Attachment

My New Favorite Book

The collicular self has the power to turn to something or turn away from it without our awareness of that ‘decision.’

Learning More About the Brain (some very basic basics in 3 parts)

This is the second of several posts I’m making in attempts to digest this really important read. Here, I’m breaking down some new brain info.

Subcortical Brainstem Structures Involved in Immediate Responses to Traumatic Events

1) Superior Colliculi WHERE	2) Periaqueductal Gray WHAT	3) Locus Coeruleus SHOCK
A multisensory integration center, registering novelty in the visual, auditory and somatosensory fields. Coordinating immediate orienting behavior.	Involved in the generation of affective (e.g., panic/grief, rage, fear and defensive (e.g., fight, flight, freeze) responding.	A noradrenaline system with diffuse projections across the cerebral cortex. Heavily involved in arousal and attention. Signaling extreme levels of volatility.

Orienting to WHERE

One of the first things we are being asked to learn in order to deliver DBR therapy is to help our clients locate a central place in their being from which they sense the world and know where they are in it. Anatomically, this place is represented by a brain structure called the Superior Colliculus. It sits on top of the periaqueductal gray, about which we will go into deeper detail later. It looks, maybe, a little like this:

Midbrain and Upper Brainstem Component of the WHERE System, the Superior Colliculus – This is an orienting structure which “has sensorimotor capacities for effecting inquisitive, acquisitive, and protective responses in relation to the unknown.” (pg 6)

“The collicular self has the power to turn to something or turn away from it without our awareness of that ‘decision.'”

I’m making mental notes here that the Superior Colliculi (Pg 16):

Serve as an integrative hub for mapping the self in space
Receive information from the retina, spinal cord and cerebral cortex
Orient to what is unexpected and novel about the world around us

“You have a sense of your body’s position – how the limbs, torso, neck, and head are placed – and how you are gently held in your chair by the earth’s gravitational field. You are in the place where all this information comes together. This ‘collicular perspective’ is the integrative hub from which your attention radiates outwards to illuminate space with your awareness. Before identifying what you see or hear, you are first aware of WHERE.“

As academics and psychologists, we have long been witness to mixed responses from youngsters and adults alike who are both attracted (compelled to attach) to someone because they represent the very things they need to survive, but at the same time are compelled to escape because they elicit great fear or confusion. This same disorganized response is the domain of the Superior Colliculi, as it turns out–at the micro level. It’s where those opposing orientations begin.

Opposing orientations have important implications for how we understand the effects of interpersonal stimuli that are both a source of nourishment and threat. (Pg 23)

“Horrific experiences activate simultaneous forces of attraction and aversion beyond our control, resulting in an entanglement of orienting responses.” (Pg 24) And this is what DBR is uniquely suited to do. To slow the process (social interaction) down enough so that these opposing orientations can be witnessed, held, and worked out by the body, with the help of a safe objective witness, once and for all.

The WHAT – The Generation of Affective and Defensive Responding

Midbrain Periaqueductal Gray (the primary structure for the WHAT response system) – our defenses: fight, flight, and freeze, and our affects: fear, rage, and panic/grief arise from this brain structure. The periaqueductal gray has a role in active and passive defense responses and their associated autonomic nervous system changes. (Pg 6)

It is sweet to have a real basis for knowing and discussing the fact that deep somatic and visceral pain of interpersonal origin actually exists. We can know this now because of the machines that are indeed measuring it as we write and read this, and the scientists who are formulating these measures. We can also know that others are, in fact, investing their academic careers to studying the behavioral relevance of such pain.

It’s reassuring and validating to read descriptors such as “social rejection” in scientific journals. Even though few of us, outside the field, have given much thought about the moment by moment, day by day, year by year interpersonal events from the perspective of our newborn, or infant self. Or that in our parents’ or grandparents’ generations infants were thought not to actually have a self, feelings or memories. An infant’s perspective might not occur in words, but it most certainly endures in the form of somatic memories.

A behavior researchers call “withdrawal” refers to what subjects do, behaviorally, upon experiencing a social loss. Social loss, they say, activates “PANIC/GRIEF systems, related action tendencies of fight (confrontation), flight (socially evasive behaviour), and freeze (social anxiety).” (pg 44)

Characteristics of the Periaqueductal Gray Columns

SHOCK – A Noradrenaline System with Diffuse Projections Across the Cerebral Cortex

Originating at Pons level in the midbrain, the Locus Coeruleus – Heavily involved in arousal and attention, the Locus Coeruleus signals extreme levels of volatility.

Stay tuned for more of my processing of this lovely piece of scholarly work. If you are a counselor or therapist supporting clients with trauma and/or dissociation, or think you might have experienced early relational trauma, I highly recommend that you read it for yourself:

Deep Brain Reorienting: Understanding the Neuroscience of Trauma, Attachment Wounding, and DBR Psychotherapy, by Frank M. Corrigan, Hannah Young and Jessica Christie-Sands

Speaking the Unspeakable

What are you doing here, and why? It’s important to be tuned into this, probably more now than ever before. I am a counselor specializing in childhood trauma. My tools, experience and temperament help clients reconnect with and understand emotional messages from their bodies. Our work together empowers them to honor themselves and achieve their unique paths.

The client that I like to work with is willing to speak of unspeakable things. Which is not easy. But the person I can help is willing. And that seems to be what I have a knack for. To help a person feel safe enough to go there. I help to soften what is calcified and leaking toxins from inside. I help provide a space where what has been longing to be seen and held feels invited and named. When the client is willing, I create the setting where the unspeakable can feel safe enough to emerge. That is what I noticed about therapy I have had in the past–that I just literally could not think of any “logical” problem that I needed help with. The unspeakable needs to be coaxed into the room. It is the unspeakable that I invite, so that it can get the care and attention it is longing and yearning for. So it does not weigh so heavy in the soul. Here are some of the things that feel welcomed and therefore transformed (and unburdened) in these healing spaces.

THE UNSPEAKABLE

Shameful Things

Jealousy
Being Hateful
Resentment
Disappointments
Greed
Rage
Selfishness

Silly Things

Overreactions
Embarrassments
Childish Things

The Pathetic

Things I’ve Learned Not to Focus On For Good Reason
Things That Could Come True or Get Worse If I Think About Them at All
Things That Might Come True If I Dignify Them With Language
Things That If Uttered Aloud Would Make Me Unlovable
The Whiny, the Annoying, the Shameful
Things That Could Send Me Straight to Hell
Things I Should Have Been Punished For. Things I Punish Myself For.
Things My Body Does and Doesn’t Do That Are Too Tedious and Too Embarrassing to Ask Anyone to Help Me Sort Through
Things I Should Have Been Able to Take Care of Long, Long Ago

I can help you if you are brave enough and willing to change, and maybe just need a place you can go to take–not all your scary baggage at once, but–the part that is ready now. I delight in meeting the person who knows they can be more of themselves, and just needs some reassurance, encouragement and a gentle witness to what they are going through, and what they have survived.

You might be aware of the shame and fear you feel about what you have been carrying. But if you are willing to show up anyway, you can unburden yourself. Maybe you have been betrayed; maybe you have betrayed others. But if you are still willing to take the chance, you will find what you seek, because you know the stakes are too great if you don’t. I want to work with you if you are interested in getting the kind of support you have been seeking all along, but somehow not finding. If you want to be supported in following a feeling as it shows you some beautiful thing you didn’t know was sacred about you. In the end, the clients who benefit from what I have to offer give me the astounding gift of seeing how universal our problems really are. I am truly blessed to know you, and hear you speak of unspeakable things.

Photo Credit: AjabaNature

Deep Brain Reorienting – DBR

Deep Brain Reorienting: Understanding the Neuroscience of Trauma, Attachment Wounding, and DBR Psychotherapy, by Frank M. Corrigan, Hannah Young & Jessica Christie-Sands

How can it be that at the highest echelons of mental health, professionals are trained to avoid talking about trauma because it destabilizes patients? Yet, according to Frank M. Corrigan, this seems to be the status quo in our mainstream medical system. Like Frank, I believe that so-called developed countries need to do better in acknowledging the impact early relational trauma has on our nervous systems and our lives. Only in this way can we actually begin to provide the kind of welcome our most vulnerable community members need in order to grow into their best, fullest lives. And only in this way can we begin to reclaim our own nervous systems so that we can live in harmony with our bodies and the planet, starting now, at whatever stage of health we’re at, which is something that is so vital to all of us during this important moment in human history.

How can it be anything but obvious that our earliest experiences set the tone for our lives, and that the tender love and consistent-enough attention of our mothers is central to our wellbeing and development? So much so that in the first hours and days following birth, the availability or absence of a warm and conscious presence imprints on the nervous system and puts in motion ways of being in the body that will shape our relationships and our physical health for a lifetime. What should not be earth shattering news is that when a human infant does not get these early needs met, the body responds with shock. If these ruptures are not repaired, it will leave the body in a chronic state of hypervigilance and trauma.

This is what mental health providers the world over are facing today. How to help clients and patients with chronic anxiety, depression, troubled relationships, and a general sense of disconnection from themselves, others and their own agency in the world.

Frank M. Corrigan suggests a sort of cultural dissociation from the reality of early relational trauma that lies not-so-subtly alongside an implied institutionalized decision by our medical establishments that trauma-derived disorders are simply too expensive to treat. Frank M. Corrigan is speaking my language. Though it’s clearly not USAian English. In fact, he’s Scottish! Corrigan is the creator of Deep Brain Reorienting, a body-oriented tool to treat shock, trauma, attachment wounding and deeply stored, unprocessed pain.

Deep Brain Reorienting brings something revolutionary to my toolbox, though I’ve specialized in trauma for almost 20 years. With DBR, we are slowing things down, looking under the hood, and addressing some important things that happen in the brain well before trauma sets in – even before emotions. It’s basic physiology, but it’s also sociopolitical. In this trailblazing book, I’m finding answers to questions I didn’t even know I had. Frank M. Corrigan speaks to my nervous system in a way I’ve never been spoken to before.

Learning Yet Another Technique

With DBR, “The therapist must be directive in eliciting the underlying sequence and then supportive as the healing process flows from within the client towards a new perspective.” (Pg 9)

Orienting Tension

As a practitioner of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), I have learned how to watch for the subtle cues that tell me when a client is effectively processing trauma; I know the landmarks that happen when we effectively transform a vivid, sensory-laden memory that feels here and now when recalled, into a narrative story that can be told with thoughtfulness, current-moment presence, and compassion for the self. But what EMDR is not as good at is effectively addressing pre-verbal trauma. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t acquire the use of spoken language as a means of communication until I was probably well into my third year. And as much as it vexes me, talking about the unresolved trauma my nervous system has been managing since birth would not be a worthwhile pursuit for me in a therapy session. Still, growing up in a family that had little time or energy for emotions, there is still a considerable amount of work to do in that addled nervous system of mine. Lucky for me, now that I’ve been introduced to Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR), I understand that there is a whole additional set of cues that we can become familiar with when we work with clients, and when we begin to heal our own nervous systems from the ruptures in attachment we experienced when we – as infants, toddlers and small children – were so completely dependent on the adults in our lives. And when we address these things, our worlds begin to expand. We are capable of so much more than we ever imagined.

This new set of cues includes tension in the muscles at the base of the skull, around the eyes, and/or in the forehead. The sensations here are referred to as orienting tension because they include muscles that become activated when “our attention is drawn to something salient, even if we do not move our eyes or our head.”

This orienting tension provides a connection with the system for the ‘whereness’ of the body, and (during therapy) it enables attention to traumatic material without being dislocated from present reality. This is where we obtain the grounding anchor, which reduces the risk of being overwhelmed during trauma processing. (Pg 5)

In the next weeks and months, I hope to process and share more about Frank Corrigan and colleagues findings and thoughts. Here are a few of the things I want to take in and “digest.”

The Nervous System Structures involved in the orienting reflex and shock
Neurological foundations of Disorganized Attachment – And how they’re healed
Implications of the diffuse pain of an infant for whom there is insufficient meeting of the need for contact
The sense of personal agency, and how it responds to early attachment disruptions
Neurochemical Dissociation and the endogenous opioids that deliver analgesia for emotional pain
Recognizing the physiological symptoms of shock
Bracing: The degree of holding in the axial structures is indicative of the level of underlying pain that is being continually braced against

Photo Credit: Rosy Ziegler / Bad Homburg / Germany

I’m on Retreat

and I’ve told many people that I’m taking time alone. I explored a niggling worry back in the deep recesses of my mind about whether I was making best use of this time; taking my retreat seriously enough. So far, the answer is a deep and resounding YES. It’s felt divinely guided. It doesn’t appear that anyone (ethereal or visceral) wants to punish or even scold me for sidestepping my isolation for an evening with friends and family the first day or driving to St. Louis to be with a friend getting medical results on the second. I’m thanking my lucky angels for all of it. It’s all as it should be. The sunshine warmed me as I ate my Ethiopian leftovers (yesterday). Today I put the finishing touches on the wonky tarot reading we didn’t finish on Monday. This morning I’ve typed up the notes I wanted to share from Sarah Peyton’s hardback book. Feel free to check that out here. It’s just so juicy, so relevant and so comforting. I finished reading Your Resonant Self Workbook, in bed yesterday morning. I hiked to the creek at the bottom of the hill twice yesterday, the second time with paper and matches so I could build a fire, sit back and read from another great book.

In a nutshell, here’s the tarot reading. I drew 3 cards from a traditional tarot deck and am referring to Jessica Dore’s book Tarot for Change, with some of my personal story interwoven.

4 of Cups – Throughout my young life, I had been resistant to taking the good stuff that was being offered to me. Somehow I couldn’t see it. I was too hurt and sad and angry.

9 of Cups Reversed – wish fulfillment, contentment, victory, success. Reversed it speaks of Truth, Loyalty, Liberty. To accept what we want requires us to also accept the pain of not having it. This card is asking me to articulate my desires from THAT place. This retreat is the time to turn inward and care for feelings I haven’t had the courage to look at before. What do I want to acknowledge and validate so that I can heal and grow beyond it?

As a 22 year old I just wanted what I was taught to want. So as a married adult woman, living with a husband and a child for 4 and 2 years, respectively, I was entering a place where I had to decide who I really was, and what I wanted from my life. As an 18 year old, I hadn’t been able to imagine anything else but being a mother and a homemaker. But that wasn’t working out so well. As my then husband complained, I was just so predictable. My higher self was urging me to try something else. And so I did. Boy have I learned a lot about desire since then.

Words of compassion from Jessica Dore: “Not knowing what you want is often rooted in things that weren’t your choice and aren’t your fault.”

It’s okay if I’m still trying to figure out who I am and what I want. It’s okay if I’m still learning to make a good wish.

4 of Pentacles – Crowned figure, Pentacle over the crown. Clasping another pentacle over the heart. Pentacles under both feet. Holding very securely that which I have. (knowledge, concepts, ideas). Pentacles in general signify physical behavior.

Jessica Dore looks at this card through a different lens: “Transcending and accepting limitations or blocks through the physical body. Moving stuck energy through the body via breath and gaze with gentle curiosity, not force. Reframing and perspective shifting = storytelling. When we relate differently to something, we tend to behave differently around it. Stories don’t mirror life, they shape it.” – Mary Van Hook, a social worker

The simple fact of identifying a block means movement is happening. Hitting a wall is not a bad thing. It helps you know that you need to find a door or a window by changing course slightly or drastically. Or dig a tunnel.

Calling something a block or a limit or a challenge “is a protest in itself, a statement or declaration that you’re not okay with being contained in this particular way and you most certainly do not plan to shape a life around some limitation that really doesn’t need to be there.”

Learning to live in harmony with blocks. My body has areas of stuckness and limitation. Which attitudes and narratives are most effective for clearing blocks? And for learning to live better with them? The pentacles at the crown block awareness. The pentacles at the heart block connection and understanding. The pentacles at the soles of the feet block action.

“With any kind of block, the first task is to be present enough to notice that it’s there – whether it be physical, behavioral, energetic, emotional, or psychological – rather than either avoiding it altogether or trying to muscle through it.”

It’s not dangerous to investigate blocks. But when I do it, I need to do it with gentleness, giving myself full permission to back off anytime it gets to feel like too much.

Noticing the block is something to celebrate. That’s when I know I’m ready to do the work.

Poke around. Find the malleable parts. The parts that have some give. Where transformation can happen, little by little.

Super excited to see what the rest of my retreat will bring. I’m here until Friday!

Tarot Reading for Today

This spread perfectly describes my takeaway from a recent Constellations Circle. Absolutely love Jessica Dore’s Tarot for Change

Six of Cups The intellect sifts out what is true; the will reaches out for what is good. But there is a third dimension to reality: Beauty. Our whole being resonates with what is beautiful. When we experience beauty, we start to speak about emotions, and the more we are touched on an emotional level, the more we seek to celebrate the experience, and it’s there that we begin to create ritual. Benedictine Monk David Steindl-Rast writes that all rituals have to do with, and celebrate, belonging.

The tenderness of the image on the Six of Cups cards tells a secret.

What if, all I’m trying to do here is to create rituals that have the potential to mark, preserve, and facilitate a return to emotional experiences that are sacred to us?

To feel safe is sacred.

To be soothed is sacred.

I am a lover of beauty and belonging. I am a lover of deep emotional resonance. I am just trying to recall some sacred feeling.

I am exploring new ways to recall those feelings – and new rituals for feeling safe and soothed.

Page of Wands: Childlike Enthusiasm, Innocence, Wonder, Youth. Knowing absolutely what I like and don’t like. According to James Hillman (along with Bert Hellinger): We each come into the world with a calling.

There is something (apart from nature/nurture) unique about each of us – a part of our being that is connected to our “daemon,” which was similar to the Roman concept of genius: Something that you are, that you have, that is not the same as the personality you think you are.

Mythologist Martin Shaw: as adults, too many of us have become “heavily defended against experiences of our own beauty.”

What do I love?

What captivates my attention?

What grips me?

What lights me up? What claims me?

Invitation to reconnect with something raw and original within us, something many of us relinquish as we cross the threshold into adulthood.

My specific calling is never far from reach.

Wands show me how to protect the spark and keep it safe so that it can warm me, and also warm whole villages.

Nine of Cups

Values Clarification. If I’m going to do the hard work of change, what will make it worth it? A life compass. Am I moving toward or away from what is precious?

Knowing what you want is deceptively challenging.

Exploring what we desire can be hard because:

Often the physical reality of our lives doesn’t line up with what we desire.
- To accept what we want requires us also to accept the pain of not having it.
Identifying what’s personally meaningful and articulating desires from that place is often in and of itself a whole healing process.
Making a wish sounds like fun until you realize you have no idea what you want. Until you realize you’re not even sure what it feels like to truly want something and are not convinced you’d know it if you felt it. This experience of finding a void where a wish ought to be can be profoundly distressing.
Not knowing what you want can bring up shame. “I’m 60 years old. I should know who I am by now.”

Making a wish might be hard because:

Your feelings were constantly invalidated, so you don’t trust your own sense of what you like and long for.
You’ve experienced a lot of frustration trying to get your needs met in life, which makes it difficult to want to try. Feeling hopeless about or quickly shutting down anything you have an inkling of really wanting is how you’ve learned to feel safe.
The people you relied on in childhood were unpredictable or erratic, so you developed the skill of scanning and tending to other people’s needs at the expense of your own needs as being necessarily dictated by the needs of others, so it’s hard to untangle them.
You developed a protective strategy commonly known as perfectionism, which means you organize your life around avoiding contact with any potential indications of being inadequate, defective, or unlovable. Wishing for or trying new things is a direct threat to that defense.
When you were growing up, no one around you had any coping skills, so you didn’t get any, either, and instead you carry an intense fear of the feelings that come with wanting something and not getting it. Fused with a belief that those feelings are unmanageable, the stakes of having a true wish are simply too high.
A heart’s desire sprouts from a sense of self that’s sturdy enough to have preferences independent of external factors.

There are so many factors that go into the maturation of a budding sense of self, and probably infinite ways to botch it, so even though adolescence is technically the time when we are “supposed” to be doing the work of figuring out who we are and what we like, there are enormous swaths of us doing it in all decades of life. And we’re often doing it not just once but over and over again as the conditions of our lives change, and with them, our wants and needs.

Sometimes, learning to make a good wish is the work.

Credit goes to Jessica Dore, author of Tarot for Change: Using the Cards for Self-care, Acceptance and Growth

What we Really Want – Redux

A new look at what can be accomplished in groups.

In my travels I’ve met people with varying opinions about bamboo. Some love it. It grows fast. It’s tough and strong, durable; doesn’t break down for a long, long time. For this reason, it is a good choice as a renewable resource. A woman I met in Mexico told me she was dedicated to removing bamboo that had been planted and become a nuisance. She teaches people what can be done with bamboo, and she finds new homes for the plants when she can. So inspiring, the things people find as their calling in life.

I was thinking about this woman when I was working in a new garden patch in my back yard. Last fall, I decided to reclaim a patch of earth from a particularly stubborn, tenacious grass that grows back there, which has been serving to cover the ground quite well for decades, requiring nothing but sun and rain and an occasional trim. But I decided to put in a garden, with watermelon, basil, parsley, mint, greens and tomatoes. And now I am face to face with this plant – grass, bamboo’s second cousin – that has root systems deep and well established, intertwined and strong and formidable. It meets the blade of my shovel like iron. It snickers at my attempts to remove it. So I get down in there with my hands. I can find the roots when I get under them, when the soil is damp, and when I’m not in a hurry. Exerting myself in this way, connecting with dirt and plants really does something for my soul.

In the office, I’ve been fielding more requests for support groups and other types of groupwork. That is where a lot of my creative energy has been going as of late. The pattern that is showing up in my one-on-one work has been the particularly tough, entrenched impact of intergenerational trauma that is blocking real progress and growth in the lives of my clients. It shows up as stubborn and tenacious and sometimes appears impermeable to change.

The feeling is of being really mired in something that keeps sucking one in. It’s requiring me to take a different look at the way I can offer myself in service to them. Just so you know, it’s always mutually beneficial because my clients always mirror me and help me move through the processes I desire to work through as they do their work, and they always inspire me, whether they realize it or not.

I’m noticing that this new shift in the work I’m called to do demands a new level of humility. It demands that I continuously search out new resources. I am pushed to continually search for the right tools, and to make care for myself a sacred priority.

The really good thing about this is that the kind of trauma my clients are bringing to me these days responds to Systemic and Family Constellations Therapy.

And that is what I want to tell you about now. Here is a brief description, in case I haven’t already shared this with you. Over the next weeks, I plan to share on some various themes that I’ve come across in my studies as I’ve been working toward certification. I’m proud to say that yesterday I completed and submitted my application for Advanced Certification as a Systemic and Family Constellations Facilitator. I also bought and planted those herbs and greens in my little garden patch, and now it’s raining. I look forward to seeing what comes of this new vision – of working with others in groups to make real shifts in our experience, to removing obstacles to our being truly generative, vibrant, and expressive of who we came here to be. I hope they have a short acronym for Systemic and Family Constellations Therapist Facilitator, Advanced!

Here’s the certificate!

My most recent vision is this:

To more powerfully perform from a place of embodiment so that I can stimulate and support the change that is desired; to collaborate with others to bring about not just a quick fix but transformation in the felt sense of people that I work with – that we finally know what it feels like to be held, to be supported in community, and believe that there is Something Bigger that we can lean into. And that joy and peace are our natural state, and that it is available to us in these bodies on this earth. To know what it feels like to be supported to move toward what we want, what we desire, what we need to make this life truly matter. And to celebrate all the movement (large and small) toward this goal.

Playing With Subtle Energies: Explaining the Unexplainable

Hello Friends,

Many years ago I was introduced to this mysterious, powerful, and beautiful therapeutic modality called Family Constellations. Immediately fascinated and enchanted, I sought out a group or a therapist here in the Midwest, and had my own constellation done. I had to drive all the way to Sedalia, MO and the group that assembled there was quite small, yet still powerful. That therapist has since passed on, and I’ve moved forward in my life as well. In Mexico, I learned that Family Constellations work is extremely popular, and most of the therapists I met had been trained in it, use it in their therapies, and many offer regular groups. In 2013 I attended a 5-day “congress” about Family Constellations in Acapulco, Mexico, attended by a huge number of people, with speakers from all over the world, and my adventures south of the border kicked off that way – in the realm of the magical, Explicando lo Inexplicable (Explaining the Unexplainable). I began attending these groups in Guadalajara as often as I could. Often they brought me to tears, even in Spanish, because they worked with something much older and much more powerful than words. And I could feel things shifting and reaching greater integration in my body, a deeper, very resonant feeling that my problems are not so unique, and that so many of them have been passed down, from past generations. In the world of Family Constellations, things can be put right though. Repairs can be made, and it is a truly beautiful and awe-inspiring thing.

I’m telling you about this now because I have a desire to play with the subtle energies of this therapeutic modality, and as I am still learning how groups in general work, I won’t be charging what most constellators charge. And I want it to be available, even for people who have limited resources. Contact me if you want more information, if you think you and a few people in your community might like to set something up. We need anywhere from 8 to 18 people, and a place that is quiet and large enough for us to move around in.

I can see how my exposure to Family Constellations as well as my training and background in CranioSacral Therapy both shape and affect my EMDR practice, and I now use a kind of hybrid of all three with my clients. We have started a constellation group in Columbia and our first four circles have been extremely powerful. Having the ability to take my work into a group context excites me no end. I’ve included a couple links so you can check it out below. Let me know what you think.

https://www.ulsamer.com/family-constellation/family-constellations-according-to-bert-hellinger/

Rupert Sheldrake talks about Family Constellations and the morphogenic field. You may want to Google that topic and follow your own curiosity.

The swirling blue on white figures in the image I include with this post make me think of the “as above, so below” phenomenon that we see in nature, and the correspondence between different planes of existence. Here, I almost see both the neurons that make up any living organism (or a brain!) and the humans that make up any living community. The design was part of the 2013 Constellations Congress I attended in Acapulco.

Learn about the Zulu origins of Family Constellations here.

Transformational Spring Reading – Hold Me Tight

I have been thinking about belonging, and the various points in my life when I felt I more or less belonged. At this particular phase where I live a rather secluded life due both to personal choice and the more recent COVID-19 pandemic, all of my attention is going toward taking care of my most basic needs, I set up my daily schedule so I can get all of that important self-care stuff in like I never have before. My house is set up so it can be as efficient as possible. If I didn’t make a concerted effort to do it, I assure you, it wouldn’t get done.

The quality of my life, of my future, depends on how well I meet my basic needs. This was also true when I was an infant. Like all infants, I had many needs and obviously a good many of them were met because I survived, right? I am here writing this blog post. But as I am getting more clear on my unmet infant needs now, my home was set up primarily to meet everyone else’s needs because either they were providing the income necessary to put a roof over our heads or because they were attending to one urgent emergency after another, juggling financial hardship and probably postpartum depression, leaving me not feeling particularly safe or cherished. The home was not set up to make sure that my unique needs were well met.

I have more clarity about this today because of a book I’m reading called Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love, by Dr. Sue Johnson (a little hint as to what I was needing and not getting). The book’s basic premise can be summed up with an acronym, A.R.E., which stands for Accessible, Responsive, and Emotionally Engaged. The level of belonging I felt in my family of origin was directly proportionate to the degree to which I felt that my caretakers were accessible, responsive to my needs, and able to emotionally engage with me.

The quality of my relationships and my adult life have been a reflection of the absence of the accessibility, responsiveness and emotional engagement that nobody but me was even aware of. Through this lens, I can finally see what it was that caused me to create relationships where I did not feel connected or safe. And now that I am in the process of parenting myself well, I am experiencing what it feels like to be safe and connected, if only to myself. And it is with great joy and anticipation that I can say that I feel as though a whole new world awaits me. As a result of the ongoing dedication I have to caring for myself well, and books and other resources such as this, I am broadening my vocabulary, my capacity to experience new things interpersonally and educating myself about what is possible when we feel truly attuned to, and are accessible to our tender selves, responsive to our own needs, and committed to staying emotionally engaged with ourselves – uncomfortable emotions, vulnerable needs and all.

I see a very different life opening up for me, where the dialogue involves a whole lot of listening to and paying attention to what delights me (even if that sounds silly or selfish), and at the same time offering myself an environment that provides safety, along with the structure and tangible practicalities that are necessary to meet the more typically recognized needs like adequate rest, good enough hygiene, sufficient exercise, hydration, routines that ensure that my spiritual needs are met, human connection and remedial care that my body requires after a lifetime of neglect. A lifetime of not being sure that I was the kind of person who could get attuned to, responded to, and emotionally engaged with – at least with a parent or a primary partner. Holding it all together on the outside is a very different thing from feeling that sense of safety and true belonging on the inside that is a result of strong bonds and healthy intimate relationships, whether it is the mother-infant dyad or the couple who knows how to stay calm and listen and offer assurance when his or her partner is experiencing intense emotions or an automatic reflex that harks back to an earlier traumatic moment.

Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love, by Dr. Sue Johnson is a godsend. It is just the material I needed to catapult my healing work forward. I recommend it highly to anyone who wants to experience more depth, connection and oxytocin in intimate relationship.

“…once distressed partners learn to hold each other tight, they continue reaching out to each other, trying to create these transforming and satisfying moments again and again. I believe that A.R.E. interactions turn on this neurochemical love potion honed by millions of years of evolution. Oxytocin seems to be nature’s way of promoting attachment.”

– Dr. Sue Johnson in Hold Me Tight

Attached – A Book Review

Attached. The New Science of Adult Attachment and How it Can Help You Find – and Keep – Love. By Amir Levine, MD, and Rachel S.F. Heller, MA

I found reading Attached to be a tasty experience. So tasty in fact, that I read it again before putting it down. It was very much like eating a cookie. I raced through, devouring each crumb, excited to have found a book on attachment so easy to read; that the authors so clearly had researched and taken due diligence to present. I learned a great deal while reading it, not just enjoying each nibble, the richness of its texture and balance by myself, but I also shared and reflected with other people – therapist friends and relatives who were reading it alongside me. How exciting to see such a phenomenon as attachment come so fully onto the public stage in such a palatable form as this! And by the time I had read it twice, I felt myself changed somehow.

Since I am a psychotherapist, I found that Attached gave me heart, and a good many angles through which to enter the topic of relationships and help my clients move toward deeper intimacy and satisfaction in theirs. Equipped with these tools and this knowledge it is easier to emerge from past failures with a sense of hopefulness and courage to try again.

I have always been intensely interested in relationships. Long before I became a social worker or a psychotherapist I was devouring literature on intimacy and connection. And as a person who has failed at relationships enough times to write ten books, I am especially grateful for Levine and Heller’s book. I believe that it provided exactly the right ingredients and precisely the right texture and crunch. I no longer identify as one of those poor, insecurely attached blokes who are not relationship material.

After finishing Attached for the second time and taking a separate, two-week webinar on attachment with my sister, and beginning to follow another phenomenal relationship, intimacy and dating expert, Ken Page, I can now say, with some certainty, that I am not as dysfunctional or broken as I previously thought. In fact, I might even go so far as to say that I have a predominantly secure attachment style. And yes, I was missing the cues that could have saved me so much time and heartache, had I come across this book decades ago.

What I’d like readers to know is that if they’ve failed at relationships, it may not be because they are jerks or incapable of empathy or are somehow broken. It’s because they are still acquiring the basic skills to recognize a healthy, life-affirming relationship and what it actually feels like to be in one.

The thing I find missing in virtually all of the popular approaches on dating and intimacy is the concept of the emotional flashback, which should not be confused with attachment style, though does contribute to many of the behaviors this book talks about.

As you learn and grow and partake of the popular literature, make sure that you don’t over-identify as an avoidant or ambivalent or disorganized person. What happens to me, and it may happen to you too, is that the prospect of new love, and the hope of connecting deeply is so moving and so tantalizing that I can lose my balance if I am not adequately caring for myself and tending to my important needs. Intimacy serves as a portal into our deepest wounds, for better or worse, and as we become more mature connoisseurs of sweets, we gain important tools and discernment about which desserts leave us with a belly ache and which ones actually leave us feeling stronger, more ourselves and deeply, truly satisfied.

Difficult Women – Book Review

Roxane Gay’s title, Difficult Women, speaks to any woman who has felt difficult to love. I had long since owned that title and studied the qualities that made me “difficult” in relationships. I had searched tirelessly to identify the conditions to which I might attribute this unfortunate state of affairs. So when my sister, the day before her wedding, gifted me this book and began to explain her intention, maybe for fear that I would feel labeled or defensive, I waved her off. Thank you! I told her. I love it already. Gay’s writing pulled me in from the very first paragraph. Her voice captures all the ways women might be considered difficult in intimate relationships yet at the same time looks deeper at who they are and why. We come out of this reading experience so much richer for having explored these stories with her. They are fiction – products of Gay’s imagination. But for me, each is a window into a rich and ornate chamber of its author’s mind. This book leaves me so much richer, with a stronger sense of how a woman might be loved well, even if temporarily. It leaves me with a broader vision of how a woman can allow her difficult self to be loved and why that might add value to her life. It leaves me with a clearer personal understanding of the complexity of myself, love and relationship and the natural grit and beauty of coupling in its infinite forms.

And I feel a little less difficult after having read this book.

Other books by Roxane Gay I plan to read:

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

An Untamed State

Bad Feminist

Ayiti

& several comic books in Marvel’s Black Panther: World of Wakanda series

“I vigorously encourage women and people of color to be ambitious, to want and work for every damn thing they can dream of. We’re allowed to want, nakedly, as long as we’re willing to put in the proverbial work….I am ambitious because I love what I do, not simply for ambition’s sake. Ambition is what allows me to take creative risks and try things I never thought I could do. Ambition makes me a better thinker and writer. Ambition makes me.” — Roxane Gay