As a highly sensitive person who can feel what the other is feeling, and who often cares and is very impacted by the feelings and experiences of others.. you quite likely learnt how to regulate the emotions in the environment (or at least feel vaguely safe) by tuning into others and changing your behavior to soothe Them. This leaves you in the precarious position of needing Them to be regulated (or loving, or kind) in order for you to be ok. The alternative to this is to learn how to regulate your nervous system as a distinct and self-loving survival function, inside your own body. Which is great. Because that’s where your incredibly intelligent survival and intuition impulses originate!

When you’re inside your own body (and trusting it), you can experience regulation, settling and resilience regardless of the psychic/emotional noise around you.

This is Big. And has a BIG impact on whether you feel you have Choice and the ability to step away from situations that don’t serve you. Cause lets be honest.. when you’re living from remote control, it takes way more energy to operate things, and isn’t really that satisfying longterm.

The thing that stops many empaths from moving from remote control to inhabiting their own animal body, is that when we first turn attention to the inner experience, we may initially feel a lot of strong and even “unsafe” feelings, sensations or emotions. Many folk will take this to mean “I just need to try harder to regulate everyone else” or “Shit, it’s not safe in my body, so I’m leaving the whole Body-thing altogether and disassociating to somewhere safer!”

So rather than these 2 (exhausting) options.. We can instead treat it like we’re wooing a wild animal.

Imagine with me that your nervous system is a wild tiger who’s retreated into a cave and is definitely not sure about whether it’s safe here. It’s holding a long history of strong feelings and quite a bit of overwhelm and it would secretly really love someone to come and help it feel safe in the world. All this wild animal knows so far is that it’s told to be quiet when it’s upset, or that it blows its lid when it can’t hold back anymore. … So you wouldn’t start by going right up to the tiger and talking to it, or poking it.. You’d start by being general and open. You might start by just sitting down and being quiet a distance away from it, looking at the sky or the dirt under you, Being.. Allowing the animal to feel that you mean to be kind and to listen without any pressure or demand.

How is it to be here? in this moment, in the room or space you’re in? Is there anything pleasant or okay about your experience? If there is.. Can you ask yourself – how do you know that you know it’s pleasant? What tells you? Maybe there’s a warm feeling in your belly, or your eyes soften a little at the edges. Maybe you notice your breathing is a little deeper than normal and stroking the fabric on your pants feels soothing?

When you spend time noticing and attending to these pleasant or okay things, it’s like placing treats at the entrance to the cave for your nervous system, and giving your felt-sense animal time to come out, check things out and be nourished by the treats…

From here, this incredibly simple practice (of taking time with what’s ok and feeling it in your body) will have helped your nervous system settle enough to get closer and get curious with it.

In my sessions with clients, this part of our work is a lot about experiencing the different branches of the nervous system (flight, fight, freeze, social connection/fawn) as safe.

If, as you hang out with feeling and sensing your body, the settling that came with the pleasant sensations shifts into agitation in the legs .. we’d spend time checking out if (contrary to the automatic response to start thinking, leave or reach out to charm me or get angry) this agitation is ok to feel.

This is groundbreaking for many people. That their uncomfortable sensations Aren’t a signal they need to react by Doing something to get away from them, but a signal the body has something to say, or the body is storing stress.

Together we gently move from something nourishing (a pleasant emotion, thought or sensation in some part of the body) to the thing you’ve previously avoided. The agitation, the fear, the anger or the vagueness. As you experience that you Can handle the sensations inside your own body, they will begin to settle and disperse and change to something more regulated. And like this, you are building your capacity (and love!) for staying with and IN your body.

Slowly you start to trust that feeling of constriction when someone asks you to help them with a task, and you say “I cant do that, sorry” rather than (internally) “what do they need? will they be super upset if I don’t say yes? Am I safe to say no?” .. and then overriding yourself and saying yes when you actually mean no.

You start to build a primary relationship with You, your animal body and your life force. Life in a body then becomes pleasurable, becomes open, becomes free(er).

I take female practitioners through this process in my 3 month 1:1 program and it makes such a huge difference to how they feel in themselves, to their energy levels, their resilience and enjoyment of their good work in the world, and also of their precious love for themselves… from inside their own body.

Shifting to embodied self-connection also means the boundarylessness and confusion of living from remote control is no longer there. You know what you want, what you feel and eventually, clearly, what’s right for you. Of course, this impacts your clarity with stating your rates at work, your boundaries/choices in relationships and your capacity to step away from dynamics that drain you. Being and empath is a gift.. but not when we ignore the messages from the sensitive apparatus that is your body.

This program is a good fit for you if you’re ok with feeling your feelings, have done a decent amount of inner work and are spiritually oriented. It’ll be good for you if you want to serve your populations (clients or family) but don’t want to do the same old over-giving and exhaustion, and if you hold a thread of knowing to the wisdom of the earth (even if it’s dormant… I have a particular love and gift for shining a light on the wisdom in You). We move through 3 phases, embodying your spiritual and animal knowing, healing unconscious patterns held in the nervous system and attachment system and strengthening your relationship with your inner judge and your mind so you can move forward with strength, resilience and self encouragement!

If you’re interested, reach out HERE, I’ll ask you some questions to see if we’re a good fit and we could begin soon

Here’s my take:

Just because you’ve read books on trauma and done a few courses doesn’t necessarily mean you can call your work trauma informed. And, calling your work trauma informed before it actually is can be (unintentionally) misleading, shaming and confusing for your clients. Because it directs them to relate to trauma on the level of the mind. It can have them believing they should be able to Think their way out of a trauma state or reaction (and by trauma here, I’m referring to any frozen or reactive responses arising from the reptilian brain).

Trauma is primarily held in the reptilian brain and the nervous system and must be met on the level of the body. If you haven’t Personally experienced and tracked your own nervous system in action it can seem like trauma is something you can just talk about and that’ll be enough for those “other” people who have trauma to feel taken care of.

It’s not. Or not if you are running embodiment or therapeutic processes. Because trauma is such a Body thing.. We communicate safety to our clients with our Bodies, our energy and voices. With our embodiment.

To be truly trauma informed you need to have deepened your capacity to track your own fight, flight, freeze or fawn behaviours, to be able to stay present in your body and inner felt-sensing, and to experience the process of release and resolution of at least Some of your bound trauma or shock from the past.

This doesn’t have to be an intense process. You don’t have to go to the bottom of your barrel to be embodied in trauma informed facilitation. (In fact it works better if you start with pleasurable felt-sense processes to experience your nervous system in response to “good/ok” sensations). It doesn’t mean that you need to have “healed” your deepest stuff. Just that you’ve been willing to experience your own nervous system in action without just Thinking about it. You’ve walked the track you want your clients to feel safe to walk with you. (I see it a bit like reconnoitering before a hike.. you’ve checked out what the cliffs and ravines are like and your feet know the terrain).

So yes, having the information is a wonderful start. But if the information hasn’t moved through your body and the foundations of your work (the words you speak, the pacing, the level of choice you give and most importantly your embodied Presence) it can be a bit like a lot of “trendy” words spoken over the top of an old system. And it can be like walking your clients out on the hike with just a paper map in your hands, when their terrain is an alive, moving landscape.

This is why I’m offering an experiential training in trauma informed facilitation. 
Because I see a lot of wonderful counselors, therapists and coaches who have the information, but haven’t walked it through their body. They either don’t use the tools they have, or they talk “trauma informed” but don’t embody it, and so cant actually support someone in real time when needed. (Leading to clients staying stuck, blaming the work, and both of you losing confidence fast). Which I know is not what you want. You want to see your clients more free and happy and you want to be of service in a tangible way.

Being trauma informed to me means being more deeply human. More anchored in these fleshy vehicles. More present, compassionate and inclusive. And from that place, hearts heal. Families become healthier and poor strategies for survival are no longer chosen. You don’t need to yell so much when your nervous system, and that old wound, has been met. You don’t need to shut down and cut off from other people when your freeze response has been unwound and safety found in the body again.

Healing trauma releases a Lot of bound energy that can then be used for creating good things; more gardens, more spacious time hugging. More meditation and silence and listening to the wisdom of the earth. More good creative thinking, more systemic change that is connected to present-time Care.

Let’s do that, hey

If you want and need your work to be more embodied and trauma informed, this program will take you through 3 stages:

> Module 1: Work with the Mind to Support Somatic Healing
One of the biggest blocks to effective somatic work is the mind and the inner judge. This module will show you how to use the mind to support rather than hinder the process of resolution and healing. It’ll show you how to get deeper access to the somatic (embodied and programmed) patterns underneath thoughts and to know what to do when the ego/identity throws up defenses.

> Module 2: Landing in the Animal Body
This will teach you how to increase presence and body awareness in yourself and your clients (even the heady ones and the disassociated ones), understand and work with the body’s natural unwinding process, create emotional resiliency, and use language to create more safety and willingness in your clients body.

> Module 3: Successfully Work with Unconscious Programming
This module takes the core skills of the program and goes deeper into how to work with relational wounding, incorporate symbols and expressive arts, how to work with shame or common patterns of bracing or collapsing found when a client is facing something that has felt too big for them to digest. This third module brings the entire training to a 400hr Certification in Somatic Therapy (recognised by IICT) 

You’ll learn how to work with intention and attention in a trauma informed way, the maps to work with someone in a freeze or shutdown state. How to work with fight or flight responses in a way that invites resolution. How to use “time” to make content more manageable and you’ll master the Goldilocks Method; how to create the right balance of safety and challenge to create healing.

The training also includes a module on ethics and trauma as well as bonus teachings on creating effective secure attachment in sessions and the structural and relational elements to working with diverse clientele (multicultural, gender or sexuality).

The course is delivered online in a series of live workshops over the space of 12months:
15 classes, 16 full workshop days, with 11 x group inquiry and connection calls, 11 x practice and case consult calls, 6 x 1:1 sessions with me and 2 x 1:1 video review sessions and lots and lots more designed to help you Embody the work personally, anchor the skills and frameworks well and then naturally offer that safe and grounded presence to your clients. 

Class times are offered on Thursday mornings and Monday evenings and the workshops on weekends (AEST)

The first Module begins as soon as you are ready, and the second module starts on June 6th.

Check out the full outline here.

There are limited places as I want to ensure good quality attention for each participant. 

If you are interested, please reach out via PM (I don’t always get notifications if you comment below). I’ll ask a few questions to see if you’re a good fit for the program and we can begin with Module 1 soon as you’re ready!

Much love

Amanda

The most common reason for this is there’s a subconscious investment in “being the competent one”.

My clients are often women who had to be independent from an early age, and who have a very strong and capable “doer” part.

A part is like a sub-personality within each of us that hold emotions, perceptions, and belief systems, and that affect our behaviour and emotional wellness. Parts are either with us from birth (a soul aspect of self like being-ness, space or deep abiding calm) or develop in childhood and through life to help us cope and adapt (like the Strategist, the Rebel, the Pusher, the Critic etc).

So for someone who Needed to be competent and adult before their time, they will often develop this strong part that’s very good at getting things done, taking charge when others cant or wont, removing their own emotionality, supporting others at the expense of themselves and just taking care of business.

This strong part will often squash or deny the more vulnerable needy parts in the person in order to create a feeling of safety. When we are competent and strong, we don’t feel the incredible vulnerability of Having needs and being vulnerable to others’ responses (or lack of responses) to them. This dynamic sets up a struggle between the primary (competent) part and the disowned (vulnerable and needy) part. (To be clear, sometimes a person will have a primary part who is needy and in a victim stance – “I cant do this, I need help” etc, and will repress their inner strength and capacity – we’re just talking about the other version for now).

Clients like this often come to me exhausted and feeling like they’ve managed to do all these amazing things, (and survive incredible hardship) but they feel very sad or lonely or even desperate inside.

When we literally speak to each of the parts in turn, we find the root of the sadness in a disowned part so it can be integrated gracefully into your life. This is super healing and transformative for an over-achiever,.. and also can be very tender and a bit scary because its so new/unknown.

When we do this, rather than running with this hard-edge “I’m fine” attitude, you’ll also have access to the softness in you, and be more open to receiving the love and support you might be craving (which your strong, competent part has been keeping out till now).

This process forms one of the first phases of my Reset Program for exhausted successful women. We meet the parts of you that have been criticizing or pushing you to Just Keep Doing, and invite the other, softer and more connected parts to come forward. We help you create healthy boundaries (around your time, energy and communications), you get core tools so you can manage your emotional, physical and mental state, we heal the core stress drivers stuck in your nervous system (the reasons you cant sleep well or get foggy brained when you’re stressed) and we expand your capacity to hold and feel pleasure as you plan out a new way of doing life.

This is a complete package to walk you from hectic pace to calm and grace It includes 1:1 sessions, group processes, an accountability coach (cause yes, sometimes we do need accountability to do these important, lovely things for ourselves) and unlimited email support over 3.5months (we’ll break over xmas).

This’ll be a match for you if you have achieved success in your external world (business, finances and “achieving” in general) and are over-ready to stop pushing yourself so hard.

Reach out through the contact form if this sounds good for you, I’ll ask you some questions to see if you are a fit and we could begin next week.

Usually one of the parts driving this frantic pace is her Rulemaker.. – the one who has all the rules about how she should be. Some common rules are:

“I should be competent and know what I’m doing at all times” (even if I’ve never done something before)

“I should be a can-do person” (even if I can’t)

“I should be able to balance work, family, heath and spiritual wellbeing regardless of how much sleep, exercise or support I have”

“I should be humble and approachable”

“I should ambitious and committed to my goals”

Whatever she values and has had deep experiences with in her life, she will have rules about that thing. If she’s been working in corporate, she’ll have rules about her level of professionalism. If she’s explored healthy eating, she’ll have rules about what and when and how she eats etc. Someone who grew up in poverty or abuse with have a different rule set to someone who didn’t (eg. “I cannot appear clueless about money”, “I have to have the perfect family (or Else)…” etc).

Regardless of the topics of the rules, one thing is common. When you put all your rules together it will be impossible to achieve them all. Your Rulemaker is not interested in achievability.. but in having you meet the “standards” compiled from everyone you have admired and wanted to emulate or everything you didn’t want to follow. Your Rulemaker will be connected to a Pusher part (the one who wakes you up like an incessant coach first thing in the morning “Right! What have we got on today? let’s make a list.. come one!”) and a Critic (the one who compares you and your progress to everybody else and the standards the Rulemaker sets).

When you do this process to meet these parts, you’ll be aware of the Rulemaker when you hear the thoughts “I need to/ I have to/ it’s not ok not to…”. Then you have the opportunity to Choose whether these rules are important and valid to you today. We often find some rules are just unquestioned or outdated, passed on from family or society – and simply do not fit you or your life as you are now. Which often becomes the case when you’re nearing exhaustion/burnout.. because it’s often your rules that have gotten you here.

Doing this process helps to make all of this conscious so you don’t keep running (what may be an unrealistic or outdated) operating system. It takes the automatic “I MUST” out of the dynamic and creates this attuned, aware and listening relationship between you and your life.

After years of doing trauma work with folk to heal and resolve highly stressed states in the nervous system, I’ve found that doing this step early on, creates so much self-understanding, compassion and then space and momentum to make new choices arising from self-connection and authenticity, and something way more life-enhancing for you.

This forms the second step of the Reset Formula that I run, helping exhausted successful women move from frantic pace to calm and grace.

We start by clarifying your definition of unconditional success (what would feel like success for You if you included your heart and body and well-being?), then we create this healthy dialogue and dynamic between your inner parts; so you can relax and allow your heart to lead more. We create healthy boundaries around your time, energy and your word, with a powerful process for communicating boundaries that creates more closeness and trust (rather than hard walls or collapsed giving-in again) and more capacity for you to feel safe being in touch with your feelings and inner longings. Then we support your overall mental and emotional balance with nervous system regulation and healing processes that will help you create a new foundation for the rest of your life. The Reset program finishes with a focus on pleasure and building your capacity to include More of it as you design your life from a new state and place.

This program is ideal for women who have great capacity to succeed and get things done, but who are craving a new way to do what they’re great at that doesn’t cost them their health or joy. It’s a 3.5month 1:1 program with ongoing group support afterwards, some self directed processes and resources to build your resilience and feel enlivened again. As we’re coming into Xmas, you could begin within the next week, and move through the first 2 phases and first 2 1:1 sessions before we take a break over Xmas to integrate for a few weeks.

If this sounds like just what you need, please reach out through the contact form. I’ll ask you some questions to see if you’re a good fit for getting these results and we could begin within the week.

If you’re like me; a Ms “Fix-it” from way back, you’ve probably tried many ways to change your story; counseling, workshops, bodywork, processing, diet changes, learning more, trying harder, Making An Effort.

But probably, like me, your story just keeps repeating on you. You may have gone to the depths of your despair in that last workshop or counseling session and came out feeling reborn, and then, What?! 2 months later, you’re feeling the same feelings and living that Same Story.

Why is that??

One thing I’ve seen across the years of “fixing” my story is that we don’t Change the story, we Wake Up inside it.

You see our early life experiences, way back to our time in the womb, literally set up a biological map or energetic imprint that is ours to walk and become conscious inside of. The dynamic between our parents, the key experiences of our childhood (belonging/exclusion, love/abandonment, friendships/loneliness etc) all create an energetic imprint and neurological track-work in the brain that then helps to form our personality and psyche and how we respond to the world.

It is possible to change this imprint and the pathways in the brain, in fact that’s a large part of what we are doing in a Somatic Experiencing session. So we may Wake Up to these pathways, and thus have more options, more choice, more flexibility, but generally these make up the terrain of our life. Your life story may not change, but You change in relation to it.

For example:

The first time you experienced being seriously ill as a child it was too overwhelmingly scary for such a little person to handle. So you learnt to disconnect from your body and live from your mind, denying your feelings and unaware of your body processes. Now as an adult, when you become ill, you have the choice to disconnect from your body, or to Feel the terror that illness invokes and become present to the sensations and experiences in your body. As you become present, you can begin to identify less with your “story” (“I’m always sick, I have no control, I cant trust my body”) and wanting the pain to go away, and you identify more with the part of you who watches it all.

Illness may always be something that you have a strong reaction to, but as you build your ability to stay conscious with whatever your story is, there becomes no Need to “fix” it. When you can be conscious with it, the emotions, the sensations and the experience of your story just are*. They may be uncomfortable, but they just are as they are. You notice the fear that arises, the movement towards disconnecting from your body, and you can choose something different, because you are more awake inside your story. And in Being awake, your capacity to experience more pleasure and good-life-force increases as well. As you are probably aware, shutting out pain also shuts out pleasure and reduces your range of feeling both ways.

(*Please note, Im not inferring that this is easy, just that it is the way to go in order to bring light and change to “problems” in your experience.)

When we wake up inside our problems, they are not “problems” anymore, they are opportunities for consciousness here and now. And consciousness is a very yummy thing

I like to imagine that we are all walking our own unique Life Maze. As we “wake up” inside this maze, we start to explore new areas and directions, and the specific qualities of our life story begin to bring particular gifts, like treasures hidden amongst the hedges. These may be humility, compassion, patience, kindness, life force, love. But to glean these treasures from your well trodden maze, you mustn’t be fooled by the story and you must be willing to try something new.

Often, when you are lost down the alley ways of your maze, its not as easy as “choosing” to find a different way. Especially if your Life Maze has some truly scary corners. Like a child lost in a maze, sometimes you need another person to come in there and take your hand, helping you see new options and guide you out. In a therapeutic or an intimate relationship, we can get to know each others’ track-work and become more present and conscious for the other when we know they are navigating tricky areas. We can befriend their maze with them and help to expand the range of feeling that is possible.

Your Life Maze is your burden or your gift for waking up. What ever your story is, it is Your story. The less you fight with that simple truth, the more you will be available to Be Here for your life and for the hidden treasures in it.

I wish you well dear traveller!

Over to you:

I’d love to hear what you think about waking up inside your problems rather than fixing them.. Have you experienced “fixing” your story, or have you had it repeat on you again and again?

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Many of us design our lives around avoiding the places, people and things that provoke a clenched heart, a racing mind, a feeling of unease. And with good reason! It is horrible to feel these things.

But in avoiding them, our lives become smaller, and in a way our fear of having fear governs us. It becomes a goblin in the corner that controls where we go because we’ll go wherever it is not! And if there’s a few fears we don’t want to face, our lives get even smaller. I see that when we say no to a dinner invite, to going for a new job or trying something new.

Yet our bodies and our personal evolution need the “activation” that fear gives us to feel alive. We need our blood pumping fast, our synapses firing, our whole system On. But we don’t need it to be such an overwhelming fear that we shut down and need to run and hide or to fight in order to feel ok again. It is the fine line between a healthy dose of fear and novelty, and the right amount of safety that creates the alchemy of transformation.

Saida Desiltes, a pioneer in women’s sexual health, talks about this line as our Erotic Edge, the places we fear to go but that actually hold a Huge amount of life-force for us. The erotic edge is “the life force that animates us; the bridge between the natural world and who we are”. And as she explains, if we don’t dance near and interact with our erotic edge, or be willing to play with novelty, we become less alive, less juicy, less pumped to be here.

So how do we find this line between excitement, fear and safety and navigate it to bring us aliveness? How do we break free of our fear of fear?
Imagine with me that you have a fear of public speaking and you are tired of hiding away and avoiding it. You are frustrated and even a little desperate to shift out of this fear because its effecting your work life and your dreams to use your voice in the world.

Now I’d like you to imagine two very different approaches to facing this …

In the first approaches, you attack this fear by putting your hand up to go on public radio. You figure big is better and will blast the fear out of the water. You feel anxious and terrified the whole week leading up to your radio debut, you have trouble thinking straight and have regular “superego” attacks (self-judgemental thoughts) as you obsess over all the mistakes you could make. You go in for the radio interview and it’s all a blur. You come out of it not knowing what you said or how you went, but full of adrenalin and buzzing energy through your body. You feel proud of yourself but deeply exhausted.

Now imagine with me another approach.

This is where you look for the line of safety and “just enough fear”. You look for a way to face your fear in stages and with support. With speaking on the radio as your goal, you decide to join a small group who read classic and original poetry together. You make a friend there who also wants to go on the radio, you feel comfortable with this person and build a sense of safety with them. Over time you take bigger and bigger risks, reading out your own poetry, speaking out in different contexts in your work life, strengthening your voice and your sense of yourself. When you feel ready, you book in a radio interview with your friend as cohort. You call each other for support through the week before and you feel a mix of exhilaration, fear and aliveness. You have a good time in your interview, maybe you don’t say so much, but it is overall a good experience. You feel proud of yourself, full of energy and ready to take on the next challenge.

The difference in these two approaches is the permission to go at a pace that is both activating and safe. In other words.. something that is manageable, and something we can integrate as we go and use to create new brain pathways of enjoyment and reward rather than fear and avoidance. Transformation can come from an easy and steady movement towards our fears, or it can come by trying to push through the fear with our will. I prefer the path of kindness and maintainability, a slow purr rather than an explosion. You know, the explosion approach can be compared to the phenomenon of break-up then make-up sex. As so many friends have shared, the make-up sex is often so hot, charged and potent, but it is also dependant on the drama for its potency. And its exhausting. The slow purr approach depends on slowness, connection and safety as well as challenging the edges, and then the potency is something that can be maintained. Then we get connection, depth, pleasure and the availability for presence and love.

Depending on what you choose to do and the level of fear/excitement involved, you can liberate yourself, your fears and your body, or you can traumatise yourself and shut-down, disassociate or become chronically activated. I have come to understand that to our nervous systems, fear and novelty go hand in hand and the fear response is very similar to the excitement response. A sense of alertness is created for “novelty” just as much as for fear, and the purpose in both is to invigorate and prepare us to respond in this new or uncertain environment. Fear and excitement enliven us. They wake us up.

“Nothing is as uncomfortable, dangerous and hurtful than believing I’m standing on the outside of my life looking in and wondering what it would be like if I had the courage to show up and let myself be seen”. – Dr Brene Brown

When we were kids, not many of us were supported to face our fears in a manageable way. In the rush of life, our parents either pushed us into scary situations or allowed us to avoid them because it was all so much “easier” that way. As adults, its our job to change our relationship with fear in order to bring more Life into our life.

I hope you’ll join me in dancing just a little bit closer to your novelty and fear and creating more aliveness in your life. If you feel like you would like support in facing your fears in a safe and life affirming way, Id love to help you. You can find out about what I do here, and contact me here

Over to you:

What challenges have you had with fear or facing fear in your life? And what success have you had in building safety? Have you experienced transformation by facing a fear? I’d love you to leave a comment below, and let us know.

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