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All | ifs | mindfulness | Trauma | Addiction & Habits | Couples
Healing Complex Trauma with Internal Family Systems (IFS)
As a trauma specialist, people interested in therapy and coaching with me tend to have three primary modes:
I know I’ve got some stuff from the past to work through, and I’m ready to get into it!
I think I’ve got some stuff from the past to work through, and I’ll do it if I have to. (Are you sure there’s no other way…?)
I just want to feel better now - let's leave the past out of it.
The vast majority show up in one of the first two modes. They have some understanding of trauma, recognizing that some kind of past experience might be at the root of their current struggles. But even as they want to “face their past,” they…
The Two Things We All Need In Relationships
“It just feels like you can’t be alone! Like you always need me to be doing something with you, or you just freak out. It’s like I can never have just a minute of space to myself to even think.”
“But it doesn’t matter how much ‘space’ I give you or whether I ask you to do things when you say it’s better for you - you just never want to spend time with me! You’d rather just watch TV or stare at your phone.”
I jump in to pause the back-and-forth between this (hypothetical) couple…
Working With Dissociation
My frustration boiled over halfway into my third two-week meditation retreat. As training for my mindfulness-based graduate psychology program, I had now been meditating regularly for a year and a half and attended multiple retreats - yet I still felt just as completely flat and disconnected as I did when I started. Disconnected from myself, from my emotions, from the picturesque Rocky Mountain winter landscape that surrounded me. From pretty much everything.
The end of undergrad had brought with it…