Beyond Talking Therapy...
(This is a longish read. If you'd rather find out more by booking a FREE discovery call, please use this link. Sessions cost from £30 an hour).
HOW DID WE END UP WHERE WE ARE?
As children we developed strategies for getting by in the safest way possible.
If our caregivers were busy and told us to be quiet in angry or impatient tones we may have developed the strategy to be as quiet as possible to be seen as ‘good’.
We may have learned to equate angry or impatient tones with danger - a threat to our feeling of peace and security and so we spend our lives trying to avoid conflict.
If we were rewarded for ‘good behaviour’ we may have learned to push away anything that would be deemed ‘bad’ (anger, insecurity, fear - any number of emotions).
If our caregivers offered us affection on a transactional basis (I’ll love you if…) then we learn to make love conditional.
If our caregivers were chaotic, love and kindness may be completely untrustworthy emotions to us: we don’t know the rules, or when the love and kindness will turn to coldness and hostility.
If our caregivers weren’t available to witness our emotions as children (and it’s impossible for a caregiver to be there every time!) we may have learned to bury and ignore those emotions as they felt too difficult to navigate alone.
Any number of childhood experiences can lead to us pushing away feelings and emotions that we simply didn’t know what to do with. None of this is our fault but the ensuing chaos/disconnect/pain that can arise is our responsibility.
We added to these strategies as we went through life and had our hearts broken, our desires quashed, our dreams ended. Each time we went through some sort of calamity, most of us learned to bury the feelings of loss, betrayal, pain, anger, anxiety, heartbreak, sadness and grief and plaster on a face of ‘I’m OK’, or worse, attempt to see the positive in the situation and ‘get on with it’ without acknowledging those very real feelings. We wanted to ‘get over it’ and we may have felt pressure from external forces too (friends, family, partners, society) and so we buried, buried, buried our true expression of what it is to live a human life.
We are constantly being told by society, by advertising, by each other that our lives are supposed to be one long stream of joy and bliss and if it’s anything less than that then there must be something wrong with us.
This is isn’t true. Life as a human being is meant to be experienced in its full and complete range. We are lured to think we should always use the high, tinkling notes at the top of the keyboard and so miss out on the depth and complexity of the darker, deeper notes at the other end. But worse than that, ignoring the darker, deeper notes just turns the higher notes into sharps and flats - they can’t be fully experienced either because there is always a subtle fear and that it will all end and what then? So we even become inhibited from enjoying the good stuff.
As we get older we wish for peace, joy, happiness, security, freedom, bliss, forgiveness. We search in meditation, we go on retreats, we read countless books, we follow certain teachers. We consume other people’s words hoping that they will somehow be able to magically feed us the special pill that will take us to a life whereby we can just pretend that all of that difficult stuff didn't happen and so we keep burying, burying, burying and ignoring our own experience.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Here’s the thing.
Peace and freedom aren’t difficult. They’re available to all of us right now - if we stop trying. This is so incredibly counter-intuitive in a world that rewards effort.
But peace and freedom are here, right now. Right under our noses. Those unconscious beliefs and confusing feelings inhibit our ability to see this. We get a sense in our lives that something isn’t quite right, but we push the feelings away because they feel uncomfortable (and we’ve been sold the story that discomfort is wrong and bad) and we want to fast forward to peace, joy, happiness, security, freedom, bliss and forgiveness.
We may get glimpses of those states, but until we have seen through those sticky stuck parts of ourselves, long buried, we’ll continue to repeat patterns, overreact, be in overwhelm, feel anxious, and find ourselves at arm’s length from our (available in every moment) experience of peace and freedom by constantly being caught up in the inner world of chatter, judgement and opinion. We cling to momentary experiences and try to repeat them, not realising that the effort and trying is what stops us from simply knowing time and time again. We find ourselves desperately trying to control an uncontrollable world and coming a cropper time and time again and in true addict style we say ‘but if I try to control this (person, event, emotion, situation) just one more time maybe this time it’ll work’....
It’s a mess! Being human is a glorious, chaotic mess - that’s for sure, and if we keep resisting that truth we find ourselves snared further and further; caught up in trying to find reason and trying to explain the inexplicable - trying to control the uncontrollable.
Using a combination of KI (Kiloby Inquiries - trauma-informed, body-based advanced mindfulness techniques), self compassion and deep listening we can help to unravel the parts of ourselves that are stuck, frozen, terrified, anxious. Until we have experienced the feelings that we trapped inside ourselves (and we trap them by using logic, reason and by trying to ‘be good’ to name a few common strategies) then we’ll continue to come up against brick walls.
We always start the process by discovering how and what it feels like to be safe. This is key. This in itself can start opening the doors of healing - simply learning to access feelings of 'safeness'.
In KI we honour resistance, we trust the body’s intuition, we have no agenda and we let things unfold in their own space and time. Nothing is forced. No trying or effort required. Just a gentle (which doesn’t mean comfortable) letting go into what needs release and expression and in so doing we create greater ease and flow with life itself. It’s not talking therapy - although some talking will happen, it isn’t trying to work things out - although we may find ourselves trying to do that. It goes underneath all that to those difficult stuck places that are crying out (and sometimes, painfully) for release.
It’s powerful stuff.
Book in for a free 30 min discovery call so that we can decide together if this approach will be useful to you.
If there isn't a time that suits you, please get in touch as I keep space back for short notice clients.
If sitting in a room isn't your thing, we can take the session outside to the beach or the woods, if you're local.
I have an enhanced DBS certificate and I look forward to meeting you!