Gestalt & Somatic Therapy

15/12/2022

Nothing happens in a vacuum. What happens here is balanced there by its opposite.

08/08/2022

With most clients, there is pre-verbal work to do, pre-verbal trauma to work with. Annie provides some easy to understand info, and she has some great books too.

08/08/2022

There are several types of dissociation that I’ve found in working with clients over the last 35 years:

🌀 2 types of Sympathetic Nervous System:

1. Fragmentation

2. Sensate awareness on top of a freeze

🌀 2 types of the Parasympathetic:

1 catatonia and depression

2 a spatial/field heaviness

🌀3rd type: Last ditch effort of Charismatic Grandiosity (sneaky power) adrenal in the brain so you don’t die...leads to grandiosity, and Sneaky power; is charismatic, addictive, seductive, because it is fueled by the endocrine system.

If you are a therapist, have you seen these types in your clients?

If you are working on your own self-healing, have you ever noticed any of these in yourself?

No need for judgment, but with awareness we can learn to see it, address it, and get the support we need to heal.

I’d love to hear what you think about this model in the comments below!

Also - get front row seats to my free brand new webinar all about complex trauma coming up on May 15th! Sign up here: https://brook.kartra.com/page/HCTfreewebinar

15/07/2022

03/07/2022

The trickster, in Gestalt, is the underdog. The part of ourselves that does not accept the "pretend normal". It's the part that seems powerless, but somehow, ends up having a lot of power in our lives. How to work with the trickster, how to bring that part of ourself into contact and relationship with the rest of us. Then we can be a little more whole.

27/06/2022

Understanding what learning is, how memory forms out of experience, is essential when working as a trauma therapist.

In the culture I come from, learning is considered to be a function of the nervous system. It is my experience that the nervous system is only one aspect of learning – that it is first a recording system and therefore the last system to “know.” ⁠
⁠
It records and stores patterns of movement and behavior and, once stored, it can retrieve them and thereby control experience through habit, memory, and projection.⁠
⁠
The nervous system records present experience, integrates it with other previously stored experience, interprets it within the context of its history, holds it in memory, and projects the coordination of the whole into the future as expectation.

27/03/2022

This :

It's your job to step out of the power struggle.
Don't expect your child to be the adult first.
—Bonnie Harris

✨ If you would like to be kept in the loop on everything Neurochild please submit your details here http://bit.ly/neurochild-connect

03/03/2022

A few words by Jeff Brown that speak so well about how we learn to assert ourselves and our boundaries, and also how not to personalize it when others do it around us.

“It is natural to take it personally when someone disconnects from you, especially if they don’t tell you why. At the same time, it is also important to realize that people’s decision to disconnect often has nothing to do with you. It is often entirely about them. One of the most common things I have witnessed, is a need to sever connection that is rooted in the personal individuation process. That is, someone has gone through their life as a people pleaser, as a co-dependent, as someone whose experience of the self is confusingly intertwined with others, and they need to push someone away in order to finally feel separate. They need to claim their stake as an individuated entity, but they don’t know how to do it non-reactively. So they abruptly terminate a personal connection, in order to establish a new way of being. Quite often, they do this with someone who is peripheral to their primary co-dependencies, because they are not ready to live without those. They pick a friend or a secondary figure, as their first stepping out. In these situations, you are merely a relational symbology, a figure that had to go in order for them to finally feel like a boundaried, empowered person. This is not to say that it won’t hurt, but it is to say that it was never about you.” Jeff Brown