Dear Awesome Human,
I hope that your holidays thus far have delivered more blessing than pain. Now let’s all get the heck out of 2020! I hear there’s a new place opening up down the street called “2021.” I – for one – am going to go down there and check it out.
Thanks so much to those of you who came to my webinar this month, to those who signed up but didn’t manage to come, and to those who thought about it but couldn’t make it work this time. I had a great time, and we had some good insights and learning.
I have two exciting pieces of personal news to share!
First, I am working on a book that will be a toolkit for navigating life inside a chaotic nervous system. I don’t know the timeline yet. The reason this is exciting for you is that I have started creating and gathering both written and recorded resources for this toolkit and I will be sharing many of them with you in my emails.
Below is this week’s tool, both in text and as a recording that you can just plug in and follow.
Here is a true story about me using this tool.
Monday I was working on a household chore. Ok, I was cleaning the bathroom. It needed a lot of cleaning because we had both been down with COVID and with post-COVID fatigue syndrome for some months. I was about a third of the way through the job, and I just got to the place where I felt like quitting. Physically I was ok, but I felt emotionally tired and I just didn’t want to do it.
For some context, I have a life-long pattern of driving myself to do things, whether I want to or not. I steam-rolled myself through most of my life. So now I have a rule that I don’t force myself to do anything. I want to be productive and effective, but not be being harsh with myself. Given that context, I wanted to find a way to keep working on the bathroom, but I didn’t want to just make myself keep working.
I was in a pickle, so I went to Coach Resilient Rosalie and asked her for advice. She suggested trying the Visiting Emotions Process below. After doing that process, I felt like continuing to work! I wanted to do it! And I completed half of the remaining work before I got physically tired and took a break.
For me, this is a really big deal. I am crazy excited about creating this package of tools for myself!
While the idea to start working on a book was stimulated by a Facebook offering, “Pay me money and I will tell you how to write a book in 30 days!”, here is what gave the idea some traction:
I realized that no matter how many awesome healing modalities I learn and no matter how many great teachers and healers I work with, there will likely never be a point where it is just easy to be me and I can just do everything automatically. Living with a traumatized nervous system is not for sissies. For the rest of my life, I will probably need to do interventions with myself several times a day. And just one or two “great life-changing techniques” will not be enough. I will need a toolkit. And I realized that I finally have the skills to create the toolkit that I have needed all along. So I’m assembling the toolkit for myself, and you are welcome to ride along!
Below is the Visiting Emotions Process. If you do the process by just reading through the prompts, you can probably do it in about 5 minutes. Here is a link to a recording of the process, which is about 12 minutes long.
Clicking here will take you to the recording on my SoundCloud page.
Visiting Emotions Process
For many people with developmental trauma, the pattern of suppressing life force and emotion is part of the package. Therefore, connecting with emotions is part of the healing journey.
Sometimes we wait for emotions to show up on their own, but that’s not the only way to do it. We can throw a party and invite all the emotions to come. That’s what this process consists of.
Just go through the following steps, one at a time.
Picture someone expressing anger
Picture yourself expressing anger
Begin to adopt a posture of anger, then include your face, then include sounds
Track a breath, in and out.
Picture someone expressing frustration
Picture yourself expressing frustration
Begin to adopt a posture of frustration, then include your face, then include sounds
Track a breath, in and out.
Picture someone expressing fear
Picture yourself expressing fear
Begin to adopt a posture of fear, then include your face, then include sounds
Track a breath, in and out.
Picture someone expressing excitement
Picture yourself expressing excitement
Begin to adopt a posture of excitement, then include your face, then include sounds
Track a breath, in and out.
Picture someone expressing hope
Picture yourself expressing hope
Begin to adopt a posture of hope, then include your face, then include sounds
Track a breath, in and out.
Picture someone expressing grief
Picture yourself expressing grief
Begin to adopt a posture of grief, then include your face, then include sounds
Track a breath, in and out.
Picture someone expressing disappointment
Picture yourself expressing disappointment
Begin to adopt a posture of disappointment, then include your face, then include sounds
Track a breath, in and out.
Picture someone expressing determination
Picture yourself expressing determination
Begin to adopt a posture of determination, then include your face, then include sounds
Track a breath, in and out.
Picture someone expressing joy
Picture yourself expressing joy
Begin to adopt a posture of joy, then include your face, then include sounds
Track a breath, in and out.
Now check in with yourself and see how your thoughts, feelings, or energies have changed from when you started.
I am curious how well the Visiting Emotions Process does or doesn’t work for you, so please let me know!
And here is my second piece of exciting news: I received by PSEP, my Provisional Somatic Experiencing™ Practitioner certificate!
PSEP! Woot woot!
This means I’ve been recognized as having completed all of the training and practice requirements to be an Somatic Experiencing™ Practitioner (SEP). However, I’m a PSEP instead until I attend a 2 day in person workshop to practice SE Touch skills.
The final module of SE training is all about using touch in trauma healing. Normally throughout the 6 day training, the students practice touch on one another with the “client” lying on a massage table. Instead, my cohort attended the training virtually over Zoom. We learned about and practiced how to support clients using self-touch in trauma healing, but we didn’t practice touch on other humans. So once this plague is under control I can magically transform from a PSEP to an SEP.
The quickest you can become an SEP or PSEP, start to finish, is about 2.5 years. It took me 5 years all told, from December 2015 until December 2020. I took a while and this is a big deal!
And Yay for You and all that you have accomplished and survived in 2020. It has been a great and daunting year! If you are planning to do some end of the year reflection and goal setting this week, perhaps the above Visiting Emotions Process could be a helpful prelude to your period of reflection.
Let me know how it goes, and I’m out of here now, on my way to 2021!
