I will guide you to clearly identify the internal emotional problem you would like my help with. Together we will examine any ways you are ignoring yourself, or not facing your truth, or avoiding the discomfort of emotion and unwittingly creating suffering for yourself. With your permission and your will to address these obstacles, we will attune to the wisdom of your body and grow your capacity to notice, tolerate and regulate little signals of anxiety in the body, steering you toward emotion. So you can matter. So you can grow.

Whether you want it or not, emotion moves you. That is vulnerable. Emotions are your embodied reaction to reality, letting you know what is true for you. Emotions are physical. They can be painful and seem scary. But experiencing emotion in your body enlivens and matures you. When you can fully feel your emotions you can be more authentic, resilient and intimate with others. You can be yourself.

The Power of Emotion

Emotion is so important for your growth that it comes with a physiological signal to catch your attention. When you feel grief, guilt, anger and even love and hope, your nervous system orients you with an uncomfortable feeling of unrest. Your wise body uses unrest to cue you to the optimal moment when you can grow: the moment emotion is rising. Unrest invites you to wake up, tune in, and be a conscious co-creator in your life.

But there is a trick that makes tuning in to unrest a radical act. Unrest speeds along the same quick circuitry as fear, your sympathetic nervous system. This makes unrest feel like danger, something to avoid. Unrest chimes, “Tune in and pay attention” but sends that message through survival wiring that warns, “Run away!”

You can see the dilemma. The emotion meant to grow you evokes a reflex to protect you. Without even realizing it, you disengage from what you feel. Instead of leaning into unrest so you can experience emotion and become more yourself, you escape. You distract and worry and shut down and turn against yourself. Your hunger to flourish bumps up against your impulse to protect, and the struggle manifests as disconnection from yourself and others.

This is the enigma of personal growth: you need to do the opposite of what comes naturally. Rather than avoid, you must instead turn towards and feel unrest when it rouses you.

Are you free to follow your dreams, or hampered by self-doubt? Can you stay present in the moment, or are you tormented by worry or regret or a frantic need to stay busy? Must you have control and certainty in order to cope? Or can you tolerate the inevitable ambiguity of life? Can you ask for help, or does that make you feel weak? Do you feel hopeless or self-attacking when faced with your human vulnerability? Does it seem you ought to feel more joy than you do? Or can you laugh and cry and feel hope and take assertive action to make change? Can you let in the love of others? Can you connect with the larger world and feel engaged and empowered to make a difference? Are you living the meaningful life you long for? Or have you settled for getting by?

You have the answers to your difficulties within you. Your emotions are the energy and information that will propel and transform you. Awakening from the slumber of numbing and distraction takes effort, but you are so very worth it. You deserve to live your most rich and authentic life. And the world needs people who can be moved by the truth and take action. It’s time to be moved. It’s time to wake up and feel your feelings deeply.

HEALING ANXIETY

Health is being confident in your authentic self, alive to the moment, and connected to the truth of your emotions. Anxiety removes you from your real self and present reality. It traps you in a remembered-past or an imagined-future. Anxiety disempowers you and distracts you from the power of now with threatening stories and self-criticisms.

RESOLVING DEPRESSION

Depression is not sadness; it is a loss of connection with the powerhouse of core emotion. Depression is an experience of having lost touch with yourself. When you’re depressed, nothing matters because you don’t matter. You’ve disconnected from the truth of your emotions, from the information and energy that flows through you like a river. As a result you are paralyzed and stuck, and you lose hope that things can be different.

OPENING TO INTIMACY

Do you want to be your real self and open up more fully to others? Among our deepest desires is to be seen and known in the inner depths of who we truly are; among our deepest fears is to be rejected there.

Therapy is a relationship. We honour certain boundaries in our work such as structure and fees.

A Relationship and a Process

I work actively, respectfully, and collaboratively with you on the internal emotional problems you want to resolve. You may resist the pain of growth in the places where you have needed to in the past. You may try to defend against the discomfort of your vulnerable feelings. That is natural.

I help you see and feel what those defenses have cost you, and I make it safe enough for the real you to emerge. I model a new way of relating with yourself that is compassionate, so that you can experience what it feels like to have someone in your corner over and over again. As you internalize our relationship you will have that safety within you always.

Out of repeated experiences of facing the truth of what you feel and being held with warm interest and non-judgment, you grow your ability to live in all the richness and complexity of who you most deeply are. You become a compassionate ally for yourself so you can risk being all you are meant to be.

Therapy

Therapy is a relationship in which your growth is the priority for both of us. This is a relationship between experts. You are the expert on you. I am the expert on transformation and growth. I connect with the healthiest parts of you, mobilizing your hope, desire, will and innate wiring for growth.

We cultivate a way of being together that is warm, interested, and non-judgmental so that you can risk feeling your human vulnerability. So that you can feel what is deeply true for you, and can fully express that truth. These are experiences, not just ideas, and in order to make change that lasts these experiences need to be lived and felt, not just understood in the mind.

You bring your expert knowledge of yourself and:

  • willingness to engage in a relationship where you deeply matter
  • courage to feel and be in the body
  • openness to being surprised by who and what we find
  • and a commitment to stop treating yourself lovelessly.

So that you can emerge in all you are meant to be, confident in your ability to cope, and able to connect with yourself and others, sharing the gift of who you are with the world.

“Embracing Unrest will help you catch yourself just as you are being ejected from the moment.”

My book “Embracing Unrest” is hitting the bookshelves October 2022! You’ll learn when and how to tune into your body to counter the reflex to avoid inner experience.