go inside your life with the tools that were meant to be in your hands all along.

The truth is that the things that happen to you in life are like electricity. Good connections occur, bad ones too, and faulty wiring is inevitable. Sometimes, specially coated wiring is established, but just as quickly, short circuiting can occur. Our experiences land in us, and they are electricity for the operation of our lives. Our lives require intricately wired power grids that we have to believe are embedded within in order to care for them. The operation of our entire experiential grid, which is essentially an emotional grid, is up to us, however, this grid is also highly prone to damage. It all requires steady monitoring. While I am a therapist of nearly two decades, I can assure you, none of us have really learned about the care our grids need until something goes wrong, so no one is tasked with watching it with expertise.

At the start of life, we outsource the monitoring to family or some type of caregiver system. These people who are meant to have already learned the watchfulness they need to monitor our emotional grids, but they don’t know about the electricity in themselves entirely and haven’t learned enough about monitoring themselves to expect this of them. This can fry the emotional grids through decades of families. We expect people in family making mode to be watchers and have watchers in the making in their ranks, but no one knows about the electricity of experience and how skilled we are meant to be. We are meant to establish electrical engineering-like expertise, we all fail. We are not invited to learn but we are changing. That is why you are reading, that is why I am writing. That is why therapy is going viral through self-helping posts and podcasts. It can take generations before repair is called for. But that is happening now, can you feel it? Maybe you are one of those calling for it, and you want to know about the tools. You sense generations before you missed the call to heal but you can claim it!

I believe that if I can get to you, reader, and provide the tools to individuals like you who feel it, it creates growth and healing for everyone. If you do feel it as you read, I am calling to you; we all need you to start your inner work. Each person who lets themselves feel the calling to heal is another person accepting the invitation, and that gives the next person permission. This is also electricity, collective interest and effort in healing, and it transfers without language. Can you feel this is possible? We can all learn the tools because each person out there is a learner waiting for the invitation to a new type of classroom. I could feel this in myself as a therapist, this call to do more creative sharing of tools that transfer the therapist’s skills to the individual.

It came to me like a bolt of truth; how profound it could be if we were all developing tools for our toolboxes. That power bolt brought me the electricity I needed to restore my own damaged emotional grid that was still healing in The Relational Healing Phase, where I realized that being a therapist was one way of relating to people and myself as “good”, but also a profound hiding from life as well. I wanted to teach myself, and now I want to share these tools with you as that teacher who relates to the students but confines the boundaries of both parties by saying, “It’s up to you to claim your classroom experience, I am only a tool to you as well”.

We Mourn the Self We Abandoned

The suicide of the “nice-good self” we have been presenting to the world is a large part of The Relational Healing Phase I am writing about here. To indicate that a self-death will restore your spirit’s electricity and heal your emotional grid may seem counter-intuitive but remember that a facade self is a large pull on the system. It takes a lot of energy to generate the mask. It doesn’t mean it comes from a bad or even false place; it is well meaning to create a self that you make do things in the world that seem your own unique version of “nice-good”. Even if you align more with being independent, strong-willed, or rational, terms that may not be associated with warm or understanding, that is a version of “nice-good” for you. We all have our versions of ourselves that need to have a death. They need to die because they drain the system, we need the electrical channel to go dead so that it can’t be used, it’s too tempting to send it our power. It’s too open as an option to lead our lives. Grief is part of The Relational Healing Phase. Tears, sadness, depression, without this period of pain striking us, we can’t feel the death that is needed. Feel it going dark but don’t be afraid on the edge of it, move in. This is useful pain, it illuminates the other channel because of its darkness.

Consider allowing your other self to die right now. I know you know what I am talking about. Don’t overthink it. We will use a meditation now, The Medusa Mask Meditation. It is embedded below in this article through a video from my YouTube Channel. Like the goddess Medusa, we all must know that we wear a crown of snaking thoughts on our heads. It is a tremendous burden, but we have tools to stop the snaking thoughts that snake down and bleed into our spirit, drain the lifeforce there and misuse the emotional grid with a bad energy source.

This weight on our heads, often inside our heads, becomes a false voice of reason. It is a blocking device we have to clear. Hear it now for what it is, fear and despair. It literally is the block, not a voice of reason at all. People tell me, “How did you learn this”, or they ask, “why do this?”. In both instances, I say it got me to the other side of myself, and I just had to keep doing it, that is both how I learned and why I do it, and lastly why I teach and promote it. A therapist cannot get you to the other side of you, it’s up to you considering tools that stop the censor, manager, and reasoning side of your mind. It gets you to the other side of your mood, negativity, and fear.

Do not feel bad you have this draining part of you. It is leftover survival brain. It was in charge of deciding whether it was safe or not to move towards thrive and often it says don’t until you……fill in the blank. Along the way we pick less than thrive, assured that it just wasn’t safe enough but what we are doing is still “nice-good”, because it is safe. Consider the meditation below, it is very simple clearing out. Then, simply sit down and write at the top of a page: “Fears, Anxieties, Resentments, or Pressures” as a question to yourself. There is another tool I use from another article that talks about a different way to use this writing prompt.

Medusa Mask Meditation

This video post showcases a simple way to include body-based or somatic methods for emotion regulation into your healing journey. Any healing journey is profoundly a wakeup call to the need to move beyond talking and basic understanding of problems with labels such as “my anxiety”, “my control issues”, “my addictive personality”, “my trauma”, or any other way we label and point a finger at ourselves, others or situations. This meditation can create a pause from the mental chatter, and in that pause is an entire opportunity for a whole other you to emerge. Come to it with the curiosity that it may become your tool. We need to collect tools for Daily Regulation and Integration Practice (DRIP). We do not want to get drippy with ourselves, we need these practices to be contained and stable but connected and able to integrate with what happens within and around us. Take a moment to “tune out to tune in”. Don't pass this up!

Areas of Electrical Impact

Our traumas impact us in one or more zones of our emotional grid. Some may know this as the seven chakras, others may have heard about the polyvagal nerve and the way our body holds trauma in the central nervous system’s three main areas of the polyvagal ladder. I am going to do what I am known for, making it self-help digestible because I don’t want you to take my path, becoming a trauma expert in order to heal. It was a valuable path, but it is not required to heal. What has happened that may have blocked up your grid and caused a “nice-good” self-drain, leaving you operate with less electricity, leaving your true spirit flatlining is in these areas. Look at them now and mentally note on a scale from mild, moderate, to severe; how much you were affected in this area.

* Root/Seat/Genitals Area: Lifeforce and safe to be. Able to take time and trust there is enough time, resources, and support.

* Pelvis Area/Lower Bowels/Core Area: Where digestion allows us to be nourished and we sense we are cared for, loved.

* Gut/Lower Rib Cages/Willpower Area: Where we sense we can do things, have agency to complete and accomplish.

* Heart/Breastbone/Chest Area: Where we sense we belong, can love and form connection through sharing ourselves, initiating.

* Throat Area: Where we sense we can use our words and voice to be heard and to communicate. Where we can ask, share, validate our experiences.

* Forehead/Third-Eye Area: Where we sense we see ourselves and our purpose as good, meaningful, impactful, or valuable.

* Crown or Top of the Head Area: Where we sense there is a higher meaning to why we are here, appreciate connections to beauty beyond ourselves, accept our smallness and still feel calm and part of all things.

If you take note of mild, moderate, severe impact in each of these areas very gently and consider clearing out with the meditation above or others I have shared in the past and will continue to share, and then commit to writing, I guarantee, you will start to have just the right kind of death. This is a dedicated practice however, I suggest at least 3 months, at least 4 days a week. The time meditating is pretty short; the time writing is up to you. Both will likely grow over time naturally.

Tips on Restoring from My Story

In my exploration of the seven areas, I found severity in the lower two regions, my gut area was more physically blocked with gastrointestinal challenges that affected my willpower at times because I feared unstructured eating outside of what was “safe”, but my willpower was very strong for personal growth, change, being a healer personally and professionally. My heart area had severe blocks early on that moved to moderate, as did my throat area. My vision and higher purpose oddly seemed open and free of blockages; however, I realized that was in comparison to the other blockages. It was good to really feel a hint of free and open in the areas of vision and connection to nature and beauty, it gave me a lot of hope, as did my sense of a strong willpower underneath the moderate blockage. I cannot be sure how my focus on it just created all this awareness, but it does. Stay at it. It will come. Then I started to write. I wrote in my journal; I started to write a book. I became a podcast host, an author, a content creator, a poet, I dabbled in songwriting and joined a group for a while. I got to the other side of myself; I am still going.

Here are some additional notes:

* It doesn’t matter if only one area is severe, many are, or none. You are detecting the spectrum of holding things. It is the blueprint that you start to see. You used this blueprint, the blocked up emotional grid version of you, as a guide to live life, unknowingly. We need tools for looking at this more than we need to talk, reason, and analyze.

* No one can ever really take an X-ray for you that explains your emotional blocks, the healing that is needed, or prescribe your solution. We need tools to see things gently, without a fixing mentality. Healing is a lifelong commitment to caring about how you hold things.

* Allow yourself to feel it the fear of doing this. Most likely, you are asking “what will I get out of this?” right now. “What will happen if I do this?”. That is exactly what the block is, always wanting to know is it safe, because if it is not, I don’t know if I can do this. But you do know safety is waiting inside you, you do know. You want to get to the other side. We write after and every day we can not to remove things but to connect to what is there. Often times, that does lead to letting it go, other times it is so obvious you tried to remove something that you have to accept is profoundly you in your own way.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

This concept applies to all of us, however. Becoming aware that you have an inner therapist and that entering into phases of healing for repair, but not with any intent that there is a doctor on call needed to fix things, is a peace of mind that is woefully needed in the brokenness community that so many of us think we are alone in and not together with others inside of at all. We all have the brokenness at one time or another and the truth is that it can be an invitation to inner work that helps you find an entire toolbox approach all your own. The message: ‘You Are not Broken’ that I posit in the book, is a message from your inner therapist. That person is a powerful guide, and you can make an appointment any time without the need to pay a co-pay or be in network!

Your inner therapist comes from a tool in the trauma informed approaches library called Internal Family Systems, or IFS, originally developed by Richard C. Schwartz. Essentially, it helps you re-discover your Core Self. This is the self that can look at things like “my addiction” or “my shame over two divorces”, as well as feeling states like repressed rage and resentment, as “parts of self”. The Core Self looks curiously on, holds a conversation, so the parts get a sort of therapy and acceptance that they are all part of a whole person who is not good or bad but just trying to be in balance.

Slowly, as I used my own toolbox, I realized it was in fact healing me and that generated more tools somehow. The phases of healing in The Toolbox Approach are Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing. At times they are mutually beneficial and cycling around on each other and the phases are less definitive. Other times, you are clearly doing inner work in one phase and using the boundaries of that phase to focus and protect it, aiming to say to yourself; ‘that is truly good enough right now, healing takes time’. That is where we stand today as I write, I can’t place my finger on what phase I am in, they are cycling around and feeding each other with new information. Nonetheless, the work I recently did as patient zero to myself, deeply impacted several therapy sessions this week, and so the post emerges as a necessary highlight for The Reprocessing Healing Phase in which I use a self-help version of IFS.

PATIENT ZERO

So, my patient zero story is, in truth, that it all started a week prior, when for the second time in a row, I tried to fit my own return to therapy into the end of my workday at 8pm. I was aware of doing this “I must try therapy again” mindset, based on a new dysregulation I was feeling like I should really work on in therapy to stay sharp about what I was also asking my therapy goers to be part of. I was not aware that I had put the intention on a ridiculous schedule that landed me in the second session with only disjointed triggers to discuss with no cohesion and only a subtle wisdom that it all made sense to me somehow but was not going to come to any inner cohesion. My approach was all head and “should” mentality and it was completely disembodied from the way it felt, disorganized, rushed, bad. I put myself on the bench the third week to prevent the pattern, but I was not feeling good. I always pride myself on noticing the feelings and taking responsibility that they are between me and me but I was outsourcing my feelings to yoga, meditation and a healthy diet and exercise routine expecting “better me” to show up and all the while I said yes to things that should have been a no and ignored that I had wanted to return to therapy and didn’t organize it in a way that felt good and was really pretty stuck. I had specific things I wanted to be regulating, things that were partially figured out and ripe for inner work, but I was stalling. My smile was painted on, my humor an escape, and my careful routine ended up a way to care less about what was being internalized.

Luckily, my body screeched at me to stop quite literally, an autoimmune reaction came knocking, ‘hey tough girl, we need to talk!”. Returning home to face myself and my guilt over several canceled sessions, my bed became a therapy session using Internal Family Systems (IFS). I was going to face “my parts” and not just say to myself the easy, “oh, I must have over done it, need some rest”. That part of me was there in full force the first hour, but with IFS we learn how to hear ourselves differently and I called my own bluff at the idea that this was all of what was going on with me. As we move toward the part, rather than run away, a slow emergence of other parts is found. A whole family system with members disengaged from one another much like in a real family when there is discord and dysfunction, is found. The members or parts of self each think they are protecting something or conversely being protected. The parts often have storylines of what is threatening, what the threat is going to do, what could happen, what should happen to prevent things, and generally they are not aware this is all about feelings that the system as a whole could hold and move through. That is where Inner Core Self or Inner Therapist comes in, this one knows to “hold space”, just like the title of the entire subscription here, Holding Space. These things create the pause we need to integrate all our parts and move through the feelings with curiosity not reactivity.

HOLDING A SESSION WITH PARTS

To hold a session with YOUR parts, is not going to be identical to the experience I had but there are a few generic similarities that may help you be your own patient zero. First, most of us are generally trying to fend off the nervous system experience of anxiety when it comes to facing ourselves. To start this session with yourself, a quick somatic or body-based tool, helps create the pause needed to start revving down. To do this, perform the following:

* Gently close the mouth and take two slow and strong breaths through the nostrils only. For imagery, you can imagine that the breaths puff up a crown or chef’s hat, or that you can feel it somehow on the top of your head.

* After the strong breaths, the exhale happens slowly, like you are expelling frosty air out of your mouth. For imagery, you can imagine coating things around you with ice and even focus on the sound like an ice wielding dragon breath sound.

* Gently place one hand over your breastbone/chest and silently claim slowed down mode powerfully; “I am here now”.

For the session, you can explore the following parts:

* Repressed Rage

* Don’t stop and feel what this really is Anxiety

* Repressed Shame

* Fear of Abandonment and Loss

ACTUAL SESSION RESULTS

Over the course of this week, I used IFS in this was several times after using it on my patient zero experience. The example provided is a combination of several sessions over the duration of my career and my own experience to protect confidentiality and preserve anonymity. Shared experiences with tools are our greatest tools in this community so if you have an experience reading, please be willing to share in the comments section, you never know who it may help.

We will use Issac, age 37, in our example. He is a writer and as his full-time employment is working as a software and IT specialist in a corporation. He is separated from his partner of 7 years, and they have raised her child from another relationship together for three years. Issac feels like the relationship changed him profoundly and he can no longer trust many people, even family. He was holding onto making it work up until a year ago when she moved to another state and he can no longer see the child he felt looked at him as “daddy”. Now, he has tried to consider writing about men’s health but finds his articles are too personal and he needs therapy to work on things “with a person I can pay to trust and hear me”. Recently, he has been getting very angry upon first interactions with women he meets on a dating app and with women at work. He tries not to let it out but mentally it gets to him, depresses him, and he has low energy, failing to stick to his normal workout routine. We used the somatic exercise with “I am here now” and Issac immediately commented “Oh, wow!”

Issac noticed right away how much he had been escaping something, first through pristine gym workouts but then when his energy got too down, through more frequent visits to the dating app. Afte the exercise, he noticed how much he had not been present in his life. Already, he was commenting, “I am not angry about women at work asking dumb questions or about these women on dating apps ghosting after one misunderstood comment!”. I asked him if he, with this part of his “I am here self” guide a meeting with the following parts. Here is his work:

Repressed Rage: “It says that I needed protection from this from the start and have only myself to blame. I helped her out of a bad situation, and it felt so good to be part of an instant family, but I never asked the important questions. I want to do it better on all these dating apps, but it takes so long getting to know people and I am just tired of not cutting to the chase and being direct about our pasts!”

Don’t Stop and Feel What this Really is Anxiety: “It says that I have to get my game back, stop skipping the gym. It says if I could just get a date, I would have reasons to be back to it again, I would have hope. I have to keep checking the app or work on my profile and just not feel rejection. I don’t want to feel like I won’t build a family after all this.”

Repressed Shame: “It says I should have been paying more attention to how she never held my hand or wanted affection. I just fell in love with being a dad and part of a family. I don’t know if my own father is proud of me, he died without me asking him so many questions I’ve wanted to know about if he wanted me or not.”

Fear of Abandonment and Loss: “I have always lost people before I can ask them how they feel about me. I am afraid that I just don’t get to have that family feeling. I feel like it is such a loss but also like I never had it so I am not sure why I can’t handle it and that frightens me more, how could I have so much fear I can’t handle the loss when I never had a real family feeling to begin with?”

Very likely you are relating your own life to this session as you read. If so, I encourage you to get a piece of paper and just try it. Be mindful to start with the short release of anxiety that comes with resistance to facing yourself. What you find, like Issac, is not a solution to your feeling but the feelings themselves. What you find is your parts. Just finding them in this mini session with yourself is an integration back into Whole Self, or Higher Self, where you don’t have to chatter away at a solution but can just accept your experience. This particular use of Internal Family Systems, IFS, is a Reprocessing Healing Phase tool today because of how it was used to reprocess dysregulation. For me, this week, I wanted to be facing things with regard to returning to therapy and learning to trust others again. Issac wanted to face his frustration and anger. Both of us were trying to point ourselves in directions but failing to take a pause and just meet with all our parts. Reprocessing things through as many parts of ourselves as we can brings us back to a more integrated self and can often be a solution in and of itself.

Life makes more sense, we are less good or bad, when we are integrated. If you like this tool, please subscribe below. Also, considers subscribing because you will get first shot at the guided approach to healing found in You Are Not Broken (not in publication yet but work in progress website for bookmarking) before it is launched on multiple platforms and audiobook. Lastly, find us on Spotify for the ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always podcast and on Patreon for Enter the Phases of Healing Courses.

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* Wake up to an alarm to get there “on time”

* Eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at a certain time

* File your taxes by the deadline

The things outside ourselves began to tell us how to live even when we are babies. We all had a very short window to know our own rhythms before something was telling us what our schedule of needs, wants and sensations should be. The cost is that we lose our listening and the art of this somatic or body-based listening hides inside as if it was a stupidity or weakness rather than the intelligence that it is. This is more than knowing how you feel but sensing where you feel and allowing the deeper art of listening to take over. The way we need to listen is different than an auditory process that goes up the brain stem into the ‘CEO’ manager of life part of your brain. It might be more like a reading concept, like reading brail. The fingertips become alive with sensation, detecting bumps, slowing down the mental state so that it does not get ahead of itself assuming what is there. You don’t use what you see and make up a story about it and call it factual, you feel what the bumps are indicating.

Somatic Awareness is like this, it allows you to slow down the ‘CEO’ manager part of your brain and lets you stay up and out of the subconscious ways you start moving, speaking and operating with the chatter as truth. Let’s move into a personal story to help highlight a day when I realized my own connection to my body was coming back on-line. It was becoming lest prescribed to do things that I thought were the scheduled things to do without stopping, without feeling signals of emotional drain, physical drain, pain, tension, lack of full breath, and hunger. Prior, my body always held the story of keep going and I could not feel how tightly it wrapped my own arms over my chest. I was outwardly a pleasant person, but I was clamped into it and my schedule for life. The clamps were blocking entrance, dead set on moving forward. I didn’t want any past thing to drag me down and the schedule of my trying allowed a sort of holding it all and moving forward. I did yoga for decades before I trained in Somatic Experiencing and advanced my own trauma therapist certification to include the tools that intuitively know how our neurobiology holds our hard things.

THE REALIZATION IT WAS WORKING

On the say I realized a different sort of schedule was working for me, a body centered effort to feel myself more through various daily practices I had committed to, I was walking to a trailhead, preparing for the hiking trail that would burn into my muscles and take me away into nature’s version of hard things. This activity is my church, and I was feeling the anticipation. I felt a looseness in one boot and looked down to see a shoelace sliding away from its knot. I thought, “can I stop and tie my shoelaces now?”. Suddenly my mind boomed with this childhood to adulthood progression of knowledge. I was aware of how in childhood, everyone wants us to stop and tie our shoes. It is very important we learn how to tie our own shoes so that we can do our start to the day on our own and adults will stop our day dead if they loosen. I remembered Velcro’s entrance into my life, my mom indicating it would help me go faster in the rush to preschool. I wanted to move faster ever since she mentioned this and something in me changed. I wanted to tie, I wanted to feel “big” being able to run this task on my own. Velcro or tie-ups, either way, the days of stopping evaporated. I learned to rush.

My mother tried to make it fun and sing a rushing song. I remember now she was doing it for herself too. We didn’t want to feel how this all felt, our only time together slipping away. We collaborated in the grown-up message: you shouldn’t stop as much, you shouldn’t feel it if you don’t have time to, anything can be tied later, just get where they tell you to get to. There were alterations to the message, like don’t be untied if someone is looking and then you should tie. Also, if you need to get somewhere, or finish something, if it’s not too risky and no one can tell, you can be untied and going somewhere, just don’t let anyone see it. It’s subliminal that getting something done, getting to something or through something faster, takes priority over slowly sensing how to proceed, in what direction, and for what purpose.

It dawned on me that all of us recovering from all sorts of things are actually discovering how to stop, how to pause, how to notice untied shoes again and actually care about a gentle re-tie, even relacing. Some of us have to face the “dam it, these shoes are worn to the soles, what have I been doing!” part of this awareness. Recovery from “the things” that happen is not a fix, it’s a repairing of false concepts of who you are, of what life should look like, of your memories, and of your relationship to yourself and others. It means you have to feel the untied places and even more, feel them in progress, so that you can sense into them and care what they indicate. Then you exercise the focus to keep going but you have multidimensional awareness of the necessary stops and the essential untied moments you have to have. Muscle memory blooms with safety rather than danger cues of tension and pain and tells you about loving kindness towards yourself. It starts to be familiar and also you know it has been forgotten to feel this way, all at once back home inside. Then, you want to cultivate an awareness to come back repeatedly. The ‘come back repeatedly’ is what I call a daily regulation and integration practice, a DRIP. You’ll want to consider a few for yourself if this speaks to you.

That day, I stopped and tied my hiking boot, walked a few feet, and realized the other one was off tension as well, and stopped again. I literally laughed out loud, letting time pass, aware of my former self becoming annoyed at the delay. I slowed my tying down and felt into the “bowl of breath” between my hips where if I feel into and send my breath from my pelvic floor up through my bellybutton and get a bowl-like sensation. Then I moved this breath up my ribcages, collarbone and to the top of my head. Crouched down and feeling myself, I felt possessed with awareness that I would hike that trail like a Queen, knowing that she walks in nature, in her body and all things are held as she rises in the woods. Maybe it sounds “woo-woo” to you but the tools in my Toolbox Approach are things I can literally feel now.

The phases of healing: Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing feel like a structure that is fluid for the inner work and repair but also the holding on to myself and moving on in life well, at home inside. Whatever accomplishments happen or do not happen, the home is where I can live. Let’s take home a few somatic awareness tools that you can use and consider choosing as a daily practice. They are best used at the start of the day. The second-best use is when you have caught an emotional trigger in your Conscious Mind, or the chatter part of your brain we tend to believe much of the time. The somatic awareness tools gently unravel the yarn that knots up your thoughts and parks a spool of tightness in your subconscious self, demanding you live like this in much of what you do without your awareness. This means your tone changes, your speed changes, your vibe changes, your actions are messages to others and yourself you would never consciously intend. We have to unwind that spool and become part of a Higher Self Mind that has gentle, paced, choice and does not believe in urgency but trusts awareness is a guide and an answer to most things.

TAKE A MOMENT

Before the somatic awareness practices are shared, first, take a moment to consider which type you are more of:

* You get in your head thinking about a situation between you and another person and think if you could only understand it, there would be some ease to how you feel. You aim for something that will help things and worry that you are overthinking it but also feel responsible to do so for some reason. You want to make sure your solution is smart and not too emotional, but you wonder if the situation is benefitted by your emotional awareness and that someone should really recognize that.

* You get in your head thinking about others and how they should stop being a certain way. Mostly you are frustrated and resent having to think about this but also think other people should understand the obvious facts and stop wanting to look too deeply into things. You are thinking into it only because the way they are forces you to, so you are thinking about how annoying that is.

Obviously, we are all extremely multidimensional and not of only two types. The two types above are basic guides. You can also answer the question: “Which do I struggle more with, my thoughts getting in the way of the way I want to act, or the way I act getting in the way and then I am forced to think about it due to the feedback I get?”. One is an issue with inner thought boundaries and the other with outer feedback boundaries. Sometimes we are moving back and forth between these kinds of problems. The bottom line is, STOP THINKING OF A SOLUTION! The Somatic Exercises below help get you back home inside yourself, offline from chatter, and into a Higher Mind. The mantra I often latch to many of these practices is helpful here, it gets you back to this place: “I am the powerful person that guides my life”.

SOMATIC AWARENESS PRACTICES TO CONSIDER

* The Wet Suite Zip Up: Starting with both hands gently below your belly button, breathe in. Then, keeping one hand as an anchor for where your breath fills from, use the other hand to act like it is zippering up an imaginary wet suite. The breath goes into the anchor hand and the other hand zippers up. As each section of your body is passed, you are more you, contained and in possession of your experience. Zipper up all the way to the top of your head. Then, one arm at a time, smooth down the wet suite arms, one at a time, squeezing and pulling each wrist at the end of the smooth down. With the basics down, repeat several times and indicate to yourself that you have not retreated, you have come back home and are not distracted by outside influences, you guide your life, not others’.

* The Head Clamp Lift: Staring with one palm pressed against the forehead like a suction, breath into the pressure between your forehead and hand. Then, on the exhale, take the other hand and suction it to the back of your head right below the crown and before the brain stem starts to go down into the spinal cord. Using the pressure of both hands against the front and back of your head lift the head up and out of your shoulder sockets, at least that is how it may feel. Keep breathing higher into your head as you lift and release, lift and release for more space into your Higher Mind. Start to indicate to yourself you are taking back your mind, breathe up through all of yourself and make a light smile. Allow only sensation for what you are doing, notice the chatter is gone.

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PARTING THOUGHTS

The truth is, more than any other phase of healing that I included in my toolbox approach to inner work, The Relational Phase of Healing, can be a blend of all the phases. It is both of the other two phases, Narrative Healing and Reprocessing Healing, because it detaches from the story you are telling yourself and reprocesses “threat” by recognizing the only reason we are ever threatened is because we lose contact with ourselves and believe anything the chatter says. Then we live inside the chatter subconsciously with our bodies and the actions we start to take. I have developed a life mission to be more than a trauma therapist through using this Toolbox Approach on myself and sharing it with therapy goers. That is the purpose of the phases of healing courses, this Holding Space Subscription and the “You Are Not Broken” introductory book coming out. There is an easy listening feature on Spotify called the ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always podcast for those of you not always able to stop quite yet but looking to dip your toes in inner work and healing from whatever has brought you here.

Find me on LinkedIn and I can welcome you to any of these communities that way as well.

There is a broken and destructive “we-ness” out there. We feel it when our partnerships don’t work out and we see the other person is suddenly a stranger. We think, what happened to our connection, our team, the sense we were in something together? It happens in larger ways as well, you suddenly see another side of a family member come out in a dismissive statement, a holiday gone wrong, a judgmental tone and suddenly everything is false and wrong, and disconnection blooms and spreads. The responses vary but whatever they are we can’t get that “we-ness” back. In an even larger sense, it happens when we turn on the news. All these updates on carelessness. No one has cared somehow, yet again, despite all the laws society has agreed on. Suddenly what it means to have a great country, society, or community is shown shattered on a 24-hour news cycle and we view our news with no “we-ness”. We tune in or off and the “we-ness” is damaged.

Recently, I have thought about my own body, the childhood painful experiences I have are both normal ones and violations of a “we-ness” I thought I was part of. When we are children, it is born into us to trust the family system, the neighborhood, the school, and our friends but collectively we all experience the “we-ness” breaking down and it can take decades to find tools to repair, many of us don’t find them. We are all suffering from degrees of it and when I am a therapist and make a diagnosis it is just a label for the unique way someone holds their many losses, their ruptures to “we-ness”.

It made me want to write, a form of healing that has started to become very profound to me. I am a trauma therapist, healing real-person, and someone who has noticed brokenness is an invitation to deep inner work that requires a deeply personal toolbox for the phases of healing one may need. The Toolbox Approach (TM) is something I developed as a way to invite people to their tools, not to prescribe their healing process as they repair. It organizes repairing false narratives, reprocessing memory that was damaged and incomplete, and restoring their relationship to themselves. This phase, Relational Healing, is where we find a Higher Self and connect with others in an emotionally safe way again.

That is what I am writing about today, and how it relates to Sexual Healing. Now, I am a child of the 1980’s and this was a song back then. "Sexual Healing" is a song recorded by American singer Marvin Gaye from his seventeenth and final studio album, Midnight Love (1982). I think a lot about my early influences and how they conditioned me to view my life as it unfolded a certain way. This song’s title has profound meaning, now that I see it. It spoke subliminally about how sexual intercourse eases emotional pain and storm and while it spoke from a male perspective, I am using it now to reveal a truth about sex being the ultimate “we-ness” contract. It is a symbol of how much we have the power to get it right and also terribly wrong and the message is everywhere. We can learn the truth about sex, that it is a symbol for The Relational Healing Phase we need to come to as a society and as individuals.

Sexual Healing as a Metaphor

The act of sex is not talked about as a symbol of healing, more often the act of sex is talked about as a pleasure-based experience. It can also be considered somewhat of a sport, where you collect wins or have more or less expertise and/or success at it. Satisfaction in sex is won or lost. It also has a way of being linked to possession, you have sex with a person who is “mine”. Additionally, it is a display, such as in “sexy”, and conveys elements of needing to be attractive or even deserving of attention in order to get it or be it somehow. The point is, there a lot of ways sex is talked about before we get to the core of what it really is. Sex is about “we-ness” that finally feels whole and complete between two forces. It is a balancing of the two versions of powerful energies life. Some might call these forces masculine and feminine energy, or yin and yang, dark and light, truth and power. Sex is in fact is beyond words in this regard, and that is why it is an action that creates something, and it is not possible to contain it in writing. That is why it is the perfect symbol for Relational Healing.

I had some violations in childhood that I never realized broke me off from “we-ness” until I found it one day in my first love in high school. Now I know I was tapped into Relational Healing without knowing it because I knew that I should let this act keep us a “we”, even though he needed to go to college before me and leave the “we”. I didn’t know what I was doing but we had “we-ness” and I strove to keep it there. I took the freedom he needed into me and held the story of us alive when we had intercourse and then he reciprocated by always coming back home where I was “girlfriend”. We balanced something for two years and it balanced the broken “we-ness” I had when friends, school, and even family showed a breakdown in what I thought they were with me. I love all my memories now, because I see the broken “we-ness” has to happen in order to heal. “We-ness” breaks and it is up to us to heal it. Relational Healing is a life process, cyclical in that it needs repeating to exist.

The act of sex is about one energy that wants to be free and move in the world with force and acquisition, providing structure and expansion dropping itself into an energy that seeks to be connected to the gentle knowing of all things and what they need to grow and change and expand at the pace of nature’s wisdom. When freedom to do as it wants energy drops into an energy of stability through understanding and connection, the latter’s job is to know willful freedom completely and thoroughly, understand it. This is why this energy, some call it the feminine, becomes so sensitive to discard. Once it has known it’s partner, it feels tremendous loss and failure for not doing its job of connection. It is happening right now in the world, we have tried to understand the willful dynamics to take something back or forge ahead, maybe even related to it, but the balance has not come from connection, understanding or gathering together and the “we-ness” is damaged. We all have the balance of willful freedom and understanding connection inside us that falls apart, the dynamic is felt on all levels from the macro to the micro. That is why the metaphor, Sexual Healing, is so profoundly informative.

This is not about men and women, although much of this can be applied to that dynamic. The act of sex, if not acknowledged as one of our only ways of truly understanding the balancing of these energies, damages culture and community, for without the balance we all feel the divide and unknowingly act to keep the divide once it has faltered and shown itself. This is the human threat response system in our nervous system, we keep a fight, flight, freeze or fawning reaction alive and stay in perpetual survival mode, forgetting the act of sex is for safety, for balancing two people, community, and the world at large.

The Structure

Even now as you listen or read, you may still go back in your mind to the familiar conditioned understanding of sex. Sexual Healing is more than the Marvin Gaye song. Here is a structure I constructed below that can be helpful in considering how to relationally heal and find sexual healing as a metaphor:

* Over-thinking Mind is the smarty pants chatter that we all seek freedom from yet still remains so attached to as the figuring it out part.

* Sub-conscious Mind is the one that takes things down below into our bodies and lives in the story being told by smarty pants. For example, “they don’t really respect me” becomes someone who isolates, or eats that extra doughnut for a quick comfort, or stays up scrolling. These acts live in the disrespect chatter says is happening.

* High-Self Mind is the one that says “I see what is happening and care very deeply about this, it is my job to both establish the freedom from it and the connection to it”

This last bullet, The Higher-Self Mind, is where Sexual Healing as a metaphor comes into play. The wanting freedom from chatter is why chatter is listened to in the first place. It comes up with a lot of good things to be worried, anxious and fearful about and we think “fix it” rather than anything about healing. When fixing is the mindset, that is essentially, non-connection, isolation, and there is no “We-ness” to come to with your Higher-Self Mind. The Toolbox Approach is about breaking free from fixing yourself and Relational Healing as a phase can be about coming to that union and “we-ness” internally and with others. The metaphor today was Sexual Healing because it is a perfect one for how subliminal the messages of healing are out there and how woefully we misconstrue them and try to “get sex”, “have sex”, “protect sex”. As a survivor of sexual molestation and manipulation, it was hard for me to address the metaphor with my Higher-Self and stop living in my below-self belief that I had been irreparably harmed and broken. What I realized is that I don’t have to do it like a goal I meet and complete. It’s a practice.

In the article Develop a DRIP and Feel a Whole Lot Better I discuss Daily Regulation & Integration Practices. These can be supportive socializing, body-based exercises, breathwork, sensory experiences (lighting candles, music), intentional relating, or journaling. Below is a new DRIP called “Good Triggers/Bad Triggers”. This clearing out activity helps you access a Higher-Self Mind in the sense that it slows down your thoughts about activated things and differentiates between “good” and “bad” in an intentional way. When you realize that you can use this good-bad dynamic less dogmatically and more intentionally, your High-Self Mind swoops in to care about this.

Good Triggers/Bad Triggers Tool

The conscious mind listens to the chatter of triggers and this tool slows it all down. All you need to do is get a pen and a journal and meet with the basic premise:

* A Good Trigger is when I am activated because this could be a good and healthy connection and I have that kind of anxiety of hope but also anticipation and not wanting to get ahead of myself.

* A Bad Trigger is when I am activated because I know this is bad vibes connection and I have anxiety about what to do and shame that it might be my fault I let it through the gates.

List as many “good trigger/bad trigger” items as you can. Once it is all slowed down, that is when we trigger the High-Self in a good way and ask, “Where is the Higher Self that directs my life?”. When I try this on my own, I audibly sigh, both with relief and healthy shame for forgetting that even though the chatter WILL come talk about fears and anxieties, you will always have the balance of High-Self Mind if you keep cultivating it. I say to myself, if I keep cultivating her, she will be there! This gives me choice and forever frees me from victimhood because chatter can be believed by my body and my Higher-Self chooses survived and thriving me, not the small, powerless one. The body knows what you are thinking and will relate based on the subconscious “non-healed” messages. Sexual Healing is a good metaphor because it provocatively shows how we get these messages wrong and how to heal them.

Please check out the subscription to Holding Space, Melinda Zappone, offered below for free or paid monthly, annually or head over to SPOTIFY for the Podcast and/or Patreon for the Enter into the Phases of Healing Courses.

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Harvesting, as a verb, means to gather and collect, so as a therapist, if I say I re-harvested the tools for self-help, it means I gathered the tools together and looked at them through a lens of aloneness. I possessed aloneness, realizing that so many of us struggle to face the pain we feel because it does have to be faced in the alone moments to really know it well. We come to therapy to learn from our pain only to the degree we have done some “knowing” already so the self-help tools can help us come to the tool of therapy with MORE knowing.

I realized it was a re-harvesting process when I noticed the vast amount of self-nourishment I needed for my inner work, despite having the tools as a professional, I needed them in a self-helping mode. The Toolbox Approach (TM) highlights inner work and healing as a journey that has three phases. They are non-linear and unprescribed, so can be done in any order, repeated or cycled through. The three phases: Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing can combine in a way that is a lifetime approach if you want it to be, or used for only those times in life that demand them undeniably. The highlight written about here is The Reprocessing Phase, and inside that phase, the somatic or body-based tools that reconnect the mind/body connection from one that only detects danger to one that could not only detect safety but establish it in any situation and recognize one’s ability to establish it within. This inner re-regulated system that is your safety becomes a tremendous source of stability that has healing power.

People needed to feel trust in themselves to continue “the work” outside of therapy sessions or their own natural healing moments. Natural healing does occur for any trauma, with time, but there is significant non-recovery from things that have happened inside you and no one can determine if it is an objective trauma or not, the un-healed or non-recovered places are unique and are what I call “your holding trauma blueprint”. This is an imprint on your nervous system that forms a plan of how to go about your life. You think your executive functioning “smarty pants” part of your brain is doing all the deciding and planning, knowing and navigating, but it’s the blueprint inside your nervous system that is the real information highway of you, holding the history and knowing what it does with it all as you seem to think you live in the present all the time.

That is why the somatic and body-based tools need to be in your hands. When we face ourselves, it can be like we have raised fists, clenched and ready for a fight. The fists you uncurl as you heal, need to pick up these tools outside of therapy and natural healing moments. We must know our blueprints were not done in permanent ink and can be redrawn in places. Our bodies hold these pieces of unprocessed emotional content. To imagine it, you might see it as fragmentation, and we hold it there, in our bodies, as we move on timewise. The Reprocessing Phase of Healing holds space for only this form of healing so that you have permission to focus on it with only those tools. Trust that you choose any phase of healing, and it cannot be prescribed. You simply read on and decide.

The phases of healing are non-linear and up to the individual, however suggesting they are phases can give you focus and permission to be inside one phase and avoid thinking of healing everything all at once. We all love the butterfly metaphor of healing; it inspires transformation and a time of darkness before emerging and taking flight, but it can be a misconstrued one. A cocooning time is a helpful concept where output is not an option and inner work is all that the cocoon holds space for, however, the body of a butterfly emerges weak. It emerges without the wings fully expanded or any knowledge that it will fly a very short distance before needing nectar for fuel to stay alive. In reality, butterflies do not live long, they are the symbol of our transformation but not the transformation itself.

In The Reprocessing Phase of Healing, we are outside of the cocooning concept. The cocoon is more of a Narrative Healing Phase where we give permission to know the parts of our story that are non-nourishing and take that time to see it. As a therapist, I often hear the stories people tell about what happened to them, inside The Narrative Healing cocoon, we hold space for seeing it and telling it in new ways. However, there came a time when a new skill started to bloom inside me that brought my awareness to a new level.

The New Form of Listening

In my work as a trauma therapist, real person self-helping myself, trauma coach/teacher, and now author, this skill became a listening and noticing of where things happen in the body. Now, as I am listening to what happened, I can also notice where it happened and become aware of an entirely different version of where people are getting stuck in what I call “non-healing”. It is in the smaller moments of noticing with people that we can guide to the larger ones and help people notice what they have been missing in their somatic or body awareness story and truly heal reactions that form patterns of relating to yourself, others, or the world’s systems (like work or government or healthcare) that may be keeping you in survival mode and like most things are a threat. For example:

* My ears were burning and red with embarrassment, but I didn’t know why I couldn’t just brush it off.

* She makes me sick, she is so self-centered, but I am going to help her and let the chips fall when it doesn’t work out. I just can’t believe this!

* I was totally stressed out by the delay, but I don’t know, all I could do was turn to my phone, and then I just couldn’t stop scrolling. I stayed up too late and I am so off.

If this sounds familiar, you’re certainly not alone. I still catch myself tuning out my nervous system’s messages. I am rushing out the door when I have spent the whole morning in a calm meditation, erasing it all just because “get to work” is suddenly on my mind. Or rolling my eyes at an email I have decided to check from home, pretending it is the email and not myself that has blurred the boundary between home and work.

Yet, I also know that when we befriend our nervous systems, we can return to regulation and readiness, even if it seems impossibly true that you “have to rush” or “have to check”, or even are swamped, disappointed, annoyed, busy, or overwhelmed by things outside yourself. This friendliness reminds you, “you are the house cleaner”. You live inside your body, you clean the house, and the stuff happening outside you is not in your home unless you let it be. Home is a place for lighting candles, playing the music you want, cooking, cuddling…..you get the point. We forget our housekeeping in the traditional sense, so it only makes sense we forget it as related to our inner cleanliness as well. Even meticulous cleaners know that is not about a clean house but a temporary relief in the mind.

That’s why I’m excited to offer you an immersive new way to experience science-backed somatic or body-based tools for cleaning your nervous system each day, even throughout the day. When you look around your life, it will be from a cleaner place internally, and you will be able to feel the external versus the internal and better care for that balance. I often use the metaphor of pointing a finger. When we point a finger at a situation, problem, or other person, there are three fingers pointing back at you. In this body-based instance, these three fingers are: Breath Awareness, Sensory Awareness, and Intentional Awareness. I am developing a course showcasing tools that are backed by Polyvagal and trauma therapy research for nurturing these three things and greater internal safety, resilience, and connection. I want to deliver this all in a relatable way starting with you just being curious with me here now.

This is a brief program I created for two reasons:

First, you may have read, scrolled or viewed Insta, TikTok or other social media posts about these practices and tried them on your own and end up struggling to feel their full benefits. Why? Because sometimes we need the intentional space that helps you stay accountable through registration to a personal classroom. Here you get the support of a calm and well-regulated guide who has been through the “trouble spots” in herself and with others and makes presence not perfection a priority.

Second, you deserve these tools! Healing emotional wounds in a world filled with so much stress and overwhelm today can be a pendulum experience. We swing towards so much progress only to feel we swing right back to dysregulation when stress re-occurs, or deeper triggers make us feel like target practice. We all need to stay grounded and courageous by tuning into the language of the nervous system, returning to a state of safety, and regaining the drive to fearlessly and joyfully fulfill our greater intentions and purposes.

Helping you to do so is my deepest intention and purpose, and I’m honored to take you on this journey home to a refuge within that will invite you to feel safe enough to fall in love with your life again.

If this sounds useful and inspiring to you, I hope you’ll join us on Patreon for “Enter the Phases of Healing with the Toolbox Approach” courses. There are several offerings based on the phases of healing for you to explore. This one is a guided somatic-based and polyvagal immersion to calm, regulate, and strengthen your nervous system, such that you reprocess the messages you send yourself and become more intentional in your life. Once membership is established, you will receive an enrollment alert to access the content and updates on when the Live Q&A Sessions are. Check out “Creating a Safe Haven Within”

SNEAK PREVIEW OF REPROCESSING & SOMATIC TOOLS

Accupressure & Intentional Awareness Exercises are listed below. Please watch the demonstration. You will notice each exercise listed below has an intention you can use to add to your practice after you view the demonstration and get the basic mechanics down.

* Light Fists Pressure Points- “I hold myself in awareness, I face it all calmly”

* Collarbone Corner Pressure Points- “I am the powerful person that guides my life, I choose my path and my direction.”

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Hi Folks! I am Melinda Zappone, creator of the Toolbox Approach to inner work and author of "You Are Not Broken". This book encourages breaking free from a fixing yourself mindset. Its content comes from nearly two decades of experience as a trauma therapist and a lifetime of trying to find my own way back to myself after a deeply entrenched pattern of holding things. In the protection of ourselves and others, we all develop these versions of the story that are not the real story and it blocks us from ourselves. That is why I promote tools rather than telling as if we know the problems like that.

Right at the forefront of this, I am going to invite you to notice my use of the word folks in my opening. I hope it lands well with you because that to me that word is one of welcoming and creating a holding space with you, almost like a family gathers. Writing about the phases of healing in my Toolbox Approach, I envisioned you all out there as "my folks" or "my people", people who sense their brokenness as an invitation to understand themselves but may have ended up with a wrongness and fixing mentality. Others of you are coming to this as resistors, repressors, suppressors, and may outsource your pain to your job or other things to move on from it, and you are my folks, too.

The invitation to know ourselves calls to you, whoever you are, watching and coming here. I believe that joining the community of people doing inner work is a sense of "folks". We feel each other if we do not know each other. Whether you are coming here to learn about the book or my Toolbox Approach, or just coming out of curiosity at some of the resources out there for "doing the work", the concept that we are all folks and connected here is helpful because the heroic journey can be a solo one at times and trust in others doing their journey can form a sense of presence and attunement that you are not alone

While you are here on my author website, you'll notice a recurring theme. That theme is the message that you are not broken, but what does that phrase mean? It means something very unique despite the familiarity of the phrase being used “out there”. I have searched the title on Amazon, and many books have it, but here, it includes the following: "Thank you for feeling this way because this is your invitation to your awakening". This is an awakening to the concept of repair, which requires tools for seeing the fragmented way you have been understanding yourself, what has happened you, how you hold that story in your body and in the body centers of yourself that can't speak about what happened and hold it all much deeper. The brokenness is the way this all feels, and it is your invitation to inner work with The Toolbox Approach.

It is interesting to me how much more we value physical pain over mental and emotional pain. It is more easily seen as beneficial, even though it can be very uncomfortable. This obvious symptom that something is wrong with your body is seen as a lifesaver. For example, a lump and early detection of breast cancer is seen as the best predictor of survival. If you don’t pay attention to a painful lump, you could die. Emotional and/or mental brokenness is equally a lifesaver because it tells you that something is wrong with the way your life is going. It is a sign that something needs attention and repair, whether it is the way you think about the world or what you are doing in the world, or both. The pain is saying, “Hey, this doesn’t feel right!”.

I propose that the way to figure out how to get back on course is through the exploration or inner work process, which may involve reaching in through self-help books, workshops, friends, support groups, therapy, or whatever seems right for you. As long as you want an approach, it will be there. The Toolbox Approach is one that is there. It proposes several phases of healing I call: Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing. You decide to enter, and you decide what is right in terms of the tools you find useful when they are revealed. Remember, when you are that student who is ready, everything is a lesson towards inner openness, but you will never be ready if you are busy protecting brokenness; you look at brokenness like an invitation.

Too many of us seem to be searching for something “out there” to make our lives complete. We feel alienated, lonely, and empty. No matter what we do or have, we never feel fulfilled. This feeling of emptiness or intense loneliness is what I call brokenness, and it is our clue that we are off course, and that we need to repair. Often, we think that the fix lies in a new partner, house, car, job, or whatever. Not so. The repair concept requires tools for finding things, these things lead to our Higher Selves. I believe that what all of us are really searching for is this special essence within ourselves. When we are far from our Higher Self, we feel homesick for our own specialness, we sense we have gone away from something. Come home and enter the website now, look for the Introduction to The Toolbox Approach found in You Are Not Broken, and consider yourself one of our "folks".

Find me on:

* LinkedIn and I can invite you to the ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always Community

* Spotify: ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always Podcast

* Substack: Holding Space, Melinda Zappone healing article subscription

* Patreon: Enter the Phases of Healing Courses

* YouTube: View live events and clips

* Facebook: ENYAcare community Page & Etsy EnyaCares Marketplace

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Wisdom is not in the age we get to claiming we’ve “lived and learned”. An ego death is often what teaches us the most. In my own life, self-destruction, has played a role in my growth and I see this in all humans. The person we mismatched with and stayed with too long, the destructive workplace we had to put up with, and knowing you are holding in pain and taking it out in ways that neither you or others completely understand. We distrust our past pain and therefore it might be vented from time to time, but it takes a walloping dose for us come to the classroom it can be.

Mostly this is a messy time when an event triggers inner work, but I have learned it does not have to be this way. Through pain and unprocessed trauma, for me, came clarity. No one will save you, but there are tools for inner knowing that is such profound wisdom that you will feel saved by your own insights, power from your own facing things, and pleasure for your own ability to look kindly and love your story, scars and all. We don’t live and learn, we let ego die a bit, pick up the tools for inner work, and see ourselves. Some might call it a search for truth, I have found it to be a journey of trust. Trust yourself and everything becomes more trustworthy. Hold yourself accountable and everything becomes a vehicle for more accountability. When I see what is on the news, the attention it requires from me to get to my fear center, I remember I am doing the inner work, processing and reprocessing experience in a classroom for personal wisdom, and the news media is not doing this. Now my mind broadcasts solutions to fear through inner work, the news broadcasts fear in progress without any filter. So, now I know internally what to listen and consume, things that feel like solutions. Do inner work and it “works” everywhere in life. Consume the things that feel like healing and repair, not more labels for what is wrong. The kind of therapy we may all need is a re-education on the past through tools for inner work, not much is in our control besides this.

We think we prepare for life by learning things so that we can go out and find our purpose. What I have learned is the purpose was always there in every memory that was created, in our core personality, in our family dynamic, in met and unmet needs, in the smallest of slights and the iconic hard things. The moved-on life where we work and become something, acquire roles like parent, spouse, partner, employee or voter, is a way to be in the world and survive it but there is a multidimensionality to life that includes being able to be in thrive and go back to survival in doses as needed. I spent a long time unknowingly waiting for safety. In the meantime, I wired myself like a guard at the gates of my life but not inside it.

Today, and everyday since beginning to live inside my life with The Toolbox Approach (TM) to guide me through facing myself, I had another classroom moment. I was walking in a crosswalk, enjoying these safe little lines that give me permission to cross the street, and exercise my body while doing so. All the cars were told to stop and let me do my thing. I like my safety, I like the rules being followed by other people. If I am honest, I was wondering if I like safety a little too much. I was in the middle of this thought, and coincidentally, the middle of the crosswalk when an SUV barreled past me and spun me out of my safety. That is what it felt like, the vehicle’s speed and closeness pushed me like a spinning top, and I whirled and yelped at the closeness of it all. I was fine but I could feel the danger and close call vibrating through me. I heard a man say, “are you okay?” and barely registered the equally shocked man leaning out of his SUV to check on me.

Was I okay? No one ever asked me that before, not like this, right in the moment of wrongdoing that didn’t end up completing the wrongness but while it was still heavily present in the air. It was just a close call, he didn’t actually hurt me, but tears started to open, and I nodded him away for privacy. My classroom began calling me, my past experience was ready to tell me something about almost getting hurt badly, the missing words of concern, no one stopping to ask or acknowledge, “I almost killed you, but I didn’t, I didn’t mean to, maybe I was sort of in my own world, are you okay?”. I think we can all get emotional about this if you let yourself. We all have a past coming up as you absorb what I am telling you here. If affected me when this happened, but not because of the surface level objective danger of it all, anyone would feel something after a close call. We do this a lot in life, share things like, “I was really feeling sick, but it was COVID and my co-worker had it last week so that makes sense”, and leave out the way you’ve lost sleep for weeks, don’t feel the same about your relationship, and hate your career and wish you had more courage or support to change somehow. We have a strange miseducation on processing experience and even when some of us try to go back to look at it for the lessons, they can be very cognitive and short-lived epiphanies. The deeper conversation between you and you is why I developed The Toolbox Approach (TM). I am a trauma therapist that specializes in trust and trauma informed tools and modalities for healing, but the most profound and life-saving trust came from the inner healing I did with myself. All I can really do is share and trust you will make the tools your own.

The almost hit by an SUV experience can showcase how to hold on to something and bring it to your classroom. Most of us want to share about something too soon or hold onto it like an upload of messy social media content and just push it out without real understanding of what we want from our audience and what the content even means to us. Doing inner work helps me feel seen and heard by myself first, it helps me possess alone time, not suffer it. I create space for the time it takes because I have a life that got shaken many times and I never knew I had a choice and power in me to go inward before I go outward and move on. The moving on, in fact, is an act and takes endless outer work to keep up, inner work builds and builds on itself, and the structure becomes so strong that there is no chink in any facade, it is all real through and through. I could shake off this SUV close call and shake it off and move on, but where is the lesson in that for me?

Since doing inner work, I feel so much more aware as a trauma therapist of self-deceptive helping. No one can really tell me what came up for me with regard to my almost accident, would it help for another person to show me what came up and how to feel better? What about the next time, and the next? We need tools for reprocessing experiences, slowing them down. I try to transfer these tools to people because there is no perfect understander of your story. The only way we can get anywhere close to perfection is through giving you the tools to your own perfect understander. The past is not the past, there is no such thing as get over it, you are forever not over it and if you try to be you stop your classroom. Learning is life, education is not something you get before you start your life, it is life long and it is up to you. I want to challenge you to read on and to look at the past as your curriculum.

The past is carefully woven for you to come back to with tools for unraveling stitches, removing patch jobs, and sewing together new meaning with the same material. Rumination is a key sign that the past you have needs your help. Avoidance is another sign you want to repress, resist and suppress the content that can lead you to your classroom. Your re-education happens in the classroom of your past but first you have to find that hallway and walk down it. How can we do that? We have to be careful revisiting the past. Like today, it was not just a close call, I choked back deeper tears and had to keep walking to get home and get to work, I didn’t have time for a classroom moment and so many of us don’t even know what that is. We create baggage and armor because no one knows about the classroom. To find the classroom you have to have awareness that you have an experience being held onto. Something happened in the deep past, often your youth, or in your adult life past that is closer to the surface of now, or even in the recent past year, month, week or day.

Sometimes we run down the hallway and slam ourselves into a friend or therapist, family member or partner, or even a stranger to get it out and free ourselves of what is coming up. To get to the classroom first you have to find the hallway called personal responsibility. If you run down the hall, claiming something or someone happened to you, you will run down that hall for a long time. A lot of people will hear what you are saying but no one is going to be much help and you will not hear yourself, or it will take a long time to see what is happening. I did have an urge to hop into a family email and give directions for publishing my book and the steps for the working with the publisher on my vision if I died. Yes, I honestly had that thought and urge quite quickly but I knew that was SO UNPROCESSED. It is not that I was not thinking but it was messy social media content, and I had no idea what I really wanted from my audience.

In the Hallway of Your Experience

When I was a child there was this phrase “grown up talk”. The message that landed in me was that the grown-ups got all the real conversations and I was hard pressed to grow up fast so I could participate. We all have versions of not being allowed to talk, it is not an overt message but a covert one. So many families have “strong boy” messages or “good girl” ones. The child that does not get the adults upset or distracted from what is important is good and yet just being a child involves doing exactly that. This is a profound trauma for anyone I have ever met, the fragmented messages for sharing our experiences all have a rightness or a wrongness implied in them.

So, being in the hallway of your experience is a tool for all of us to feel safe from that fear. The urge to share has been damaged. For some it comes like a tug of war, I need to but I can’t. For others it comes like a hunger strike, I do not need to and I will not do it. Still others find it is more like vomiting, where they can’t believe what came out and how awful they still feel. There are those that learn the sharing recipe that works for them and others and yet their lesson is not always relatable to someone else as guidance.

In the hallway of your experience is a phrase that is a tool for what you need to share with yourself so that you can come to the classroom of your experience. After the classroom, the relating your experience to and with others closes a special circle of understanding. When this is repeated over time, healing and strength is the result. The core character in you blooms and you see that you were never broken.

Steps to Take in Your Hallway

I moved on with my day after the SUV incident, but I marked it down mentally to go back to. I do a daily practice that I can condense to about 5 minutes. It is offered here in this article where I explain the 20-minute version. Basically, I write down fears and anxieties I have for 45 seconds, resentments and frustrations for another 45 seconds, and pressures I have for another 45 seconds. Then I write for 90 seconds about the one out of the three that I wish would just lift out of me and why. Sometimes I skip days but knowing the practice is there helps because certain days I am tugged at to come to it. That was the SUV incident day and that is how I knew to stay in the hallway on it.

When I came back to it the first step I took was to float back to where it happened in my body. To do this you can place three fingers in the middle of your forehead. This creates a little cave over your face. Breathe up and in over your hand into the top of your head and exhale such that you feel the breeze of your breath on the inside of your palm. Taking a couple of these breaths will center you. Then, on the next inhalation and release, the release breath will be the sound created when you say “EYYYYYYEEEEE”, extending the sound until you run out of breath. If you choose to listen above, I will demonstrate.

After this you are ready to float back visually to the experience as best you can. For me, I remembered the freedom of walking, I was really pumping to the music with my arms, I felt like I could not look at my surrounding because I was in the crosswalk and I can feel myself all pumping arms and heal to toe and thighs. I wear weights on my arms, and I felt them. I felt strong and free. Then I felt spun, falling, hit but not, and heard my yelp. I felt my hand over my heart the most out of everything in the experience, I kept putting it there and on my beltline. I didn’t even realize I could remember things like this but we all can. You have to be intentional and float back to the movie. I heard a man “are you okay?” and I felt some uncertainty and tears coming. Again, the most profound thing was the hand on my heart and belt line after, guiding me for where this all happened.

Now, this is the tool really at work. It is called somatic awareness. The best way I conceptualize it is through knowing the body centers: root, sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, forehead, and crown of the head. My hand over my heart and on my belt line let me know it all happened in the heart and sacral centers for me. Here is what the centers say when they are not okay. Centers cannot speak in words and that is why we try to honor and educate ourselves on the mind body connection. Connection to our centers as sources of information is helpful. It is not happening in any sharing that we know how to do in words. In the hallway you can access this, and it will help you get to the real classroom of experience you need. As you read, have an awareness that these centers can also be in “okay” mode as well and then have a different message lying there.

* Root= I don’t feel physically safe. I am not sure if I have what I need. I am not sure if anyone is here to give me what I need. What if I am helpless and alone and no one comes to feed, clothe and shelter me?

* Sacral= I don’t feel loved and cared about. Who is thinking of me? Do I matter? Is it emotionally safe to show myself and be considered enough? Who will cherish me? I don’t think I matter or am cherished at all.

* Solar Plexus= I don’t feel like I can exert my will and know my purpose here. I want to say no, yes and make decisions but instead I feel like something prevents me and I cannot be strong enough to go my own way and feel good and effective. Am I important, does what I do matter?

* Heart= I don’t feel connected to others. I am not sure if anyone wants to connect to me. I fear I have to be closed off to protect myself from dangerous connection. I fear I am forever too open and will be left empty and waiting for connection. I cannot trust. I am burned out from believing in trust.

* Throat= I don’t have words for how I feel. I cannot say what hurts and ask for what I need. I want to say what is okay to do and not to do to me and why and tell others that I will not stay if they cannot listen to this. I want to say things about who I am and never lose the courage no matter what happens around me, but I don’t. I want to not speak or speak based on a deep sense of knowing but it isn’t there.

* Forehead (third eye)= I don’t see myself in the future very clearly. I cannot see the growth and smile knowing it will happen. I feel like I see only struggle. I feel afraid to see. I want a plan, steps, and expected outcomes rather than a trusted vision that is gently just there as real future vision for myself. I don’t trust things could be better just by keeping self-promises. I have to know what the right thing is and what the outcome will be for my ego.

* Crown= I won’t rise above this and see the greater purpose of all the things that happen in life. Everything is getting by, no one is connected to anyone and there is nothing in nature or the arts that speaks to me. This struggle is all there is.

This step involves being honest with yourself, “In that moment was I okay?”. No, I was not okay! This involves no cognitive interpretation, “I was okay, I was just flustered, and the tears were just for a second, that guy was nice and stopped, he realized he scared me”. Nope, I kept placing my hand on my chest and then more absently holding my beltline. It all happened in my heart and sacral. I had to realize I was in a place of “I don’t matter” and disconnection.

The second step involves watching my urge like a movie. The urge might have been acted upon, that happens, we have to deal with it. You can still come to the hallway and find your classroom of experience anyway. I wanted to send a family email “In case anything happens to me, promise me the publisher uses all I have written to share my vision of healing”. As embarrassing as it was to me that I really almost did this on my phone while I was walking but the sun glare was really bad, I went back to that part as well. I watched it and then rated its intensity on a scale from 0-10. I think it went from 8 to 7 as it was happening only because I am doing inner work. By the time I reached the top of the hill it was a 6 but again only because the walking helped me focus on getting to a goal, home and to the rest of the day which usually involves a pretty important timeline to stick to.

At this point, I know you might be thinking, does she really do this, is this really necessary? Well, it’s up to you, all I can say, and I think my family and patients would too, it must be working because I have come back to life by using my own tools and I was NOT OKAY for nearly two decades, but I am a present and an effective therapist with many fellow healing warriors to account that what I do with them works. I work on me, and I had to enter the classroom to learn what all the expertise could not tell me, our stories are aching to be reprocessed so we can know the healed versions and grow.

What Does this Remind Me of?

The next step is realizing that you can link this to something else because our somatic awareness is always speaking in timeless importance. How it felt, in somatic awareness, is based on how all the things like this feel. It’s like a painter’s color wheel; the categories of basic colors all have various tints. Your awareness of disconnection has a unique variation of tints when you look into your life. You can ask yourself, for example, was it disconnection like when I broke up with my first love? Or was it like when I lost my cat to a bladder infection? Maybe it was like when my brother and I estranged for several years?

For me, the SUV experience brought me back to something I never talk about. I was glad I was using tools because that told me that I have struggled to understand and process this experience to this day. I nearly died at a concert when I was 19. My family is aware it was a terrible night and accident given I had dental reconstruction for years, but that night I had a deep disconnection with life. I went down a dark tunnel, not a lighted near-death experience at all. Realizing I forced myself to be okay with it all upon waking in the hospital, rushing through all the stitching and bracing up of my teeth to keep my friends from waiting and so they could go back to the concert was a profound realization. This was my pattern with many of my traumas, if I could smile on the outside, I would be fine. The darkness I felt all around me when I was unconscious that night is something I realize now was a message of what can happen if you do not deal with your life. I remembered from a place that doesn’t fit the words of what actually happened. Now, in my reprocessing, I can sense that this and that many of my traumas happened to send messages; “come back to this, do not end up a dark soul”.

You may not have the traumas I have but you have linked experiences waiting for you to apply these steps to them and gently come to the classroom of your experience. Once you have linked something you write down, “I think this incident connects to………..”. Then begin the third eye meditation several times again. At this point, it could be time to consider the other articles in the Holding Space Subscription or finding a therapist to guide you through inner work. I have a book coming out soon, “You Are Not Broken. Break free from the fixing yourself mindset with The Toolbox Approach”. This will guide people through coming to inner work and introduce the Narrative Healing Phase. There are also a menu of courses coming up on Patreon, once we get good enrollment, we will alert participants of the 2025 start dates.

It’s up to you to let things call to you and walk, not run, down the hallway of your experience, then consider entering the classroom with The Toolbox Approach (TM).

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Like physical wounds, there are inside processes and external ones. There are phases, tools and resources for healing physical wounds. No one person owns this process although it can happen for all of us and many wear scars proudly, treat old injury carefully and learn from physical wound or injury experiences, how to live more mindfully. The same healing is in our power to occur emotionally, mentally and in our neurology.

I was a therapist for 15 years before I felt my inner work consolidate and integrate into this approach. Then, I found I could put into words and share more explicitly with others and that is what I do here with this subscription, in the book You Are Not Broken. Break free from the fixing yourself mindset with The Toolbox Approach (June 2025), on the ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always Podcast on Spotify and will bring to you in therapy and courses on Patreon.

The focus for the space often comes from my lived experience as a therapist and work in progress myself, using tools to heal and maintain life’s lessons. Recently, I experienced a dream that I was starting to try to meet all my therapy goers in the waiting room before they got there. In the dream I was excited to be there beforehand and I was waiting on the side for them to announce to reception, “I am here to see Melinda”. In the dream, that was my moment to say, “No, you are here to see yourself!”

When I woke up, I wondered, is that really a dreamy concept? Can I help people recognize that is what we are here for, even outside of a therapy session? I took to my morning walk to figure out if The Toolbox Approach was doing that or not and realized that was an impossible thought loop. It had worked for me but then why was I dreaming about this. Then I remembered a time I was taking care of my niece while everyone was still fast asleep. She was about 5 years old and very soft spoken back then. We woke up somewhat together, she was hot and stripping off her pajamas, so I went into my sister’s kitchen to get her water, leaving her in the bedroom. Before I knew it, I heard her at the opposite end of the house yelling, “Hi, I’m Awake!”.

I dashed to the front of the house with my brain on fire alarm status, thinking she had opened the front door and was showing all the neighbors her little underweared-only body and I was the worst aunt ever! I got to the door and cranked it further open to block, save, and recover from this aunting catastrophe and no one else was there. My pint-sized fabulous niece just thought it was simply wonderful that she woke up that morning and thought the whole neighborhood should know. She didn’t remember the dance recital the day before where the sound was too much and her knees locked inward and sank her to the floor, alone on her own private island of sound and sensation overload. She completely trusted the day was a new one.

This float back is something I now know to use the tools of reprocessing on for myself, for the message. Many of us are living in various degrees of survival mode where we block a reprocessing experience. In survival mode, moving is priority, stillness is weak and makes you vulnerable to not doing the things you need to do to survive. The tools of trauma-informed therapy modalities have allowed me to reformat these things for self-help methods and so I created a way to view regular life through a trauma-informed lens when attempting to reprocess, or go back over, experiences. I have to do this in a way that takes my smarty pants manager part of my operating system by the hand and says “use this tool”. The manager wants instantaneous figuring it out and keep moving mentality, so I have to redirect deal with it, make it work, and get it done messages with intentionality to use the tool.

First, survival mode is full of variations of these four responses: fight, flight, freeze and fawn. This jargon is too technical for real life however, I am not in a therapy session, I am trying to really help myself in real time, so I need something relatable. Here are the four survival mode awareness questions to figure out which one you are in and then I can show you how I reprocessed what the dream and memory of my niece ended up reprocessing as for me.

Survival Mode Awareness Questions

* Fight: Are you feeling like you want to face this aggressively?

* Freeze: Are you feeling like you want to numb out, be less than or shrink?

* Flight: Are you feeling like you want to get out or away from this?

* Fawn: Are you feeling like you want to be overly understanding, help or suggest?

These questions form the beginning of your reprocessing experience. It takes intention to do reprocessing and that is why The Toolbox Approach (TM) promotes doing a Narrative Healing Phase of inner work. This is a phase where you have more deeply accepted that you may have “emotional baggage” as a result of things that survived. The baggage is unprocessed experience and because of this you have things like stuck negative cognitions in your internal world. Examples are “I’m not good enough”, “I’m powerless”, “I cannot trust anyone”, or “I deserve to feel this way”. Once you are aware of this in a Narrative Healing Phase, you can consider that you have been processing experience through this mindset and try reprocessing. However, it is still quite valuable even if you have not formally done this healing, given we are all naturally looking at our lives and reconsidering what happened as we just simply age and live on.

These questions help you determine what aspect of survival mode you are in when processing experience so you can slow down your mind and reprocess. For example, if you lose money in a situation somehow, how are you facing it? Is your stance aggressive, or like you want to numb out and shrink? Is your stance to avoid and distance or overly understanding? This will determine if you are in fight, freeze, flight or fawn. In this example, if you face it aggressively, you are in fight survival mode. Survival mode is not wrong or bad but it can be a way of operating we get stuck in or conversely is not worth the recovery or disturbance to our relationships. Survival mode is where we are “not okay me” or “threatened me” versions of ourselves. To be okay versions of ourselves, we do much better and feel much better in thrive modes. We can’t be in thrive versions of ourselves all the time but if our awareness of survival mode improves, it can be more in our control and then “must survive” mindset can be momentarily useful and less a place we get stuck in. This leads to a better life and better emotional processing. It all keeps you feeling like you are in a sense of thrive regardless of if you are there ALL the time! If you hold difficult life experiences that you are still working through, this tool also helps the present stay manageable so you can work on your unresolved “stuff”.

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The Feedback and Reprocessing Loop Tool

As we start to use the Feedback and Reprocessing Loop tool, we have already acknowledged “I am not okay”. There is often a range of distress we could be in. In my line of work as a therapist I often just encourage people to rate the units of distress on a scale from 0-10 as they see or feel it. Then we use the Feedback and Reprocessing Loop Tool. This means we are reprocessing experience to get better feedback or data from the situation. Things that happen in real time are fast and make us process fast as well. The tool slows it all down, and our awareness of distress or some range of “not okay” is crucial and a skill that grows with use of this process. It all helps you reprocess what was happening for you such that you enter the classroom of yourself and let go of ideas that it is between you and a situation or person before it is between you and you. A big mistake we all make is that the emotions are between you and the situation or other person, but the “not okay”, or it can be more formally called emotional dysregulation, is inside you, and getting in between unsafe you and safe you. It is annoyingly true that you cannot expect safe from other people unless you are a reasonably safe version of yourself.

The tool follows 5 steps:

* What did I see and hear as if I am rolling back audio and video on the situation only?

* What story did I make up about what happened in order to store it in my brain? Essentially, what meaning did I create from the audio and video upload?

* What feelings am I having as a result of the story I made up and replay in my brain?

* I am not okay, I am disharmonious inside me as a result of all this, what can I do for myself to get internally a bit more in tune with my inner harmony?

Okay, I know this last one sounds a bit cheesy but the reality of using the tool is that this question creates a HUGE reset and redirection. Your brain takes back its resources, which can be wasted on what needs to be dealt with outside yourself a lot of the time. When we are outputting our brain power to external things, there is nothing left for inner work. A lot of times, a healthy version of fight, freeze, flight, or fawn is an option here. These responses have adaptive versions. From the example before with the fight response to losing money, one might realize quite literally they need to chill out first before taking any action on their sense of financial loss, which is an adaptive and healthy freeze response.

Hi World! I’m Awake!

When my niece was at the doorway in my anecdotal story earlier, it was a memory of something. This memory was prompted by a dream that I had where I was envisioning telling all the therapy goers, they were not there to see me but to see themselves. Something was unsettled inside me and I was not benefiting from my walk, stretching, or busying myself. I decided to use the tool and float back to what survival mode I might have been in during the memory of the situation with my niece. I determined that I was in fawning because I had focused on making the morning into a game. I needed to get her away from the door and so I hid and then popped out, saying “Hi World, I’m Awake!”. This distracted us both from what had been going on with her near strip tease to the neighborhood.

Then, with the Feedback and Reprocessing Loop tool, I realized that while I objectively saw her at the open door in her underwear facing the street, the story that I made up about it was not “Oh, no I am the worst Aunt!”. It was “Was I ever that brave, clear, free, and happy to be awake for the day?”. As I realized that her display that day was something I had lost despite my early morning stretches, walks and “healthy behavior”, I realized it was grief I was feeling all those years ago. This was about seven years ago and the dream had triggered it back to my awareness for reprocessing. It was a disharmony inside me that day but I was fawning and falsely playing with her. It locked itself away until I hit a phase in my life where I am moving closer to my purpose and dreaming about it at night. Seven years ago, I had debilitating nightmares, that was the true early waking reason. Walks, stretching, and healthy eating, were all attempts to treat the restless mind, body and digestive disorder trying to tell me about what I was holding on to.

I promote these tools now simply because they work on my “stuff” and I have to say it, “Hi, World! I’m Awake!”. It is only that much more believable content when I add to it that it comes from the multitude of trauma informed tools and modalities that I have trained and certified in the past two decades. Come into this Holding Space community through subscribing or find us on the podcast and break free from the fixing yourself mindset with The Toolbox Approach (TM).

Today we use a familiar concept, having a home we live much of our lives in, and drill down on the home we spend all 24 hours inside non-stop, our body. If there was a way to clean your body home each day of the piles of leftover emotion, so you could see more clearly when a real emotional mess needs to be addressed, we would see the logic to this undoubtedly. The way it tends to go, however, is much like the other concept of home cleaning, we hold off on vacuuming, swiffering, trash removal, organizing, dirty dishes, laundry, etc., to that day, “I have to clean this place!” and expect to be clear-headed and calm approaching it all. Some of you may think you like the pressure release of cleaning when there is a compulsion to do so, but it is based on stress build-up and a pattern of yo-yo regulation and cortisol spikes that is not what our system needs to thrive and tackle the hard stuff of life.

Clean the House Daily Practice

There is a “Clean the House” practice that I created when I realized my own Daily Regulation & Integration Practices (DRIPs) were not cutting it. Being able to regulate emotions is important since our emotions are closely connected to how we think and feel. Our thoughts and feelings help us to decide how best to respond to a situation and what action we should take. Essentially, emotional regulation can influence behavior. If our emotions are shut down or avoided, we may struggle with powerlessness, negative thinking, ruminating, resentment, and increased frustration. This could result in the development of anxiety, depression, or physical complaints. Regulating means you learn to face your feelings and integrate them into your body so you can stay with them not seek out a way to get past them quickly, numb them or escape them somehow.

I had emotion dysregulation for many years. I was underregulating by using a lot of exercise to avoid fear of being intruded. Constantly moving my body helped me feel escape was always possible, I had the endurance for endless survival, when in the behavior. With restorative methods of ending an active yoga routine, I began re-regulating this. It was my first DRIP! However, it took decades for me to discover my toolbox approach and the phases of healing I needed to go through. I do not want others to have the decades of missing tools that I had, although the missing them is something we all may go through and all we can do is find them wherever we are in our journeys.

Your body is the house you live in all day long and it is often overlooked and only superficially cared for when it comes to cleaning out emotion dysregulation. We look for outside ways to care for this home we live in and the dysregulation inside gets surface level clean. I was using hikes, eating in a way that helped my gut, music, meditation and yoga to balance out after long days as a mental health therapist specializing in trauma, but it started to be a challenge for it to be a true clear-out when I needed to have a “clean house” for me!

This method is less than 20 minutes a day, 6 steps, and a commitment of 7-10 days straight, one time, and you will forever have access to love and joy for what your body home requires of you when there is a need for clarity to face something deeper. For me, I was publishing a book related to the first stage of healing repressed trauma and I knew I had to face it being done and now being received by the world. It had been mine and now I had to face however it might land in the world. I also wanted to date more, stay a therapist, be a better daughter, sister, aunt and friend. There was too much in there and I lost touch with what I had to face exactly! I needed to clean my own house and so I developed this and tried it for 10 days. I have done it now twice since, shared it with others, and the results are unanimous, we feel proud, clean and willing to keep at it if we need to.

Many of us truly are searching for a solution to the ups and downs of mental health and wellness that make us feel stifled and unfulfilled and we want to clean house. We want something that we can do that changes things. A good dose of therapy or a course of self-helping, we hope, is what we need to get us back on track, eliminate depression or anxiety, or recover from some event, situation, or relationship. When we do these things, we get names and labels for various problems that we couldn’t nail down exactly in that way before. New concepts give us hope and we can say “I am working on it”, and feel good about that concept. After all, if you do a good job and work on the “right” things, you will get a life promotion.

That is how we do this, we apply the rules of regular working to personal growth, change, and developing new mindsets like it is a job. So, let a daily practice of Cleaning the House be your new job for 7-10 days! This can serve as a precursor to the course Prepare to Arrive on Patreon where you can self-guide a daily practice challenge and get coaching from me.

How it’s Done

This is done with you, a journal, a pen, and 6 steps:

* Sweep the Floor: Take 45 seconds to write down any fears and anxieties you have on the floor of your mind/body home (ex: I am afraid to date again, I am anxious about aging, etc.)

* Take out the Trash: Take 45 seconds to write down the trashy emotions: resentment, anger, shame you have in the ruminating mind/body home (ex: everyone moves on but me, I didn’t deserve that from my ex, etc.)

* Dirty Dishes in the Sink: Take 45 seconds to write down all the pressures sitting in the sink soaking, they should be getting done by your mind/body home (ex: I need to figure out my taxes, I need to save more, I should have exercised this week)

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Disinfect One Thing Wish: Take up to 10 minutes at most to consider which one of the three categories above, would you wish to be entirely disinfected from your system/home for a lighter feeling inside. Write about why you picked this and if you had the lightness, it would create and what that would mean for you.

* Breathe in the Clean House: Now, placing one hand on your belt line, the area right below your belly button, and one hand over your breastbone above the nipple line over your heart and use the hands to breath in. The hand over your belly feels the breath in first, as you breathe up to the next hand and then all the way up to the top of your head. On the exhale, audibly make the sound “AHHHHHH”. You will feel the vibration under your hand as you do and enjoy the clean house.

* Be the Clean House: Now, placing both hands in a butterfly shape over your chest/heart area you are going to do a back-and-forth tapping motion on your collarbone. This is called the Butterfly Technique, and it creates a gently thumping feeling and sound you can feel vibrating. Then chant, “I am the powerful person who cleans my house, I am the powerful person who guides my life”. This is bi-lateral stimulation, which distracts the left and right hemispheres of the brain and keeps you in calm awareness and noticing that you are the clean house now.

The challenge is to do this under 20-minute DRIP (Daily Regulation & Integration Practice) for 7-10 days. It is both a practice and can be preparation for inner work with The Toolbox Approach (TM). Learn more about the approach in this Holding Space Subscription and “Prepare to Arrive” in your healing journey.

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As a child I always observed my father’s love for sailing from a distance. His love for sailing was in a private place from me, which I understand now. It brought to him lessons from his younger years and while he tried to incorporate it into adult life, he was in a phase of accomplishing and providing and I watched how he started to learn from it more later on, when he couldn’t do it as much. I learned the concepts of sailing like life lessons occasionally too, when he would talk about sailing more than do it with me. It still informed me profoundly that tacking is the way to approach life and like any sailor, I learned after many course corrections. I learned that to truly have an inner navigation system meant accepting that everything I do is like little errors. Each error requires a course correction and all together they get me near my purpose but not quite on top of it. I am the sailor, pilot or powerful person who guides my life always.

The Toolbox Approach (TM) is a navigation system that generates tools for your inner work so that you can be the powerful person who guides your life, accepting all the course corrections. It takes tools to do this because we have resistances inside us that comes from accumulated life experiences that only got quickly processed. They lay there waiting for us to finish the job. The ones that completed through already guide us well and therefore we all have Core Self lying in wait for us when we uncover unprocessed material. Today, I am taking a step back from the separate phases of healing in the approach to talk about tacking and the zig-zag course of the True Path so you can consider the initial phase of inner work and the “Prepare to Arrive” and the “Clean the House” practice invitation here at the end of the article/post.

Mastering the art of tacking is an essential skill for any sailor. It requires a combination of knowledge, intuition, and experience to effectively navigate through the wind and execute a successful maneuver, which is always a zig-zag path forward. By understanding the right inner commands to hold to, being aware of the wind’s behavior, and using tools, sailors can enhance their ability to “see” the wind and make informed decisions about when to tack. With practice and determination, we can be sailors that can confidently tack our boats, adjusting their course and embracing the challenges that come with life. We will find that our sailboats also have a trusty motor, your life’s motivational force inside, to lend a helping hand. So, if tacking is a lot of error-based course corrections to move forward against the wind, you also have the tools inside your inner motivation motor as back-up. That is the value of The Toolbox Approach (TM), it keeps your motor available and tacking itself is a tool inside this whole process of leading a Core Self-directed life.

So, the path to where you want to be starts with an error that gets corrected, which then becomes the next error, and so on. This tacking and zig-zag line crosses the True Path. We spend a lot of time worrying in life, but scientifically only 10% ends up true, it is 90% ineffective to worry. We don’t have to worry about making the wrong decision, but we do have to be mindful of the next direction after the error. Learning the tools for your own inner work becomes like super powered instinct that helps you know when it is time to align your next direction after a necessary error.

The two instincts to hone are the awareness of your own lack of clarity for where to direct yourself and your own dissatisfaction. Yes, ironically, growing tolerance for these negative states so you can observe them and not avoid them are positive instincts to hone. I know it is hard to accept, but this kind of turbulence in your life is beneficial, in that it tells you that you are off course in some way, and you need to find your way back to your particular path of clarity once again. These instincts can tell you that you’re off track and help you change direction or can be absent and get you exactly where avoidance goes, the wrong way!

Seeing the Path Through the Zigzag

You can simply read this next section or take some time to enter into a process and create your own zigzag diagram. Simply put, you can draw a line for “True Path” and then a zigzag one over it. This paragraph is for seeing something in your own personal zigzagging. Then you can consider the 10-day challenge offer below. Think about times of lack of clarity and dissatisfaction now and consider the zigs and zags these may have actually been crossing over your True Path. Follow the diagram below if you are interested in making this a personal process. For me, I saw that the line that always coursing through as my True Path was that I could never give up on my sense that I could see a certain kind of organization to people healing themselves. Early on I felt it as emotional disconnection inside my family and then inside myself and I tried to throw my body on the line many times to bridge the disconnections. I saw that becoming a therapist before I was fully healed was a very important zag that kept me on this path, believing in change and healing, instead of disenchanted from it. Try seeing this modified example as an invitation to use the concept on yourself:

Prepare To Arrive

Most of us want to do inner work but get blocked from it in various ways; from stopping after one self-help book, to not finding the time, and having a conflict with therapy or a therapist. Some get blocked by wanting to move on and not focus on the past, or resentment feeling forced to do inner work and even through distrust in these “types of things”. There are a whole host of other things, however, the truth is there is really only one universal block, dysregulation. The accumulated emotional experiences we have in life are all imprinted on our nervous system in a neurological story akin to hieroglyphics on a cave wall. This is the way that prehistoric humans captured story and to look at it at first glance is a head scratcher, “what’s the story?”. Well, we all have a hidden story of what has happened imprinted like this on our nervous system, the thinking and rational part of our brain is only a small part of knowing that story and because of this all of us carry fragments of neurological story that blocks us from inner work. It is dysregulated content, often patterns of dysregulation that makes us fight, flight, freeze or fawn when we try to, or accidentally access it.

Prepare to Arrive means accepting that you may need my 10-day challenge that acknowledges what I have learned as a therapist for almost two decades, we help ourselves and allow others to help us only to the amount we have arrived inside ourselves. I can attest to the value of therapy but also to its profound failure in my own life. My abandonment wounds would not allow me to trust many people and it took becoming a therapist myself and then 15 years in profound re-traumatization of my past to arrive inside myself and let the real helping and healing begin. This $25 course guides you through a process of two, twenty-minute check-in’s a day for 10 days. The Patreon Course, “Prepare to Arrive! Finding the Path to Inner Work and Healing gives you a process I call “Clean the House” in which you slowly regulate in a miniature version of the full healing journey experience. This serves as preparation to doing inner work but also serves as a wonderful tool both as a daily practice for mental well-being or a reboot when you are going through something. While my purpose is to help everyone Prepare to Arrive and then embrace inner work and the development of your own toolbox with the approach as your guide, my goal is never to prescribe your path but only to help you recognize there is one ahead that may only be challenged by a fragmented past narrative and dysregulated nervous system.

JOIN US FOR UPCOMING PATREON COURSES! READ THE SUBSTACK! LISTEN TO ENYA, EVERYONE NEEDS YOU ALWAYS ON SPOTIFY.

LOOK FOR THE BOOK: “You Are Not Broken. Break free from the fixing yourself mindset with The Toolbox Approach (TM)” to be published late spring/summer 2025!

The lyrics to the song above are written below, hum along with me in your private moments and enjoy your fresh start!

I guess only snow knows that falling is a fresh start

When there is a fresh coat of snow, it seems like only snow knows

So, if you haven't figured it out

That falling in love is a fresh start

Then I guess I have to walk away

And make my first step in fresh snow

No one will take my fresh start away

Freeeeeshhh Staaaaart

Hold on to your heart

Make a feeeeshh staaaart

Looking for a Spot to Grow in a Parking Lot

Everybody has the parking lot experience in life. Let me explain the metaphor. We drive around the rectangular world we have constructed for ourselves, pretending it is something that someone else built and that we have to find a spot. I say pretending because we are all complicit in creating all these stores we need to go to in one convenient location, and so really the parking lot for all the convenience is our own idea, although not literally built with our own hands. If only we could find the best spot, but it’s crowded, and your mind starts to shift to finding any spot. Sometimes, there is a chance to get a sticker, and that can guarantee you a spot, but often you are not in the right situation to get a sticker when you need it most.

When our minds are on finding a spot, parking, and feeling safe in that, it is easy to forget that parking spots, pavement, it’s not a fertile ground situation for growth. You don’t plant trees, or much of anything, in a parking lot. In fact, pavement is much better for walking on, or any sort of movement, more than it is for parking on top of. I started to think about this a lot when I needed a metaphor for this feeling that I was just milling around continuing to look for growth and falling up short.

I had looked at my life with the Narrative Healing Tools in my approach to inner work and healing and found the real lessons I was looking for. I was feeling more authentic, but I kept thinking maybe the world might give me a standing ovation or something, and it was not. I am a good therapist and the work I do healing trauma with people is deeply rewarding but I still didn’t feel good enough. I still wasn’t risking living in authenticity enough of the time to feel secure. I thought I would, but I was still getting really afraid to follow the Nike adage, “Just Do It!”.

That’s when it dawned on me. You’re in a parking lot! I wanted more growth, and this pavement was better for walking on, moving………..on. Moving On! That’s it, it dawned on me to stop forcing this car around the lot, purpose driven as I may be, and let go of looking for a spot. I wanted fertile ground, and I was not going to find it here.

Letting Go is a Process

So, I have learned there are four steps to letting go. It doesn’t happen all at once, although the idea to do it often does come suddenly, like the sound of your own inner voice saying, “let it go”. For the first step, the parking lot metaphor works really well, so it’s good that we are familiar with it already. First, you have to look really deeply at that spot that you keep coveting and wanting to be yours. You don’t just want the spot; you want the sticker that proves it’s yours. Be honest, you want it to be yours and waiting there for you, even to never have to leave it for very long given all the convenient things around you, why drive anywhere else!

For me, I wanted all these deep connections to start blossoming with ease. I wasn’t broken anymore, and I remembered who I was, I thought it would be obvious that I was ready now and the right people would just be there to support me through. I realized I had deep triggers as a result of the repressed traumas that I now had uncovered but I was working on the old behaviors: people pleasing, caring more than asked, over functioning, restricting rest, over exercising, and idealizing the safety I could be for other people. Largely this was all inside being in a respected role for others, a trauma therapist, and not inside the authentic healer I wanted to be, regardless of the credentials to prove it.

While I was parking spot searching, I thought working on these things with unrelenting authenticity would grant me a spot in the parking lot. I had to look deeply at that spot I wanted in step one of letting go. It was deep connection I was looking for by finding the spot. I wanted the person and people like me, but not in a therapy way, in a real people way. Then I realized if everyone else was going through their own version of what I was, I was never going to find it in the lot with the pavement everyone else was also getting tricked by. I already knew the loneliness of the growth journey. You have to do inner work and see a lot of your own life alone, no one can see it like you can. I was in such parking spot searching that I didn’t realize I was already ready to realize that no one can mirror my own story back to me, it’s up to me. I had to really look at not finding a parking spot of deep connection and see it as fruitless. When I looked again, really looked, I saw I have to go out there and just be myself, connect to that version of me out in the world, that is the spot I need to be for deep connection.

Step Two

Step two is for looking at how you were getting “it”, but falsely. The question to ask is how am I getting a substitute version of what I really want? The parking spot I wanted was deep connection but, in the meantime, I was using a substitute, connecting deeply to what I do as a trauma therapist. Connecting too much to what I do for work, oddly, was stalling my personal growth. You can grow a lot through what you do in the world, how you make money, how you provide for your family, and how you take on things you wouldn’t if you didn’t have to for work and career-based goals and successes. Still, it is not the thing to latch onto as the reason and purpose you are here. I looked deeply at the spot I was looking for in Step 1 and it was not a career as a trauma therapist. It was really close to that; respect, trust, connection, and expertise, but it was a substitute.

I see this as a beneficial step for all of us. I can see a few examples of taking this step for recent therapy goers I have had the pleasure of meeting with. Let’s look at two cases (Note: cases are combined, and names are changed to protect confidentiality):

* Kairi has been a special education teacher for 13 years in a prestigious upper-class public-school district. She is second generation Japanese and one of only four other minority teachers in the whole K-4 building, and the only Asian American teacher. She exudes a lot of energy during the day, and admitted to me that she could just feel it was what they expected of her. Part of that was really her, she has a lot of passion for the music she incorporates into teaching the special education students and has been given awards for her teaching methods. Still, she started getting migraines and lethargy her 14th year and came to therapy disappointed to reveal “I think I have depression”. She thought she wanted the “best special education teacher ever” parking spot, but needed to let go of it as enough, it was depressing her. She was afraid at first realizing this but then came in one day after many sessions melting fear and told me, “I don’t have to stop being a teacher, I have to start being more me, a bit of music in the daytime is not enough!”.

* Jonah has been in healthcare administration for 8 years. He moved up from administrative assistant to clinic administrator in 5 years and has been there for 3 when he came for therapy. He is known for his team-based approaches to managing the community health drop-in clinic and all the patients know him by name, get a personal welcome in the first 90 days, and there has never been a poor rating on any customer survey in his tenure. He started getting panic attacks after a lawsuit on the facility involving poorly sealed concrete that was repaired, and which he signed off on as repaired. Having no experience with negative feedback, it was draining him to keep up his smiling and welcoming ways when he could not change the outcome of the lawsuit, they were being held liable for a trip and fall injury for one of the patients and he needed to testify in court. He was ashamed and told me, “I can’t be myself anymore, I don’t know what is happening to who I was”. As he worked on this in therapy, he uncovered severe poverty trauma from his childhood. He felt he never wanted to become like his father, a miserable working man. He promised himself he would love his job and never looked back. One day he came in after month of therapy and mindfulness coaching and developing a deeper connection with himself and told me, “I am happier in the hours with myself than I have ever been, I think it’s time for a career change maybe?”. He thinks maybe he wants to do mindfulness training for hospital executives and thinks because he has personal experience it would be “the real me”.

Step 3, Opening Your Heart

The people above, including myself, had to look at the substitute as the resistance. When all of us resisted letting go of our roles, we were protecting ourselves from fear. What will I do if I am not a therapist? Will I be nothing? Am I abandoned and alone? What will I be good at? What if I am not good enough? No one wants to face that fear. It’s too hard, but, as each of us slowly realized, so is holding on. Will creates mental health symptoms after a while. Holding on to having to be something for a parking spot should be the real fear. If I need a spot to tell me I have a gift, I will be searching for a long time. I have to open my heart and to do that I have to unblock it from fear.

This heart unblocking came to me through my knowledge of energy centers, somatic experiencing forms of body-based therapy, Emotional Freedom Technique and loosely on the seven Chakra’s and the concept of the central nervous system having a Polyvagal Ladder or nerve coursing up and down the vertical line in our bodies. This line of energy, nerves, somatic and sensory information and memory can get blocked when we are in fear states and fear loops. Many of us have become less and less our authentic selves because of a failure to address the fear facing that brings us back to our body’s ability to feel safe, secure, and ready to connect. To clear out your heart and prepare to let go, I created the following somatic exercise.

* Light a candle or several. This is part of slowing down and being deliberate but can also be skipped and just be deliberate sitting down. Find a spot you feel supported and relaxed but upright: a chair, sitting cross legged on the floor, or even sitting outside. Now place the right hand inside the left, as if the left hand is cradling the right palms up. The left hand is ego and fear, “what will I do if I don’t figure out a way to………”, for example. The right hand is the simple things that universe already gives you that bring you joy: a hot shower, a cuddle with your kids, a pet, the sounds of nature, a good meal, attraction, laughter, a favorite smell, etc. Notice the left hand is anchored and stabilized by the right “simple things” hand.

* Now, gently touch the thumbs of each hand together. They should almost naturally touch, and you only have to bring them slightly closer. On the next inhale deep in through your nostrils, press the thumbs against each other more firmly than the soft touching previously. Then exhale and release to softness again. Repeat this again and this time when you are breathing in, breath in through your heart and press the thumbs together. Exhale and release the heart. Repeat this three times, gently unblocking the heart. Each inhalation, imagine a cool vapor is coming into your heart and then exhale and feel the space created.

* Now, take the hands up to shoulder level, facing your. Linking the thumbs of the hands so that in total, they form a butterfly shape with palms facing inward toward you. You should be able to flap them like a shadow puppet butterfly to ensure you have the right position. Now, place this shape over your heart. As you nestle the shape into your chest over your heart, notice the fingertips falling on the collarbone. Press firmly into the chest with your palms and release, then press into the collarbone with your fingertips and release. Now we are going to inhale pressing into the chest and heart with palms and exhale press fingers into the collarbone. Releasing and opening the heart. We’ll do this several times.

* Start repeating slowly, I am here, here I am, I am love. Repeat several times pressing into your heart on the inhale, releasing and pressing into your collarbone on the exhale until you feel calm take hold. Start to feel warmth under your hands and build this with your breath. Lastly, gently smile to yourself such that you can feel your face change and the corners of your mouth move up. On the exhale, audible say “AHHHH”. You will feel the vibration of the sound under your hands.

* WELCOME HOME, Your Heart is Open. This is Healing Your Hear from fear.

Step 4, Letting Go

Once you have been practicing the meditation regularly, you will be more confident to envision yourself like this in a real “outside in the world” type way. That is the fourth step. Take this feeling and imagine it is with you in a real moment, heart open, when you need it to be authentic and also realistic. For example, I imagine that I will be telling someone that I am dedicating more time to authorship, affordable classes and coaching, and no longer taking trauma therapy patients through insurance full time. I can feel my heart openly saying, “I offer healing events, books, subscriptions and courses, way more than you would get from trauma therapy because I felt it was more of supported journey with phases that people needed the tools for”. When I see myself doing that and feel my in progress open heart, I can let go of the fear of not getting a spot somewhere. Whenever I need it, this practice is here for me to repeat, and that feels like the safest thing I own!

Last Note

The Toolbox Approach (TM) is a three phased healing and inner work approach that will be published this spring 2025 in the book You Are Not Broken. Break free from a fixing yourself mindset with The Toolbox Approach(TM). Many of the tools are already offered in the Holding Space Substack and on Spotify in the ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always Podcast. Please subscribe and enter your own inner work journey. The subscription will soon require a paid membership to get the tools beyond the book’s Narrative Healing Phase/Tools. This paid subscription will give you access to the Reprocessing Healing Phase/Tools at only $5.99/month.

Heal Your Heart (HYH) is an acronym that we will start to use on this journey. HYH sounds like “high” when you say it out loud. That is the goal, getting high on healing and opening your heart to your own authenticity so you can reprocess your story and enter all the phases of healing: 1. Narrative Healing, 2. Reprocessing Healing and 3. Relational Healing.

Best Wishes, Open Heart, Authentic Spirit!

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I thought being a therapist was my moving on, but I got shocked into seeing my unhealed narrative when my mother passed away. Now, I promote inner work even more than therapy sessions themselves. I can do both, conduct a therapy and show the tools for inner work, however the tools for inner work I promote are freshly reformed from my own healing journey and so the special delivery had to happen outside of my role as therapist and by my real person still on a healing journey side that is my authentic self. As a therapist, I am as authentic as I can be, but I often cannot expound freely on what tool I have just used on myself recently. So, today, you are reading and listening about a matrix tool that helped me see something recently regarding how I was still getting stuck.

As I mentioned, rabbits are animals and have no inner world. They move towards things that give them energy, safety, and restoration for the next day to be lived again. You, on the other hand, are not a rabbit. You have an inner world, a whole life inside that is made up of things that are remembered. These things are the feelings associated with what happened, the way the feelings landed and felt inside you and where that is located in your body, the storyline of your interpretation of what happened, and things you did as a result or other consequences that transpired. The rabbit has no interpretation of the outcome of what happened either, it just completes moving towards carrots and eating them or moving away from a predator and getting to safety. We do have interpretations, and forever more those can have loops of meaning that keep us stuck thinking we can only have move towards or move away and not both.

We might say, “If I make twice the income this year then I will be safe to buy a home”, but buying a home is not safe unless that happens, we don’t conceptualize we can do both. Most of us have inner worlds, by this example, that keep us stuck but then add the concept of harder and more emotionally laden losses, rejections, failures, betrayals, violations or abandonments, and you have a lot of inner world experience to distract you as you try to conceptualize moving toward what you want.

This inner world has recent “stuff” and not so recent, only partially processed, experience. The inner world spins it around; often called thinking, contemplating, analyzing, ruminating or even brooding. This may be on a spectrum of inner world things that go on, the spectrum goes from less looped and repetitive to more. If we can move beyond just knowing this is happening with short term fixes and theories, to really understanding your unique looping, you can create a matrix of understanding that is unique to your private way of remaining stuck. It can show you how you are not a rabbit easily moving toward things that give you energy, safety and restoration and away from danger, threats and starvation, but are stuck in a loop of only thinking to move away from danger and never towards what really matters to you most.

This matrix of understanding can be accomplished with a tool from ACT that we can reformat for use as a self-help method inside The Toolbox Approach(TM). This understanding of your stuck loop is a Narrative Healing Phase tool. In Narrative Healing, you go beyond talking about what traumas you have and see how they stayed in your life as hidden agendas for what you were allowed to pursue or not. What happens is that we end up living out what is unprocessed experience because this never registers as completed in the inner world and it distracts us from moving towards things we want in life.

The Matrix as a Road Map

Consider that each of the axes on the matrix you create with the guide below are a continuum. Rather than living in all-or-nothing, this matrix provides a road map to identify what can move you closer to one side or the other. There are a range of possibilities to explore along each of these lines. Sometimes you are somewhere on this roadmap without awareness, creating it is part of that improved awareness.

Creating Your Matrix Map

Now, let’s consider how you can reflect on your personal values to fill out this road map and identify what patterns are keeping you stuck. We do this through a series of four questions that guide you to identify how you are moving toward or away from your goals, and how your internal experience as well as your behavior play a role in that dynamic. Let’s start with the bottom right quadrant. To begin this journey of developing your matrix that acts like a better roadmap for getting unstuck, look at the below diagram and consider following along.

To do this start drawing a line horizontally, so that one end is “away” and the other “towards”. Then, draw another line the crosses over vertically and leave it as is for now. Looking at the right side and down, this section can be meant to show you all the things that are important to you. What matters to me? What is important to me? What values do I hold?

Write a list in this quadrant of what is most important to you. Aim for about 4-5 people, things, concepts, values that are most significant. Reflect on what they mean for you. For example, if one of your values is “to be a good person,” consider what that would look like. Recently, for me, it has meant trying to build a connection with people beyond the confines of a therapy session. I wanted to be authentically myself, that became very important to me as I was also trying to write a book for The Toolbox Approach (TM) to reach people that might not go to therapy or find a therapist that has many trauma tools to provide given all the specialties out there. I saw in quadrant one that I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to authentically be myself. That was a bit of a shock after identifying so long as a therapist only.

This completes quadrant one, where you are moving towards your own inner experience of what is important and matters to you. You can watch the video below as I move on and fill in the other quadrants. Use the text below as a further guide.

Quadrant 2 (bottom left – moving away, inner experience)

What thoughts, feelings, urges, or other internal experiences get in the way of living into those values? What limits me from being able to have what is important to me?

Reflect on the internal experience that gets in the way of the full expression of those values. For example, my lack of confidence in being fully relationally healed and fear of letting romance into my life makes me doubt my own healing approach as a valid one if I remain single as I promote it as a full healing approach. Perhaps your lack of confidence from a past break-up or divorce taking so long to heal prevents you from being able to date and pursue marriage, while you know you value sharing a life with someone. Maybe you feel bouts of intense sadness and grief over the loss of a loved one and get to thinking there is no one there to be proud of you any longer, which is preventing you from living out your goal to achieve at work or pursue a talent.

Quadrant 3 (top left – moving away, outer experience)

When I have the thoughts and feelings in quadrant 2, what do I do? How do I respond in observable behaviors?

Now it’s time to see how these thoughts and feelings influence your behaviors and how you respond. These may include attempts at coping with the troubling internal experience, for better or for worse. What you’re looking for here is anything that moves you away from what is important to you. For example, I burn myself out working as a full-time therapist using The Toolbox Approach (TM) in sessions and resist the down time I need on the weekends. Instead, I write and edit, convinced that if the approach is valued, then I will feel good enough to pursue a relationship. Another attempt at coping might be if you find yourself overeating every time you feel lonely. Or you drink more when you’re dealing with a storm of insecure thoughts. Perhaps you withdraw and isolate from others when you’re feeling lonely or sense rejection.

Quadrant 4 (top right – moving toward, outer experience)

What can I do to move me toward what is important to me?

The ultimate goal of this guide map is to help you brainstorm and define ways to increase movement toward the things that are important to you. By reflecting on the first three quadrants, you may be able to clarify for yourself what behaviors support your values and goals. You might identify initiating something with more clarity than if it was just suggested or you were bored and filling time. For me, I was aware of becoming isolated in my work and that this was getting in the way of me feeling it was important and all I felt was annoyed and tired. I reread what was important to me, being a writer, and being authentically myself and realized I needed to go for a hike with some friends who knew the real me and talk opening in my writing group about the burnout. For others, intimacy might be important and a date with your spouse as an action that moves you toward intimacy in your marriage is needed. Or you might realize you need more sleep if you are going to work on the importance of moving your body in the morning as valuable to you.

Feedback Loops

Often where we get stuck is in the interplay between quadrants two and three. Look at the behaviors you listed in quadrant 3. When you engage in those behaviors, how do they impact your thoughts, feelings, urges, and inner experience? Typically, they either reinforce the internal experience that’s already happening, or they create another inner dynamic that moves you away from what you value. Using all my free time to make my approach meaningful was sapping my authenticity and making me feel not good enough for the work I was doing as a therapist and the inner work I was committed to each day as I meditated and stretched and continued my own phases of healing.

When we have an inner experience that is challenging, distressing, or painful, we respond to that experience with behaviors that reinforce it and send us back into the pain. No wonder we find ourselves stuck in those loops! But there’s good news: once you’re aware that this feedback loop is happening, you can change the way you interact with it, often by using the behaviors involved in quadrant 4. We know of these behaviors but doing the matrix unlocks them more profoundly. I knew I could enjoy a hike with friends, and it would feel good, but I was not linking it to getting unstuck from a not good enough mentality.

Compassion

One strength of the ACT matrix approach is looking at these behaviors with a nonjudgmental lens. When you see where they fit on this road map, you can identify how they function. All behaviors have a function and work to serve that function, even if they seem confusing or counterintuitive. Another way to explain this is that everything you do works for you in some way – otherwise, you wouldn’t be doing it. What you need to ask yourself is what function that behavior is serving in your life.

For example, the overworking was numbing my self-doubt about publishing a book in such a deeply personal expression of my own inner work. Someone else might find themselves endlessly scrolling through social media and using that as their numbing function. Maybe texting or social media is a temporary way to feel connected when you’re isolated from loved ones or lack a social group. Or perhaps seeing the memes and reels gives you a sense of creative ideas, even if they are not your own. Each of these potential functions (and sometimes a combination of several) drives and motivates this behavior but might also not be moving you towards what is important to you.

Seek to offer kindness to yourself and explore where you are on the continuum without judgment, exploring where you might want to go and what steps you can take to get there.

Agency

It is not shown in the diagram, but it is helpful to envision a circle at the center that overlaps all quadrants. This circle represents you as the observer, becoming aware of the system of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that influence you. Awareness of the system can lead you to reflect on what’s in charge of the systems in place: for example, who is in charge of choosing what’s important to you (quadrant 1)? Who is having these thoughts and emotional responses (quadrant 2)? Who is acting on these behaviors in response to the thoughts and feelings (quadrant 3)? The answer to all these questions is you.

Spend some time observing your movement on this ACT matrix: how your thoughts and actions influence how connected you are to your inner or outer experience, or how much you are moving toward what feels important or moving away from it. You could do it several times a week for one week as an exercise in becoming more conscious of the behaviors that move you toward what matters to you and to reduce the intensity of the feedback loops you experience.

If you find yourself noticing these patterns but still feeling stuck or unable to change, that’s where a good therapist can help you work through those stuck points. Also consider subscribing and sharing this as cultivating people in your life also willing to do inner work can become a great way to expand and grow and feel accepted on the path to breaking free from fixing and moving into a healing mindset.

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The tool I spontaneously generated today was easy to come by in one way, and also took a lot of staying power to stick by. It required me to do all the phases of healing in one brief little loop: 1. Narrative Healing Phase, 2. Reprocessing Healing Phase, and 3. Relational Healing Phase. When doing deeper inner work the phases are more like campgrounds for a month or two, or possibly longer, and even returned to cyclically for 1-3 years of breaking free from fixing and into healing. Today with the “Why Bother? Just Re-Thob” tool, we are doing the phases like micro coaching sessions that show the tool at work. Here are the micro coaching session questions:

* Narrative Healing Phase: What’s the story that started happening for you internally based on what was objectively seen and heard?

* Reprocessing Healing Phase: How are you hiding yourself, your feelings and what is happening for you? Are you navigating with your woundedness and/or triggered self or the real you? Can you reimagine how you would land if you could operate in your Core Self?

* Relational Healing Phase: How are you getting in your own way right now? How is your focus on another person or thing in your way protecting you from this? Are you ready to face that disconnection is in your way and not your own or another’s personality traits?

Okay, so those questions can help you have micro coaching sessions with yourself but you also need the guiding tool “Why Bother? Just Re-Thob.” The first part of this statement is basically how we come to the tool, “Why Bother!”. We come to it when someone is frustrating us for the last time and you just can’t tolerate it anymore. There is history here, which is why we need the coaching questions because there is no objectivity and you are definitely getting emotionally triggered. This means all the words and actions blend with the story that is there in emotional history between you and the other person, you and people like this person, or you and parents, lovers, friends, etc. You are operating out of this emotional landscape and the questions help you “Re-Thob”.

Re-Thob, stands for Return to Thought Objectivity. When we can use the guiding questions to go inward, then we are connected to ourselves and bear witness to what is happening there, then Return to Thought Objectivity is not some robotic suppression of emotion but a true witnessing of what occurred. What this state of thought is might be better defined as X-Ray Thought Objectivity, where you see in and can know better what is happening all around. Let’s put this to a demonstration.

Case Example:

Nick is 47 and divorced once, 3 years ago. He has two children from the marriage. One child is in middle school and one is set to enter the first grade and ride the bus for the first time. Every available adult from the blended family plans to be there for either bus stop pick up or drop off. The unspoken family consensus on the side of his ex-wife is that the divorce is hardest on this first grade child who still wets the bed nightly, and the blame has been launched on Nick in undertones of hostility when he is over the former family home. Nick cheated on his former wife. In couple’s counseling he revealed loneliness and a long time emotional affair before the act of physical betrayal he got caught on. He continued counseling on his own and in one session is describing the how he navigated the first day on the bus situation.

“I called her manipulative, I know she told me the wrong location so I would miss it and look bad. She does this all the time! It’s just like when we were married, she left me out of things intentionally, kept a separate life from me, had separate friends. I don’t think she liked me for me, she liked me because I am in finance and do well. People think I am confident and fine because I look athletic and can carry myself well but no one wants to just be my friend, it is always a competition. I wish my own father had been there more, he left us to play professional hockey and then tried to pretend he was back, but it was always on his time when he could show up for things.”

* Nick saw a text from his ex with a location. She got it wrong. Everyone else got the same text. Everyone else nearly missed it but left extra time. Nick entirely missed it. Nick went by the precise GPS time. The story from micro coaching however, was; “she did it on purpose to make me look bad and get back at me” and “she intentionally leaves me out”.

* Nick was hiding that he was wounded and longed to be a present husband and father. He wanted to be included despite his mistakes and was ashamed he never told anyone this and ended up having an affair. He wanted to be in a better Core Self and say “I don’t want anything to get in the way of me being here for the firsts, I feel awful and like this is punishment for the affair somehow even if it was totally unintentional”. He admitted though that he didn’t trust it was unintentional.

* He realized this concern that it was intentional punishment and cutting him out blocked him from talking to his ex just like before. It blocked him from sharing “I don’t like missing out, I don’t like being left out of our family no matter what the reason is, my fault or otherwise. I never felt my family had a dad and it still bothers me.” He realized the disconnection was there because he never talked about being left out, being viewed as fine and successful on his own but feeling alone frequently and having no connection to his own father. He kept it all in.

Nick prevented himself from sinking into “Why Bother?” even though it did seem to be the truth in some angles of his reality. He needed a tool. He went inward and once he did his Return to Objective Thought was this: “In situations where I want to be included, I have to be proactive.”.

He did more work after this in therapy on how he hides his need for inclusion, maintains himself meticulously because that has always made him “pass and feel like a man I guess”, and how he wants to start dating but knows he should really realize what he wants first. He was about to say to himself “Why bother with this anymore, she is set out to exclude me as punishment”. When he stopped focusing on it and more on operating out of woundedness I introduced him to the full Toolbox Approach.

If you are interested in this approach, subscribe and share. The tools are always the subject of posts and the book, You Are Not Broken. Break free from the fixing yourself mindset with The Toolbox Approach, comes out this spring 2025!

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I made a promise to myself and my writing that when I started to leave my expert realm behind, I would be authentic and admit that while I am a certified trauma therapist for 18 years, my writing career is personal work. I share my personal experience with the phases of healing and only hope you knowing I am a trauma therapist proves we all need tools for inner work. I spent my life hiding in a therapist mask in order to garner the courage to really use my knowledge base and experience on myself and my healing journey. This article today is from my Relational Healing Phase. I have healed a lot of my old narrative and can sense when it replays and wants me to think, do, and feel old things. I have reprocessed the old thoughts and behaviors so that they now mean I was only trying to cover up myself for fear of looking wounded and not healing. So, now I feel less burdened by my past and any mistakes I made.

The Relational Healing Phase is about improving your relationship with yourself and others in a way that is present but also aware of the past. For example, as the article title states, “Let’s Fight”, was not ever something I would allow myself to think or feel. Relationally, I though I always had to be good for everyone and never land poorly and this only became more entrenched as I repressed traumas in my life and wouldn’t let the wounds get activated. I became a therapist and tried to land well with everyone so they could feel safe with me and that became how I showed up in all relationships. There was no “Let’s Fight”.

I was always fighting a private battle, however, and my fight energy was so repressed I could not use it when it was called upon to stand up and say “I think this hurts, and you are not landing well in me!”. I have noticed this now through some deep inner work, and through that I can see all the ways a core childhood sexual intrusion, manipulation, and molestation experience kick-started a pattern of silence and smiling through things. As if I always projected warmth, it would all be okay.

I never thought about fighting what I knew was wrong, my trauma psychology processed it into “be good, give more, help people”. I thought healing what caused people to land hurtfully in me would make me better and safer in the world. I saw this through my inner work, but I would have never been able to just go to therapy and talk until I figured it out. It took The Toolbox Approach that I write about on this Substack and will soon be published in spring 2025 to put it all together.

The “Let’s Fight” lesson I ended up learning recently in my Relational Healing Phase came about when I went to a Krav Maga self-defense class recently, looking to toughen up and access my fight energy. I entered, and the class was filled with all male participants. I had emailed to announce my trial first free class and therefore was signed up by doing so. So, when I entered, they knew I was coming and immediately said, “Melinda right?”. I was bulls-eyed as they all turned to see. That was my first face off and we hadn’t even started the class yet! I faced off with fear, ‘what did I sign up for?’. The smile I put on in that moment felt very different from other times, however. I found myself saying, “call me Mel, let’s do this!”, and they all laughed and welcomed me in.

I thought I was there to learn how to really fight and defend myself against men that might want to hurt me. As the class went on and we went full-steam, sparring and taking hits at each other with padded punches and elbows strikes, I realized they were all helping me. We were paired against one another at times, but not really. One gentleman was particularly helpful as he held me in a headlock, “you’re in your head, you only have seconds, just pull down and move to strike”. He wanted me to win. He wanted me to feel smart, but not use my head as much as my instinct. I realized then that being in a relationship with a man could be like this. I was always coming into relationships wanting the other person to win and grow and never thought about looking for it in return, even though I wanted it badly. This man was showing me to maybe act more like a man and just want to win and then I would attract that, someone else who wanted me to win too.

I didn’t know I would be leaving with a lifelong lesson on how we all need to show up in a relationship when I took this class. When I took Krav Maga with a group of men, what I realized is that while we were all there to fight, that was not really why we were all there. We were all there to learn; to learn how to protect ourselves from attack. If we were being attacked, we wanted to win, but we didn’t want to be attacked or to fight, we wanted to learn. Something about relationships dawned on me then; that we keep facing each other, somewhat pretending we are looking for connection when we are pitted against each other; who will hurt who first? If we had the idea instead that we are both there to learn protection, how do we stay in healthy protection for each other in this relationship class we are in? How de we learn cheering each other on such that the attackers are not me and you, but some other thing outside us?

That's what built the connection to those men in class for me. I didn't want to let them down, I wanted to fight; for myself and for all of us learning to defend ourselves against something else. The attackers were not in the relationships inside that class, they were outside. It healed something inside me to realize that my trauma regarding people using me and my body was not about attackers outside of me, bad people, people who don’t care, or don’t notice, or aren’t there when you need them. The traumatic impact of what happened in my past was that I stopped believing people were with me and wanted me to win; win at protecting myself no matter what!

Thank you to all the men in Krav Maga class, in all my 18 years of education, I never learned anything so clearly before! Now, I am going to ask you too, to help me win. Please subscribe, share this and believe in the inner work I propose can be done with the Toolbox Approach. I am living proof it is working and I want to give it you, so help us win and SUBSCRIBE BELOW!!

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Welcome to my Substack, Holding Space. If you have not been here before you may want to know this is an authentic space where I admit that despite being a trauma expert for 18 years, I struggle to this day to redirect my helping and use the tools for inner work on myself. That is why I founded ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always, LLC and started funding this Substack, Pop-Up Healing Events, Online Healing Conversations and the publication You Are Not Broken. Break free from a fixing yourself mindset with The Toolbox Approach. We need clarity on the stages of healing that makes up an inner work journey so that we face it knowing to take care and hold plenty of space around the process. Today, we are discussing the “Prepare to Arrive” mentality.

When I first found Yoga, I was a 20-year-old Wanna-Be Spiritually Seeking Person (WSSP). To my credit, I kind of understood this about myself so I decided to train to become a LifeForce Yoga Practitioner (LFYP) and made it through level 1 before I realized, I was trying to treat my mental health without knowing what was really off inside me. So, I went into counseling psychology and ultimately became a mental health therapist and came to specialize in trauma. I am doing this now 18 years, but my Yoga education is what I use to conceptualize both my own need to arrive inside my life and the needs of others as they enter therapy or use my articles to learn about doing inner work. In Yoga, we say “Prepare to Arrive”. By this we mean, you may have come to class, you may be sitting on your mat breathing, and be ready to use your body, but you are not arrived and fully present yet.

Each class starts with guidance on preparing to arrive inside yourself and the hope is that by the ending pose you will lay in pleasant stillness and be inside yourself. People come back to Yoga for this very reason, guidance on arriving back inside. Often the moment we move back into “real life”, we tend to leave again. The truth is, we come and go from the inside of ourselves often and we need guidance to get back inside. This is a perpetual acceptance of needing tools and that you never fix this tendency to leave yourself. Like a wise parent, you arrive at your responsibility that this parenting is life long. For many of us it is a reparenting and a corrective one from the wounds our parents may have unknowingly caused.

This article is not about arriving in 2025, although you can use it for that kind of fresh start at the prompting of the calendar’s New Year’s Day. This article is meant to invite you into the two lives conundrum so you can choose which life you want to be in most often.

The truth is, there are two lives, the real one that comes when you've arrived inside yourself and the one you only think of as yours right now.

The two lives conundrum is my term for how we all possess a mirror life or self and a prism life/self. The mirror self looks good in the reflection. It might be putting out the image of, for example, what you do for work or some other role you hold, and show you “this is what you are, what you contribute, and why you belong”. At first glance, it seems like a great thing to define yourself by and it looks good in the reflection. As it is performed the mirror bounces back what we need it to. If we look deeper however, we don’t get to absorb that reflection into us, we aren’t able to take it in and reflect back something different if we want to or if we stand in front of the mirror and don’t look but just try to feel something, our eyes stay shut and we cannot see what really happens there.

The prism self, leading the prism life, gets to absorb light and reflect back an array of colors. Prisms can reverse the direction of light by internal reflection, they take in white light and separate it into a spectrum that is based on bending what is received and that is what makes the various colors. When you prepare to arrive inside, you get a prism self experience that can guide you to choosing more prism life experiences.

The prism life acknowledges you are so much more than a thing you do. Recently, I thought I really needed to keep waiting for this newfound gift of putting my healing to a structure called The Toolbox Approach to hit the world through being published in You Are Not Broken this spring 2025. I felt it could finally confirm I reclaimed brokenness and it all turned out fine because I did this thing with the traumas in my life. The approach explains phases of healing called Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing and Relational Healing and I have been using it but I haven’t felt the prism life yet. I set the deadline for January 1st, I would complete the last developmental editing stage and feel it the New Year has arrived and I will be a published author!

I lied to myself. I was looking in the mirror and needing to see an author but it wouldn’t get in me and submitting on January 1st was a mirror life move! Instead, I needed to prepare to arrive inside the self that is a published author right now! This is what I did:

This somatic-based exercise is a way to access your third-eye chakra for vision on your prism self but regardless of the exercise, you are “Preparing to Arrive” if you just let this concept of leading a prism life land in you. The way to start a New Year inside you doesn’t need to be just for January 1st. My hope is that you think about the concept, share it, notice yourself and lead your way back to yourself repeatedly all year long!

Ever since I was a little girl I could feel and sense things I was not supposed to and this concept of “The One” really hurt me. I thought I already was that for everyone. I would learn later in that I was an empath as a child. I became a therapist, so, obviously I still am, and I was relentless in my thinking I could be something to everyone and anyone who wanted an understanding presence. This was even decades later, this other concept of being the one, but not ever in the Disney way. It took me a very long time to realize this was also embedded in a trauma response to several rounds of childhood trauma and sexual intrusion and manipulation. But before I shamed my belief that I was this one person for everyone, I believed. I tried to clean it up and pretend it didn’t hurt, I repressed the trauma and dealt with other hard things that I thought taught me about human psychology. I became a trauma therapist. Still, it took a long time to heal, and the last part of my journey has been a phase of healing I call Relational Healing.

I didn’t know I was developing The Toolbox Approach when I started out, over 35 years ago, tying to hold my own haunted feeling that I was wrong or bad somehow and just make myself feel something different. Only 18 of those years were spent in direct contact with a label that you would think would have me saying “I figured it all out!”. Trauma therapist, that is what I am. I have a lot of certifications and some fancy licenses to deliver special modes of therapy to people and help them reprocesses the narratives they hold about themselves and what has been happening in their lives. Still, it was only recently that I really faced having to deliver my own approach to myself and face the flaws that were there, in my approach, in myself, it the mask of believing I could be there for everyone and yet still somehow miss myself.

The approach has three phases:

* The Narrative Healing Phase in which the Narrative Tools are used to identify the stories you tell yourself about your life and where the holes, gaps and repressions are.

* The Reprocessing Healing Phase in which the Reprocessing Tools help you sense the healing messages you need to be in your story now and regenerate your story so you can live in it fully and not keep leading a half-full life.

* The Relational Healing Phase in which the Relational Healing Tools help you communicate to yourself how you feel rather than avoid it and then move into relating to others with feelings you are ready to speak about. Here you care how you land in others and respectfully make it possible for them to land in you with some degree of temporary disharmony because you know this is the way it goes sometimes, and you have to provide space for the harmony to return or you can always stop participating without blame or resentment.

These phases are not easy and that is why they come with tools. You are not supposed to just know what you are doing and do better. You accept that you have wounds, you have wounded and that these are phases to get yourself back. You accept that this is your best shot, and you let go of fixing yourself or other people. I call it entering the classroom that no one ever offered you in school or life before. When you do, this is finding “The One” in progress because you are in fact looking for someone else who is doing this too, that is your “The One”.

As I was conceptualizing all this and turning it into a book called You Are Not Broken. Break free from the fixing yourself mindset with The Toolbox Approach, I got a publishing contract and got afraid. The book cover design came into my inbox and the words stared back at me. I am single and I am not broken but suddenly I wasn’t sure if I was “The One”. My life has taken on this kind of spiritually aligned quality now, so I faced it and asked for a message in these hard feelings of imposter syndrome. I was shocked when my Spotify app on my phone had cued up a new-to-me Podcast called Finding the One with Danny Morel and Jen Landesberg. This podcast will find you if you are ready, otherwise you might not believe in its message and discount the couple. Essentially, they have found each other because they were already trying to be the one for themselves in their own unique journeys. They say nothing groundbreaking and everything groundbreaking. This is because suddenly, as they are saying these things about where they were each at as they were not yet a couple, you realize this is a community of people listening on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify as well as following on various Instagram accounts the couple have, starting to all silently whisper “I knew it was possible”.

Again, there is no real wow factor here, and perhaps they have the money and means to make this all happen so if you are not ready for the message, you will discount them. Danny Morel was in very dire straits in his personal story and Jen Landesberg suffered panic attacks and feeling awkward despite her clear beauty. If you are going to dissect them, you will definitely miss the message. The message is that they were each doing personal work, found each other and continued to do the work, challenged each other and chose themselves over the other at times and grew each other and developed a recipe for how to keep repeating that with each other. The show just may very well be another tool they are using now as they face life with a child and want to hold on to what works between them by keeping it alive in the episodes. Whatever it is, “I knew it was possible”.

So, in honor of their effort and rekindling my belief in my book You Are Not Broken, I am becoming the one with my songwriting and creating and gifting them a song today. I am going to try to contact them with this gift and hope that it honors the Relational Healing Phase of inner work for all of us collectively. Here goes.

All the children are lined up, ready to be led to the classroom

And no one comes

Until a voice says, “Oh children, there is no door to show you, no one will welcome you into the sort of classroom you need for finding the one.”

The children end up outside on the grass, still waiting

One stands up and says, “Let's not pretend we are learning this by reading books”

Another stands, playing wise, “You must pursue the lesson like a hiker, finding the trail and following the markers”

Another shouts, “So, why do they tell us to find the one before we've barely begun to know ourselves?"

And then the song begins…..

When does this lesson begin that we should aim to fall for them and somehow that is a win?

And no one ever gets hurt or left in the dirt when the chemistry ends?

Why don't they tell us to grow first and then find the mirror that helps you see clearer, than your own reflection did?

Why does no one say that there is no white and pure wedding day?

That it is hard work

And you have to know your worth

And find it in another person too

We are not glue for each other

We don't stick together

We push one another to fall apart because it is our letting go

Then we grow!

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In Spring 2025 the book You Are Not Broken. Break free from the fixing yourself mindset with The Toolbox Approach will make its debut. This book comes from a personal struggle with brokenness that became a professional journey the past 18 years to develop tools for individuals that empower a therapeutic process when other people may be the last tool you feel capable to use. I am a trauma therapist who felt like a failed therapy goer myself, so I knew the tools needed to have a structure for the work that many times is only done alone and hanging on. We can look one way on the outside so well and that ability comes right into therapy too. So we may need tools to get at the real stuff.

We are like clenched fists with our problems, and it does not really work for someone to pry us open, so the tools create that slow and gradual opening in phases. The Toolbox Approach is used in therapy, but the real broken feeling is felt most when alone and these tools are ideal for your inner work if you are being called to it. The phases are: Narrative, Reprocessing and Relational healing and the tools within each phase are similarly named and grouped. Below, we take a sneak peek into the You Are Not Broken Toolbox for two relational healing tools.

Tool #19 COACHING FROM THE REPAIR CHECKLIST

What Is the Gottman Repair Checklist?

The repair checklist is a list of phrases that you can use during certain situations that can help you better express how you're feeling, apologize more effectively, let the other person know you appreciate them, and more. First, however, we need to notice why repair is the key to Relational Healing as a phase of inner work and growth. First, we often fail to understand the three primary components of a meaningful relationship:

* Friendship

* Ability to manage conflict

* Creating shared goals

While we don’t have to be long-term friends with everyone we interact with, the energy of intended friendship is important in any interaction and/or relationship. The same goes for 2 and 3, coming in with the ability to manage conflict and the ability to find the shared goals we might have in any interaction and/or relationship is a skill set WE need to bring to the situation rather than expect it be there already. We are more ready for this tool only after completing the former stages of healing in The Toolbox Approach. While the stages are not linear, the Relational Healing Phase & Tools often come after the first two stages have formed a foundation of inner work and integration of the self has become an anchor of stability to return to relationships for better emotional safety repair.

It is important to realize the science of relationships for this tool, this comes from The Gottman Method primarily and is based on decades of research. While it is couples based it is very applicable to all relationships. I have more experience being single than partnered and it has been very important to reformat this tool and make it applicable to Relational Healing.

Over more than 40 years, John Gottman has performed hundreds of empirical studies with over 3,000 couples. During that time, he and his colleague Robert Levenson performed a series of longitudinal studies that found that some marriages end in divorce while others succeed due to the way couples interact and that approximately 69% of problems between partners are never resolved. I took a leap, based on my experience as therapist who hears about the relational pain people hold daily, that this is true for most relational discord and that it profoundly blocks our healing attempts as individuals.

When you think about it, every version of two people in a relationship is set up for failure; parent/child, lover/lover; spouse/spouse, etc. It’s impossible to be emotionally available to the other person 100% of the time. In his book, The Science of Trust, Dr. Gottman explains that both partners in a relationship are emotionally available only 9% of the time. This leaves 91% of our relationship ripe for miscommunication.

But failure is not the problem. Even a mother who failed to be responsive and available 50% of the time can raise a child to be a healthy adult with healthy relationships. The difference between “good mothers and bad mothers,” according to Donald Winnicott, “is not the commission of errors, but what they do with them.” How a child copes with everyday failures and fluctuations is directly related to the degree in which their parent creates an environment for a secure attachment bond and how that parent repairs their errors.

This is no different in our romantic relationships. The difference between happy relationships and unhappy relationships is not that happy ones don’t have mistakes that are happening. We all make them in relationships. How we repair is what separates the relationship Masters from the Disasters.

Repair is key to relationship success in any relationship. No matter how careful you are, you will inevitably rupture the bond in your relationship. You will get critical and defensive, want to be right rather than listen, act passive aggressive, retreat and stonewall, label or name call, or raise your voice, to name a few. Repair is starting a conversation where we make a concerted verbal move to recover from it. The difference between the Masters and the Disasters of relationships is the Masters repair their interactions effectively.

What makes a repair effective? Well, Dr. Dr. Gottman analyzed repair attempts in his Love Lab, asking the question: “How do people try to make things better?”. In the Gottman Repair Checklist, we give several examples of repair attempts, including:

This list is important to take in because after studying more than 3,000 couples, Dr. Gottman found that how a repair attempt was made did not necessarily predict the effectiveness of the repair attempt. Some people would make repair attempts in a beautiful way, and their partner just couldn’t hear it. Other couples made repair attempts in really clumsy ways and were successful. The list is helpful to clearly demonstrate the effortful verbal statements that can demonstrate “I am trying to open up a repair here”. In fact, I may just have invented a simple catch all there to consider always starting with. You know your nervous system by now and you know when it feels conflict. When you feel it, a very important statement could just be “I want to try to open up repair here, will you join me?”. The list is helpful, but it doesn’t matter specifically as long as you are starting to believe the concept of repair as essential to your inner work. The work won’t take if you don’t feel safe in at least a few supportive relationships.

CASE EXAMPLE

Shondra has been miserable for 3 months when we consider using this tool. She did inner child work almost a year ago and realized she was being helpful and agreeing much of the time in her relationships and her child self wanted more protection. Her mother was a covert narcissist, and she could never disagree, or she would risk the only love she would get from her, which was the statement “you are such a good girl when you do what I say”. She worked on being more direct in her relationship and on a trip said something about what she really wanted the last day of the trip to go like and her partner stopped talking to her besides basic answers. They had parted at the airport and not talked for three months.

We ultimately decided she had to stay the course in her healing and express herself but do so in a way that came with the idea of repair. She realized she felt punished for something with the stonewalling and silent treatment but that it was also a form of communication that might be the best her partner could give her because he was dysregulated somehow. She fought wanting to blame him for making her feel this way and used the list for support. We looked at #13 and rephrased it from “I feel criticized, can you rephrase that?” to “I feel punished by this silent treatment we have going on between us; can we meet so I can understand what is happening for you?”. She felt so much lighter even realizing there was a productive way to say that she started to realize she really did notice he struggles too with fawning possibly in a very different way and decided to add “I think you may be a lot like me, not wanting to say anything for fear of rejection that has happened too many times, I also want to talk about those kinds of patterns for both of us from previous things in life”.

Ultimately, at the end of session she realized, “I can do this, I can have this kind of conversation now!”. She was hopeful she would make a repair but also knew that she was getting healthier somehow and she could make several attempts and then move on.

Friendship is vital to good repair

It wasn’t until Dr. Gottman looked at the physiology of the partner receiving the repair that he uncovered the secret weapon of emotionally connected couples. The real difference between the couples who repaired successfully and those who didn’t was the emotional climate between partners. In other words, your repair attempt is only going to work well if you have really been a good friend to them, especially lately. We can’t be friends with everyone, but we can hold the concept of what it means to be friendly and know that it is also a feeling that you give and receive. This means remembering to know what the world of the other person is like by asking questions and remembering the answers.

This friendship mentality is key to repair. What the friendship mentality means is that you make an effort to stay connected in a way I call “world to world”. We have such different lives and at times our reactions to each other come from the unique subjective world we are experiencing that day. For example, “I thought about a movie we can see because you seem stressed” can be responded to, “I am stressed and a movie would stress me out more, I have too much work to do”. If the “world to world” is not understood, this can go pretty poorly. For example, “forget it, I was just trying to be empathetic and helpful, but I will never do that again!”. It can take a lot of effort to carve out time for yourself and put that interaction back through the “world to world” concept. For example, “that makes sense, I wanted to help but I can see it would just feel like time wasted when you have things to get done, can we go for a quick walk before you start your stuff?”. Even now reading this I bet you can feel that, it feels nice to read that person understanding the other, but it takes work, and we are carrying a lot of emotional turmoil on any given day that can get triggered. That is what the tools are for! Now, let’s consider another Relational Healing Tool, Tool #20 “How Does That Land in You?”.

TOOL # 20 – HOW DOES THAT LAND IN YOU?

This tool is just a phrase, one phrase, “How does that land in you?”. I came across it accidentally as a young therapist when I had to just wing it given, I was all training and no experience. I was listening to a woman in full on rant about her husband and what he did. I was glad for the talking in some ways, but she was not taking a pause at all, it was one thing he did after another, and I couldn’t provide my presence at all. She couldn’t even tell I was there; it was just full on “let me get this out”. At that time, it was just intuition when I thought “she is not getting any attention”. I pictured her ranting at him too and it not landing at all that she was hurting for real attention. It dawned on me that she still wasn’t getting any attention now because I was getting distracted by stopping the rant and I really wanted to help her. So, I decided to just say it, “So, how did that land in you?”.

She stopped dead in her rant and looked at me and burst into tears. I passed her tissues and when she cleared herself, she looked at me like a girl all of a sudden, “I don’t think he is in love with me anymore.”. We established that the comments and slights were landing like “I don’t love you anymore”. It was a decade later when I started to train in Relational Life Therapy for couples. Given I am a trauma therapist, I was already finding that couples can have problems with trauma triggers and individuals slow their healing given they often feel most broken inside relationships that are failing or repeatedly on edge. Terry Real models the use of this phrase by using it as a therapist for the couple, as I did above, and it becomes an awareness and a preventative measure that leads to relational healing. First, let’s take a look at why it works from a glance at The Still Face Experiment.

This experiment established that the single most important thing that your child needs at any stage in their development is your connection, presence, and affection. In 1970, Dr. Ed Tronick did the famous "still face" experiment. It showed how strong our need for connection is. The still face experience gives an insight into how a parent's reaction can impact the emotional development of a baby. Specifically, this experiment told us what happens when connection does not occur. Since the parental connection is the foundation for all connections moving forward, it is of particular value in our understanding of why this phrase “How did that land in you?” is so important.

The study involved the baby and mother sitting face-to-face and playing. You see the mother engaging with her baby and the baby responding by smiling, making movements, and sounds to communicate. In the second part of this experiment, you see the mother engage in "still face" or a lack of responsiveness to her baby for two minutes. After two minutes, there is a repair, where the mother returns to normal by responding, playing, and smiling.

What psychologists learned in this classic study is how the baby's behavior changed based on their mother's reaction. You see a baby go from smiling and making sounds, to appearing confused and attempting to connect by making sounds and movements. The baby looks around the room; she tries smiling, then pointing. As her mom continues to engage in the still face with no response, the baby continues to test other sounds and movements to get her attention. Then frustration sets in, and the baby begins to cry and screech. The “still face” did not land well with that baby and in general when we go away, retract warmth or connection, it does not land well. There are subtle and overt ways this can happen, and it is best to remember this phrase when it does and just ask, “How did that land in you?”. For the babies in the experiment, once the mother's attention returns, the baby shows a clear sign of relief and goes back to smiling.

Researchers also have repeated this study using the fathers where the babies had the same responses. It has also been replicated with toddlers and recorded similar findings. Part of my own trauma is not in the “what happened” but it the way it landed in me and that is why my own Relational Healing Phase is so important now. I need to reverse all the “you are bad”, “it’s your fault”, “no one will love you now” and “you can’t be so open even if you want love”. The Reprocessing Tools and Phase can greatly help this negatively landed things however Relational Healing propels us even further to close the void that was created, living this way so long. Just one person caring how they landed is an opening to a lot of healing.

Having a non-responsive parent, partner, friend, or coworker is not a problem if it occurs in short doses. It’s the way the “land in you” piles up over time. We don’t need to have a takeaway that overgeneralizes the research findings and feel that we need to respond and engage 100% of the time with people. That is just not realistic and can create a lack of boundaries. Short, occasional non-responsiveness is not the same as consistent, prolonged inattention or lack of responsiveness and we need to acknowledge that it is how it lands and not always our own perception so just ask, “How did that land in you when I didn’t text you back all day?”. Then listen until it is landing in you too and you “get it”.

CASE EXAMPLE

CJ was 32 and in a 2-year relationship when he came to me stating his girlfriend was “marriage material”, but he was aware she didn’t think the same of him. They had talked about it endlessly and he reported “I know she loves me, but I am not there yet in her eyes”. He wanted to know how he could get there. CJ has ADHD, so listening is not his strong point because he is formulating what he wants to say back before the other person is done. It is an anxiety he has to forget what he should say in response, but it leads to a lot of problems in his relationship. He was also late diagnosed with ADHD his senior year in high school when his father re-married a school counselor who was more attentive. He never got a grasp on tools he could use to be a better listener but when I started modeling “How does that land in you?”, he reported to me that it must have brainwashed him or something because he used it, and he thought he was done with therapy now. He told me “Seriously, it changes everything”.

He explained that his girlfriend was telling him they had to get laundry done that weekend because her parents were coming the next weekend, and the week was too busy. The background was that her parents did not approve of them living together and made frequent jabs at her rather than directly talk about what she knew they felt was disloyal to the way they raised her and the unspoken family rules. He knew she was going to make that point “you know how they are” and so he did not let her finish and said, “I know how they are, but I can get it done next week between things”. Immediately they were in a fight, and she screamed at him, “you are so self-centered!”.

He told me, “I used the phrase in a kind of different way”. He told me it was an epiphany, “I landed self-centered in her so I asked her ‘why did I land self-centered in you just now?’, and she told me and I was like ‘I get it’ and things went great!”. We agreed that therapy was not in fact over and he stayed on another year up to the proposal!

THAT’S THE SNEEK PEEK, AND NOW A MESSAGE

We Can Do This!

Where are all my “we people”? Ever since I was a child, I felt the “we-ness” of the world like it was something on my Christmas List. I hoped I would wake up in the morning and it would be there underneath the tree. Everybody, all of us, and a togetherness would just be there waiting but it never quite happened.

I know now, I was too small to make it happen, but I grew up and I never forgot about it. Now I need it big time! We have 72 hours to donate to ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always LLC and podcast or become a $5/month subscriber by following the subscribe button below. I have a publishing contract for this book of tools from The Toolbox Approach but no marketing budget and your donation or paid subscription will get us there. The book is already yours; it is for you and titled YOU ARE NOT BROKEN. Please bring it to yourself by considering these options. The Black Friday Sale for the marketing package ends 11/30, we have a bout 72 hours!

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Well, I can't answer this question specifically for each of you reading, listening or otherwise joining in, but I can in a more general sense give an answer because I am a therapist for 18 years and have listened to so many human stories in that time. So, I really do know, we have all been coming to this conversation since we were kids ourselves. Talking is so easy at first, we say one simple word, and everyone claps, but it gets harder and harder after that. I know you remember; no one wants to be a bad kid based on something they said, and as a kid, no one teaches us how to hold a conversation and we often just had to wait for it to happen.​ Many times this waited for conversation never happens. We, former kids all of us, do feel it at the time but don’t know we’ve missed out until we grow up and we see and reflect on our lives. The collective pain in all of us just many very well be the missed conversations that could have showed someone cares, someone is listening, someone wants to be there.

So, you came to this because you were a kid with missed conversations and hopefully you've had them now, but very likely many of them you have not had still to this day. I am a child who needed to talk about the things that were happening to me. Largely, this conversation today, and my decision to both become a therapist and start ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always LLC, is to provide these somewhat spontaneous events as opportunities for larger relational healing conversations. There is a missing phase to healing for many of us, relational healing. This is when we find we can reconnect to parts of ourselves and join in a community who is doing the same and enhance this healing. We enhance healing by listening to how others experience the same things, with slightly different pain and repair stories and feel the sameness in the path we have been on. ​This lessens the divide in the world greatly and has healing effects.

NOTE: YOUR DONATIONS ARE GREATLY APPRECIATED

I have needed to be a safe place for others to talk for 18 years because I did not have one and we were all kids like this in one way or another. There are people and entities out there that pretend to be something towards kids and entice them into false safety. Today, we are here to talk specifically about child exploitation and how to move from protecting childhood, to empowering it with the belief we can hold these conversations with kids​.

Why Empower?

There are already many projects out there to protect childhood. In fact, the U.S. Department of Justice has the most widespread one, Project Safe Childhood, so let's do an overview to describe that and then move to "Why Empower?" Briefly, however, we focus on EMPOWER CHILDHOOD because we want kids to have the power to start the conversation and if not, adults to have empowering tools to facilitate their participation in one.​

* Project Safe Childhood is a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse. It was launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice in the US government. It is led by the US Attorney's Offices and the Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS), PSC marshals federal, state, and local agencies to better locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet, as well as to identify and rescue survivors. ​

* The internet can have positive aspects, but it may also open opportunities for child exploitation by online sexual predators. As many children use the internet on computers, tablets, and cell phones (sometimes unrestricted), Project Safe Childhood focuses on keeping them safe. They aim to find those seeking to exploit children and ensure proper measures are taken to stop them, whether through the law or special investigations.​

* Many of us involved in kids' lives cannot be investigators or IT specialists monitoring the safety of online interactions, in fact, it can feel disempowering for adults to feel this is what it takes to protect kids. We focus on empower because we focus on THE POWER of conversation when one has tools and awareness for creating safe space.​

* The government is actively and vigorously working to protect our children. Identifying children being exploited and arresting the people behind the acts are two significant parts of what Project Safe Childhood does. While they provide education and awareness too, today we are here to amplify that effort and EMPOWER CHILDHOOD WITH THE POWER OF CONVERSATION.​

* Briefly, According to the Centers for Disease Control, one in seven children experience abuse or neglect in the US. In addition, over half a million people are online at any given moment, intending to exploit or harm children. Childhood abuse and exploitation have long-lasting adverse effects, including Improper brain development, Impaired cognitive, social, and emotional development, Lower language development, Anxiety, Physical and psychological trauma, and Behavioral challenges. The experience is considered, from a trauma informed perspective, an ACE, Aversive Childhood Experience that links to many poor long term mental and physical outcomes.​

This Really Matters

* Being abused as a child can significantly impact one's ability to function as an adult healthily. Children who were abused or neglected are at an increased risk for arrest, teen pregnancy, and substance use. Those are the measurable challenges; however, and many can go on to question their worth and judgment for decades. While the work done by Project Safe Childhood and its partners helps stop and prevent child exploitation, so fewer children endure the adverse impacts of abuse that can last into adulthood, they cannot create the individual conversations needed for the actual feeling of safety our children need. ​

* So much of our safety comes from the ability to know and understand what is okay, what is not okay, why and then how to hold responsibility and accountability for that, which is the foundation of what much trauma recovery is about in my line of work, the ability to vocalize, discuss and understand your responsibility to your own emotional and physical boundaries. ​

* According to the US Department of State, live-streaming acts of child exploitation on web cameras and cell phones for profit have become common. In many cases, predators use apps that appear innocent to target children. This abuse happens to children of all ages and backgrounds from around the world, and law enforcement teams in many places lack the experience and knowledge needed to solve the problem so the government has stepped in to do a lot of the protecting we need, now we need to do the EMPOWERING.​

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Sextortion and Financial Sextortion

* The FBI has seen a huge increase in the number of cases involving children and teens being threatened and coerced into sending explicit images online—a crime called sextortion or financial sextortion.​

* Straight sextortion can start on any site, app, messaging platform, or game where people meet and communicate. In some cases, the first contact with the criminal will be a threat. The person may claim to already have a revealing picture or video of a child that will be shared if the victim does not send more pictures.​

* However, more often this crime starts when young people believe they are communicating with someone their own age who is interested in a relationship or with someone who is offering something of value. ​

* After the criminals have one or more videos or pictures, they threaten to publish that content, or they threaten violence, to get the victim to produce more images. ​

* The shame, fear, and confusion children feel when they are caught in this cycle often prevent them from asking for help or reporting the abuse. Caregivers and young people should understand how the crime occurs and openly discuss online safety.​

The FBI also has recently seen an increase in financial sextortion cases targeting minor victims in the U.S. This is different from traditional sextortion. In these cases, the offender receives sexually explicit material from the child and then threatens to release the compromising material unless the victim sends money and/or gift cards. The amount requested varies, and the offender often releases the victim’s sexually explicit material regardless of whether they receive payment. This increasing threat has resulted in an alarming number of kids attempting to end their lives.​

How to Get Help ​

* If young people are being exploited, they are the victim of a crime and should report it. Contact your local FBI field office, call 1-800-CALL-FBI, or report it online at tips.fbi.gov.​

* The FBI also has staff dedicated to assisting victims of crime. Learn more about our Victim Services Division and know your rights if you are the victim of sextortion and your images have been posted online. ​

* BE THE HELP YOU SEEK, SEE THE NEXT FEW SECTIONS!

What Kids and Teens Need to Know​

You are not stupid; you are targeted to agree to do this.​

The people who commit this crime have studied how to reach and target children and teens.​

One person the FBI put in prison for this crime was a man in his 40s who worked as a youth minister so he could learn how teens talked to each other. Then, he created social media profiles where he pretended to be a teenage girl. This “girl” would start talking to boys online and encourage them to make videos.​

Another person offered money and new smartphones to his victims.​​In one case, the criminal threatened a girl, saying he would hurt her and bomb her school if she didn’t send pictures.​​Other cases start with the offer of currency or credits in a video game in exchange for a quick picture.​

How do you know who can be trusted online?​

That’s what is so hard about online connections. The FBI has found that those who commit this crime may have dozens of different online accounts and profiles and are communicating with many young people at the same time—trying to find victims. Don't trust "friends of friends". Blocking is always best, tell someone and allow the person to be investigated, no friendship should come with risk, especially when you can't always un-feel how it feels to be betrayed or manipulated.​​Be extremely cautious when you are communicating with anyone online. It’s easy to think: I’m on my phone, in my own house, what could possibly happen? But you can very quickly give a criminal the information and material he or she needs to do you harm.​

But how can this harm me?​

Indeed, these criminals don’t usually meet up with kids in real life, but the victims of this crime still experience negative effects. The criminals can become vicious and non-stop with their demands, harassment, and threats. Victims report feeling scared, alone, embarrassed, anxious, and desperate. Many feel like there’s no way out of the situation.​

What do I do if this is happening to me?​

If you are ready, reach out to the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI or report the crime online at tips.fbi.gov. Agents see these cases a lot and have helped thousands of young people. Their goals are to stop the harassment, arrest the person behind the crime, and help you get the support you need.​​If you’re not feeling ready to speak to the FBI, go to another trusted adult. Say you are being victimized online and need help. Talking about this can feel impossible, but there are people who can help. You are not the one in trouble.​

How can you say I won’t be in trouble?​

You are not the one who is breaking the law. This situation can feel really confusing, and the criminals count on you feeling too unsure, scared, or embarrassed to tell someone. Even if this started on an app or site that you are too young to be on. Even if you felt okay about making some of the content. Even if you accepted money or a game credit or something else, you are not the one who is in trouble. Sextortion is a crime because it is illegal and wrong for an adult to ask for, pay for, or demand graphic images from a minor.​

How do I protect myself and my friends?​

Your generation can be the generation that shuts down these criminals. Awareness and sensible safety practices online, along with a willingness to ask for help, can put an end to this exploitation.​

KNOW THESE SIX THINGS:​​

* Be selective about what you share online. If your social media accounts are open to everyone, a predator may be able to figure out a lot of information about you.​

* Be wary of anyone you encounter for the first time online. Block or ignore messages from strangers.​

* Be aware that people can pretend to be anything or anyone online. Videos and photos are not proof that people are who they claim to be. Images can be altered or stolen. In some cases, predators have even taken over the social media accounts of their victims.​

* Be suspicious if you meet someone on one game or app and this person asks you to start talking on a different platform.​

* Be in the know. Any content you create online—whether it is a text message, photo, or video—can be made public. And nothing "disappears" online. Once you send something, you don’t have any control over where it goes next.​

* Be willing to ask for help. If you are getting messages or requests online that don’t seem right, block the sender, report the behavior to the site administrator, or go to an adult. If you have been victimized online, tell someone.​

What Caregivers Need to Know

Why would any child or teen agree to do such a thing?​

The individuals carrying out this crime are skilled and ruthless and have honed their techniques and approaches to maximize their chances at success. The entry point to a young person can be any number of mobile or online sites, applications, or games. The approach may come as compliments or flattery or the pretense of beginning a romantic relationship.​​Another entry point is to offer children something they value in exchange for a taking a quick picture. This could be the possibility of a modeling contract; online game credits or codes; or money, cryptocurrency, and gift cards.​​The third common point of entry is to go right to threats by either claiming they already have an image of the young person that they will distribute or threatening to harm the child or other people or things the child cares about. Once perpetrators have the first image, they use the threat of exposure or other harm to keep the child producing more and more explicit material.​

But my child would never do that.​

The FBI has interviewed victims as young as 8, and the crime affects children of both genders and crosses all ethnic and socioeconomic groups. The victims are honor-roll students, the children of teachers, student-athletes, etc. The only common trait among victims is internet access.​

Why don’t the victims tell someone or ask for help?​

The cycle of victimization continues because children are afraid—afraid of the repercussions threatened by the criminal and afraid they will be in trouble with their parents, guardians, or law enforcement. By the time children are victims, they have done something that may be generating feelings of shame and embarrassment. The criminal may also be telling them they have produced child pornography and will be prosecuted for it. In addition, they may fear their access to their phone or computer will be taken away from them because of their actions.​

How do I protect the young people I know? ​

Information-sharing and open lines of communication are the best defense. Young people need to know this crime is happening and understand where the risks are hiding. Explain to the children in your life that people can pretend to be anyone or anything online, a stranger reaching out to them online may be doing so with bad intent, and no matter what the platform or application claims, nothing “disappears” online. If they take a photo or video, it always has the potential to become public.​​You may choose to place certain limits on your children’s Internet use or spot check their phones and other devices to see what applications they are using and with whom they are communicating. This can be part of an open and ongoing conversation about what it and is not appropriate online. It also may be worth considering a rule against devices in bedrooms overnight or shutting off Wi-Fi access in the overnight hours. Caregivers may also want to review the settings on a young person’s social media accounts with them. Keeping accounts private can prevent predators from gathering their personal information.​​The other crucial element is to keep the door open so that they know they can come to you and ask for help. Let them know that your first move will be to help—always. These predators are powerful because of fear, and the victims suffer ever more negative consequences as the crime carries on over days, weeks, and months. If you are the adult a child trusts with this information, comfort them, help them understand they have been the victim of a crime, and help them report it to law enforcement.​

​EMPOWERMENT CONVERSATIONS

Now we have my favorite part of this mission, starting empowerment conversations with kids. All these conversation starters help you get some sort of engagement right from the start by using a basic question that is relatable to them. Even a shrug indication they are listening is an indicator of some engagement. Remember, it starts with your own empowerment, we did not get this, or didn’t get enough of it consistently, as kids, so now we are uniquely empowered to give it. We are educated on the subject matter, and we know our role here. Many agencies are protecting, and we always join those efforts, but our greatest impact is THE POWER OF CONVERSATION! Here are three examples.

The New Version of Don’t Talk to Strangers​

* You know how when you're online, people can message you while you're doing something else, and you might not notice right away? Well, has anyone you don’t know ever tried to contact or talk to you?​

* It’s kind of hard to know what to do, what did you do or what would you do if that happened?​

* Why do you think someone you don't really know would want to reach you online?​

* You know how we went on vacation and took all those happy pictures, but it wasn't all happy? If I posted some of them, we would look happy but it's kind of pretend we were happy the whole time, right? It’s easy to pretend to be someone you’re not online and not every person has good intentions like posting happy pictures when they are not all true. ​

* Can you make sure you block or ignore anything that comes in from someone you don’t know in real life? Even a friend of a friend until you know them, okay?

The Power of a Picture​

* Has anyone you know ever sent a picture of themselves to like just one person and then that got passed around school or to a whole team or club?​

* When you send a picture, do you know about how long that stays in digital memory or what’s possible anytime you send someone a picture?​

* Sometimes pictures aren't embarrassing with friends but what if that picture were embarrassing later on?​

* Can you think about how someone could use that kind of picture as a way to be almost against a person or have more power somehow?​

I’m Here to Help​

* I was listening to a podcast and this teenage girl was talking about being pressured to send images and video of their bodies to a person they met online. Have you ever heard about anything like that? Sometimes they were being threatened and harassed—scary stuff.

* You know, if you are ever feeling like something is going on—online or off—that feels scary or wrong or over your head, my first concern is going to be helping you. You can always come to me. We can figure it out together, from what I know, it is never your fault when something like this happens, it's called being targeted.​

LAST NOTE

As a last portion of this EMPOWER CHILDHOOD conversation, I would like to share something from a trauma-informed perspective on “how can this happen?”. Many ask themselves how kids or people in general fall into this kid of exploitation. Well, it is a profound manipulation of human attachment. Many people know the term “trauma bond” today. Unfortunately, it is deeply misunderstood. This is not when two people sharing traumatic stories experience a bond of understanding. It is when an individual gives small doses of emotional connection and then avoids, rejects, threatens, dismisses or neglects a person. These come in episodic doses such that the person experiencing the connection begins to question the period of an abusive connection and stays in the situation, waiting for the good connection to return.

These connections are traumatic and ultimately expose individuals to more abuse. Children and teens are extremely susceptible to this. These open conversations, as well as regular and ongoing conversations with our kids; knowing their world and trying to model consistent connections, matters. The message "You matter, and I know mostly what goes on with you even when you don't tell me", is not helicopter parenting. You do not have to demand to know things, simply hold these skilled conversations out loud anyway, regardless of responsiveness, and even if there is no response, you are modeling connection regardless and their brains will determine the difference. It is not the only tool of caregiving we have, but a often a vastly missing one at times when life can seem too busy, and we opt for texting as a conversation. BE EMPOWERED ADULT PROMOTING EMPOWERED CHILDHOOD!!

NOTE: This Pop-Up healing conversations and events are sponsored by ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always LLC funding entirely by one therapist as part of a personal healing mission that becomes collective only through impact. Your donations are greatly appreciated. Please also consider subscribing:

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Many adults come to therapy thinking that current stress or more recent trauma is at play and affecting their mental health, but often we can detect the traumas of childhood in a more general sense, by the way we respond to things. Also known as our usual stance in life, it is more telling about our current stressors and mental health than we realize. This puts the therapist, and the individual in therapy, in a position to validate that these traumas are there without going into detail. It is especially helpful when you can’t or don’t want to go into detail about it. I learned the skill of noticing and addressing trauma responses first and foremost from my own story, where I always knew I held some deeper thing by the way I operated in life, a fiercely hidden independence. Not only would I do everything on my own, but I would also often not talk about it or mention that I had. I would not reflect on possibly asking for assistance the next time if it had been grueling. I barely detected grueling.

Let’s try to understand this better.

What Causes a Trauma Response?

When a person experiences a disturbing, distressing, or life-threatening event that they are unable to cope with in a healthy way, this event is considered traumatic. Traumatic events can be single experiences, like a car accident or natural disaster, or they can be chronic and ongoing, like neglect or abuse.

Some chronic, stressful experiences in childhood that can cause trauma symptoms later in life are called adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). ACEs are linked to physical illness, depression, anxiety, and even early death in adulthood.

Examples of ACEs include:

* Physical or emotional abuse

* Molestation

* Severe bullying

* Watching extreme adult discord or overhearing it frequently

* Abandonment or neglect

* Loss of a family member to suicide

* Substance abuse or alcoholism in the household

* A mentally ill parent

* An incarcerated parent

* Parental divorce or separation

* An early life accident or illness

These are just a few examples however, as a child, many things can overwhelm the ability to regulate. Due to flight, freeze, and appease responses, sometimes a child’s reaction to a stressor is under recognized or intentionally dismissed by an adult.

Other Reasons for Trauma Responses

* Sign of weakness. Children who were raised to believe that asking for help was a sign of weakness. This belief may be especially prominent in competitive families and kids who are gifted/talented or if gifted/talented is the expectation. At times there is a long line of strength in stoicism generationally.

* Parentification. Children who were parentified and experienced role reversal in the family. They literally had no help and are not used to having support. They were praised for being a mother in the house or “my little man of the house” and elevated when they were most like a parent. Their sense of self is often tied to what they can do for themselves and others.

* Messaging. Children who had their basic needs met would not necessarily see themselves as neglected; however, they may have received a constant message that they needed to do things on their own. There were no adults present to help them figure things out—whether that was in school, socially, in activities, or interests. They developed the sense that they were on their own. There can be “good children take what they are given”, “figuring it out builds character”, and “I figured it out so will you”, to name a few.

The Mind and Body's Response to Trauma

When someone experiences something traumatic in today’s world, it is most often a different kind of survival threat, such as the fear that a toxic work environment that has devolved into sabotaging your progress means you may have to start looking and risk a pay cut. It still ignites what our body has registered as threatening in our past and in general regarding what is threatening to humans. Whatever the threat, the brain automatically activates the body's defense mechanism, also known as the survival response. This built-in defense mechanism means that the body chooses behaviors based on what will keep it safest at the moment. Because our brains are wired to keep us safe and alive, we tend to hold onto survival mode long after the traumatic event has passed if we do not process it, even if it is no longer adaptive or helpful to do so. This is 100% true for the childhood aversive experiences we have had, but also for the adult. As the above example alludes to, I have had many adults triggered by work conflict come into therapy and start working on a lifetime of other traumas due to the sudden awareness that it all felt like the same unprocessed reaction all the time, that wasn’t entirely going away.

In fact, we are so good at surviving traumatic events that our genetic expression can change in response to trauma, we can see our patterns in generations before us. I myself was afraid of becoming a parent for that very reason, passing the trauma response down to offspring through intergenerational trauma because of fears I was not fully healed yet.

Why Is Fierce Independence a Trauma Response?

Fierce or Hyper-independence can develop in response to trauma for various reasons. Not everyone who experiences a trauma will have the same trauma responses. In fact, some people begin to believe that they are incapable of independence as a result of their trauma.

Feeling Undeserving of Social Support

Trauma survivors who experience hyper-independence may believe that they do not deserve support or help from other people. They might have been told that needing help or receiving support is unacceptable, so they become hyper-independent to avoid having that need.

Past Neglect

Some people’s trauma includes going through periods when their needs were not met, so they can develop hyper-independent tendencies to survive. The neglect they experienced taught them that they could only rely on themselves. They might believe that others cannot or will not help them, so there is no point in seeking help or support from others.

Mistrust of Others

Fierce or hyper-independence can also emerge from reluctance to trust others. The trauma survivor might have experienced abuse by their caregivers. This can lead to feeling unsafe asking for help, as they could pair the concept of relying on another person with that person abusing them.

Coping Mechanism

Sometimes, fierce independence can be a way of coping with uncertainty. Many trauma survivors experience a loss of control as part of their trauma, and this independence on steroids might be a way that they seek to regain a sense of control over their environment.

What is the Treatment for this form of Independence?

Well, I have to be honest, the treatment is mostly in your awareness. Additionally, I would say you heal and care about this response more than you fix it or eliminate it. It is important to honor it protected you and it can stay in a milder form, even still slightly on the high end but perhaps less fierce or hyper. Hyper-independence is an extreme form of independence that can lead to personal and relational issues. The hyper-independent person can run into trouble when they are unable to meet a need without help and feel unable to seek support. They also often struggle with interpersonal relationships due to their mistrust of others. I know I did. For my first date in many years, I offered the guy $60, not even realizing of course he wouldn’t come if he can pay for his own gas! I thought I had to be independently responsible for the entire date!

I want to say support is available but that means you may have to out yourself. Therapy can only help if you reveal this as a problem you want to work on. Therapy can go at a pace that you are comfortable with, and there is no deadline by which you have to get better. Take your time finding a provider who is a good fit and know that you can let go of the maladaptive coping patterns that helped you survive your past. Below I show you how you can work on it on your own as well. I know, kind of a mixed message, but that is the thing, I KNOW how you are if you are considering this is a problem, you will need some do it yourself methods.

Although hyper-independence is not a formal diagnosis, it is a trauma and stress response. People with posttraumatic stress disorder or another mental health issue triggered by a trauma history might experience hyper-independence. I take a “holding trauma” perspective on mental health where I see all symptoms as signs of holding unprocessed emotional experience that was not entirely digested through and causing discomfort. A person experiencing hyper-independence can definitely work on healthy relationships, trust, and honoring their own limitations in therapy and on their own. Because hyper-independence is a trauma response, trauma-informed care is an important component of this treatment.

Examples of My Healing Work

The work for everyone is different because the reasons that led to hyper-independence were different.

* Letting go of perfectionism; for me this means letting people see my human side, letting my patients know “I have been late all day, I got behind in one session and can’t catch up”.

* Exploring your identity outside of doing things for others; for me this meant spending money and time in songwriting classes just for fun. It won’t go anywhere; it is just for me and is my outlet now.

* Understanding the cost of not asking for help; for me this was holding a meeting at work where I admitted, “I can’t do this without more resources, I am burning out”

* Realizing that there is help available now as adults, even if it wasn't as children; for me this meant reconnecting with my siblings who were 10 and 13 years older than me, telling them, “I need you to be regularly in my life, and I always did.”

* Normalizing asking for help and not seeing it as a sign of weakness; for me I am still working on this one! Maybe I will call my sister when I am done writing this and ask if she can help!!

* Doing an inventory of what it is costing you to not ask for help; for me this meant realizing that smiling through, all too proud to do it all the time on my own, was a self-dismissal and part of extreme loneliness.

* Learning how to delegate"; for me this one needs work, but I do let the front desk call my patients when I am out sick now and no longer do it myself!!!!

Coping With the Hidden Fierce Independence

It is essential to remember that any trauma response is a way to survive and cope in a stressful and unfair situation. While fierce independence could and does cause problems, it likely helped you survive a traumatic situation if you developed this response. You can acknowledge how this response helped you at the time while working to let go of behavior that no longer serves you. Moving past a trauma response takes time and can involve small steps forward as well as periods of regression. Be gentle with yourself and leave space for pauses, setbacks and difficult times.

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

4:30 PM PRESENTATION, DISCUSSION AND Q & A

THIS IS FAMILY FRIENDLY; Parents, Professionals, Youth, Community and Family Members are all part of the EMPOWER CHILDHOOD COMMUNITY

The Background

Recently I felt a huge call to urgency well up inside me that was also born out of an incredibly unexpected emotional trigger. I have been recovering from childhood trauma for over 35 years and in that time, I have become an adult trauma specialist and mental health counselor intent on combining the expert tools I was privileged to access into an approach called The Toolbox Approach. Before processing and reprocessing phases of therapy, I teach that in healing emotionally, mentally and neurobiologically, triggers become our classrooms. This only happens if we understand that no matter what it is that pushes down your lever, causing emotions to fire, it is all in you already.

We are all loaded with things inside that require an education and set of tools we don’t get in formal education, but we need to decipher what we carry. These things we carry show up in self-esteem struggles, relationship breakdowns, loneliness, achievement problems and over or under performing, mood imbalance, and in physical health malfunctions; to name a few.

So, when I found out that someone in my professional community had use the “safe space” assumption that one should expect when going to therapy as a ploy, and the title of “therapist” as a mask and was putting vulnerable children at risk as well as promoting others to exploit them and violate the entire concept of childhood, I knew the emotions that came up were in me already. What shocked me most was how my own healing brought me quickly to a call to urgency to hold a live event EMPOWER CHILDHOOD.

Survivors have once been victims and then turn in to advocates and healers in numerous ways. I know the forgotten stage of healing for many therapy goers is relational healing given just one therapist does not have that power to give you relational healing. Unfortunately, one therapist, or one person, can give you a relational wound in childhood or in other phases of life that can last decades. A key component of The Toolbox Approach is how to establish the emotional safety inside oneself and with others once anyone’s difficult and often traumatic experiences have been transitioned from “this happened to me” to “this happened for me”.

I realize today this trigger happened for me and my company ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always LLC, to offer a live event that explains child exploitation, sextortion, what kids need to know and what caregivers and community need to know. ENYA will temporarily pause promotion of the book and podcast supporting The Toolbox Approach to embody the approach itself by creating a community for relational healing. Many are not currently victims or survivors of this particular childhood violation, but we all share in doing for our children what often was not done for us no matter if you had “big T” trauma or not, straight talk to help you protect yourself. This will be a youth friendly event, helping us all feel held in safe and open communication.

When I was a kid there was “Stranger Danger” yet missing education on the way people establish trust with children easily by seeming “safe”. Today we can do better with CHILDHOOD EMPOWERMENT for all of those willing to joing the conversation.

ENYA will provide a presentation, offer open discussion and take questions. The following will be covered:

* What is Child Exploitation?

* How Are Children Sexually Exploited Online?

* Sextortion, the method of drawing youth in.

* What Kids and Teens Need to Know 

* Why do young people agree to do this?

* How do you know who can be trusted online?

* But how can this harm me?

* What do I do if this is happening to me?

* How can you say I won’t be in trouble?

* How can I help someone else who is in this situation?

* How do I protect myself and my friends?

* What Caregivers Need to Know 

* Why would any child or teen agree to do such a thing?

* But my child would never do that.

* Why don’t the victims tell someone or ask for help?

* How do I protect the young people I know? 

* How can I talk to my kids about sextortion?

THIS EVENT WILL BE CROSS POSTED ON THE PODCAST AND LINKED IN

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

To truly understand trauma today is to recognize that traumatic experiences are no longer just the “T” in PTSD. The word “trauma” literally means wound, shock, or injury. When we add the word “psychological” to trauma, we mean the experience of emotional distress is coming from an event that overwhelms one’s capacity to emotionally digest it. Essentially, one “holds it”. A metaphor of the digestive system can be helpful here. For example, you have heard the folklore on swallowing gum taking seven years to digest, right? Well, while this is entirely not true, it serves as a good metaphor for us. Stuck emotional experiences can take years to digest and infact many are more like swallowing metal; you will never digest it. You will just hold it there, hoping it passes through. The tools of inner work found in The Toolbox Approach reveal to you what is stuck and how you just hoped moving on would work to feel “fine” about this and eventually forget it was there. It never truly passed however, and if you are developing symptoms of poor mental health, these diagnoses you may get, are clues, but not the problem itself.

So, we are all “holding traumas”. Those of us that develop PTSD or something called Complex Trauma which remarkable is still not an official diagnosis, will require the tools to integrate parts of them damaged by the trauma to become more aware of inner resources that were not taken by trauma but certainly felt that way. However, we can all learn from the term, and awareness of our metaphorical emotional digestive system, which is more accurately called the central nervous system.

The part of your nervous system that “holds trauma” is called the information highway or polyvagal nerve that runs from the brain stem into all your organs, helping you slow digestion or activate heart rate, to respond to the threat. The precipitating event that is a potential trauma may be a one-time occurrence, or a series of occurrences perceived as seriously harmful or life-threatening to oneself or loved ones. People process experiences differently, and not everyone has the same reaction to any event; what one person experiences as trauma may not cause distress for another. At times this is largely due to resiliency factors that are outside of our control. For more information on childhood adverse experiences and your resiliency, there are assessments here that can provide insight.

Holding trauma can also be connected to the familiar term “emotional baggage.” It’s sometimes used to describe the phenomenon of carrying past trauma or so-called negative experiences through life, relationships, or a career. In fact, you may even see this reflected in the way people carry themselves, such as a tight jaw and neck frequently, chocking back words that would convey their true emotions or in someone’s posture, as if they’re carrying around an unbearable weight. It may even prevent them from moving forward in life.

Everyone carries unprocessed emotions from experiences to some degree. However, emotions that aren’t dealt with don’t just go away.

They can affect:

* the way you think about yourself

* how you react to stress

* your physical well-being

* your relationships with others

After all, emotional baggage gets its name from somewhere, right? So, we have to unpack the layers of how and where emotions get stuck so you can release what is holding you back or weighing you down in life. That is where the term HOLDING SPACE comes in. In this process, we remove a lens of wrongness over what symptoms of OCD, ADHD, substance abuse or addiction, food addiction, Generalized Anxiety, Depression, Bipolar, personality problems or other “holding” disorders are occurring because they are all evidence of holding your unique hard things that have not been processed.

What does it mean to have “held” emotions?

You may have noticed people talking about Yoga or massage as a release. I still remember the first time a hip opener got me emotional in a Yoga class in my 20’s and many people swear by a good foot massage as a basic need from their partner. Perhaps you’ve heard of people crying during yoga, massage, or acupuncture treatment because of a tender spot that, when activated, appears to lead to an emotional release. Even though you may have heard of trauma being “stored” or “trapped” in the body, that isn’t the neurobiologically accurate way to put it, kind of fuzzy science there.

However, the symptoms of traumatic stress can manifest physically. This may be because the brain associates this area with a particular memory — often on a subconscious level. When I did my training in Somatic Experiencing, I learned that each individual needs to “drop in” to the “felt sense” and learn to honor that on some level they do know where they are holding. Again, the term “Holding Space” can mean another person can hold the space for emotional and nervous system safety with you so you can feel calm enough to observe and be observed and get feedback on “where are you holding”.

I have a patient who returned to therapy feeling dejected when her panic attacks came back while she was “really doing fine for several years on my medication”. They could not believe it at first that this was a sign they were holding. In fact, they were not in their body much of the time at all but to feel exhausted. We explored that something had activated a body memory and in time they grew to feel more comfortable with the concept as they realized how much of their life was spent avoiding dropping in. Over functioning much of the felt sense away and losing it as a resource.

Emotions are constantly being generated — subconsciously or consciously — in response to the reactivation of memories or unsatisfied goal. This is the basis of somatic based understanding of “holding trauma”.

Touch may bring up emotions or a memory may create sensations in a particular area of the body. While this is usually associated with a bodily location, much is happening in something called the Polyvagal System and therefore directly connects to areas of the brain, therefore the emotional “stuck” links directly to neurobiology.

Alternatively, some believe that trauma and difficult emotions can, in fact, become literally stuck energy in the body, though this isn’t supported by scientific evidence. Treatments such as Chakra Work and Emotional Freedom Technique follow the meridian points of acupuncture and I myself have felt that I gain more awareness of my nervous system and the organ-related areas of my body, particularly the heart, lungs, intestines and reproductive organs, that are linked to personal trauma of my own and generationally.

According to Bradley Nelson, DC, trapped emotional vibrations cause surrounding tissues to vibrate at the same frequency, known as resonance.

In his book “The Emotion Code,” Nelson writes, “Each trapped emotion resides in a specific location in the body, vibrating at its own particular frequency.” This may cause you to attract more of that emotion, he says, creating a buildup or blockage.

Still, Nelson’s stance remains theoretical until further research can be done.

How do emotions get trapped?

Research as early as 1992, along with more current research, supports the mind-body connection, or the belief that a person’s mental and emotional health impacts the state of their physical health.

Examples of this lay in both the emotions of fear and shame.

If you’re in a situation where you’re afraid or ashamed, your body generates a physical response to this emotion by activating the fight-flight-freeze response. These are common emotions in relationships, despite that we are no longer engaging with the threats of being chased, eaten or starved in most relationships today, the threat response system is still for exactly that possibility.

According to Nelson, three things happen when an emotion is experienced.

* We develop an emotional vibration.

* We feel the emotion and any thoughts or physical sensations associated with it. This is where the mind and body’s interconnectedness come into play.

* We move on from the emotion by processing it.

According to Olson and other others, emotional processing occurs in the limbic structures of the brain. We constantly take in information, which generates pre-conscious autonomic nervous system responses. This sends a signal to the body, activating the corresponding emotion.

In other words, state predicts story or your “feeling” comes from what your nervous system is telling you. Now, when the second or third step mentioned above gets interrupted, the energy of the emotion becomes “held” in the body. As a result, you might experience muscle tension, pain, or other ailments. The higher the emotional intensity, the more likely it is to become trapped.

Some find it helpful to view that the “held” emotion blocks the Core Self from leading your life. The Core Self is an Internal Family Systems (IFS) theory that postulates there are “no bad part” but we become fragmented under the weight of unprocessed traumas. The parts want to express something that other protective parts think will wreck the system and stop it from moving forward. I explore the in The Toolbox Approach in the Narrative Tools/Phase of healing, although it can also serve as a Reprocessing Tool.

In IFS, we think of the Core Self as the part of us that we are born with that is naturally open, curious, and trusting, and can serve as an inner guide, while the protective parts emerge as a set of adaptive parts with strategies to protect from pain and loss.

What could be considered as repressed parts can be expressed as:

* resentment

* poor decision making

* self-sabotage

* overreaction

* increased stress and anxiety

* depression

* fatigue

As a mind-body therapist, I could say that “holding” is similar to carrying around a large satchel, no easy backpack straps and compartments, just hung over your back. It weighs us down, impacts our mood, and drains our energy. Additionally, now that I am learning about integrative health and medicine, it can also destroy body tissues and prevent normal functions of organs and glands. It’s just like a giant roadblock on information highway of your organs and central nervous system and it is hard for things to flow naturally through to all the places information needs to get to, in order to operate holistically and function well.

Held emotions and trauma

It’s impossible to have a conversation about trapped emotions without exploring trauma, especially how the brain experiences it.

Nearly everyone experiences trauma at some point in their lives.

According to a recent survey of almost 69,000 adults across 6 continents, over 70% of respondents reported exposure to a traumatic event, while 30.5% were exposed to 4 or more.

Trauma can come about through life experiences like:

* a breakup or divorce

* a major life change

* a major illness

* a physical violation

* the death of a loved one

* infidelity in a relationship

* loss of a job

* an experience of violence, discrimination, or racism

Trauma can impact cognitive processes. It especially affects memory processing and the ability to recall factual information, also known as explicit memory. As a result, the traumatic experience or memory is not “logged” properly in the brain. When it comes to an extremely overwhelming experience, like a trauma, the brain encodes the traumatic memories as pictures or body sensations. When triggered, the brain may disconnect from reality or replay the traumatic event in the form of a flashback. This is known as dissociation or psychological disconnect.

These sensory fragments remain in the mind and interrupt the brain’s natural recovery process.

We can compare traumatic memories to a virus in our encoding system, where unprocessed events can cause our mental and physical processes to malfunction.

When trauma isn’t processed or resolved on its own, it may linger far past the actual event.

This is often seen in people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition that develops after a person undergoes terrifying or life-threatening events.

Research has proven that those with current PTSD have a smaller hippocampus, a center for emotions and memory in the brain. This leads to trouble processing the experience and is another example of where the phrase “holding trauma” comes from.

The stress of difficult experiences that are not being processed leads to the release of the hormone cortisol is a way that can lead to adverse outcomes. Cortisol, which is a part of the fight-flight-freeze response, can start to dump in too prolonged a way. Prolonged stress damages the hippocampus, which may show up as abnormal blood flow or reduced size, again affecting the release and we “hold” stress too long. As a result, your body may remain in this hypervigilant state even if you’re not consciously thinking of the traumatic event.

Where are held emotions stored in the body?

Ever feel a tightness in your chest during an anxiety-inducing situation? Or do you notice that it feels good to stretch your hips after an emotionally draining day? Where one person feels tension or sensitivity in their body might not be the same for another.

Some studies, however, provide a baseline for where emotions are generally experienced. But there’s still more research needed on this subject for conclusive takeaways. Still, researchers have found that different emotions were associated with different bodily sensations that were generally the same for all 700 participants across the board.

For example, anger, fear, and anxiety showed increased activity in the chest and upper body. This may explain the origins of expressions like “hot-headed” or “carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders.” These emotions can also kickstart the sympathetic nervous system to create a quick response in the body. That’s why you may feel your heart pulsing or your muscles tightening when you become nervous or stressed.

A chart in the study references where these feelings were found to be experienced in the body. See a summary below:

Additionally, the same researchers conducted a follow-up study that found the intensity of a feeling directly correlated with the intensity of physical and mental sensations. Feelings are ever-changing, and this research may be helpful for those who have trouble understanding their emotions.

Acknowledge your feelings

The more you understand your emotional world, the more you can digest your feelings in healthy ways. The first step is to connect with and understand your emotions. People with repressed emotions may have trouble identifying their feelings, which is why it can be valuable to engage in inner work with a professional like we have shown can be done at HOLDING SPACE CONCIERGE THERAPIES. Again, I encourage you to search sources such as Headway and LifeStance Health for this.

You can do this by using psychological tools, like those found in The Toolbox Approach.

Work through past trauma

Often, there are things we carry around for years that stem back to childhood. Some examples of past trauma include:

* abuse, including mental, emotional, physical, or sexual

* neglect

* loss of a loved one

* separation from a parent or caregiver

* bullying

* dysfunction at home

Unresolved childhood trauma can show up in many ways, including:

* self-blaming

* casting blame on others

* feeling depressed

* withdrawing from social activities

In order to work through trauma, you will need tools to work through the unmet emotional needs and how to operate in the present with that awareness. There may be grief and loss to process. Once you’ve allowed yourself that grief, through varied tools that can act like stages of healing, you can acknowledge the adaptive ways you developed as a result and feel yourself developing a better relationship and lightness with yourself.

For example, you may have developed a coping strategy to be independent that eventually results in feelings of isolation. Without recognizing the way your holding this need to be independent, you might start to feel you have to be and feel trapped and alone. On the other hand, if you realize your isolation comes from your adaptive strategy, you can identify the root of the issue and modify your strategy to better meet your true needs.

While this is only an overview of “Holding Trauma”. There is a whole library here already to explore. I hope you do and encourage you to subscribe.

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Today we focus on Internal Family Systems as a tool in the Narrative Healing set of tools.

(The below is from the Narrative Tools set in the Toolbox Approach, TOOL #4. An excerpt from “You Are Not Broken” to be released in 2025)

PARTS WORK AND INTERNAL FAMILY SYSTEMS (IFS)

While I admit I define myself as a trauma therapist, I use parts work and Internal Family Systems (IFS) in nearly all of my sessions. Even for those who come into therapy knowing that trauma is the core of what we will work on, we all have things that have happened in life that won’t reveal themselves in well-ordered stories. This tool’s approach recognizes the impact of all the things that have happened to us on the innermost sense of self. It suggests that to hold everything inside the “Self”, we develop sub-selves and become somewhat fragmented. So, Internal Family Systems (IFS) focuses on helping individuals heal and integrate their fragmented parts of self.  

"Parts" is a key concept in IFS, and it is assumed an individual is still very "sane" despite identifying and having many parts. It is not a pathological splitting to have parts, as in multiple personalities or dissociative identity disorder. One of the key techniques used in IFS is the concept of "parts work." This approach recognizes that individuals have multiple parts of themselves, each with their own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Experiences we have, even relationships, can cause these parts to become fragmented and disconnected, leading to feelings of internal turmoil and confusion. 

As readers, by now, hopefully we have a therapeutic relationship, as it is extremely important that you trust these tools as we explore finding parts of oneself that have not been fully seen and hold emotional pain that is protected by other parts. I will explain this now.  

According to the founder of IFS, Richard Schwartz, Ph.D. (2021, p. 6), basic thinking on a daily basis involves parts “talking to each other and to you constantly about things you have to do or debating the best course of action, and so on.” Each part has its own beliefs, feelings, and characteristics and a distinct role in the overall system. They are clustered into the following three groups (Sweezy & Ziskind, 2013; IFS Institute, n.d.): 

Managers

Managers are a protective group of parts that attempt to keep us organized and safe, running our day-to-day lives. Over time, they may push for perfectionism and even inflict harm in their pursuit of safety. 

Exiles

Exiles are the injured parts of us and have typically experienced trauma. Exiled by the managers, they can become increasingly extreme, ultimately overriding the managers to become who we are. 

Firefighters

Firefighters are another form of protection that “put out the emotional fire at any cost,” often starting backfires. They do so in several ways, including unhealthy or unhelpful behavior, such as alcohol and drug abuse and eating disorders (Sweezy & Ziskind, 2013, p. xviii). 

In You Are Not Broken (releasing 2025), we are saying let’s break free from fixing ourselves and so this tool, Internal Family Systems, establishes how parts of us have stories that have been ignored. Parts of us need to talk and have been thought of as too vulnerable or disruptive to the moving on parts that think they are protecting us by managing or impulsively ignoring or suppressing the stories of other parts. There are no correcting “irrational beliefs” like some therapies that base themselves on us having only one mind. Those theories relying on the single or mono-mind model may lead us to fear or dislike ourselves, believing we only have one mind that we struggle to control and that we demand to create output in the form of solutions. 

As a therapy IFS Therapy has four goals, I will list them below. As a tool, you will see how I have modified it for use inside the Toolbox Approach and as one of the Narrative Tools for that stage of inner work and healing. The four goals are: 

* To liberate parts from the roles they have been forced into, freeing them to be who they were designed to be. 

* To restore faith in the self and in self-leadership. 

* To re-harmonize the inner system. 

* To encourage self-leadership in your interactions with the world. 

As your guide, I need to be invited in, so I will use my work with creating and using the IFS tool on myself. I had to explore the parts of myself that were wounded by trauma and identify how these parts are showing up in my current life. Mind you, it was not work to stop them showing up but to understand them so they have space to show up differently; because they are seen and heard, this often starts to gradually happen.  

This tool helps us identify and communicate with our parts without judgment and in a more compassionate way. By acknowledging and validating each part's unique perspective, individuals begin to build trust and develop a more cohesive sense of self. A method called unburdening involves the tool, and our new conversation, helping us process and release the emotional and physical sensations associated with unprocessed experiences that are the condition of a divided self.

When we recognize the impact of a divided self on the internal system and begin working to heal and integrate fragmented parts, we can experience greater self-awareness, emotional regulation, and resilience. IFS highlights the belief that every person has inner wisdom and a self that is compassionate, curious, and capable of healing. In IFS, we become more of our Core Self as we witness parts as a resource for healing. The self is seen as the leader of the internal system, and this new view, with the use of the tool, works to help the client cultivate a relationship with this part of themselves as they see the Core Self as a leader of the system more and more. The Toolbox Approach helps you start Internal Family Systems or “parts work” on your own, then consider if you would be interested in a therapist as a guide. 

The Script: 

Imagine you are in a tiled lobby of an office building waiting in front of a bank of elevators. You have pressed the button, “up”, and you are waiting to be scooped up to the second floor. The elevator arrives and you ascend to the second floor and begin walking down a hallway to a room labeled “conference room”. You enter and find a table of seated “parts of self”. These are all the parts of you that form your Internal Family. They are things like fear, shame and vulnerability. They are actual time capsule versions of you like you at age 5-, or 16-year-old you. Some parts can only be heard faintly, and some seem almost ignored. Each of them will fall into a main role, Manager, Firefighter, or Exile, but that is not important as you start the meeting. You are Curious Core Self, and you lead the meeting inside the conference room. A question has been on your mind, and you allow yourself to announce it to the group. Allow yourself to stumble with the way to ask it. Start writing it down until you get to a question.  

MY WORK WITH HYPERVIGILANT PART:

The Tool at Work 

MY QUESTION (From Curious Core Self): “I want to ask about this anxiety we experience, this weight of responsibility to other people because we feel their experience so deeply that it is like a call to notice everything they go through. We have done a lot of work on it, but I think we need to be noticed in return. We seem to be operating to be noticed for acts of giving and helping but not for our inner experience, our struggle, or who we are. Can we talk about this?”

* Hypervigilant Body Part: “I think I am doing better not over-exercising and trying to start the day with acceptance that my body wants to flee but it will do yoga and know that it’s a feeling of safe movement feeling myself, not running away, that I want. I still find myself, through processing someone else though. I have nightmares and then I feel sensitive to the pain in other people instead of my own. There are whispers to flee all the time still. I start to be rigid with the health conditions I have, too rigid with taking supplements and keeping my diet clean. It has been lonely to come and go into myself. I guess it is good that I miss her, the grounded one, when she is gone, but I feel too open to noticing how other people may need more help than I do when she is gone.” 

* Hypervigilant Mind Part: “I feel better finding my truth that I am an empath and felt things from a very young age. I overtaxed my thinking too young and it is in me now to do this, I have made my brain habitually fast, so it makes sense but I am lonely too. I put together a pretty accurate story of someone's pain and it gets me caring for people like I am their therapist when I am not in that role and it is a real-life relationship. My therapeutic relationships are so real and authentic it feels like I should be able to do it all the same way in real life. I feel not good enough and I am constantly aware I am thinking more about others than they are of me.” 

* Author Part: “I think we should put this all in the book, we are doing The Toolbox Approach, we are not broken just like the book says, this isn’t a problem that needs to be fixed. Loneliness is a part that probably needs to talk here too” 

* Loneliness Part: “I think I have changed and that I also go back and forth feeling like a discarded child and a grown woman. As a child, I felt dumped in daycare while bad things happened, and I must smile and make bad friends and keep adult secrets. Then a passionate woman who can choose who gets her secret light. Then sometimes I just want to shine and not worry about any of it. And while I want someone to notice me, I think me as a woman is getting noticed. Me as a child did not know how to tell people they were missing things about my experience and that I was scared they would have to stop their lives for me and I would be bad. I think my loneliness has changed, I see things and sense things and I know what to do to help people but I am lonely because no one real is asking me to do that, that is what a therapist does, what am I to do as a woman? I am a bit afraid I have spent too long healing and I don’t want anyone to break me, so I will choose to be alone out of protection. That will be the same pattern essentially as holding trauma and that makes me feel lonely for myself.  

What this taught me is that I was about to catch loneliness as a sneaky protector, keeping me too safe. I was possibly blocking a stage in relational healing that would essentially impede growth. I was in love with working on myself and then protecting “the work”, it was the safest relationship I knew of and the only one I had really let in since I tried and failed at love at the beginning of my journey, a year after my mother passed. This was extremely eye opening. We can feel very safe inside working on ourselves and be enticed by protective loneliness.  

Now, let's look at an organic use of Internal Family Systems (IFS) that came out of a session with Jake. 

SESSION WITH JAKE

Why Am I So Afraid, I Thought I Was Supposed to Feel Better? 

Jake and I have been working in Internal Family Systems and on his “parts” for several months. He came to therapy 5 years ago to focus on addiction, then underlying mental health conditions, then stabilizing his medication, a deteriorating marriage and now he has come to me to face his trauma. I have been speaking to him about his mindset “why is this happening to me?” and if he can use his parts, the idea that there are members of his internal family that need to learn from a wise adult, that he can now cultivate, to move to “what can I learn from this?”. The wise adult is a part he has not met that is more an integration of parts, yet there is still a sense this can guide him. I invite him to lean into this sense, with my presence as comfort. I will hold your fear, I tell him, temporarily, and you can manage it after that.  We talk about both the father he never had and the one he needed, and lastly the Father Part he has to become now too, in order to avoid repeating the same patterns in his lineage. 

He looks up at me after a time, we have just talked about his father teaching him the misery of manhood. His feelings that despite how adult him knows his father was just complaining about work, there is a sense of overwhelming confusion he gets whenever there is criticism of any form, real or perceived, from the newer adult world of these 20 out of his 43 years. Dad’s posture and tone, his face as it moves from and between complaining about work bitterly and then it switches to his mother, at or about her, he isn’t sure. Then it switches to him too, sometimes there is a belt involved. There hadn’t needed to be, however, to make this traumatic. This hatred felt like a blow in and of itself and it all landed on his innocent face.  I can see it, the boy. I invite him to see it too. He looks at me and tells me how scared he is to feel this, or anything. Not in words, he tells me with his eyes.  

So I asked him to stand up with me. We do, together, and I tell him to assume the superhero pose. I ask him if he’s got it, and he has. So, I sit down. I invite him to put this innocent boy behind him and face his father. I tell him we are slicing through the past, but it will not hurt. 

These moments are the best. When the joy of this work comes in knowing a person has just found a truth about what they are doing here in this therapy, finding out how to live the life they already have with reverence for the sacred skill that is needed. Jake “gets it”.  

He looks different now, when he comes to session now, more whole. We’ve melted his resistance and he is stronger, not anything like the prissy boy his Dad would claim was his fate for having feelings. Not a boy at all. A new man. 

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Even when I am not a therapist, I am an emotional empath. I can feel people and get into conversations that end up being like mini therapy sessions frequently because it helps me understand if what I am picking up on is separate from what I am going through or related somehow, directly or indirectly. The conversations I get into with others sometimes lead to someone telling me they regret not having shared something or known what to share or say regarding a relationship. They tell me the “nots” and how that lead to the ball of unresolved and the relationship is like a stuck experience, unfinished. We move on timewise and we don’t emotionally somehow. This sense that we all have a phantom conversation that we are not having because it is too late or too long or some other “too” is something I pick up on and relate to from my own incomplete network of things that are moved on from but not behind me. That is why I created this special tool for my Toolbox Approach to inner work.

The Toolbox Approach is a set of tools in three areas: 1. Detecting your misshapen narrative about your life 2. Reprocessing or reshaping your narrative 3. Relationally healing your relationship with self and others. The Narrative Tools found in area one help you explore what is hard to put into words. For example, people come to therapy and say, “well I grew up with divorced parents from age 5, one of whom was a recovered alcoholic from age 16 on”. That can seem like the narrative to focus on for “I think that is why I never got a real childhood and have so many control issues today”. Somehow, all of that doesn’t help a person change that narrative and only reinforces, “so how do I fix that”. Of course, you can’t fix the way you grew up, but you can understand the meaning you made of it and held on a subconscious level, beyond “control issues”.

This Narrative Tool I created, The Phantom Conversation, is one of those tools for understanding the meaning you made out a relationship in which you have a lot of unspoken and unresolved things floating around. You may have defined yourself out of this relationship subconsciously because it was subliminal feedback on how you are received in the world by others. You don’t think of it as a thing that you can work on but even reading this it is starting to well up in you, “I know this has affected me”.

You are not going to know in the traditional way that you need to work on this relationship, in fact it is VERY POSSIBLE you cannot work on it. This person could be gone from your life in various ways, and it is not possible to have an actual conversation. Conversely, they may be in your life, but the prospect of a healing conversation is akin to “when pigs fly” or somehow very unlikely or inconceivable. It may be a relationship with plenty of conversation or interaction but never that “thing”. It may be a relationship where you tried to talk about it, and it went poorly or damaged the relationship to bring it up and you are afraid now.

The Phantom Conversation Tool starts like this:

Close your eyes and cultivate calm by breathing gently in through your nostrils and then lightly blow out your mouth like cooling down a hot drink. Feel the sense of it in your hands and that you have all the patience in the world to let it cool until it’s ready. Just cultivate that kind of calm, the kind that you sense will reward you and feels natural. Then gently start to consider someone else is there starting to pressure you in some way. It is not a nice pressure; you feel like you have no time suddenly and there might not be a way to stay in the comfort and peace of this. Look to who it is, this person is not easy to talk to lately or historically, they don’t or haven’t understood something. You will need to explain it if you are to stay in the calm patience you had. This person is a Phantom version of the person they really are today most likely. They are in the place of your most misunderstood moments with them. You will need to start a Phantom Conversation to get them to resolve the pressure. You will need to put down the drink and take a bracing breath for the Phantom Conversation. Open your eyes, here is some structure:

I saw and heard you _______________________________________________________________________ The story that has been happening for me from all that is _______________________________________________________________________ Over and over again this feels like __________________________________________________________________

I tried to tell you that I need ____________________________________________________________________

But you ____________________________________________________________________

I don’t even want the things I used to, but I still feel ___________________________________________________________________

I want you to understand what it has been like for me, it has been _____________________________________________________________________

I want to release from this because _____________________________________________________________________

You can help me release from this by

______________________________________________________________________

I can accept you may not help me release from this by

______________________________________________________________________

I know I never told you like this before because

______________________________________________________________________

This is private and I think now I need to let myself

_______________________________________________________________________

Take some time to enjoy this inner work you have done. Exhale and feel it as a job well done. Below is an example and don’t feel bad if you have skipped ahead and not done the work yet. Use the example, if you can, as encouragement, this is from a combination of individuals using it in therapy.

“I saw and heard you say I was not going to finish college if I dropped out and tried to go back. The story that is happening to me from all that is that you wanted to bring me down for some reason and you did. Over and over, I feel like you saw something in me that was both true and not true and I wondered if you loved me or hated me. I tried to tell you that I needed encouragement, but I don’t think you got any from your parents and you didn’t want to give anymore. You were out of giving; from someplace that I think was there once, but before me. I don’t want the things I used to; I don’t want encouragement from you, but I still feel thrown away by you. I want you to understand what it has been like for me, it has been like I can’t connect to anyone correctly now, I am always afraid they will toss me away. I want to release from this because it makes me care too much and then isolate myself and I want to find release to focus on myself and self-acceptance. You can help me release from this by telling me you know you will not change, and it has nothing to do with me. I can accept you may not help me release from this by focusing on going to therapy and writing. I know I never told you like this before because I was afraid you could hate me in a more permanent way I don’t entirely understand even now as I write this. This is private and I will not tell you most likely because I know now, I need to let myself heal in the present and figure that out.”

If you were not able to do the activity, try again now using the support from the above example based on the past year of use in over 1,000 therapy sessions. While I have conducted well over that amount in 17 years, I reformat the tools based on my own inner work. That is “patient zero” for this tool I brought you today. Work on!

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

There are times in life when you suddenly feel very happy, and you literally experience it as a tingle of energy running down your spine and arms, this is interoception. Another example of interoception could be horror, such as in, “It made my skin crawl.” On the other hand, peak emotional experiences during exposure to emotionally meaningful songs, speeches, or art pieces will universally produce what scientists refer to as aesthetic chills or frisson. Opposites of peak emotion, like nausea, disgust, and sudden loss of bladder or bowel control, are still expressions of embodied feelings. This is remarkable access, if we were to only focus on the skin’s reaction such as in chills that "made the hair on my back stand up," this alone is a remarkable embodied feeling and access to a resource of what is happening beyond words. It acts as a somatic marker (body memory) that is tied to this abstract emotion and it is unique to your power of interoception that you interpret as a meaningful moment or a terrified one.

What I have to do through Somatic Awareness is “sense” how a comment from childhood that my client is sharing, for example, “you are a failed abortion”, jams my own system. I sense this in order to guide them to where it is stuck in theirs and for relief that it can be known and released without the rehashing of talk that would likely not get very far. If their eyes shoot daggers at me and their jaw locks, I hold it and understand it has to be at me temporarily so I can see it and understand.

My songwriting class is my outlet for the felt sense of understanding burnout I can experience. However, today it became a platform for a message I didn’t know I was holding inside me; “Try a Litte Tenderness”. By this I mean, try understanding that someone else has a process they are going through. Allow yourself to feel it without diagnosing it or psychoanalyzing. Understand through the felt sense and release from the idea we trigger each other intentionally.

The songwriting class prompted me last week to “write about someone you know”. I wrote about my “triggered” neighbor upstairs and it became a profound metaphor. The Lady Upstairs is someone who needed my understanding. The Lady Upstairs is Me and You. I hope you enjoyed listening to this side bar on understanding today. Here now is the song and please consider clicking on the link to the article Does Time Heal?

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I don’t know if I want to do this. Share my stuff, is that really going to help? I just know I am compelled to face something. What is it?

~A Secret Thought in Everyone

Hopefully you have been following along and have read previous articles on my Toolbox Approach to looking inside your life and your difficulties and already know the concept. Briefly, you don’t know what to look for because you lack the tools for doing so. There are three sets of tools in The Toolbox Approach: Narrative Tools, Reprocessing Tools and Relational Healing Tools. I want to democratize mental health such that attending therapy can be a tool however one that you may select after some work using the Toolbox Approach. If you come to therapy, you will come with authority, knowing what you need the relationship for and what area you need another person to help you see more deeply into. I am a therapist myself but my “beef” with therapy is that assumes a great amount of trust in another right when the individual is likely at their lowest point in the self-trust and other-trust categories.

Today we are exploring a tool from the Narrative Tools set. This set is for looking beyond the story you would tell a therapist or a friend in words. For example,

“I think I should be on medication for ADHD, I don’t know I have it for sure, but everyone tells me I do, and my son’s school is requiring he be tested. I know it could be genetic. I never did well explaining what it is like up there, and I end up looking very unreliable, it’s a problem”.

On the surface it would be fine for this individual to seek out therapy and possibly medication for this issue. It would likely work out well for him and he would drop out of therapy and feel fine about it. Sometimes people stay on longer and dive deeper and that is beneficial, again, they drop off feeling fine, better and pleased. Sometimes the match between a provider and an individual is not great and some of this “better” gets delayed or an individual gets turned off and they find their own way of feeling “better”.

But let me get to the point. I think the above is a problem, I think we need to do better. I think people need tools prior to therapy. Rarely does anyone get a tool that basically shows them “Did you know you have to face this?”. We all sense there are deeper things, but we will immediately revert to working on any improvement that is on the surface of things because it is easier. We have a more than 5 senses, all of us. Often, we cut off from the most important other 6th and 7th senses. One of other senses I want to focus on now is interoception, the way we gather information internally to sense “I am thirsty”, “I am hot”, “I am uncomfortable with that man staring at me”. We don’t often use this sense to detect what we need to address in our lives. That is why the Narrative Tools can help you to do what then the interoceptive felt sense can validate once we get there deeper in your story or personal narrative beyond what you know to talk about. You will get that “oh, I do need to face that” feeling.

As the “I am uncomfortable with that man staring at me” example above demonstrates, it is a “felt sense”. This may be a combination of increased heart rate and tension in our chest, a constriction of the jaw and tensing or pressure from the gaze somehow. It is all the feeling of the experience that calculates “I am uncomfortable”. If this is coming up it is a challenge to put it all into words, “why do I feel this way?”. The Narrative Tool I show you today helps you face things that you might not mention are the problem but very likely are the things that form the foundation of other problems, you feel them more than you can put into words.

The man with ADHD from above is also struggling with parental guilt and fear he is becoming like his mother was. In some ways he is a more present and stable parent, but he also knows his kids do not make that comparison and he is afraid to look at the part of him he never dared to before coming a parent. Now he fears, “facing all that”. Just going on medication and talking about being unreliable may protect him too much from deeper work that is needed. All this can be missed without tools for allowing him to go deeper, even if a therapist does not guide him there.

This tool is one I couple inside the Narrative Tools because it helps tell a part of your story that you may not volunteer in words. One thing I know we all hate to face is disappointment. When I was reformatting therapeutic tools for use on myself, I spent a long time avoiding this one. I tried therapy and found I could not find a therapist I had the bond of trust feeling with and in fact I had this profound lack of trust in all my relationships. I became the trustworthy one instead of facing the profound disappointment I had in myself for never trusting another person fully. I subconsciously repeat a pattern of over sacrificing myself for others and ruin the chance of anyone ever knowing me enough to do the same. I have changed this profoundly with this tool.

It starts like this:

Close your eyes, breathe in through your nostrils like you are drawing in menthol cooling breath up to your eyes and infusing them with whatever color for clarity you like, mine was green for growth. Then let this rise to the crown of your head and create an open feeling that hovers over as protection as you ask yourself:

Who comes immediately to mind when I think of a person in my life whose connection to me has been disappointing, possibly to the point of heartache or heartbreak?

* Keep in mind this may be a friend, lover, parent, sibling, colleague, child, partner, teacher, coach, mentor, or otherwise.

* Stay in what comes up right now and do not resist if it doesn’t seem to make sense.

Let the image of the person form as they seem to you in that disappointment. This may not be as they are today. Notice this sense of time. Allow yourself to feel it in your body as you explore areas with your breath. Breathe in with this into your feet and exhale. Breathe into this with expansion into your thighs. Breathe into your hips and see the image enhanced as you exhale. Allow a series of images display them to you as there may be a montage of this iconic person. Aim to bring up four images across time. Notice that you are not re-experiencing the disappointment but just the image of the person. Feel this impacting you with no need to explain why. Breathe in and exhale.

MY EXPERIENCE

I knew I need to face disappointment in relationships for a long time. This awareness came to me most profoundly when a lengthy break up stretched into striking wisdom. I struggled to detach from what could have been because I was still struggling with what could have been in my family relationships if I had shared the violations I faced in childhood. When the relationship was finally completed, I noticed he had been a combination of my mother, my father and a recapitulation of my family dynamic entirely, that is why the disappointment was so wrenching, it was so deeply familiar. Consequently, my father, whom I held on a pedestal all my life but was never really quite sure was proud of me or saw me as brave, strong and smart, or even really thought of me that much at all, asked me to be his healthcare proxy and power of attorney. I felt oddly important in his life. Then my brother texted me “you are a very loyal person” and intoned that not many people act like I did in his life, that I was unique. I finally saw it was time to face my pattern of sacrificing myself without telling a sole. No wonder I felt this invisible ache and shame. Maybe my family does see who I am?

When you do this, you need to be aware that someone you love may come up. The people we love are probably the most disappointing of all, this is a tool to look at yourself, not one to point the blame at others in your life. It helps you see your pain clearly and face what you need to. It is not about the other person being viewed in a factual way at all. This is YOUR PROCESS and not the relational work with that person but the relational work with yourself. Here is my experience:

The image that came up for me was my father. First as frozen snapshot with me on his lap, the image of us I think I was always trying to deserve again. I realized I pined after this “place” in his field of attention, and I sacrificed my troubled experiences to be that happy little girl who was allowed to sit on his lap and cuddle.

The next image was him in a light gray suit, a pink tie, very professional. I realized I felt small and less important than this suit somehow. This was a man of importance, and he had meetings to attend. I hear gravel in my experience, and I am sure it is the driveway and both times I am sleeping as he is coming and going in his car to and from work.

The next image that comes is me watching my father sleep. He is suffering a migraine from working too hard and trying to solve all the problems at the school he was an administrator at, and I know I will never tell him what I have been going through, I can’t give him more to deal with.

The next time I see him, he is angry and tense but trying to hide it. I am crying. He is silent and I am bad somehow. He doesn’t understand I have sacrificed everything to keep him from knowing things about me. I think I have to help him achieve his goals and somehow our roles are reversed. I feel alone.

I stopped here. I am a therapist, so I knew to set the tool for four images only. Narrative Tools are not about reprocessing, there is a readiness that occurs naturally when parts of the narrative are revealed as unfinished. Then the reprocessing tools are there for that part of your process. At times a therapist is helpful here if you hold trauma. The reprocessing tools will be offered in these Substack posts and on the ENYA Podcast, follow below.

The last imagery experience was the most profound for me. It helped me understand my pattern in relationships. I reversed the role of receiving love so habitually I have spent a lifetime of giving without letting much in. This, I know, is a trauma response called fawning. The trauma can also, for anyone, just be the series of relational hurts in your life that have accumulated with repetition. Fight, flight, freeze and fawn are the survival or threat responses. We also know now they are relational stress responses. Here are very simplistic definitions of what is now called fight, flight, freeze, and fawn:

* Fight: facing any perceived threat aggressively.

* Flight: running away from danger.

* Freeze: unable to move or act against a threat.

* Fawn: immediately acting to try to please to avoid any conflict.

When one feels threatened, relationally or otherwise, the body rapidly responds to imminent danger. The underlying goal of springing into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, is to decrease, end, or evade the danger to return to a state of calm and control. The stress response occurs when the demands of the environment are greater than our perceived ability to cope with them.

Now I Knew I Had to Face This

Knowing I had profoundly changed my psychology by keeping 5 years of childhood trauma a secret for 35 years was something I was facing privately already. As I saw the pattern played out in nearly every relationship I entered, I knew that attachment wounds and the attachment theory tools could help me. Those exist here too in Substack, LinkedIn and The ENYA Podcast.

The relationships where I was professional healer were healthy and all about using that superpower that I honed through holding trauma and studying and training for decades; be there for the witnessing of another’s experience as they see it and feel and reflect back what they cannot process on their own. Now, I needed to truly heal myself as a woman and step out of the wounds of my childhood and embody the safety I sought was not one others could take away ever again. When I saw that my adaptation was not my true self but a sort of holding on to suffering, I really wanted to address it. That is the power of the tools.

What I learned was that the fawning response I often had related to an anxious attachment and deep fear of abandonment. This linked to my experience of abandoning myself before I even knew there was a me to honor and stand up for. The tools for attachment wounds can be found here and in the podcast. This is also a great time to consider if you want to use therapy as a tool. Be sure to tell your potential therapist you are already doing the work and have been introduced to some tools you would like a live companion to support you in using.

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Toolbox Approach to healing unprocessed life experiences or stuck concepts about yourself and what has happened in your life has three core sets of tools.

* Narrative Tools

* Reprocessing Tools

* Relational Healing Tools

This last set of tools includes the tool of this community, ENYA. The resources are nothing without all of you, absorbing them and taking them to heart. This song I created today is for elucidating, there is no healing unless we do it together. So I made this place for you!

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

“I can’t believe it, he told me he didn’t know how to respond to my text so he just didn’t, FOR THREE DAYS!! I don’t think I can be in a relationship like this. That was a serious text about me going off birth control. He said he wants to move in with me and ‘get serious’ but I want to be in love with a man not a child! I am so disappointed and yet I love him, or I thought I did. I don’t know, I just can’t see him being reliable and there for me if he just cops out when something doesn’t make sense! Did I miss a red flag, does he even love me? He is so on top of things in his business life, can he learn? You have to help me, we have been together for two years, what if I have to walk away? I don’t know if he can love me correctly, he seems damaged all of a sudden and like, I don’t know, not capable!”

This is an example of someone in the throws of realizing she is in a relationship with someone who hesitates to take responsibility or make commitments and has started to behave less like a grown person and more like a child or teen. “Arrested development” is a term that describes this condition. It arises when a person is “stuck” at an early phase of emotional development. Causes of arrested development vary. This psychological phenomenon describes people who fail to progress emotionally, socially, or psychologically beyond a certain point in their lives. They work and present as functioning adults but eventually a profound stagnation is visible to those that try to be closer. This stagnation can have profound effects on their overall well-being and relationships.

Causes of Arrested Development

Arrested development can result from trauma, grief, or neglect, however, these are broad categories, so to expand; it may occur when a child, preteen, or adolescent is subject to an experience that they are unable to resolve and feel isolated from adequate support. This can present like a trauma no matter the situation, often because it is linked to lack of parental nurturing. Parents are not perfect so even if it is not overt lack of nurturance such as in addiction, physical abuse, imprisonment or an untreated mental health condition; nurturing can be absent due to death, career demands, divorce, too many other kids or other unintended reasons.

If the child doesn’t get the nurturing required, their psychological development may not move ahead. Essentially, they get stuck. In fact, they may remain frozen at the stage they are into adulthood and beyond. Adults can be frozen at a stage of emotional or psychological maturity in many manifestations. At times there is still a boundary issue with a parent whom they still live with as an adult and they may shirk other relationships with the mindset they can’t leave the parent and risk losing that bond of co-dependency. Conversely, they may feel they still require the parent to be there in some way as an adult and feel they need to consult them on everything, feeling they cannot make decisions on their own. Adult children who remain in a dependent or co-dependent relationship with a parent often experience arrested development.

Aside from the initial trauma, grief or neglect, the resistance or unwillingness to assume adult responsibilities further arrests their development into a mature adults as they may refrain from or delay marrying, having children, or buying a home. Subconsciously they still feel like a child who cannot face these things and may minimize they are “just not ready yet”. This is different from knowing you have things to work on or accepting the aspect of unprocessed trauma that hold one back. This stance is denied avoidance and child-like excuses for not facing adult responsibilities.

Additionally, a struggle with alcohol or substance or other addiction such as porn or gaming, gambling or hoarding, may develop stalling engagement with adult interests that are empowering. This will accumulate into having difficulty entering into and participating in committed relationships outside of those that have been there for decades. At times, some relational mistakes have been made that are hidden from and avoided, such as having children of their own with multiple partners. There is a general facade of parenting equally whereas the other parents are more responsible, organized and engaged with the “raising”.

Other Causes of Arrested Development

Some think that arrested development is an inherited psychological condition. But most believe that it’s a child’s defense system against psychological or emotional pain and that childhood trauma and unresolved issues are often the primary cause of arrested development.

Traumatic events experienced during childhood, such as abuse, neglect, or the loss of a loved one, can impede emotional and social development. A good way to acknowledge there are things you may hold from your childhood is to take the assessments at the link below:

Get your Aversive Childhood Experience (ACE) and Resiliency Scores

If these, often relational, traumas may seem like they are not single events and therefore because they create a collective “normal to me” experience, they are not addressed and processed. If this happens, individuals whose major developmental years are impacted, don’t recognize it as such and they may remain stuck in certain emotional states, unable to move forward and reach their full potential. Presenting like an adult at work or in controlled setting but inwardly suffering severe emotional immaturity.

For example, a child who loses a parent may process that loss effectively, if they are supported by others. This is a resiliency or protective factor. However a child who doesn’t have support or understand the loss, may be unable to process and release their grief effectively. Being unable to process their grief may cause them to remain stuck in a pattern of overly attending to others and reacting poorly if they are not cared for back, as if “hey, you are not playing fair”. Individuals who wall off like children then do not get adult support or companionship and deepen their wound.

Arrested development can generally be fueled by a fear of change and a reluctance to take risks. This fear may stem from past failures, rejection, or a lack of self-confidence. As a result, those who suffer from arrested development may avoid stepping out of their comfort zones, resisting opportunities for personal growth and development. Their fear of change acts as a barrier, keeping them trapped in a state of emotional and social stagnation.

Treatment

Some believe healing may happen through life experiences (e.g., “adulting”), however that is often situational and support and intentional individuals who take interest in helping are often a key ingredient. Understanding relationships, ones where the partner or friend can encourage addressing trauma, can gently confront the fact that they can only move on if they encounter an adult who helps them effectively process their trauma. The stage of professional therapy may only be helpful if there is real life relational support first. That person also must demonstrate behavior appropriate to the next phases of development and be assured to have no ulterior motive.

The recovery strategies for Arrested Development are often akin to those of working through trauma. The Toolbox Approach I have created consists of 3 stages with tools unique to each stage: 1. Narrative Tools 2. Reprocessing Tools 3. Relational Healing Tools. The ENYA Podcast is a great starting place to learn this approach.

Symptoms and Psychology of Arrested Development

Some people may exhibit a kind of insatiable desire for material gain or social value, such as status, or power. They may also have emotional immaturity or irrational fear. and may develop addictions and be prone to blame others for their misfortunes. People with arrested development may also struggle with emotional regulation and can not even know how they feel when asked. They may find it challenging to manage their emotions effectively, leading to outbursts of anger, impulsivity, or emotional shutdown. Lastly, confusion with how others feel about them and being quick to have resentment are also present. At times it can form into narcissistic personality disorder but Arrested Development can also become an insecure attachment style called Dismissive Avoidant and not a personality disorder.

The difficulty with these conditions of immaturity and trauma are that they are formed at a very young age. An adult seeking help may present with another problem and be reactionary to treat the underlying condition, drop out of therapy or reject it entirely claiming it doesn’t work and the professionals are all hacks or are deficient in some way.

Limited Social Skills and Interpersonal Difficulties

Arrested development often manifests in limited social skills and interpersonal difficulties. People with arrested development may struggle to form and maintain meaningful relationships, lacking the necessary emotional intelligence and social competence to do so. They may find it challenging to connect with others, express their emotions, or empathize with different perspectives.

These social limitations perpetuate their arrested development, as they hinder the ability to engage in healthy emotional exchanges and personal growth through relationships. Being in a relationship with a person who suffers from arrested development can be very frustrating. Difficulties in emotional regulation can hinder personal growth and interpersonal relationships, as they prevent people from navigating life’s challenges in a healthy and adaptive manner.

Still, this writer sees hope, as long as you can develop your own boundaries and ensure your emotional needs are being met in other ways, temporarily, it can help to focus on compassion and encourage them to see you have done research and would like to support them to work on this. Consider showing them the article. They may be the way they are due to a challenging childhood and while that is not an excuse, it is also often not a choice to resist help but a reaction to a “not safe” directive in the past such as “what is wrong with you, get help”. In this way, there may be relationships in adulthood that left them feeling like that neglected or abused child yet they looked like the perpetrator again and again. The encouragement from a supportive person with no agenda, for example marital pressure, is important.

If you know someone who experiences arrested development, there may be a way to be the adult they can look to for inspiration. Talking about your own therapy or the ways you have had hard lessons on you own immaturity can help. Be kind and supportive as you treat them as the adult that they are.

As with other mental health conditions, arrested development may resolve through the many forms of trauma therapy or other treatment from a qualified professional. Encourage your loved one to seek care so that they may move through the phases of emotional development.

SOME WARNINGS

Fixed Mindset and Resistance to Growth

Possessing a fixed mindset and resisting personal growth are common features of arrested development. Those with a fixed mindset believe that their abilities and qualities are set in stone and cannot be changed or improved.

This fixed mindset can lead to a lack of motivation for personal growth, difficulty with learning and academic achievement, or the belief that personal change is impossible. Resisting growth further perpetuates their arrested development, preventing them from embracing new experiences and opportunities for self-improvement.

Lack of Self-Awareness and Reflection

Arrested development can be reinforced by a lack of self-awareness and reflection. Without self-awareness, people may be oblivious to their emotional stagnation and the underlying factors contributing to it. Self-reflection is necessary for personal growth, as it allows us to examine our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, gaining insight into patterns or barriers that prevent further development.

Is It Really Arrested Development?

We all know someone who breaks promises. Who waits until things have to be done and avoids planning things. They may start projects, only to abandon them mid-way through. Maybe they can’t commit to a routine, or a job schedule and become their own boss to avoid this. When you make plans to meet, they show up late or not at all. They avoid difficult conversations and sense confrontation acutely and dodge this through avoidance. As a result of their inability to commit, their relationships are often transitory or superficial. They may be unable to commit to a life partner or even own a home. Some people who experience these challenges are definitely experiencing arrested development. But some may just have personality tendencies that resemble the condition.

Differences Between Arrested Development and Narcissism

There are some similarities between arrested development and narcissism, however, there are also distinct difference that help us to distinguish one from the other.

* Core Characteristics: Narcissism primarily revolves around an excessive focus on oneself, a need for admiration, and a lack of empathy. In contrast, arrested development is centered around emotional and psychological stagnation. People with arrested development display behaviors and thought patterns characteristic of an earlier stage of development.

* Impact on Relationships: Those with narcissistic tendencies often prioritize their own needs and desires above others, leading to difficulties in maintaining healthy relationships. Their lack of empathy and constant need for validation can strain interpersonal connections. On the other hand, arrested development can hinder emotional intimacy and contribute to codependent dynamics, as those with arrested development may struggle with emotional regulation and self-sufficiency.

* Treatment Approaches: While both narcissism and arrested development can benefit from therapy, the treatment approaches often differ. Narcissistic personality disorder may require specialized therapeutic techniques aimed at addressing deep-rooted patterns of behavior and fostering empathy. In contrast, therapy for those with arrested development may focus on helping them develop the skills, tools, and coping mechanisms necessary for emotional growth and maturity.

Signs and Symptoms

When adults tend to act like children, it can be a strong clue that they suffer from arrested development.

Some examples of specific behaviors to look out for include:

* Tantrums: Being unable to manage anger or other emotions, or to keep an even keel. Sometimes these episodes can result in physical altercations or damage to property. They feel better and seem not to care or minimize the effect on others.

* Telling Lies: Those with arrested development may make up elaborate stories to explain away their own poor behavior or to cover up mistakes they have made. At times they so believe their version it is hard to detect. They omit things that fit with their feeling of what happened, altering their role.

* Name-calling and Bullying: Making fun of others’ physical appearance, personality characteristics or social circumstances with haughty tones or one up stances, camouflaging their own insecurity.

* Poor Impulse control: Those with arrested development may exhibit lack of self-control. They may make rash decisions. Or be prone to interrupting others when they speak.

* Blame-Shifting: Individuals with arrested development look for others to blame. Or make other excuses for their own behavior.

* Seeking the Spotlight: Sometimes this can be reminiscent of an unruly child, bursting in with their right to feel as they do. An adult with arrested development tends to dominate the situation. They can be overbearing and rude to others around them.

* Self-Centeredness: Those with arrested development tend to not see other’s feelings or beliefs or activities or needs as important as their own. In fact, they may go so far as to have an altered view of reality. This can result in gaslighting those around them. They may also exhibit other narcissistic personality characteristics while not having the full disorder.

Arrested Development Additional Resources

Creating and using a questionnaire to determine if someone may have signs of arrested development should be approached with caution, as mental health assessments should ideally be conducted by trained professionals.

However, it can be helpful to use an arrested development questionnaire as an initial screening tool, to learn more about whether professional help is needed.

Cognitive Abilities Affected by Arrested Development

Another unfortunate impact of arrested development is that it may delay or impair the brain’s ability to develop and acquire cognitive skills. Those with arrested development may struggle with learning, problem-solving, memory, and other cognitive functions.

1. Learning and Memory

People with arrested development often face challenges in acquiring new knowledge and retaining information. Their ability to process and comprehend new concepts may be delayed or impaired. This could manifest in difficulties in academic settings, where learning and memory play a critical role.

2. Problem-Solving and Decision Making

Arrested development can hinder a person’s problem-solving and decision-making abilities. They may struggle to analyze complex situations, find effective solutions, and make decisions based on logical reasoning. This can impact their ability to navigate daily challenges and adapt to new circumstances.

3. Executive Functions

Executive functions include crucial skills like attention, planning, organizing, and self-control. Those with arrested development may exhibit deficits in these areas, finding it challenging to focus, stay organized, manage time, or regulate their emotions effectively.

4. Language and Communication

Language and communication skills can also be affected. People who experience arrested development may experience delays or difficulties in language development, such as expressing themselves or understanding verbal and written information. These challenges can hinder social interactions and limit their ability to effectively communicate with others.

What Can Help Address Arrested Development?

Unresolved trauma in childhood, adolescence or even adulthood is one of the most common causes of arrested development. Unprocessed trauma can cause a person to get stuck or frozen at the stage of emotional development it happened or, if multiple stressors built to an emotional injury or attachment that is cumulative at any stage of development it got to a “breaking point”. They are unable to move onto further adult phases and commitments without support processing or often reprocessing and unfinished experience that has developed a unhelpful script about their life.

Accordingly, techniques that can help appropriately surface and diffuse past trauma are the key to helping adults get unfrozen, so to speak, and continue the maturation or development process.

The Toolbox Approach I posit on the ENYA Podcast is a great starting point to learn about such tools. They are also found here by following this Substack by Melinda Zappone, LMHC, CCTP2, LFYP

Have You Experienced Trauma?

As noted above, unresolved trauma is one of the most common causes of arrested development. It can also lead to many other psychological or emotional conditions. You may not be aware that you have experienced trauma, and trauma can result from a wide range of situations and experiences depending on our age and personal characteristics. Resolving childhood trauma can be essential to your mental health and can help you to avoid developing other mental health conditions.

If you suspect you may have experienced childhood trauma or know you have experienced trauma at other times in your life, it is essential to seek the help and support you need to process it appropriately.

Seeking Professional Help and Support

Overcoming arrested development often requires professional help and support.

A therapist or counselor can provide guidance, helping individuals gain self-awareness, process past traumas, develop emotional regulation skills, and challenge limiting beliefs. Through therapy, those who struggle can pave the way for personal growth, increased self-confidence, enhanced overall well-being, and embark on a journey towards emotional maturity and fulfillment.

Thank you as always for reading.

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I have seen this common need, no matter who you are, that equalizes the struggle of being here and being human. We all seek to know what our problems are and fix them. This elevation we place on knowing things to control our course is our collective anxiety. I am here to tell you, it blocks our healing things profoundly. The truth is we don’t have to label and find what I call “Your Stuff” in the ways we have constructed and are so common in traditional talk therapy. So many of us have the broken feeling regardless of the unique content of your life story. So, it is not “Your Stuff” that qualifies you as traumatized or not and you don’t need to wait for a therapist to diagnose something. I would like to propose that feeling broken is your invitation to look at “Your Stuff” differently. I define “Stuff” as akin to “emotional baggage”. This refers to unfinished emotional issues, stressors, pain, and difficulties we’ve experienced that continue to take up space in our minds. This Stuff affects our present relationships, our bodies and the deep rooted somatic and neurobiological systems we possess for our most important task; feeling safe, secure and ready to connect. 

If you have been following this Subtack page or The ENYA Podcast, you have learned about the Toolbox Approach having three main categories: Narrative Tools, Reprocessing Tools, and Relational Healing Tools. These resources have begun to present to you that you need a staged process with tools. These resources also start to create a community for you that prepare you for the last stage of Relational Healing. As you join here to the Subtack page or The ENYA Podcast you get the felt sense of people there interested in this way we repair things inside us that have been damaged but not broken and in need of fixing. This community is there for you. This community has events planned to hold space for live healing events. All you have to do is begin. I encourage you if you have not listened or read Do You Want to Listen or Begin, to do so now. This content is meant to guide you today, so far it has been free. There are links to explore to extensions that are only open to paid members however because I am doing the work too. I am working on knowing this work has the most value when I put one on it. I paid many prices coming to it, I hope you will consider one as well.

The tool presented today is part of the Narrative Tools. If you have not explored Your Stuff is Not the Story, I would encourage you to do so. That resource on Substack and on The ENYA Podcast introduces the Toolbox Approach and Narrative Tools as a part of this process of relearning yourself and your life for deeper meaning. This first tool is the Timeline Tool, which can provide clarity in that it is a new way of seeing what parts if your story you may be carrying that have never been discussed because they are not ready for that kind of process without this tool. This tool helps you gain backstage passes to your performance ‘My Life’ and therefore more access to the show. Normally we access it only through what you can talk about in an episodic way, like “This is what happened in the Netflix series called ‘My Life’”. This tool gives you enhanced features. Please go to that resource, before this next tool which is called Knowing Your Attachment Wounds. For deeper work with this tool, the paid resource Knowing Your Attachment Style and Patterns is also offered to you here. You will be able to take and score your style easily for deeper work.

The diagram below is something I encourage people to just look at and “let it happen to you”. When I encourage this, the felt sense kicks in and most are able to feel a pull towards a category that fits. The experiences are varied but many have a sense “oh my goodness, this explains my experience so much”. Many tell me they are not even exactly sure what they mean, if it is the experience they had growing up or have right now, often it is both and this makes this awareness a profound awakening. This is what is “wrong” but not in the sense it needs to be fixed or made right, but this is the ache and that broken feeling.

Once you identify with a category you are already inside the process of developing a more coherent narrative for yourself beyond what you previously might think to talk about in a “what’s wrong” concept where you need to fix something about yourself. Attachment research tells us that to break free of a cycle of strained attachments, we must make sense of and feel the full pain of our past but not re-experience every detail. As many attachment experts relate, how our parents made sense of our childhood experiences predicts how secure we are, however a child’s experience can be missed in so many ways, no matter the health of the parent. That is why; in order to repair our attachment ability and develop more inner security as adults, we must be willing to create what Daniel Siegel calls a “coherent narrative” of our experience.

Therefore, by allowing this diagram to turn up new autobiographical questions, we can discover how you have made sense of your past— how your mind may have shaped your memories of the past to explain who you are in the present. When you reveal this internal narrative or story you were not aware of telling yourself, you find insight into what may be limiting you in the present and may also be causing you to pass down to your children the same painful legacy that damaged their own early days. In other words, if we can face our history and make sense of our narrative, we can actually influence the course of our lives now, as well as our relationships, and the attachment patterns we pass on to our kids.

Telling our story in a coherent way can help us resolve both what is called “big T and little t traumas” in our lives. The truth is that most of us have experienced trauma. While people may think of trauma as something unusual or life-threatening, “big T trauma”; a serious loss, abuse, or life-threatening event, is only one kind. There is also “little t trauma,” a situation, event or period of time in which it may not have seemed like a drama unfolding at the time but impacted us by causing distress, fear, or pain. “Little t” is somewhat of a misnomer as usually it has, we realize often in hindsight, changed the way we saw ourselves and the world around us irreversibly. If we don’t make sense of our experience, we are likely to be triggered and affected by our trauma in ways of which we aren’t aware, but that cause us considerable sorrow.

CASE EXAMPLES ARE COMING TO THE ENYA PODCAST STAY TUNED!

Please continue on for an enhanced dive into attachment by determining your style as another tool: Knowing Your Attachment Style and Patterns.

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Once it is established the attachment style often guides you in your life subliminally, like a commercial that may makes you hungry for something even if it is targeted to only be about Heinz Ketchup. It determines the way you relate to intimate partners, work colleagues, friends, and how you parent your own children. When we know our attachment style, we can understand why we behave the way we do when it comes to connection, belonging and relationships.

It also helps us to reassess the childhood emotional ‘toolbox’ we have and make changes if things from our history are negatively impacting the relationships we long for today. Below is an attachment questionnaire. Complete it as honestly as you can (this will give you a more accurate attachment style prediction).

Attachment Style Questionnaire Instructions

Alongside each statement in the questionnaire you will see only one checkbox in either the A, B or C column. If the statement is TRUE FOR YOU then tick the one available checkbox (don’t worry about which column it is in). If the statement is NOT TRUE FOR YOU then do nothing and leave the checkbox unchecked.

You will find scoring instructions following the questionnaire.

Note: Some or all of your style may apply or you may start to read and realize specific relationships brought out your style “for the worse”. At times all of us can be securely attached in a relationship and sometimes other styles come into play but you will find insight into registering a predominant style.

Anxious Attachment

When this is your predominant way of connecting with others you will greatly value closeness and aim for unique closeness with “inner circle people” especially a romantic partner. You long for and crave connection and intimacy. You may fear that that other (again definitely your partner) doesn’t want to be as close to you as you do. You may also doubt their love for you. When you begin, or sometimes at other points after trust is established if you are a guarded anxious, a relationship can feel all-consuming, and you may spend lots of time thinking about the relationship. You may also feel like you are on a seesaw at times, with intense feelings of happiness, but also some strong fears about how the relationship will progress. You can be very sensitive to your partner’s moods and actions, and often attribute negative thoughts to them (that they are angry or upset with you or something you have done). You may also take their behavior really personally and want to ‘fix’ things for them. You may become upset easily and feel a lot of negative emotions in the relationship especially if you feel your partner is not listening to you, paying attention to you feel like they are pulling away from you. As a result of these thoughts and feelings you might act out and be very emotional, saying and doing things that you regret later. You may struggle to set appropriate boundaries in your relationship. You may also give more in the relationship than your partner does. You may get involved in relationships very quickly and want the relationship to progress to a commitment as soon as possible.

Secure Attachment

You feel comfortable and loving in a committed relationship. You enjoy intimacy and connection, and you do not spend time worrying about your relationships. You are able to go with the flow when it comes to love and romance, and you don’t often get upset about relationship issues. You are a good communicator, and you are able to easily and comfortably share your needs and feelings with your partner. You are also able to read and understand your partner’s emotional cues and then respond to them appropriately. You share your successes, worries or concerns with you partner and you are able to be there for them if they need you. You are able to set appropriate boundaries. The level of give and take in the relationship is fairly even. You tend to start relationships slowly, getting to know your partner over time.

Avoidant Attachment

The things that are extremely important to you are independence and self-sufficiency. When in an intimate relationship you will have the tendency to push for your freedom and autonomy. Intimate relationships can feel claustrophobic. You want to feel connected to another, but you may also feel very uncomfortable if you feel there is too much closeness. You prefer to keep your relationships casual and your partner at a comfortable emotional distance. You don’t spend much time worrying about your romantic relationships or about being rejected. You prefer not to share too much information about yourself or what you do with your life you’re your partner and they will often complain that they feel unimportant to you and that you are emotionally distant. In a committed relationship you are constantly on the lookout for any signs that your partner is trying to control you or trying to take away your personal freedom.

After connection or intimacy, you may withdraw for periods of time. You may also talk openly about previous relationships and partners which can make your current partner uncomfortable and worried about how secure the relationship is. You tend to have very rigid boundaries and can be become very offended if people try to get too close to you.

Note: This questionnaire is not a clinic tool and provides a general indication of your attachment style only.

Knowing your attachment style helps you better process relationships, particularly losses and ruptures of the past. With this lens, you create a more coherent narrative, which is why I include it in the Narrative Tools part of your relearning and reprocessing life experiences for deeper connection to yourself such that you no longer think of things as needing to be fixed.

My journey exploring my own anxious attachment helped me see how much I held my story back out of fear of abandonment. This experience was reinforced however by holding back a core trauma and it reversed a child’s role to be protected by family to that of the child protecting the family from itself. This was key to my awareness as I came out of silence. Fighting a fear of abandonment may very likely have kept me silent for more years had I not empowered my anxiety and told myself if I did not abandon myself I would not every truly be able to be abandoned by anyone else.

This was a profound awakening and may have been what has inspired me to come out with the Toolbox Approach and include my story as its greatest impetus.

“The right tool for the right job makes all the difference.” – Benjamin Franklin 

“Tools empower us to do more than we could do alone.” – Barack Obama 

“Tools are the extension of man’s knowledge, ability, and potential.”  

– Bruce Lee 

"Do not wait; the time will never be ‘just right.’ Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along." - George Herbert  

"To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail." -Abraham Maslow 

I still remember the day when I stopped writing something in my journal and moved to the computer. It is not so much a day I remember but a feeling like something was happening like a trance, and I didn’t want to be too present. The memory is in the felt sense I had in my body that something was changing, and my emotional pain was turning into something else. There were months where I blocked myself from knowing that what I was doing was writing a book that would integrate me and help me be myself more authentically. It was news to me when Microsoft Word said I hit 83 pages. I shook and I did not take it well. It felt like too much pressure, and I questioned myself. Then I realized I was writing a human story. The Tools I used for seeing things better and reprocessing that into a shakingly new self-concept where inside this book in the making and it was okay to be like a fawn on new legs. I learned through the process that I would have to ask for a lot more help and really put myself out there more than I ever have.

I have to write a book proposal, beg the publishing world to see this as worthy. You will hear on this podcast, or read if you are on the Substack page, my call for help to get this out there but no matter what, I promise to put it all out here to you ENYA Community, I will come to you here somehow ALWAYS and deliver the tools no matter if I am picked or not. Some tools are already posted, the ENYA Podcast on Spotify, we will be delivering them piecemeal with gaps in between to help you pace your process. If you have not listened to the first episode “Do You Want to Listen or Begin”. I hope you can listen to the episodes in order, they may be posted most recent first so please scroll down. At times episodes themselves will be pauses between The Tools to expand and create room for a gentle process. Please access them in order if possible. Listen/Read on.

I am a person who has been searching. I’ve done it haphazardly, lost and alone. I have done it with mistaken ideas and the wrong structure. I did it with love and then with grief in my heart. I have done it as an expert in getting you through things. I have failed at it, and that may just educate me most of all. It certainly has seasoned me most. I am also, in another part of myself that now integrates with all the rest finally, an expert. I am a Mental Health Therapist with 17 years of experience, and I am a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional (Level 2).  

So, I have arrived at this “expert” status, first as a person searching and then from completing additional years of training, certifications, and applied practice in the field. All this expertise, I realize now, was done in the ongoing pursuit of something that is bigger than any of those qualifiers. The Tools were the thing I was working on all along. The Tools that show me, as the title reflects, I am NOT BROKEN.  

I am a true expert in repressed “Stuff” and have sensed it my whole life in others. Why I sense or how I came to it is not as important to me now as conveying I know I have this sense to help clarify what is happening in all of us. Everyone is born with a purpose. Mine is to show you how to come to the repressed parts of your Narrative with Tools. I have been overwhelmed and shamed by symptoms that hide the intensity of what I held back from myself. As a pre-teen I imagined myself a journalist, then a reporter, because I wanted tools from a young age to be able to tell everyone what was happening with me and with them and for it to all make sense like they do on the news. They thought I was too sensitive. While that was half right; sensing yourself and everyone else and not knowing how to decide what to do with the conflicting information is a sensitivity, but for any brain it is also an overprocessing. I was taxing my brain to figure it all out. When we work in this way in the brain, it assists repression. We figure out the wrong things or conversely start avoiding, find other work to crank out so there is no space for it. 

This book, NOT BROKEN, This is Your Stuff, These are The Tools. Therapists are People Too is the end to my figuring and begins the adventure of empowering people to have The Toolbox Approach for their lives. As the quotes depict above, tools are essential, and our thought leaders have always promoted them. These tools are more than conceptual however, they are for reprocessing and somatic awareness and go further than talk therapy can go. Even though there is childhood trauma in my story, now I know the drive was always in me to see the deeper story. For me, the real trauma was feeling it all in everyone and myself before I was developed enough to understand it. I wanted to see myself and only saw the reflection of my smallness in everyone else's eyes, I was a kid. We all have a version of that very basic pain, left out of some self-understanding and therefore invisible in some bigger way. We are all connected in this “holding things” condition. These things, “Your Stuff”, are much deeper than the problems we have or the things we would say are in our way.  

I know therapy was developed into this complicated device in which we say the individual cannot see the problem clearly and requires an expert but that tends to deny the underlying and simpler human need for a therapeutic relationship. We need someone there with us because we don’t know how to look inward. The other person, if trust can be established, is that device or mirror. The trouble is that the trust violations that keep us from looking inward are remembered through both conscious and unconscious memories of experiences where trust was missing. The therapeutic relationship will remind us of all relationships where we hoped for trust, and it was not there. Entering therapy is risky because people are untrustworthy even if they are trying their utmost not to be. We feel this risk, all of us.  

As a therapist I try to be a “safe space”, but I cannot know the experience of the other person and how I may land on them, or in them, differently because of what they have been through in life. So, while we aim to avoid being overwhelmed by it all when we decide to trust this process, and a therapist, it is still very emotionally risky. In the school setting we have the buffer of our own ability to study, we have the material we know to learn in the book, we have tools for learning despite the relationship with the teacher. Therapy is a good idea but an odd expectation, “Just trust me!”. That is why the Toolbox Approach is so necessary. 

The inward journey of learning yourself and what has happened and the meaning you make of this “happened” deserves steadfast and stable tools just as reliable as any tools of any “work” we decide to take on in life. So, that you trust you better to do the job of looking inward. This requires The Toolbox Approach. Helping you enter the stages of seeing your life, reprocessing for deeper awareness and clarity, and then lastly relating as a healing container, can secure a better process for repeatedly growing. As you come out of old, stuck ways in a reprocessing phase, the other phases are there to support you and propel you equally. 

The wisdom that lies in both understanding our lives, and not being able to fully understand them, is not something we ever get to possess.  This is because wisdom or insight is not static or fixed and it is a process of using tools and being in our lives fully with all the “Stuff”. We hold the tools for this process regardless and there is profound learning and realization in their use. So, this book may most notably be written by your Crash Test Dummy on this collision course called “working on Your Stuff”. We don’t need to crash into our “Stuff” however.  

As a therapist, that is often when people seek me out, when they have crashed in some way, because when anyone has their own unique version of a crash in their life, the urgency to look inward is clearer. I know there is a better way. I know because my own REAL STUFF lay hidden for over 35 years. At least two decades of that span of 35 years was spent in pursuit of mastery in the mental health field, and as attested above, the wisdom was not mine to possess. I would never get there and be past everything because we are meant to hold our experiences. There is nothing wrong with holding things, however we are unaware what we are holding and there are things left undigested and blocking us and require The Tools here in NOT BROKEN. 

I have over nine specializations and like many in the field, much of my career expertise was fueled by lived experiences I had wanted to help myself through and yet had gotten through imperfectly. A therapist, if they are honest, heals through the work too. It was devastating when I realized that with all my expertise, not at all the “Stuff” I ultimately needed to address in the search to finding a more complete Self was in my awareness to work on. When my mother passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2021, a pandora’s box of repressed trauma revealed to me how desperately my own tools needed to be refined and put to new use on myself.  Her death opened up repressed memory. This was a pattern of childhood sexual intrusion, manipulation and molestation that I lacked, at age 5-10 years old, the understanding to know was not a game I wanted a secret pass to.  

The trapped shame changed my psychology in ways I needed to look at but I was stuck to “just talk”. The repression was lifting but a wall of defenses boxed me in, making me feel as though it was me against me. It was the me that had faced the world backed against the me that needed to look inward and we were together in a standstill blocking me from seeing the very experiences that had formed my self-concept. I was blocked by the fear of losing my armor, my professional self, and my proof I was NOT BROKEN. What if it was all just a flimsy idea of moving on? The idea that I had found a purpose through moving on and becoming a therapist began to falter. Often the journey does begin with fear of losing yourself. My strategies felt like only thought-based healing, just like drinking more water can be thought of as good for you without a real measure or goal in sight for the healthy water drinking you. Becoming a therapist felt like progress, but was it just like losing weight on a diet? It can seem like it is you and not the rigidity of the diet, but is it? 

I knew I had seen this before in others that come to me for therapy, and I was turning to see it in myself. Was being a therapist a mask? I knew then, I could be brave and admit even an expert can get their own moving on wrong. I felt then that to come out with all I have got, lived experience and expertise, is my real purpose. I rose, NOT BROKEN. I developed the Toolbox Approach here. It must be shared because my sessions are not enough. Expert is not enough.  Sometimes you must trust yourself profoundly first. 

That is what this book is meant to showcase, a blend of two things about the human condition, we do not know how to see ourselves without tools, and we need help learning and mastering these tools. The myth of Narcissus traditionally tells how a youth, whose name was Narcissus, loved his own image so much that he spent days looking at his own reflection in a lake. One day, he was so infatuated with himself that he lost his concentration, slipped and drowned in the lake. A flower grew where he fell, and this plant came to be called the narcissus. As the story of Narcissus and the lake will tell you, looking at yourself alone in the reflection of water is a misuse of the tool of reflection. Furthermore, if you look to grow only flowers out of this reflection, it is a loss; a memorial that is left there on the ground in the symbol of a pretty flower only.  

Therapy is a tool that needs the refinement of the individual coming to it informed on themselves. They need to be already on their brave course of inward looking. I AM a therapist and I wasted decades on what I thought was a journey seeking myself.  We cannot see ourselves without tools and then the expertise to use them. It is lacking or missing in one’s education or resources no matter who you are, professional or not, because they are not in our systems of education and only hidden amongst other systems that one must find like that of a treasure hunt. We all need tools, it is the essence of being human, no other species is this advanced and this in need of tools to live life and survive well. We need these tools and a relationship of trust in others that seek to do the same inner work journey. We can collaborate with each other on our adjacent journeys. Readers of this will collectively feel the tools in use, and it will kick up the call to join the movement you will read about below as well. This movement is called ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always. It inspires the concept that we all deserve this access and need each other to call to action its impact.  

The fact is nearly everyone faces some form of traumatic experience. Trauma is defined as the result of an event that is particularly jarring for someone, whether it’s life-threatening or harmful physically or emotionally, and has lasting effects on their psychological health. Mental trauma has a broad definition, and as such, it’s estimated that most people in the United States will experience some degree of trauma in their lives. 

Exactly how common is mental trauma? Unlike many other mental health conditions, trauma isn’t considered a single disorder recognized by the current edition of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-5. This makes it difficult to measure trauma statistically and, likely, difficult for some people who have experienced trauma to get the help they need. 

In this book, we introduce the Toolbox Approach to holding trauma through a therapist's journey. I demonstrate their use on myself and the application of “the Tools” is displayed in my sessions. On Substack and Spotify you will see/hear excerpts from the book and the book outline that displays all the tools in phases of use that are most natural to the process of seeing “Your Stuff”. However, we need first to recognize the importance of a book that can democratize mental health by making tools accessible from a trauma informed lens. This is THE CUTTING-EDGE lens of the time in many fields such as psychology, somatic theory, physical trauma, disease, self-help, well-being, neurobiological health, holistic health and ancient healing practices.  

THE SIDE NOTE I WROTE TO POTENTIAL PUBLISHERS 

I don’t want to write this proposal. I just want to give these tools away, but I have tried to, and I find it too risky to rely on social media platforms. You can’t just give this stuff away; it doesn’t work because people will come to it with all sorts of halfway focus and the space for this work needs an order and container that a book structure can better provide. I am also used to welcoming people into an authentic “safe space” that I create with my whole body, my office, my sense of self and my listening, and oddly I need to be selling myself and the concept somehow and I find I can’t do it in the big way it is needed without a publishing company. So, like my own profession would encourage others to admit, I have to say, I need help. I see therapists come authors, self-help leaders, educators in trauma informed practices, and brand names in and of themselves and I don’t see myself at all. Terry Real, Lori Gottlieb, Guy Winch, Terri Cole, Janina Fisher, and Bessel van der Kolk, to name an elite few. I have trained under all of them in various ways, a few of them more directly than others. I believe in what they are doing and their approach, but I have always just been Melinda, Munchkin, Melinz, Chico and Auntie Melinda. My patients and clients call my office “safe zone” and this extends to me too. I feel like I can’t do it the big roll out way without a publisher.  

I have the passion needed to beat the band, and everyone knows this about me, you can hear it in my voice on ENYA (Everyone Needs You Always) Podcast, but the “look at me I wrote a book that can help”, I need help with that if this is to truly keep my authenticity boundary around it. I have thought about how just saying the word “water”, does not mean you get wet. Writing this means I could get rejected and yet writing this also means I have accepted that it matters already. It is an approach that has served over 2,300 therapy sessions in 2023 and most importantly saved my own sense of brokenness after repressed trauma. Writing this may mean I am asking, “will you pick me?”, however writing this is only “water” and I have already picked myself for this work.  

STATISTICALLY WHY THIS MATTERS 

So, first, let me break down key statistics about mental trauma and why we need to democratize treatment and empower individuals to escalate their expertise in determining their “Stuff”. Given the concept of holding trauma does not only apply to trauma diagnoses like PTSD, a trauma informed lens is helpful to all individuals seeking to address pain, from the physical manifestations of it to mental/emotional. Additionally, this concept of being able to see ones “Stuff” from a trauma lens, can promote the ideal approach to traditional treatment, which is to propose Shared Decision Making in treatment should someone seek professional help.  

Shared Decision-Making (SDM) is a collaborative process that empowers people to make informed choices about their “working on things” journey. It’s particularly relevant in the context of PTSD treatment. With the Toolbox approach applied in this book, anyone can come to a therapeutic process and talk about shared decision making. Healthcare has changed drastically in the way we need to jump hoops to be “approved” for what we need to treat conditions. The hope is that this Toolbox approach is an entirely pre-approved and free access way to come to a behavioral health journey and be informed about what you need. It can very likely save individual years of wrongly sought “treatment” based solely on insurance covered services. It is possible it will be the treatment for many people or their invitation to own their mental and emotional health. 

I will provide some Trauma “Stats” background here to clarify we are not just talking about PTSD or a concept that is applicable to a defined niche. Mental trauma statistics are not as clear as those surrounding depression or anxiety, for example. According to the DSM-5, trauma isn’t an objectively diagnosable psychological condition. That’s not to say the mental health treatment community disregards trauma. Post-traumatic stress disorder, which is a documented condition, often results from mental trauma, but not everyone who experiences trauma develops PTSD. 

Mental trauma can result from any traumatic occurrence. While this may include large-scale events like the pandemic, natural disasters and terrorism, which are now more prevalent on a collective level, but can still affect uniquely individuals; they are far less common. Large-scale trauma is, however, what may add to accumulated trauma throughout one’s life and be the tipping point for getting help and possibly not the only trauma. Statistics on trauma may come from large scale events or more personal events like domestic violence, accidents or serious injury, sexual assault, homelessness and a variety of other circumstances that are mentally jarring and may induce trauma. 

It should be noted that there is also accumulated evidence that Aversive Childhood Experiences as identified in the ACE Questionnaire and research on it as a screening tool for trauma later in life are also hard to provide statistics for as are relational traumas that are not only physically or sexually abusive but may be more emotionally or psychologically so, in childhood or adulthood. Additionally, while physical and mental trauma are different, there can be a connection between the two. For example, if someone suffers a serious injury, this is clearly physical trauma, but traumatic psychological or emotional effects can also be associated with the event that caused the injury. With this understanding of why psychological trauma statistics are not as clearly outlined as statistics for other mental health conditions, let’s explore some of the key stats surrounding mental trauma. 

Prevalence of Mental Trauma 

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 61% of men and 51% of women report at least one traumatic event in their lifetimes. This would put mental trauma at the top of the list of most-common psychological health conditions. For perspective, these are some of the other most-common mental health disorders, courtesy of the National Alliance on Mental Illness: 

* Depression: 7.2% of American adults report having had a major depressive episode. 

* Anxiety Disorders: 19.1% of Americans say that they’ve suffered from anxiety at some point in their lives. 

* Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: 3.6% of Americans are currently living with PTSD.   

The last one is especially notable because PTSD and mental trauma share an obvious link. While PTSD can be objectively diagnosed, among people who experience trauma (50-60%), the rate of those who end up with PTSD (3.6%) is relatively small.  

SingleCare, the free prescription savings service, recently surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. respondents to determine current perspectives on mental health, including behaviors and experiences regarding accessing care. According to SingleCare’s survey, 62% of U.S. respondents said that they are concerned about their mental health. This comes as nearly half (42%) are currently receiving mental health treatment via talk therapy with a psychiatrist, or psychologist. There is also wariness for diagnosis by a professional and individuals long for a relational approach that admit that even the expert would use these tools, has used the tools, and stakes their professional identity on them by admitting to their active use in sessions as their trademark.  

SingleCare’s survey found that 43% of U.S. respondents are currently taking medication for their mental health. Of those taking mental health medications, 56% said that they’ve skipped their medicine due to price, another reason to democratize mental health tools via the approach in this book. It is evident today that effective management of mental health conditions often involves a combination of medications and supportive therapies tailored to each individual's unique needs. While medications can play a crucial role in symptom relief, it's essential to approach their use holistically, considering factors such as self-help, lifestyle, nutrition, and therapy, to optimize overall well-being and treatment outcomes. 

Barriers to mental healthcare remain  

Although SingleCare survey respondents used certain resources to address mental health, U.S. adults still feel as though there are still barriers to care. When asked which barriers stopped them from getting the care they need, respondents said the following:  

* 64% the cost of therapy/doctor’s appointments  

* 45% the cost of medication  

* 38% difficulty finding the right therapist/doctor  

* 35% lack of health insurance  

* 34% accessibility to care  

* 28% making time for therapy/doctor appointments  

* 24% difficulty finding a therapist/doctor who is taking new patients  

* 24% they don’t know where to start with finding care  

* 23% negative stigma  

* 16% culturally responsive care  

Given the above statistics, there is clear benefit from empowering individuals to consider the tools of trauma treatment in a Toolbox approach as they may be missed by diagnostic criteria for anxiety, depression and/or PTSD. The criteria for a DSM-V diagnosis are also a structure for “treatment” and qualify and quantify your coverage for such treatment. The above statistics also form a checklist for what the Toolbox Approach could address regarding barriers to care. Imagine Tools that provide care and community with only the price of an E-book off Amazon? 

TOOLS IN THE TOOLBOX APPROACH 

The tools are broken down into those that explore “Your Stuff” in stages that are analogous to a heroic journey model where one is brave in stages and not all at once: 

The Narrative Tools or “what happened”. The narrative tools explore what you carry that may not be in the form of traditional memory. This can be missed in therapy given repression or some other block but can be explored gently with tools: 

* Getting at the narrative via the timeline tool that eliminates the need to tell the story completely as full spoken narrative that is linear and complete. 

* Getting at your unspoken family rules and family role as a method of your lived story that is beyond what you can tell through traditional narrative.  

* Determining wound themes as a method of getting at what happened in childhood without detailed re-experiencing. 

* The Enneagram Typing Tool addresses the motivations that stem from underlying personality. 

* Parts of Self Tools: Internal Family Systems, Shadow Work, Inner Child: These tools explore the way we may protect ourselves through parts that act and do not communicate. This creates a divided self that can be seen and held compassionately with tools. 

* Putting it all Together Narrative Grid Tool: See the Stuff Collectively 

The Reprocessing Tools or the tools for unblocking what you carry so it can be fully processed. This is where new channels of understanding can happen as less activation is present to block us from seeing and feeling parts of ourselves that hold pain, deeper meaning and new learning experiences from held unprocessed memory. 

* Learning how to be aware of triggers as learning opportunities. Trigger awareness tools model how the activating circumstances that eventually lead to pushing down the trigger all the way are not as important as the gun and ammunition. We are the gun and we hold the ammunition in this lens.  

* Somatic Awareness tools use Polyvagal Theory and the Polyvagal Ladder concept to understand the felt sense of danger or safe lies in our Central Nervous System. The attention needed to heal this system is not “top down” or talk oriented, hence these tools come after the Narrative Tools. 

* Habitual Survival Response Awareness tools help us understand survival responses: fight, flight, freeze and fawn/appease. There are versions of these responses that are considered more complete in the sense they are not stuck and get us to that “I am safe now” feeling. This tools explores where one may be stuck. 

* Threat Response Cycle can become a habitual way we respond to danger. This older danger awareness system is not always helpful for psychological danger that blends relational and emotional threats through connections we attempt to make, are thwarted or absent, or even dysfunctional. Encoding this can allow us to orient to safety rather than danger habitually and heal our Central Nervous System and break the cycle of not getting to safety and stuck survival responses as above. 

* EMDR Tools for Reprocessing get at stuck negative thoughts about ourselves because of unprocessed negative experience. Exploring lists of generic negative cognitions in themes can allow for reprocessing without re-experiencing. Memory is not always there but the meaning we carry about ourselve is. This can be stuck and needs reprocessing.  

* The Healthy Stress Response Awareness Tool explores how to grow awareness of nervous system response within that is healthy. Feeling this possibility literally builds somatic awareness and aides Neuroplasticity. 

* The Window of Tolerance (WOT) Tool provides awareness of how severely emotionally dysregulated we can be once in a survival physiology habitually. Symptoms that underly most mental health conditions lie in the Window of Tolerance becoming narrower and dysregulation therefore becoming something we survive without returning to the WOT. 

* Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) and tapping tool is for unblocking stuck core beliefs that block self-acceptance and lead to a fixing mentality as the only path to wellness. 

* Chakra unblocking tools are for accessing deeper felt sense of relational wounds such as abandonment, neglect, rejection, intrusion, invalidation, violation, manipulation, degradation, ignoring, hatred or indifference that cannot be explained and come from pre-cognitive processing abilities. 

Relational Healing Tools: These are the tools for the last stages of working on “Your Stuff”. They are for that full climb up the Polyvagal Ladder when one wants to promote that sense of “safe, secure, and ready to connect”. When we need to be mirrors for one another and not sit by the river like Narcissus and dwell in our own reflection. 

* The Feedback and Processing Loop Tool 

* The Harmony, Disharmony, Repair Concept 

* The Repair Checklist 

* How does that land in you? How does that land with you? 

* BRAVING tool for creating boundaries in your boundary style 

* Realizing Relational Patterns 

HOW DOES IT WORK? 

People come to a certain threshold of struggle and may get that inevitability to “work on it”, “figure out what I am going through” or “recover”. We say it is a issue or experience like unresolved grief, trauma, or mental dis-ease, for example and want to know “How do I get through this?” As a therapist it is hard enough when a person is with me willing and wanting to look, to get them to keep coming for the “going through to get through” process. Because negative experiences often involve strong emotional pain, people (consciously or unconsciously) commonly avoid or resist the “going through Your Stuff” process. I know first and second hand, however, that painful issues often go unresolved and haunt the individual. 

I come to this work with authenticity not authority. I use the tools on myself. There have been things in my nervous and self-belief system that were out of tune. I never knew how to read the music written there in the things I would not or could not dare to remember completely. You have your stuff, which could be all the symptoms you might seek relief from, but these are also things that are hidden stories and experiences. Sometimes you feel it there, sometimes you see “the Stuff” like fresh new episodes of pain, or it weighs on you, but you can’t see and stuck is the sensation. Stuff activates problems in your life. You are sheets and sheets of music inside and there should be a song playing but something is making the musical score offbeat.  

By applying a series of therapeutic tools in a single, more seamless, subtle process, The Toolbox Approach helps individuals to get through “the Stuff” with new meaning making. These tools are for releasing stuck storylines, reprocessing self-concepts that were acting like clenched fists that lack the openness needed to climb our ladders for the work we were meant to do in this life. This Real Work is the relational compatibility we can find in others, our community and at large when we are all clearer on ourselves. When we get more “all the way through” Your Stuff in a gentle and supportive way that does not go back in time to tell the story again, we heal emotional memory.  We access reprocessing capacities without re-experiencing the same “old Stuff”. This approach helps resolve problematic past, present or even future worry predictions by regenerating old story lines into new meaning. This regeneration includes the felt sense of safety inside. We feel The Tools building understanding where old emotional responses damaged the process and new emotional responses build readiness for the relational healing tools that imprint further safety into our present self experiences.  

The fact that I have “Stuff” is a cornerstone of the book. I thought digging it up made me perfect for this career as a therapist, and it did. Then I found out I had MORE STUFF, 15 years into my expertise as a trauma therapist. I found out how profoundly I made mistakes repressing my Stuff but I also found out how to understand what I needed was a perpetual search and “the Tools” to do such a search through “the Stuff” because it is mine and that is what it needs from me. I make mistakes reading my own sheet music, it must happen for a tool to be called upon. Then we learn to tune and tone and try again because “the Stuff” has been found and we can’t stop now.  These tools first show you the sheets and sheets of music inside you, “the Stuff” is profoundly unique and not at all what you think, it is not problems you have it is your anatomy of experience, when you can really see it, then you decide what needs tuning and what is just for your awareness and care. I bring the tools to sessions these past 17 years, but they are profoundly better now that I have refined them again and again the last three of those years. I know this is how to get at “Your Stuff, and that these are “the Tools” to get at it; I know because Therapists Are People Too!   

EMERGENT LOVE CONCEPT PRIMER 

You will listen/read later, after the tools have been fully laid out on the podcast, about The Emergent Love Model of Therapy that I have started to feel is the larger model for all relationships you seek out promote your healing and growth. Growing love does not happen overnight but it emerges, so this model can be the forever framework you will need to in order to maintain that last process of relational healing, given an individual process is only a section of the whole. The Tools for relational healing are here in this book how Emergent Love concept is like the container for this work. There is a kind of love built in interacting with others we can all achieve more often, whether in therapy or not. This can then become a more ever-present holding container and turn into more safety and security overall. We all know interactions with others can feel like either pleasant or awful mirrors of ourselves, with the power to lift and sink our self-worth. So, if we can insure that Emergent Love is a more accepted model, the growth of everyone benefits.  

The Emergent Love Concept is briefly shown below and will be detailed at the end of the book. This is important to view now because as a reader you may not be getting the therapeutic relationship and so this is my model for the ones I try to cultivate in sessions. Holding it here as a concept may help you understand this too as you enter this process. 

We need The Tools for our unprocessed “Stuff”. No one taught you how to carry the load that is your life. You would not expect to meet with a ton of dumbbells and just expect to be able to lift them. Would you start a new health initiative by walking into a gym and starting a 400-pound deadlift? Unlike a physical health journey, we don’t need to lean up and restrict our appetites. Our lives are heavy, and we need tools for training and skill to lift things one at a time. We need to explore unused muscles and we need the thirst of knowledge to get to the felt sense of healthy. Emotional health is not a set of criteria or a goal weight, it is a felt sense "Oh this really is the Real Stuff!”. You will feel it is true when you use a tool, and it lands with you that you have discovered something new, and that this finally is getting you somewhere new. 

Truthfully, I have felt like it could be a mistake to start with you, or anyone, asking a professional to assess and diagnose what the problems are. It’s this big fearful, already started process in the private inner life of many people, “I don’t really know what is wrong with me”, sometimes for years, before considering “help”. When we finally get help no one addresses that fear that is still there, “will the therapist see it, will they not, do I want either of these things?”.  Therapy is or working on things, looking inward and possibly back into the past is such an off-putting thing, and it must be a collaboration, we must both admit that we are each other's tools and that the tools we use are also part of this and we have to be concerned collaboratively if we are using the right tools here.  

I still go hiking in the woods and get this feeling like, “maybe I should stay here, I feel lost, it feels like the right place to stay, I need more time”. I feel like trauma is still in my body and want to hide in the woods as I hike and survive there, knowing my body can take it. We can all survive out here, this is the real wilderness, we are doing it, and we are hiding in plain sight. The real journey is inward, and the question is “do I have the tools?” I can see now that there are so many ways of being that I need, I need a mode of just surviving but I also need connection. Sometimes I need a light way of leaving myself or things but also a way to come back and face the anxieties that will grow me. I need failure and being hard on myself, I even use neglectful patterns, they are the signal for using the tools for seeing what these things intend to do for me but go astray and do something to me instead. I am building love with you, it is emerging as I show you the use of The Tools and you see Your Stuff well beyond the accuracy of any therapist out there.  

STAY TUNED!!!! ON SPOTIFY

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Are we all walking wounded and alone

The Treatment

The Treatment

The Treatment

What is The Treatment we all want?

Are we all walking wounded and alone

They say who is your God

They say Fix yourself, NOOOO we don't need that

But

The Treatment

The Treatment

The Treatment

We are beyond the cure

People

Yes, we are

We are walking

Wounded

And still belong

OOOOHHHH

The Treatment

The Treatment

The Treatment

The Treatment HMMMM

Forgive Yourself

Forgive your family

Forgive your neighbor, your lover, your friend

OOOOHHHH

The Treatment

The Treatment

The Treatment

Forgive us our TRUST PASSES

As we forgive those that TRUST PASSED us

Do you hear me?

We let Trusting each other fall away!

SOOOOOOOOOO

The Treatment

The Treatment

The Treatment

You hurt yourself

You hurt someone else

SOOOOOOOO

The Treatment

We are one

There is no better you or me

Only better us

What we all do behind our eyes is The Treatment

HMMMMMM

Think better

Love better

The Treatment

The Treatment

The Treatment

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I now feel that I can be that worked on imperfect person and maybe this is my greatest use now as a therapist. I don’t model trust, I think I may just step into fear and trembling and fail, because I am doing “the Work” too. I am doing “the Work”, trying to know myself so I can be with my life and the people in, out and around it, with authenticity.

When you hold trauma like I do, there is a worry you won’t ever be yourself again. I still remember the day I realized my childhood self was the lost one, that it was not all of me. I finally felt the difference between losing myself and her lost feeling. Like I was my own mother, I felt like I had failed to protect her, and in my repression, I lost her and knew she was only five years old when traumatic childhood manipulation, violation and molestation started; and no one was there to help her be brave and tell. She must have grown up alongside me all along though and just somehow stayed the same age, both wanting to be brave and wanting to be loved and never knowing she could have and deserved both. When I feel like there is a profound BROKEN somewhere or everywhere inside me, I realize now from my own use of The Tools, it is just a part cut off from the others inside me. You don’t have to hold trauma to feel like you are pining for all these other versions of yourself to come together and make you whole. We assume it is an impossible thing, the True Self, and that growing up is going to work and being more realistic. We suffer this more than any repression. 

Through writing this I started to realize it was a concept, working on revealing yourself to yourself and needing the final stage to be relational healing. I developed the concept ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always and at the time I was 15 years in this field, and I was in my 10th year as an identified trauma therapist. It is now more years past that this book comes to you, whenever it comes to you. Then and now, diving in and out of deeper work on repressed trauma that had surfaced in the context of my mother’s passing, I realize we are all always working on it haphazardly, why not have tools that make that more linear a process that is akin to entering all kids into school, seen as a human right these days. The right to be “tooled up” in life, and go through the stages of understanding, in order to access your own potential and repair when necessary. This is the real graduation day we all seek, formal school or not, it is a human right to know and relate profoundly from the core of who you are.

It came to me that we all need to do “the Work”. The Work needs to be applied to Your Stuff and The Tools are the things that aid in this work. With tools you are finding all the different parts of yourself inside the stories of you and making it more linear and organized so you can really come into a whole Core self. We resist the fact that we need each other to truly be ourselves. They say therapists have only questions and deflect back to you to answer but I have found a few answers as to what can form the structure of “the Work”; mine and yours and you can figure out the answers to your own questions, ones that don’t get asked out loud but in the echos of your soul. Life looks like a solitary thing when you see it as a birth or a grave, but it takes all of us using tools of introspection and growth. ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always to do this Work! 

A Note on The Tools 

I will try to display the tools with a sense of order. However, using them is ecliptic, like the path the sun travels over a year. The ecliptic is an imaginary line on the sky marking the sun's path. Your movement as you work through knowing yourself in new ways may not feel like a path forward.  It will feel more like laps swam in a pool.  You swim and reach the wall, but it is no real destination, just a place to circle back and repeat from. You are exercising your ability to know your own rhythm and you master each lap. You enjoy the rhythm of what is happening, even if your breath is labored.  

As you use these tools you must check in with how you are feeling. You are learning your strokes inside the things you already know. The water should feel wet, and it does and so this is familiar. You are accustomed to how your arms slosh and hands slap the water with their sounds, you expected it, it is also a familiar thing as you are learning. The walls you use are not made for blocking in or out, they define nothing, but they act as your boundary, the work is done here, and you use them to help make your turn off.  With the support from the wall, you can keep going another lap.  

ENYA stands for Everyone Needs You Always. This concept applies to democratizing mental health. It means equal access to tools in these areas below, areas which can act like phases of seeing into oneself for a better understanding of whole-self-awareness and living authentically.  

* NARRATIVE TOOLS: Seeing and feeling the Narrative that is “Your Stuff” or story, to develop a more linear understanding of our experience of what happens to us in this life from childhood throughout our development. Experiences shape us and how we function in a patterned and episodic way beyond explicit memory.  We just cannot speak about what we already know and remember and talk ourselves to health, we need narrative tools for the implicit things in our narrative beyond the direct conscious mind.  

* REPROCESSING TOOLS: Integrating the Fragmented Self: Determining the meanings we create out of what happens, and how it serves as our thoughts about ourselves that may require reprocessing. Whatever symptoms you have, they speak from parts of you that don’t do traditional therapy. We need tools to integrate these parts. Somatic Awareness is brought in here: Our bodies reflect how fragmented parts of ourselves hold meaning; affecting mental, emotional, and physical well-being. What your body engages in consciously and unconsciously is a stuck survival response that can become habitual and needs a return to that natural balance 

* RELATIONAL HEALING TOOLS: These are the tools for the last stages of working on “Your Stuff”. They are for that full climb up the Polyvagal Ladder when one wants to promote that sense of “safe, secure, and ready to connect”. These tools help you stay in the difficult conversations that can repair disharmony. Relationships have the power to heal and the potential to threat activate the Central Nervous System (CNS).   Here we learn how to harness fight, flight, flee or fawn and keep this at the level where connection is maintained, and disharmony is only temporary. 

We say “Everyone” is needed because humans are unlike any other species in our reliance on relationships, and because health is relational for us and not based on survival alone. We cannot afford to merely survive things. We must reprocess when survival mode sets in or we risk what it means to be human, to thrive, and all of us suffer if any one of us risks thriving because survival feels like the only choice. As we enter new challenges, our future well-being will be more relational, not less. Technology connects us more each day and the idea that we are more and more mentally alone in the face of this can be temporary. We can have traumatic growth and recover from the trauma that disconnection creates no matter what you have been through in life, however mental health needs to be equally accessible in the form of tools that build a person to their own awareness. With tools we could all ask for help that enlists a team of support from specialists and community rather than an appointment to measure the illness we suspect through symptoms of poor relationships, mood or some diminished capacity.  

Being Trauma informed is to follow an ENYA philosophy and believe everyone needs you to do this work on yourself. The launch of the ENYA page and concept is to promote the first profit bearing product; NOT BROKEN: This is Your Stuff, These Are The Tools. Therapists Are People Too. The book is to promote “The Toolbox” concept. As a trauma therapist for 17 years, even I needed to reprocess my story when my mother began dying of cancer and I was getting indicators repressed trauma was triggering me. In the book I use and introduce the tools. However, mostly I want the tools to be virtually free and will post them on ENYA page on LinkedIn and on The ENYA Podcast and in articles through Substack and Spotify.  

Therapists and individuals can benefit from simplifying trauma informed care to ENYA. I believe that being involved in a Toolbox community levels the healing and helping community to include broader and wider ranging resources beyond therapy and is part of a larger picture regarding where Mental Health and Well Being is headed. This destination is Relational Healing. It would mean we are all in each other's care. That patients and clinicians are in each other's care especially, when we speak to applying these tools in that dynamic. Clinicians, like myself, need to be able to use the therapeutic space to hold themselves accountable for being their own ambassadors in terms of knowing and growing from their own pain points. In this vein we can apply The Tools and influence and guide patients in finding pain points and being their own Ambassadors because we have used The Tools on our Stuff. 

The tools will be introduced here in NOT BROKEN but hopefully this is just the beginning of a movement and belief system we all have a right to processing our lives in ways that make mental health something we always hold necessary to care for in our daily life. We have lessons in how to care for physical health and those of others in the basic ways we cover our mouths when we sneeze or know about a fever and what it could mean, or the consequences of staying up when we should be sleeping. It is time for tools that are common knowledge. Let’s begin creating our classroom. 

There is a Difference Between Tools for Fixing things and Tools for Repair, Reposition, Reorder 

I am a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) and a Level Two Certified Clinical Trauma Professional (CCTP). I have many certifications that establish me as specialized beyond the credentials I use at the end of my name and extend into somatic methods, yoga, and trauma informed care. I can sense unprocessed trauma within systems and within people individually. I have publications, have developed initiatives, posted free resources, and started a company. I can look at it all, and at times I feel sad for how much it is all evidence for my own craving for repair. I decided to embrace my failed moving on even through all my acquired expertise and realize that emotional repression is part of the Human Condition now that I really treat in myself and in collaboration with others who come to sessions to see themselves better. My story is every story. NOT BROKEN is everyone’s realization but how do we both understand that we are fragmented and yet not broken and apply a repair mindset to what is there? 

My story, your story, it is a good story we carry. It is not one we entirely understand though. It cannot fit the normal measure of “good” and “bad” and it is not revealed in what we remember and can talk about or say, “this is my story”, if it was, we would all be greatly healed after one telling. I came to psychology for this reason, I had revealed a problem in my twenties, I was massively losing weight, I was urgent to move all the time and something ached in me physically. I was told what “it” was and attached myself to that problem, ashamed each time it came back at me. It was not the problem and was disappointed in my own therapy but not in how when I went to graduate school it opened me up to learning and all the tools and theories. The wealth of information I accumulated about human experience was a safe place for me for decades. I established a sense I was truly “with” others in their journey, helping them feel less alone. I held a touchable fantasy that within my safe presence and with the way of “holding space” for others, I was forming the protection for others I had found in my journey. In my 20’s, when I thought I had overcome some things, I began a vision of myself as a therapist, but I never completely mastered the ability to hold space for myself.  I still repair my own loneliness for holdin my own story back each day.  

Therefore, I want to highlight there is a big difference between fixing and repairing. That is essential to know now. With myself, it took realizing I was not emotionally available much of the time. It is hard to admit this as a therapist. I got stuck in surviving a thing and years passed. I held beautiful theories on myself and my pain and conducted multiple sessions in which others confronted their trauma and worked through it. I did “trauma work” on the wrong things and not on the underlying wounds that traumatize all childhoods. We are all just girls and boys on the seesaw, forgetting to make eye contact and enjoy the ride, communicating with our joy and connection, rather than looking behind for supervision, to parents that will only see it their way, and through their own seesaw experience.   

Repairing relationship to self means listening to your own story differently. I have attempted to do that for myself despite wanting to avoid the conflict. This is like all relationships really, a period of repeated rupturing happens mainly because of the desire to avoid conflict, so we create an even worse one through avoidance.  

Repairing relationship to self means listening to your own story differently. I have attempted to do that for myself despite wanting to avoid the conflict. This is like all relationships really, a period of repeated rupturing happens mainly because of the desire to avoid conflict, so we create an even worse one through avoidance. 

So, How Do You Know What you are Carrying? 

THE TIMELINE TOOL

Sometimes writing all this down, trying to come to myself with all these questions from memories that were always there but seem like they are rewriting my life, has been like allowing myself to be blindfolded.  That is why it can be so refreshing to remember you have done this before and called it childhood. You went blind folded into it and yet we call it learning when children progress to the next stage, “Tyrell learned his first word, he said ‘hello’, oh my gosh it was so cute!”. So, imagine what we are doing here is something closer to that of a class. You are learning yourself and the concept of taking a class and the experiences you revisit and the story you find to reprocess for new meaning I so essential to who you are currently, and what you hope to become. What young people are doing in class all around the world these days feels essential to what they will be in the world. We now know, you need an education somehow and if there is no classroom you create one. Learning the tools in this book are essential to how you will learn yourself. That is the metaphor at least and it lands well with all clients, but especially ones like the example provides below. This character I call Natasha below is a blend of individuals that are real people working with me, they help me bring this to you today with their bravery.    

Natasha, 19 and home on a break, tells me she has thought about what we talked about in the last session. I had told her that sometimes growing up is a leap of faith. She is essentially hoping that the work she is doing on herself now will help her future self have a relatively smooth landing into that future life. We discuss how there is no guarantee, and she still must take that leap and try to show up, for therapy, for herself. She tells me that she thought of the time she was blindfolded at a camp. She remembers that the exercise was meant to increase your awareness of your other non-sight senses. We grew together in that moment. We agree silently that this, what we are doing, trying to see her in her life but also into the rest of her life; it is like allowing a blindfold to be placed over her eyes and trusting that she will find her way, albeit differently than she would have thought, even differently than she thought it would feel.  She tells me “It is like it is supposed to feel a little unsafe and uncertain but then you remember why you are there”. Later, reflecting and making sure her chart notes are relevant reflections, I wonder to myself if I am really receiving here in this session too. I remember that blindfolded feeling stretching back into my own story and see her many times in that place.  I think about the ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always, concept, I think “Let’s help them Do the Work everyone needs to be with this ability, it’s time”.   

That session is symbolic of many. No matter your age, race, sex, religion; no matter who you are really, most individuals come to their first session with questions inside. The question I have for them is, “what are you carrying?”. However, we don’t just come out that way with it, somehow it is behind every therapy session I’ve ever held space for. My approach, a trauma informed one to be sure, is not specific to those with trauma diagnoses. We all have accumulated events that we (or our unconscious minds) have interpreted as emotionally painful. The pain can block our stories, they come out without connection, or they stay locked inside. This is because pain is an insult to the natural flow of your life force. Whatever you are going through, in any moment, in any stage of life, it’s all about the accumulation of these untold stories. The body will speak a language of ailments to this if you do not, cannot or don't know how. 

Bessel van der Kolk states, “Trauma is not the story of something that happened back then. It's the current imprint of that pain, horror, and fear living inside people.” We all have a “what happened to you narrative” that needs to be understood. At times I incorporate trauma informed yoga into sessions now and invite patients to a choice “can you notice what is happening with your breath?” It can be the second most important phrase in a session, where I can diagnose held pain. Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than with fear, or shame, everything converges. 

The narrative, however, is the topic today. When patients come in they often don’t ask for self-growth. In this way, their "problem" can almost keep secrets and suppress information. I’ve experienced this conundrum, so I know, much of the time we are fundamentally at war with ourselves. It takes a real leap of courage to see yourself, what you carry, allow yourself to know what you know. That takes a good space, the right questions and an understanding that accumulated events are unresolved traumas. 

That is why developing a Trauma Narrative with my patients is so important. Most adults have a collection of pain points, at least a few painful memories, or larger events, as mentioned above in can be cumulative. On the spectrum are those shaming experiences that cause you to cringe, even decades later. The spectrum can include things like heartbreak, loss, and regret. These memories are more than a series of facts and images—they also carry powerful emotions that reprint pain invisibly or visibly every time they surface. In the case of trauma, this phenomenon is taken to the extreme. Yet, all emotional memory can take its lessons from the traumatic memory process. Traumatic memories are so emotionally loaded that even the smallest of reminders can be crippling. The sound of a car horn might trigger a panic attack, or a familiar smell can lead to an uncontrollable rage. 

Gentle Exposure to What You Carry 

Innately, many survivors of trauma do their best to dodge these memories—as if they are a moving target, many of the maneuvers they make in life have to do with this, subconsciously. After all, it can feel strong to appear agile, who would willingly expose themselves to even more pain? Unfortunately, avoidance of trauma can sometimes be more harmful than it is helpful. Avoidance can cause trauma to accumulate, and it becomes more painful, and of course some triggers are simply impossible to avoid. One way that therapists help survivors of trauma is through what this writer is calling, gentle exposure treatments or the Trauma Narrative. 

During this exposure, the patient has choices and methods of revealing their narrative and may feel less exposed to the concept of having to tell it all or find the words, even the whole intact memories to prove it happened. Like traditional exposure, the patient is choosing to be confronted with reminders of their trauma gradually, in a safe environment. With enough exposure, trauma loosens its emotional power. This brief article is meant to merely open your awareness of this method and help you enter into treatment requesting it if it feels right to you. This is just one of many techniques I combine with others. The trauma narrative is a powerful technique that allows survivors of trauma to confront and overcome their painful memories through storytelling. 

Many of the tools in this book extend the concept of coming to know your narrative because the tools go beyond the basic concept of storytelling. You will see tools for learning the body’s neurobiological telling of what is in your narrative and a narrative tool for putting much together in a visual representation of several things that can be seen in the Narrative Grid. First, let us extend the concept below. 

What is a Trauma Narrative Extended 

Trauma narrative is a psychological technique used to help survivors of trauma make sense of their experiences, while also acting as a form of exposure to painful memories. Without treatment, the memories of a trauma can feel cluttered, chaotic and tangled—an unbearable wash of images, sounds, and emotions. When completing a trauma narrative, the story of a traumatic experience will be told repeatedly through verbal, written, experiential, somatic or artistic means. 

Sharing and expanding upon a trauma narrative allows the individual to organize their memories, making them more manageable, and diminishing the painful emotions they carry. Trauma stories are often shared organically through conversation, both in and out of treatment. Sometimes, the organic retelling of a traumatic experience can cause dysregulation and be harmful, especially if it’s in an unsuitable setting (e.g., work, holiday party, class). 

I am going to broaden the concept and use it here as the way we find the linear and logical paragraphs and chapters of our life story. There is a golden thread in the fabric that makes up you, so to speak, this is the beauty of your understanding. What we strive for when we do inner working on yourself type “stuff” is being able to move between the imperfections of the fabric and the golden thread that ties it all together somehow and that perfection of your understanding is you. Without treatment, the memories of a trauma can feel cluttered, chaotic and tangled—an unbearable wash of images, sounds, and emotions.  

When completing a trauma narrative, as I broaden the concept, all sorts of tools found in this book can be used. The story of a traumatic experience will be told repeatedly through verbal, written, experiential, somatic or artistic means. That is what these tools are all for. As you read you will see how non-verbal some of them are or, rather are not traditionally verbal as we know therapy to be in depictions of it in mainstream culture like movies and TV. They are inner work. You can talk about them an how you applied them and that becomes your authority and if you choose to start building relationships around this, like one with a therapist, sharing and expanding upon a trauma narrative allows you to organize further, making overt memories or more sensory ones, more manageable, and diminishing the painful emotions they carry. Trauma stories are often shared organically through conversation, both in and out of treatment. We know now that the organic retelling of a traumatic experience can cause dysregulation and be harmful, especially if it’s in an unsuitable setting (e.g., work, holiday party, class), but even in therapy it can happen and we need to know what we carry through the use of therapeutic tools that gently let us narrate in dynamic ways.  

Learning to use trauma narratives purposefully with your therapist allows you to control for these potential problems. I encourage you to explore this with your therapist or if seeking therapy to find someone who can adapt or has experience with this regardless of if you identify as holding trauma. My experience is that it may be circuitous, but it works in some way to release pain and keeps that internals space clear to continue navigating life’s challenges with less maladaptive patterns. 

WHERE DO I BEGIN? 

As a mental health professional, you learn that the entry into therapy begins with the assessment. This is where an individual is interviewed about the presenting problem and data is collected on their life experiences, former mental health challenges, family background, current stressors, methods of coping and relative health issues. We formulate goals and objectives from this, and it is all meant to organize things. As a young therapist this is such a welcome structure, to be able to know and have permission to ask a battery of questions, even believe in methods to precisely test for depression and anxiety and a spectrum of “disorders”. As a beginning therapist, the concept was collecting data and “know what we are dealing with here”. The therapist I am today, after nothing could help me feel an organized “treatment plan” inside my own story, has grown to see that what we need most is a way to begin. The way to begin to work on yourself, even without access or interest in formal therapy, is still fueled by the need for structure and a felt sense of what the problem is. We can’t just show up to therapy or come to our own private sit down with ourselves, and simply start. We guess, but we don’t know where this will go at all, sometimes that is enough for people to get in their own way, not try as hard as they might be capable of. That sense of uncertainty is enough to derail anyone.  

Tool # 1 The Timeline 

DO YOU HAVE ANY MEMORIES? Trauma Misconceptions And Symptoms 

Trauma is maybe becoming an overused term, while it can be accurate that trauma shows up like flashbacks and nightmares, or even severe behaviors like not leaving the house or dissociating. All of us have relational memories trapped in our bodies and so more often, it manifests as boundary and control issues, unhealthy coping mechanisms, a style of relating that destroys connection rather than aids it. It shows up in how we eat, how we handle money — I think you get the drift. Almost everything we do in life can become a way to try to find and return to relational safety. Who loves me, who really cares, who looks out for me? 

A trauma “symptom” is any once useful response to a past threat, which now shows up in the present where there is no threat, making it much less helpful.  For example, you will meet Sandy below, a combination of individuals I work with to protect their privacy, as I will do throughout.  Sandy launched a viscous Yelp campaign against a contractor she hired when he had not been returning her phone calls and left work half-finished for 3 days. In fact, his wife had called her to let her know of a family emergency, however suspicious of unknown callers she blocked it. Sandy lost her childhood home when her father left. She has unprocessed memories of him starting on the roof of their home, leaving it unfinished and a devastating eviction. To add to her triggered reaction, torment enough to her system as she raged and became obsessed with new Yelp profiles and complaints, she only discovered her missed communication issue when the police showed up at her home to investigate. This, in fact, is not all that extreme. There is beauty in this ‘gun blazing’ protector who never got this chance to protect her in the past and doesn’t know it can stand down now. The responses of fight, flight, freeze or fix (and all its manifestations like self-harm, addiction, eating disorders, disassociation, etc.) can, however, overprotect us from what happened in the past happening again namely because we are not in the past when it is triggered. It is like we are acting on old data downloading as current from a recent update from Microsoft but we are getting an old operating system instead.  

These impulsive protective parts might find horror, guilt, shame or fear in their failed attempts if we were to interview them later on, but they are off the scene by then and an adult is left there holding the damage. At times we cand trust this adult to manage it but there is still repair needed and no guarantee a real lesson has been learned inside our system to understand what happened and how to navigate this better next time. So, the problem is that these overreactions to inappropriate stimuli (only vaguely related to what hurt us) can affect our present and future exponentially in a reverse growth process not a beneficial maturation. Even with this, however, we must be grateful for our systems’ attempt to care for us. This may be a seemingly absurd self-contradictory start of a change effort but, like Buddha says, hating that we do this and moving on doesn’t work.  

“If hate worked, I would teach you that” 

- Buddha. 

No one I have met is not triggered by something from the past in the present, and this applies to all healing and very much applies to healing your trauma symptoms. Many people can feel like these trapped past reactions lying in wait for their triggers are part of their personality and can be attached to it in some ways. Sandy, for example, divorced and in her own home alone since, was sick of being “nice”, she was set on not being left now and was already known as a “tough customer” and quite happy about that. Sandy mistook her “gut level” trauma response for a part of her personality and was understandably attached to it. 

We can all relate to this, for example, I am overly prepared for things that could emotionally affect other people and can take it on as my responsibility, and my value is contingent on it. It stems from childhood molestation in many ways, specifically feeling it could be valuable and protective to not speak of it, it has turned into going through quite a lot before talking about it and intense fear my value could go down when I do.  A lot of the behavior I exhibit when I am stressed out is to overcompensate for a sense I am valueless, no one knows what is happening with me, no one cares. Some darkly cloaked residual trauma evil mastermind parts of self can be there. If you were in no way affected by early decisions that were mean to be relationally protective in the face of hard things, threats, and traumas; you would respond appropriately all the time. And you don’t, let’s be honest. 

When I have experienced a post-traumatic growth, my triggers become classrooms with the perfect lesson and teacher waiting just for me.  I feel wonderfully weird for this experience, but my clients agree, “it's a thing”. Still, there is caution and care to be taken, old patterns can slide in at any time without a practice of inner work ongoing.  I see one such example in Sandy, for example, her clear and kind statement that she will not stand down spending Christmas morning with her kids and can drop them off herself at her ex’s home by 10 am so as not to feel “left” that day.  The slide into comparing herself to her sister’s social media post, Christmas day in a newly renovated home, and blocking her traditional Christmas day call.  We all must recognize that this work will be in progress. For me I am okay with that concept for the rest of my life, I feel the growth spurts, and I can accept it may show up in unexpected ways if I am not consciously aware of what is happening within myself. 

If you can hold on and remember, everyone on the planet has lived through traumatic experiences, and the pain you feel toward an event, no matter if it fits what objectively defines trauma, is unique to you and your experience. In sessions, I often start with the “sunnier” experiences and use the tool slightly differently. This is because trust is being built between myself, the individual and the tool. Below you will see it used one way and the book includes client experiences.

The Timeline Tool shows how the events or combination of everyday hurts may be of a different intensity than another more specific single incident, even if you are not labeling it traumatic. Other’ lives may have seemingly “harder” things, or “real trauma”, we toss that concept and judgment out with the tools and just help you have wonder about the fact you are reading and doing this.

Do you feel the time is right for you to assess this in your life? Does the thought of opening the door frighten or excite you? If you are at the start of your journey toward recovery, consider it will be like a heroic journey to take the first step before leaping. We will get into this researched concept of the heroic journey in all human stories. For now, using the timeline tool on myself below will help view the tool at work. What my use of the tool does is allow me to see something that needs my attention that may be a part of my story I wouldn’t normally tell. Rather than decide what may story is and what the problems I already think are, they are revealed with less defenses in the way.

It is important to realize that what is really blocking you is not something you have thought of before. For example, you may know you have not returned to dating for 3 years after the last “toxic breakup”, but the block is not fear of repeating the relationship, it is not really knowing what about your story landed you there and how that is a classroom for you now. Before you see it at work, briefly, look at the diagram showing how memory works. There are different types of memory, the Explicit Memory category is often accessed in traditional talk therapy and while it can access a sense of relief and understanding can also develop into a certain level of insight that changes behavior, it is often not that lasting change and felt sense of “my life is better now, I feel more like my authentic self” most of us want. Looking below, the Implicit Memory category, the emotions you held in emotional memory is accessed by the Timeline Tool. Suddenly, you “see” that a memory has emotional intensity you missed and it can start to make sense why and reveal valuable insights that were missed prior.

NOTE: The timeline is blank at first and one just sets up blank spaces of five year increments. There is one key starting place you will notice, PRENATAL. This is the situation right before you were born. In each 5 year increment you just let yourself generally and minimally state what comes up that “is meaningful at this stage to me even if these are random things”.

MY CONDENSED TIMELINE

PRENATAL (before I was born):

* Mom nearly 40 met Dad two years prior.

* Mom had two children, 10 and 13, from a previous troubled marriage.

* My birth was glue that made us an official family.

* I would be my father’s only biological child.

* The extended family would accept us more when I am born.

0-4

* I sense I am the center of attention.

* Attention ends, daycare starts, much less attention.

* Keep a secret that sometimes I am not well cared for.

* Someone shows me how to lighten up and tickles me places to be happier.

* At home try for center of attention but it is different, people are busy.

* I idolize Rainbow Brite and my Cabbage Patch Doll is with me always.

5-10

* I hear “princess in the pea” and “wimpy wimpy wimpy”

* Mom says no “Daddy do it”.

* Dad works and gets headaches a lot.

* I am lonely but I meet a best friend who moves in across the street.

* I hide in the closet and notice sad boys in the neighborhood need my help.

* A boy six years older in the closet teaches me “show me yours”

* Mom says go back to the party, the game ends.

* I start to be in games that remind me of being tickled to happiness like before.

* I think I am helping kids and I am the center of their attention.

10-15

* I learn how to want to be something. I want to be a journalist.

* I get good grades. I walk places on my own to study.

* I think I am bad somehow.

* My best friend says the game is just us now but then moves away.

* The games stop and I know they were bad now.

* I get my period and think it is punishment for everything. I am lonely again.

* I start to be popular, I have to be normal. I am smart but my grades drop.

* Parents send me to a camp for troubled kids failing. It is not the problem.

Answer the Following Questions:

What jumps out at you as significant when you look at your timeline?

What was a particularly difficult period?

What painful relational dynamics from the past are you still living out today?

This exercise was profound for me. As I absorbed what I had done, it jumped out at me how lonely I was both then and now, and how much I was keeping it all in. No one knew any of this. I realized that if no one knew any of this, then I was not as authentically me as I thought. I realized that in the first 15 years of life, so much had already happened to me, and this was only scratching the surface of what I didn’t talk about. All the reasons I had become a therapist were entirely different than this. I linked my struggles to my 20s mostly and the struggles I had after a near death accident trauma. I was trying to cope by controlling my diet and exercising, as well as trying to come off brave by leaping into traveling Europe, when I was really running away. This was the story below the story and I was in for a lot of “Stuff” that I needed to sift through and which started to form the entire concept of the Toolbox Approach that ENYA Podcast and the book Not Broken. This is Your Stuff, These are The Tools. Therapists are People Too, attempts to bring you now. Keep reading, keep listening. EVERYONE NEEDS YOU ALWAYS to “do the work”.

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

We all have struggles because of variations of this Human Situation and so we have loved through, forming attachments to all sorts of things that teach us poorly. In this we are all the same, so Everyone Needs You Always to learn to do three things:

* Use Narrative Tools to see your story beyond what you “know” happened for the enhanced version.

* Use Reprocessing Tools with the enhanced version and work through all the new elements that create a disharmony inside that blocks you from how you want to be.

* Use Relational Healing Tools for the final repair, which is not a fixing but a healing the bonds of connection so relational threats are temporary and there is a “felt sense” one can always go through: HARMONY>DISHARMONY>REPAIR.

These Tools are already pre-released in the articles section of this Substack. They form the structure or “brain” of my aspirational book with no timeline NOT BROKEN. This is Your Stuff, These are The Tools. Therapists Are People Too.

This book is a personal and professional account of how I missed my own Stuff and then had to let go of the thought I could keep going without addressing it. After 15 years as a therapist, the passing of my mother opened up repressed childhood sexual violation, intrusion and manipulation memories that spanned 5 years. It was the Stuff underneath the stuff I had already worked on. I really had no choice but to look at my repressed emotional experience given what I do as a trauma professional needs to be authentically lived and then backed by studying trauma modalities and developing treatment expertise. That is the way I have always worked and people who have come to their sessions and called me their therapist know this, I am authentically using The Tools too. Still, why could I not take at least 6 months of my life to find tools and use them consecutively and ongoing before this inevitability, I had excuses and the inner dialog “I can’t because”.

It was in three categories:

* I worked on so many things in my twenties, I cannot endure more “help” or tell someone what I need because I don’t know, I don’t think I need much, so what would be the point?

* I am fine now, I have a purpose, I cannot do more seeking just because I am alone sometimes.

* I do everything for myself now, no one can hurt me anymore, no therapist ever figured out I have trauma, I had to figure this out myself and I already wasted so much time doing that.

So I had to “treat” three things first:

* My delusion that I did not know what I needed or needed very little. I need to treat the fear. I was afraid of how much I needed from myself and others.

* The distorted idea that a purpose replaces the need for connection and that loneliness can be “fine” and endurable.

* My concept of wasted time. Time is not a commodity; it is always depreciating if that is the case. I will to the end of My Time and there is only one way to ensure it doesn’t feel like a waste, FACE THINGS!

There are a lot of people claiming to be on a “healing journey”. I don’t think you can be inside the journey and committed if you’re only scrolling and reading a few things, following in the hopes of beginning one day is mostly what we do if we are honest. If The Tools are not inside you and creating new vision, reprocessing, purpose and connection, you are not inside yet. BUT YOU COULD BE AT ANY MOMENT.

Then staying would be the key. ENYA Podcast hopes to have your back with that however. So, it starts here with treating your excuses, your “because”.

Now, let’s look at what we do first when attempting to look inward at our lives. Well, the first thing we do is look outward. (BRIEF URBAN FOLK-TALE on “the missing keys” only heard on the Podcast).

We get this urge to look at our lives and without really looking in we focus outward, and we might sense there is not enough healthy behavior. It is way easier to start with a look at healthy behavior. So, for a more demonstrative example that can act as a metaphor, we get a Brita Filter. We pour in our unhealthy water, filter it through the Brita, and claim to be both drinking cleaner water and dedicated to drinking more of it. It seems like an inside job, it is meant to address something inside, but what? To extend this further, let’s say we pour it into a mug, we aren’t really even drinking from a clear glass and able to observe if the filter does it’s job. In fact, there is no measure here at all aside from our own mind’s idea “this has to be better than before!”.

I think you are getting my point so I will not belabor it. We don’t get really committed to looking inward because our mind’s idea of things get’s in the way. There is a sense though that if looking inward is a process and requires tools, like I am suggesting in my book and with the ENYA CONCEPT, it take too long. This is where your “because” comes in, the excuse for why you can’t do it that way. I shared mine above and I believe I will likely go through a process like this again, but I also know now I can do so repeatedly, and I may always have to start with treating this first.

So, right now (pouring water into a clear glass), we are going to take a full breath in just like pouring water into a clear glass. We trust the boundaries, although see through, will provide the container for this and fill our abdomen, lower ribs, upper ribs, into the clavicle with breath. We are inhaling through the nostrils with lips closed and even feeling it go up the spine into the top of our head. Now, exhale with a slight smirking “AHHHH”, gently. Now, take to the question, I can’t start because? (Or for some it may be “I have not started because?”)

HERE ARE SOME POPULAR ONES:

* I am full of doubts

* I don’t know enough about the problem

* I have health problems that are more important

* I don’t have the time

* I have kids that take priority over my own time

* I don’t know where to begin

* I feel like the past is the past

* I don’t have extra money to spend on this and it will likely take that

* I don’t think I can change much

* I have to work

SO WE TREAT (this is tough, we will go line by line from above)

* The delusion that life is about being certain in order to start something

* The distortion that you know a problem in your head and not in some other way

* The distortion that emotional health is separate from neurobiology and physical health

* The time illusion, there is always only 12 hours in a day and you choose them all the time, thought predicts reality, I do have the time, I don’t choose my time I submit to its illusion of not enough.

* The kids enjoy you when you enjoy you, they don’t want to be your have to, they want to be your want to. Treat the distortion that you suffer so your kids don’t have to, they suffer never knowing how you could be and so do you.

* The fact is no one knows where they are, where they have been, or where they are going. Treat the delusion you start this without tools to tell you these things. You do know you are not an expert and have already been existing as such.

* The information you learned, for example 2+2=4 is valuable in the present in ways the past never could have predicted, this happens to you every day, the past is frequently the source of newly usable efforts toward something.

* Treat the concept of needing more money or extra money in order to do something. If you were sick and blowing your nose and blew through the tissue after tissue and experienced the need for more, you might experience distress, but would you block that need and stop pulling out of the box? After awhile would you not consider other tools? Treat you concept of needing money to blow your own nose and clear out what is in there to see what you are dealing with.

* Treat the concept of change. For most people, even a 5% change is something of value, there is no measurement for change except for your own sense of "better” and that is up to you. What is better than the way things are by 5%? Can you think about that? When we don’t think we can change it means we don’t think we can be uncomfortable for the length of time it feels like is necessary for a complete overhaul, but change is not a complete overhaul or uncomfortable the whole time.

* Treat the concept of work. Work is a part of life but it is not your life. If you have to work another four years before you can do this, will future you consider that a smart decision, “thank you we needed to work another 4 years because the job was not done yet, I am really glad you waited”. Is that what future you would say?

The point is, your because gets in the way. It makes you do this “sort of” process of be more aware of what people carry in general by scrolling through your phone for content that “speaks to me”, eating better, getting your steps in, quitting a substance or behavior, going to yoga, reading some self-help books, taking a vacation, or listening to good self-improvement podcasts, to name a few. It is not using The Tools. The Tools as I define them here on ENYA Podcast are detailed in the book NOT BROKEN. This is Your Stuff, These are The Tools, Therapists Are People Too. They fall in three categories as mentioned above and have begun to be presented on this Substack Page and are introduced in the INTRODUCTION SNEAK PREVIEW.

You do not have to “be ready” to start using them but you do need to treat your excuses and “I can’t because” first. Don’t waste time in therapy or in self-helping without letting the Toolbox Approach mentality sync in and make sense to you. Then come back to ENYA Podcast, we will be delivering The Tools here in expanded versions of what is already available in articles with the Substack subscription.

Melinda’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The tools in the book I am writing are based on my own awareness that after nearly two decades of crafting my own pain into the purpose of become an expert trauma therapist. I also needed to find my pain again and learn the rooms of my heart that were held back from me. Holding trauma is really what we all do, we hold our pain as if moving forward with it is the thing that makes us a success in life. If we push forward and find a job, call it a career, open a bank account and are able to say who we are through what we do, then we are safe.

Safety, it turns out, is a feeling in your Central Nervous System. You have to climb a different kind of ladder to get there. This Substack has numerous tools to understand the safety inside you when you can figure out on your own certain things that help you see “Your Stuff” with expertise the mental health field traditionally has felt then need to diagnose first. These tools reverse the process. Please listen to this song, the lyrics are below for those who like that level of engagement. Use the link embedded in the lyrics to subscribe to this Substack and freely use the tools in “NOT BROKEN. This is Your Stuff, These are the Tools. Therapists are People Too.

This book is going to include a soundtrack to go along. These tunes will be raw and released here just like I am doing with some of the raw partially edited chapters and content. The tools can’t wait for me to formally publish them, I put them to you now.

Your next big step is reading this content NOW!

Thanks for reading Melinda’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

MMM MMM

Mmm MMMMM

OOOO OOOOO

What did mommy teach you? MMM MMMM

Be good, be nice, be kind……

Keep your miiiiind…………..

In check?

MMM MMM

Mmm MMMMM

OOOO OOOOOOo

What did daddy say? Did he turn away?

Go to work, when you wanted to play?

Oh children, who are you, how do you know what to do?

Or what to be?

Listen to the beat…….

MMM MMM

Mmm MMMMMM

There are rooms to know

Not the one you grew up in

Not the one you live in right noooow wo wo wo

You know sometimes I loook around the rooom

I know I don’t what to do

You two are just are just picture is a frame

It’s not the same, your not here to tell me what to do

And you know it wasn’t like that when you were

It’s a blur

Who taught me this life I have I don’t know what to do

Oh children do we know who we are?

Feel the beat in your heart.

Look around the room

You may need some tools for the space there

No it’s not fair but your not alone

Your just doing it on your own

But we all are

MMM MMM

Mmmm MMMM

OOOO OOOO

Look around the room

You many need some tools for the space there

Start with this Substack Page

Thank you for reading Melinda’s Substack. This post is public so feel free to share it.

There is woman there

And she’s been aware just for you

She’s a motherless mother and she cares

It doesn’t always feel like this however. For example, we can get to thinking “why are they acting that way, it feels like they don’t even care!?”, and then feel powerless to change what is happening to us. This is a process of feeling like things happen to us and we don’t often get any indicator or guide to go inside for a solution. Inside, however, is where it is really happening. The information from the outside could be not be responded to for example. In this case my eyes were looking for a response and that absence of one is a threat. This “oh no not there” enters into my eyes and triggers a widening of them, gearing to get more information. Hands may scroll text messages from before to validate the responses were there and now they are not. The heart rate is going up and distress is registering now. As you can see, the not there text response is happening inside the system, not outside. The outside “trigger”, if focused on much longer may put the system at risk for moving down the Polyvagal Ladder depicted above.

This state in the example is the Sympathetic “RED ZONE” above. It want so prepare me for fight or flight but if it can’t and I start to scroll and scroll and deplete my anxiety to action window I will move down the ladder, not up. I will move to the “GREY ZONE”, getting low energy, feeling defeated, abandoned, cancelled and insignificant. Looking at the ladder shown above, we see that the job of the ladder is to climb it and get to the Ventral Vagal “BLUE ZONE” but how? At times there have been a few bounces back and forth and it is getting really hard to even consider a climb up this ladder is possible.

You see, moment by moment, our neural circuits distinguish whether situations or people are safe, dangerous, or life threatening. We can be feeling safe and comfortable in a group, and then a comment or a glance or snigger that we interpret as a threat or a criticism can completely hijack us and we are pulled out of our ventral vagal state into sympathetic state, into a state of fight or flight. 

This reaction happens below the level of awareness – we start to feel a bit uncomfortable but we can usually recover, realise we may have misinterpreted what just happened and carry on. It can happen when, as above, we are happily checking our phone for the response we expect from our loving “good morning” and nothing is there hours later, we initially flood with panic and fight or flight energy. However, many times a few moments later, rather than descending into full blown “they don’t care” mode, we shrug it off and accept we are busy. There are just as many times, however, when we are not okay. We need the tools of climbing the ladder awareness but we are lost.

Understanding the Vagus Nerve through a Trauma Lens

The ability to quickly recover can be impaired by stress and a whole number of things and it may be seriously compromised after trauma. When someone has experienced trauma, particularly in experiences where they were left immobilised, their ability to scan their environment for danger cues can become skewed. If we grew up in a home with a lot of anger and unpredictability, for example, when we experience a situation later in life that feels similar, our nervous system can respond exactly as it did when we were young and unable to protect ourselves. Of course, our body’s goal is to help us never experience a terrifying moment like that again, so it will do whatever it needs to do in order to help protect us.

The polyvagal theory is useful firstly because it allows people with trauma to understand what our body does to protect us. With this knowledge, people with PTSD are often able to forgive themselves and to understand why they continue to experience so much activation and/or dissociation. Secondly, learners realise that we CAN assert control over our nervous systems, helping ourselves complete defensive cycles and move back into our ventral, social state.

Understanding our nervous system in this way can change the way we think of these states in ourselves.  Therefore there can be less self-judgement and more compassion for ourselves. In the example above, we ended wondering how the person is going to climb that ladder. Let’s learn a bit more first and see if we can train ourselves in this concept with an activity and help ourselves climb to safety with this awareness in place for future.

The polyvagal ladder exercise involves us imagining our nervous system as a ladder, with ventral vagal at the top, sympathetic in the middle, and dorsal vagal at the bottom. (See image above). Key to this concept is that a neuroception of safety brings us into a ventral vagal state, at the top of the “ladder”. This word neuroception means if our nervous system “sees” thing as safe we will get to the BLUE. This is a state of social engagement and connection. From this state we might say the world is a safe place and describe ourselves as happy, active, and interested in connection. 

You learned above, if something happens to alert us to danger (no text there when one was expected, a harsh tone from a boss), we go into a sympathetic nervous system state of mobilisation. This is the state of fight or flight and is evolutionarily linked to mammals. We feel adrenaline, feel anxious or angry and ready for action. The world may feel dangerous, chaotic, unfriendly. We may feel we need to protect ourselves.

Going down a step on the ladder, (getting drained scrolling) if we sense signs of extreme danger, neurologically we go into the dorsal vagal state of immobilisation. Think of a turtle drawing its head inside its shell. We might feel frozen, numb, not here, alone, hopeless. From here the world is not safe.

In this exercise, we can write

down our typical feelings and behaviours when we’re in a sympathetic state, often using words and phrases like out of control, angry, confrontational, fearful, and panicking. We do the same for our experiences of being in dorsal vagal, which may include silent, numb, hopeless, helpless, shut down, and feeling abandoned and unwanted. Finally, we recall times of being firmly planted at the top of the ladder—the ventral vagal zone. These typically include such descriptors as openhearted, engaged, curious, connected, calm, and happy.

We then complete this exercise by finishing two sentences for each state: 

“I am…” and “The world is….” 

Here is an example using the “no text there”:

DORSAL-GREY ZONE

I am not important to my partner, I am unwanted. The world is cold and uncaring.

SYMPATHETIC-RED ZONE

I am panicking and fearful. The world is too much for me.

VENTRAL-BLUE ZONE

I am calm and exude love. The world benefits from me and enjoys me.

I find that most individuals recognize with sharp clarity the dramatic difference in story they tell themselves or their core narrative, all depending on the zone they inhabit. In a ventral state, people typically characterise their story as something like “I belong” and “the world welcomes me and has opportunity.” In sympathetic, they may say, “I feel crazy, panicked. I’m trapped in a world that’s unfriendly and scary.” When in dorsal, the response is something like: “I’m invisible, unlovable, lost, alone. The world is cold and empty.”

Using an activity like this is simple and clear and now we can have a real mental picture and more “top” or head experience to remember of what happens. Now we have both a mental picture and a language for their “ladder” at any given moment. The aim of this exercise is that over time, we learn to shift our default autonomic nervous system setting from a place of danger and distrust to a state of open hearted safety.

I hope you enjoyed this. Please consider finding me on LinkedIn, I would love to invite you to ENYA Page community where, EVERYONE NEEDS YOU ALWAYS to do this inner work.

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I am not a parent, you don’t have to be one to understand that at a certain point in your life, you start to interact and notice the children related to you or close to you and see yourself. Even if you have never been to therapy or heard of the term “reprocessing”, we are doing it and at a certain point in life, we do it more. It can often be triggered by interacting with youth in some way and then it is as if we are looking through lenses that are like re-visiting your own childhood, but in new ways. We accept that children are more sensitive and might cry at loud noises or not understand that a frown is not rejection but might be mistaken that way if we see that their lips start to quiver. They may feel a bump in the road more strongly or feel the sheets are too rough and become cranky. All when we think these things are just fine, or at least something to just put up with.

Today, as we process the children in our lives being sensitive, and we “get it” suddenly, we may feel a pang of despair. No one noticed us in this way. A lot is explained immediately and yet it is also a fleeting moment that can be overlooked. “Things were different back then”, is often the refrain, but our brains have been our brains since creation, and they are not in fact that different right now than the ones we had as children. The things we had sensitivities to might have been missed. Our systems do hold on to these misses however, and like you learned in the video, the emotional parts of our brain, that are often reacting to the sensitive information, are responsible for the safety or threat of the memory. We can remember sensory experiences as threatening and repeat them unknowingly if the noticers in our lives reinforced missing things. There are, in fact, no perfect parents or adults to support perfect Central Nervous System processing, fortunately we can grow our own healing neurology (called neuroplasticity).

We can all benefit from knowing the brain’s sensitivity and its main mission to keep us oriented to safety. The sensitivities, if ignored, misunderstood, rejected, repressed, judged or attacked, start to lose their purpose. They cannot be used by our Central Nervous System, largely made up of our brain and spinal cord, to lead us to that “I am safe here” feeling. We are all sensitive to the missed sense of safety. I will explain four main areas of sensitivity: the five senses, the vestibular and kinesthetic senses, proprioception and interoception. These areas can get alarmed and detect danger, in fact they must, at certain points, detect danger. We must acknowledge, however, that this process can get stuck in survival mode and learn that we possess the power to heal our Central Nervous System through something called neuroplasticity.

This essentially means we can grow a better understanding. Namely, we can learn not to ignore our sensitivities, so we can establish then, after our sensitivities process things, how to use the thinking part of our brain to speak our needs, desires, hurts, hopes and fears in the form of words. Anyone who has been around kids knows that push pull between how much we want to care and how hard it is when they can’t communicate the sensitivities going on that are clearly influencing their behavior with us, it is no different with grown-ups. We don’t know our own sensitivities because we refuse to feel them.

I am an aunt to a wonderful rock star soccer player/vlogger in the making. Despite years of attempting to understand myself as a person and a Master’s Level Education in mental health with 9 certifications in processing trauma, her experiences with the 5 senses, the vestibular and kinesthetic senses, proprioception and interoception, helped me truly “get it” because I could almost see me again as a child. Let me break down four areas that she and I are uniquely sensitive in, the ways we differ in these areas and then end with an invitation to use a sensitivity check list for consideration of what you process either with an intense awareness or a more dissociated one. Either way, your system deserves to feel safe, if you are missing information because early experiences of “not safe” cut you off, or you experience high sensitivity and feel unsafe because certain things are deep processed and lead to anxiety or depression, this information is essential. There is no one not on the spectrum or sensitivity in your nervous system, it applies to us all.

The Five Senses

Okay, the FIVE SENSES. These are sight, touch, smell, sound, taste. My niece has auditory processing disorder. When she was 5 years old, she was in a child ballet performance. It was time for much needed socialization, she needed an activity and to make friends and she was quiet. Being a girl it was a logical choice, right, dance! She would not have to talk much and could follow the instructor and still be engaged with all the girls the same size and age as her. We didn’t know she had sensory processing disorder but when she froze on stage and my sister and I could just see her little body fold in and away, it broke our hearts. All the little girls were like daisies on the stage, petals wide open and a round face open to the audience, little stick-stem legs trying to be seen and following. Her petals were drooped over her face and her stick stem-legs went in, she wanted to turn away but was frozen. It was the sound. The live performance was more sound than practice, it was sensory overload and she had never been able to absorb all the instructions from practice to begin with, they were mostly auditory and what saved her was following along.

I could relate, I longed to do gymnastics as a child. I was really good after school in my school clothes. We learned early on I could not wear denim but that was just fine, cotton and other blends were cheaper, and no one saw me cartwheel and tumble much, my parents worked and the after school “gymnast” was not actually a pro, just a local who needed extra income. I would need to be comfortable in a leotard and on the rough texture of the balance beam at American Gymnastics. I was excited for a birthday party there, a girl in my 3rd grade class had to invite everyone, so all the girls were. The sensory experience that was overloaded for me was touch. The tights, the mats, the balance beam, the trampoline. All my talent left me. I expected to come home ready to convince my parents I could afford classes on my own and would give up my bike and future birthday and all presents if I had to. I did not come home and do that. I said nothing, and no one asked much. “That’s the way things were back then”.

I know you have stories like these. The FIVE SENSES are important, and they are avenues by which we process “Am I safe”, “Am I good here”, “Will I be accepted”. In fact the other senses we will explore also process this because this is the job of our Central Nervous System (CNS). Re-processing, which is essential to healing the CNS, is about sensing in rather than sensing out, understanding what you have processed too little or too much or in a disorganized fashion is part of the process. It is what gets you noticing and considering it could matter. When you feel something in these stories that brings up you own “Stuff” (reference to my book link here), it will get you interested to consider your Central Nervous System sensitivity. Now, onto Vestibular Sense.

Vestibular and Kinesthetic Senses

What are kinesthesis and the vestibular sense?

Kinesthesis is the body's sense of how much tension or pressure your various muscles are exerting and how extended or contracted they are. From this information, it is possible to know where the limbs are in relation to each other and how much force is being exerting to stand up or lift something.

The vestibular sense informs us if our body is in motion and tells us about our orientation in relationship to gravity (the ground).

Taken together, this is how we sense movement, react to movement in our environment and maintain balance, even when lifting something.

What is an example of vestibular and kinesthetic senses?

Recently my sister and I had a texting conversation over concern that my niece might opt out of the Statue of Liberty class trip due to the ferry ride. Being a deep processor, I had already felt it in my entire body when my father had told me with perplexity “She remembered your sister getting sick on the ferry and doesn’t want to go”. He seemed to be questioning if it was an excuse or real, but I felt it as empathic knowing immediately, when my sister said she was dizzy or nauseous, she felt the movement in her own system.

The vestibular sense is our sense of how our bodies move and where they are in space, giving us a sense of balance and located in the inner ear where my niece struggles with auditory processing; where the hairs that send signals to the auditory nerve are 12. The vestibular sense helps us to maintain balance, coordination, and spatial orientation. My niece is a confident soccer player now, but the temporary damage done by a comment “I got a little nauseous” affects her vestibular system effecting her ability to move through the world with confidence34. Even temporary, damage to the vestibular system may cause dizziness, vertigo, and difficulty with balance and coordination. Luckily, gum, her Opa bringing her instead of Mom and some other sensory supports prevented sensory avoidance and we have amazing pictures of her facing the day. She will move forward with a sense “I can” and feel safe in her sensory overload. Not all of us have been getting this awareness. It is a needed skill that we should care about cultivating in adults as well.

The kinesthetic example I can give you is from my own story. Ever since I was a child, I would lock my muscles when I was very afraid. This is something that just became “a thing” but is now so profoundly a sensory issue in my path to re-processing for decades that it can be like grief when I forget to see the life, I am proud of now. As a child however, I experienced so much fear in my body when I was being coerced into things that I developed certain habits of tensing my body I was not aware of. As an adult I was prone to over-exercise, any form of exercise that could unlock the tension I gravitated towards. I would enjoy short relief and presented physically healthy, but it was not until my professional life help me blend Yoga and emotional blocks in my Central Nervous System that I began to understand the healing I needed. There is another article on Chakra Healing in my collection here.

Proprioception and Interoception

We must respond to information in our environment in order to achieve safety. You know this already. The information requires us to be sensitive, but we avoid that and try to override this sensitivity and move right into using the cortex or thinking part of our brain. You know from the video the brain is made up of parts and is part of something called the Central Nervous System. We get information from outside of the system from more than just our FIVE SENSES, we also get it from proprioception and interoception.

Proprioception is our awareness of our body in space. For example, if I am in an airplane and want to stretch, I use proprioception to notice I have very little space side-to-side, so I may stretch out or up, or even twist slightly. Whereas if I am in my bed by myself waking up, I innately understand I can stretch out to my heart’s content.

Additionally, there is a felt sense “I am safe now” that come from our internal states. For example, one can know the difference between, “I think I ate too much” sensations in your stomach and, “I think I have that stomach bug going around” when you are nauseous suddenly after a week as a teacher where student kept calling out.

See below for a mini lesson:

* Proprioception:

* Proprioception refers to the sense of the relative positioning of neighboring parts of the body and the strength of effort needed for movement1.

* It helps us understand where our body is in space and how our muscles and joints are positioned.

* Proprioceptors, found in muscles, tendons, and joints, provide feedback to our brain about body position and movement.

* Interoception:

* Interoception focuses on how our body feels internally.

* It involves detecting sensations related to internal organs, such as hunger, thirst, and temperature regulation.

* When we’re tuned in to interoception, we make unconscious decisions to maintain homeostasis (e.g., eating when hungry, using the bathroom, adjusting the thermostat)2.

In summary, proprioception helps us understand our body’s position, while interoception relates to internal sensations. Both play essential roles in our overall sensory experience! 32.

Proprioception and Interoception

The missed moments are memories you can retrieve with your own awareness of your Central Nervous System today

As we use this article to re-process sensory information you may have missed using both the stories of mine and my niece and education, we become more self-directed. As you use this to become more self-directed, the ultimate “I am safe now” can be achieved. That occurs through connectedness. When you are more understanding of your own Central Nervous System and full sense of yourself with all it its sensitivities, you related better to others. You understand others are not threatening but your system may be processing them as such and there is no need to point the finger first. Going within, like we do with the children in our lives, to help them figure it out and act on this information relationally.

My niece and I both experienced the sense of smallness in different ways. I was always too little, being the youngest by 10 years and dubbed “Munchkin”, no one would know that I literally felt too small in the spaces I navigated. When I would ask “Daddy do it?”, my mother would frown in frustration. I deep processed that with my system and could feel my smallness in profound ways. I know have to tools to re-process that experience and the meaning I made of it subconsciously in my life, “you are too small to do things on your own, but you must figure out a way to”. Now I know that I have to move beyond understanding things and experience life bigger and more boldly and in connection not alone, figuring things out on my own. My niece too, had a period of time that is still occurring, she copes with a sense of small or overwhelmed by going into her tablet. However, she comes out by posting to YouTube and has grown social skills and followers, she is making her way and controlling her sensory experience in moderation. At times she seeks to sensory avoid and we try to coax her out of it while still leaving avenues for sensory safety. We are working on things together.

WE ARE ALL WORKING ON THINGS TOGETHER!

Please follow here and at ENYA Page. If you are not a member, please find me on Linked In and become a connection and I will invite you. I seek for this to be a safe community for those who want this inner re-processing and not a social media trend, therefore I want to be deliberate, authentic and ensure a sense “I can be safe here”. It is easy to follow the Substack however, the ENYA community aims to be a safe space for “the work” where I will be available for comments and connection.

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BONUS CHECKLIST: Awareness of if you are on the HSP spectrum and/or of all the possible sensitivities you do have but your CNS manages with less intensity.

* I am easily affected by loud noises and often notice and get annoyed by sounds that others don't even pay attention to

* I often feel other people's emotions and feelings strongly

* I easily notice subtleties in my environment or in the way people act

* I am especially sensitive to strong smells and they easily distract me

* I need a lot of alone time to recharge

* I am easily overwhelmed and feel drained after spending time with many people

* I tend to prefer to hang out with only one friend at a time or with smaller groups

* I get easily distressed by cruelty and don't like to watch violent movies

* I get "hangry" easily - when I am hungry,

* I get quickly irritated and it seems hard to focus on anything else

* I am creative and insightful

* I am good at making physical environments more cosy and comfortable for everyone

* I am easily overwhelmed by bright lights and having dim lighting is important to me

* When I see something beautiful in nature, like a sunset or a starry sky, I often get deeply moved

* Any kind of conflict or disagreement with others easily impacts me to my core

* I have strong intuition I easily notice the small, beautiful details in things that others often think are just normal or mundane

* I get easily rattled and nervous if someone is observing me doing tasks

* I have a deep and rich inner life and tend to feel my emotions deeply

* I am perceptive and can easily notice if someone is lying or if they are uncomfortable

* I'm jumpy and startle easily, for example when hearing loud noises

* I am often emotionally drained from absorbing other people's feelings

* I don't perform well at all under time pressure

* I often notice hidden/unspoken meanings and easily sense people's vibes

* I get easily stressed out and feel nervous if I need to do too many things at the same time

* People often tell me I am too sensitive, ever since I was a child

Did you watch the clip? If you did then you know all you need to know about Neuro-somatic intelligence. How? Because you felt the story through this intelligence. I am a trauma therapist, and this is the hidden gem of healing I am here to explore with you today. If you have been wondering why talking about what bothers you, what you remember about the past, or why you feel so stuck hasn’t helped, it is due to the fact that talking about things does not release what is stuck in our nervous system’s story, in your somatic intelligence. The felt sense of what has happened in life is still there in an activated nervous system that has become very good at sweating all the things and disguising this as the hard work of life and moving forward. There is a way to release from survival mode. Watching the short clip is an exercise in awareness. This is not what we do with our own lives. We do not sit silently and play back all the clips; survival mode protects us from our own somatic intelligence. However, you get to a certain point, and you just know. You are reading this because you know. Read on and feel this be true to you.

The Polyvagal Ladder comes from a neurological and somatic concept of our emotional and mental health that speaks to where in the body our life narratives may have stuck points. We cannot talk out all that has happened because it is not just a What Happened, it is a Where. When you watch the above video without sound it is a mini-experience of the neuro-somatic reality that stories hit us as a sensory experience, and we make up the meaning based on this. Our life stories are all on a timeline called “my life” but not all the memories are clear episodes, and then there are the ones we don’t know how to tell because they are only felt and not recorded the same way. They still demand we tell them and release them. It is very likely they hold pain and want to be released so we can find the lesson. All stories do have something to teach us, yours is no different. Let’s learn from an experience I had recently the demonstrates how to blend Neuro-somatic intelligence and the Polyvagal Ladder concept with good old creativity for release.

Recently, I got the idea that there was healing left for me to do. I have been becoming more aware of what it means to feel safe and secure in my life and I floated back to childhood. Today I am aware I was going through a lot. I have childhood trauma that surfaced after a tragic loss during the pandemic. As mentioned, I am a trauma therapist, and the pandemic changed the way I work tremendously given the boundaries shifted between therapist and individual seeking therapy. People were coming to therapy knowing I was inside at least one collective trauma, right along with them, there was no way I could be more expert than them and I decided to embrace that. So, I pulled back into my own healing right along with many others feeling they really had nowhere else to go but inward. The goal was to be as authentically with everyone as I could, but it transformed into another piece of inner work that would come to be authentic and just for me. This is the backdrop of the past few years. Now I seek healing out in new ways that are more creative and can work for you too, no matter where you are in deciding there could be a past “thing” still affecting your life.

I began writing and found a hidden chorus inside me. I felt like I needed to feel myself speak but I am a listener, and it didn’t feel as though I could. I returned to my somatic training and realized that I kept humming to myself as I wrote, as I went hiking, and as I tried to stop thinking and go to sleep. There was a sound for everything I was feeling, so I felt like I needed to tap into that. I am not on a course to become a professional singer so when I shook like a leaf in a singing class and only found strength when I just ended up singing something I made up, Eve Soto, the wonderful guide for the course suggested I go to the songwriting class.

I knew immediately this was the right track because there was some authentic energy between Eve and I in that moment and she knew I was there to heal something unspoken. So, I went as a way to continue to release emotional wounds encoded in my limbic system’s implicit memory. My body knows it has not been singing and humming to itself for comfort in decades. I sensed I needed to bring this back now and not always turn to thinking and understanding stuck emotions by figuring them out or explaining them, but truly let them complete themselves and why they are showing up in a body centered way.

In the class we were prompted to watch the clip above and let it inspire our own lyrics. I could sense my system immediately feeling the connection to what I do as a trauma therapist. I felt the story I witnessed and the pull to make it the familiar one my brain already knew was the “accepted version” but held on to the mission to let this inspire something unique and new. I was nervous but realized it was possibly the good kind and not the bad. The class, when they heard my lyrics could sense the story I felt, they didn’t laugh or disagree. I knew then I had done something it can take months to teach to people that come to therapy, I saw a story through the felt sense, totally unafraid of what I would find.

Many people have had bad experiences both telling and not telling what has been going on in their lives. We wait until the need is large and dump it or repress it trying to protect others. In both instances we don’t feel what we are afraid of, we just label it a bad story that feels worse in the telling. We assume it feels worse because we spend so much time moving on in spite of or address things in critical, managerial and impulsively avoidant ways that numb it away.

The way I was able to use creative song writing, following my humming, singing it out in the group imperfectly through feeling a life story that was not my own but somehow was, is a method of climbing up the ladder to social connection and feeling safe. The group understood my words and felt my music despite how in tune or off, they felt it completely because of my ability to let this story hit my system and so I poured that back out and it was understood. However, we rarely get this experience with our own stories. Largely, we try to talk about things as a release, but it can fall short. I encourage you to watch and feel as an exercise of what this could be like. I am normally a very shy singer, I have not even heard myself until recently, but I want you to listen to my raw expression of this at the end of the article. I am not afraid because I felt it, and it feels real and authentic. Feeling and releasing emotions in a body centered way is part of self-care and self-regulation leading to authenticity.  

CLIMB BACK UP THE LADDER

Climbing back up the Polyvagal ladder to emotional safety and desire for connection to others is not a talk about it process. We are disrupted in life largely by trapped threat activations that never complete themselves. Remarkably, we can carry on in survival mode for decades. The accomplishments we think up to drive us out of our bodies and into productivity are a powerful disconnector.

Take a moment now and breath in. Place your hands around your middle, underneath your ribcage and breath in again as if you are stoking the fire in your heart. Now breath in one last time into your core, breathe into the underneath of your hands and feel from the inside of yourself how all this hard work really is in there. Imagine how you look when you are not in this awareness but when you are making the mental list of what to do, or thinking about what is wrong, why you haven’t gotten to that important thing or made that appointment or done the things you were supposed to do last week and keep moving around in avoidance loops. This is what you look like, can you feel that? Somatic intelligence tapping will let you release in ways that release more than just stress but the hidden stories of not good enough, not there yet, something is wrong with me, I missed out, I keep making mistakes, I don’t know, who is there for me; all the ways we manifest the Saber Tooth Tigers our ancestors ran from be we run from only within our minds. Our threats are different and we have to work with the somatic intelligence of the past and blend it with an awareness of our internalized mental projection of our story.

The amygdala triggers our threat response system as part of a natural process meant for us to ultimately orient to safety, however at times humans, unlike other animals, disrupt their process by attempts to use what I will call the Front Brain for simplicity, and altering the response cycle such that it does not complete itself. There are rich tools in what I will call the Back Brain, again for clarity and simplicity, tools that come largely from the information highway that is our Vagal System, the large cranial nerve that courses from the brain down through our facial muscles into our organs through the branches of its trunk that is backed by the spinal cord. Tools that make up the Sympathetic nervous system and include the Back Brain goodies that come to us from the information highway of our Vagal System are the way we can imagine a ladder inside ready for us to climb up to safety. This system that is like a ladder is depicted below.

The Steps of the Polyvagal Ladder 

At the top of the ladder is “safe and social.” When people are on this third step of the ladder it is because they are in the ventral vagal state. In this state, people can connect with others because they feel tied to the present and do not feel like they are under attack. This is what I experienced in Eve Soto’s Class.

In the middle of the ladder is when people are in sympathetic activation. When people are on the middle step of the ladder it is because their fight or flight response is activated and their nervous system senses that there are threats in a person’s environment.  

On the last step of the ladder is dorsal vagal activation. When people are on the last step of the ladder, it is because they are in a state of hypo-arousal. In this state people often feel frozen, shut down, and they cannot move to plan things or think more sluggishly and give up. They also have trouble connecting with others because the world feels fuzzier, meaning other people can feel illusory, like the value in connecting with others is dulled and doesn’t register as a need, desire or possibility, there is no connection urge.  

Takeaways from the Polyvagal Ladder 

The Polyvagal Ladder explains that when we are in a shutdown state, we can’t get back up into the safe and social zone until we go through the sympathetic activation because part of what brings us out of that shutdown state is getting more sympathetic activation. Being in a very angry or very anxious state is uncomfortable, so sometimes we can try to calm ourselves back down to the point that we go back into the dorsal vagal hypoarousal state. 

The desire to no longer be anxious or angry can cause us to get stuck between the fight or flight and the numb, “stuck” state. When we are stuck going between the bottom two levels of the ladder, we are never able to reach the safe and social zone at the top of the ladder. Part of the process of coming out of the shutdown state is to move into that activated, anxious, or angry state, before you can move into the calmer state. There are no skipping states. I, for example, had to feel my lowered mood, the time I was spending helping other people work through trauma had overshadowed my own tender spots that still need tending. I will write more articles on tending to your vagal system because this is not a one-time process. Our nervous system is our total health operating system, and it needs chronic upkeep. My depletion, of short duration, is good, as is the shaking anxiety needed to come out of it. In the group I worried if I would be able to share. I had to feel the self-doubt signing up for the course, sitting in it, and in willing my body to stay while hearing my own mind say, “just pass when it is your turn”.

Oftentimes we don’t like to feel anxious or angry so we can be more comfortable in the shutdown state, but we can’t be relational from that place and like it or not, it is science, we cannot get back up the ladder to a felt sense of safety without the sense of safety that allows us to be seen, even if by a trusted few. Just knowing that being in the uncomfortable nervous state is on the road to getting you where you want to go can be helpful in pushing through it before turning to something like overworking, “situationships”, dieting, binging, perfectionism, over exercise, drugs or alcohol to numb those uncomfortable feelings. 

Don’t Worry Shifting States is Normal

Throughout the day we shift through these states. We work our way up and down the ladder. Some of us live mostly in the ventral vagal zone, but others, often due to adverse life circumstances and trauma, tend to spend more time further down the ladder and have a harder time “climbing” up. 

The more time we spend on different points on the ladder, the more we’re likely to get stuck in negative patterns.  The psychologist, Steven Porges, Ph.D, even suggests we develop related physical symptoms related to the ways we can be stuck in our threat activation states and operating in a dysregulated hypoarousal or hyperarousal state for decades, changing our neurobiology and manifesting all sorts of symptoms we call physical but have nervous system connections.

Leading a Polyvagal-informed life is somewhat of the encouragement in this article. I offer it in therapy when I take a somatic approach and offer tools to help you be closer to the top of the ladder, more of the time. In Deb Dana’s excellent book, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy which informs this article, there many tools for mapping out your own nervous system ladder, including how you can help yourself climb up the ladder. The tools I have collected in Therapists Are People Too, now in editing and with author’s note and articles shared in this Substack, are also of the mindset that our stories and what is keeping us stuck on the Ladder, can be beyond “just talk about it”.

How can this theory help you? 

Understanding your Neuro-somatic intelligence and the nervous system in this way can change the way you think of these states in yourself.  Therefore, there can be less self-judgement and more compassion for your state when you know it is merely a rung on the ladder inside you and there is a way back to safe and secure.

By recognizing what state, or rung, you are on in a given moment, and understanding how you shift between states, you can change your state so you can feel connected and safer more of the time.  You can feel less hopeless when you’re in the dorsal vagal shut down state, as you’ll know ways to help yourself out of it. You can also more easily understand anxiety and fear as a necessary process and not wall off or demean yourself from enlisting the help of others in this, since as mammals we need connection with others to feel safe. 

This theory, as I mentioned above, is especially relevant for those with trauma in their background. A trauma history often creates a hyper- or hypo-vigilant state, where either one is scanning for safety all of the time, and one can interpret neutral events or interactions as threatening ones, or one is shut down and depressed. This is a natural result of trauma as our nervous systems have had to protect us against danger and have now got used to that protection mode. The good news is that through positive connections (and possibly some therapy) we can help retrain the nervous system to be able to relax and feel safe. 

For more information read Deb Dana’s article A Beginner’s Guide to Polyvagal Theory. Dana also has worksheets available but do check her guidelines first from her other writing to make it safe and to get the full benefit of the exercises. I would also be happy to help you on your journey and encourage you to stay posted and subscribe below. All the tools are embodied although some are more geared towards a better understanding of the narrative of your story, and some are for clearing and reprocessing without explicit understanding that can be talked out in a traditional “get it off your chest” way.

Much of the embodied work I specialize in helps regulate nervous system states to bring you “up the ladder”. See all my articles here and on ENYA Page, Everyone Needs You Always, to do understand yourself and do this inner work.

Listen to my raw and real vagal toning experience. This is not the voice of an expert singer, and while I may be trauma specialist, this is the voice of someone trying to heal and connect with you in your healing journey. Consider subscribing if you feel this!

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Triggers, as a term applied to the human experience of emotions, has gotten conflated with emotions firing and exploding out of people. However, if you think of a gun, the TRIGGER portion is what is pressed down on. The trigger is not the actual explosion or firing. Additionally, firing a gun is associated with attacking back in this concept and not as much defense. Emotions are not explosions meant to attack, they are experiences giving us information to defend our resources, consider our options and act to keep ourselves safe. In other chapters, we will talk about fight, flight, freeze and fawn as habitual survival responses that can get stuck in our neurobiology and become somewhat of a standard operating procedure for stress and threat experiences. This is for another section of Therapists Are People Too.  

First, we want to recognize what a classroom being triggered can become with tools for awareness. And second, we must accept that we are the loaded gun, and the trigger is just what did the pressing down. The ammunition that fires is lying in the gun, waiting to be launched. What fires emotionally out is lying in us waiting to be pressed down on. Maybe imagining that we all have ways of being like loaded guns is more accurate, for our purposes, not that a thing that is said or done that causes us to emotionally overreact. Sometimes there is a rejection of understanding triggers as excuses or conversely and over blending with them. It is neither a way we are off the hook or given permission to have unregulated expression of how we feel because another person or whole system was unsympathetic to our experience, nor a way to villainize others ignorant of our experience. Triggers, for personal growth experiences, are classrooms for what is lying in you that was left hurting and untold. It needs a tool to come out, it can’t be told in a rant or a vent. Often traditional “you need therapy” advice, may only serve to identify, not learn. 

Here is the “TRIGGERED!” AWARENESS TOOL IN ACTION: 

It was three weeks since Maya had heard her father was on a death watch. She flew up to Maine when she heard the news, thinking she would be there to pay her respects and be there to support her sister who had “been more on the front lines the past year”. She put work on hold despite it being her first week as a new project leader and felt a strong desire inside to deny any animosity towards her family who had gaslit and denied her fears her father was manipulating all of them with this 10-year fake illness. Her previous therapist had mentioned factitious disorder as a mental disorder in which people fake illness and she had done work in our sessions uncovering her own emotional abuse and neglect realizing this was only one narcissistic tendency of her father, who was only now truly and officially diagnosed ten years later with heart failure and had no sign of any Multiple Sclerosis like he claimed. She had moved away but previously identified as “Make it fine Maya”, during her childhood. As the older sister to her brother and sister, twins, by 13 years, she had been the mother figure in the home in a 1950’s style, “for looks”, fashion. We talked about how she was denying a part of her resentment, but she felt “it’s a quick trip to say goodbye” and felt it we be over quickly. When she returned from the trip, and it continued to be another three weeks of death watch, she returned to therapy reporting a “colossal trigger”.  

Her siblings had cornered her in a video call, having planned it out prior. They were demanding she return to wait out the last days of the now prolific decline of their father who was becoming demanding and declarative he was not truly cared for. They had talked and decided between the two of them that they all felt abandoned by her, they said their father was really indicating she wasn’t there. She lost it, blocked all three of them and her stepmother and asked for guidance in therapy. Once she had come down some, the anger turned into sadness and depression. She felt stuck and like her father would die and once again, leave her left to deal with something she couldn’t use “Make it fine Maya” on anymore. She wanted answers out of the trigger and quickly realized, “I just need to know what happens to me and do something different”. She wished she had thought more about the initial visit, but we had been working together awhile and we looked at each other knowingly, “Triggers are a classroom”. We practically said it in unison and brushed off “what is okay, what is not okay, and why”. Here is how it works: 

TRIGGERS: Get real with yourself, what’s in there?

(mini-coaching session) 

What could be okay with the situation? What is understandable and reasonable? 

* For Maya it was okay her siblings needed her support and were struggling with their father’s difficult personality. It was okay that her sister may have enlisted her twin for extra support given she was overwhelmed and tended to be perfectionistic and needed approval she was doing a good job much of the time even when things were normal.  

What is not okay within you? What hurts? What feels like is pushes the boundaries of what is reasonable for you? 

* For Maya it was not okay that her siblings were blaming her. She was hurt that they did not recognize that from 13 to 28 years old she raised them and ran the house and escaped with most of her youth behind her. She felt moving was a distance that kept the family demands off her assuredly and no longer allowed any guilt or abandonment to burden her given they were all adults now officially and they had previously told her to go and live her life when she left begrudgingly 10 years ago. It was unreasonable they say she had abandoned them now.  

Why are you not okay? Why are you more not okay than okay right now? 

* For Maya, she realized she finally got a lead project role and had no one to tell or be proud of her. She went dutifully to visit her family when it did not work for her and risked her new success. Now she was being called out for abandonment. That was not okay because she had abandoned herself in the end. She was more furious with herself, which is what she realized at the end of her Mini Coaching Session.  

(Note: You don’t need to do this with a therapist, but it can greatly help. If you are in therapy, you can bring some self-help efforts to therapy and ask for expanded coaching) 

NOW THE BRAVING 

BRAVING: An Acronym for Building Trust  

We need the concept of bravery when talking about triggers as a classroom to know ourselves because to talk about all this is to talk about self-trust. The BRAVING acronym is one from Brene Brown’s research on shame, vulnerability and self-leadership depicted in Daring Greatly and Braving the Wilderness. To talk about trust, Brown uses the acronym BRAVING which stands for: boundaries, reliability, accountability, the vault, integrity, non-judgment, and generosity. Understanding that these are components of trust and how they work can help us really understand how we do or don’t trust others, or ourselves. When we use trusting ourselves to own and understand out triggers, we experience more emotional safety within ourselves. Naturally this creates more emotional safety overall because other things outside us are less in control of what causes things to happen inside us.  

Much of our sense that something outside does the triggering comes from a very young place when there is no choice but to be vulnerable. With Trigger Awareness you can develop trust internally. Then trust is a choice. You can choose to make what you learn about yourself important by the two main ingredients in BRAVING: Responsibility and Accountability. There is another tool in Therapists Are People Too that puts together Self-Leadership and being able to link it to not away from “what happened” using the Narrative Grid. The Trigger Awareness tool is great for facilitating that as a next step.  

The Last Steps. Skipping to Responsibility and Accountability (BRAVING) 

Responsibility: What do I accept as my responsibility if I am honest with myself. What do I know has to be up to me? 

Accountability: What do I hold myself accountable for? What am I willing to say I missed, failed to see, or didn’t want to. How can I know I am being honest with myself? 

For Maya, this last section, taking responsibility and holding herself accountable meant taking the coaching end point, the ‘Why this is not okay?’, and realizing that her triggered reaction was in her, not anyone else, and would keep firing until she learned from it. She did. She learned that she had to talk about her role as project manager and feeling like her goodbye was sufficient three weeks ago. She knew she had to say, “I don’t think there is anything more I can do and it won’t help to guilt me int it”. She wanted to hold herself accountable to saying kindly to herself, “I missed this three weeks ago because I have only moved away, never really confronted myself about saying no to things that are too boundary violating”. She had to say kindly to her siblings, “I don’t expect this to be easy to hear, I should have told you directly, I don’t want to do more for him.” She had to trust they would understand and deal with whatever triggered consequently inside them, to have its own process.  

In the weeks we processed what came out of that initial classroom, Maya never once regretted her journey into this trigger. During a session after her father’s passing, she said to me; “I feel like I have grown a decade, in a good way”. 

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Lift me up to the moon for my good night kiss.

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On a shooting star

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