About
Sound familiar? Your family chaos may have looked different from mine, but the effect is often very similar.
I didn’t know that I was learning survival tactics that would harden into full-blown self-protective patterns; patterns that would make it really tough to have authentic loving relationships. (I didn’t even know I wasn’t able to connect with loved ones. I thought I was.)
Life Clue: You don’t know what you are missing if you never had it to begin with!
I stumbled into hospice nursing without realizing that it would change my life in ways I could never have predicted. Spending such intimate time with families during the super-charged days just before a loved one’s death taught me invaluable lessons about family dynamics and the impact of unhealed early emotional wounds on each family member.
I learned that, just like family systems in the outer world, each of us has a family system in our inner world. Instead of our inner emotional world resembling an onion, with ever deeper layers to peel back, I learned that it is actually more like a garlic clove, with clusters of inner parts of me that influence every decision I make and experience that I have. I found out that each of these inner parts wants to protect me from further hurt but, more often than not, does it in such a way that gets me in even more hot water, emotionally speaking.
Does any of that ring true for you?
Does part of you sometimes rear up in a prickly or rageful reaction, seemingly out of nowhere?
It’s frustrating, and frankly kind of scary, isn’t it?
Are those rageful, terrified, passive aggressive, or controlling parts really who we are?
Contact me and we can look at them and what they mean.
I spent my childhood moving from place to place every year, and sometimes several times a year, because my dad was in the Coast Guard. Lots of things happened in those turbulent years to send tender parts of me deep into hiding and prickly protectors to take their place as guards around my heart.
When I became an adult, I kept up that pattern of running from my pain. By the time I hit fifty, I had moved over sixty times. One of those moves took me, with my family and a few friends, to a log lodge in northern Idaho to “live off the land” and create a beautiful place for clients to come and do some healing work.
It was wonderful and a huge adventure, until everything came crashing down in the absolute worst experience of my life. In a bipolar psychotic break, my beloved brother shot my husband in the head with a handgun while I was on the phone with him. My husband survived through a series of miracles too lengthy to go into here, but my shredded heart took years to even begin to recover.
My search for relief from the ripping pain was complicated by my family’s reaction to the shooting. I pushed for family counseling and, instead, my dad disowned and blamed me. My brother went to prison and completed suicide when he was released on parole. There seemed to be no healing possible for a wound too deep for words.
In the depths of my despair and grief, I was led by caring friends to an EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) and attachment theory therapist, who also understood the inner garlic clove of a family system that formed to protect me from feeling the hundreds of wounds I experienced in my childhood. Following the feelings down to their roots, she showed me how to gently work with my inner protectors and give them a chance to voice their fears and let go of their burdens.
I found, to my delight and relief, that these inner protective parts want very much to be heard. They spoke (and still speak) to me in dreams and through art projects and, most often, through emotional reactions to something in the present that reminds them of a painful experience in the past.
My life since has been totally dedicated to learning everything I can about Internal Family Systems (IFS) and applying it through art therapy and my work with horses and animals, and with my clients in classes and personal life coaching. It’s a system of healing emotional trauma that works. I know it does because it healed my life.
Are you ready to explore what it can do for you?
Let me know if you are and we can set up a time to talk.
Every journey begins with a step and this step might be the one that changes everything for you.
In my grief classes, healing groups and retreats, and individual coaching sessions, I’ve helped hundreds of people identify and heal the thorny emotional issues that have been holding them back for a lifetime.
My latest book, Living in Color: A Seven Day Plan for Emotional Healing Through the Chakras, delves deeply into the practical everyday things we can do to bring our hearts and minds into balance and calm down those terrified protectors who guard our innermost wounded places, so we can heal those too.
If you feel you are being called to work with me for a season, contact me and we can talk about what your needs are and what we might be able to accomplish together.
