Shannon HJ Psychotherapy, PLLC

04/13/2022

“Adventures are all very well in their place, but there’s a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.” -Neil Gaiman

12/15/2021

Here’s your invitation to rest✨ ✨
Holiday stress can feel like a f$&-ing ⭐️ lodged in your shoulder blades. 💚I invite you to pause the scrolling and have a listen💚
📷 .psych at Falls Lake
Disclaimer: this post and this account are not a replacement for therapy. ✨Please give yourself permission to get set up (call, email,click) with your own therapist today✨

12/09/2021

💚

The advisory is to call attention to a "youth mental health crisis" and recommend resources to call on and actions to take.

12/03/2021

This is so timely as we are in the thick of the holiday season.✨

This post addresses the role of boundaries as instrumental to healing trauma, especially childhood trauma. Boundaries are the limits that help to define...

11/29/2021

✨you hold your healing…beautiful, resourceful you.✨💕

11/02/2021

Adapting to survive?! 🧠

Yes. Survival responses like fight, flight, or freeze get lots of airplay. However, please and appease (sometimes called “fawn” or “people-pleasing”) is an automatic survival response too.

We’re born with the need to connect with our caregivers and receive warm reassurance, also known as co-regulation. We can learn “I and thou” - what one is feeling and what the other is feeling. We also learn to self-regulate our emotions.

When caregivers neglect to raise us with warm, attuned response and reassurance, we adapt to that for our survival.

Physiologically, our vagus nerve is working in high gear on the ventral and dorsal side. In ventral vagal, we’re reading the social/emotional cues of others to attend to their needs.
In dorsal vagal, we’re cutting-off, or going numb, and dissociating from our own needs.

So we may feel exhausted, and at the same time fearful about what may happen if we say “no.”

Healing is possible! We can update the job responsibility of this protective part of ourself. Step one is to recognize when we engage in people-pleasing behaviors now. In the present.

Learning to recognize when we engage in the behavior and tuning in to how our body feels take practice! Be gentle with yourself.

Identify who you can be around and/or where you can be and feel relatively safe noticing in to your body sensations. It might be in nature, or while with a friend who makes you laugh.

Read a book, follow an account 💗 like mine .psych 💗, or listen to a podcast on boundaries.
Some of my faves are:


Sources: Dr. Arielle Schwartz, Dr. Sandra Paulsen
Disclaimer: this post and this account are not a replacement for therapy. ✨Please give yourself permission to get set up (call, email, click) with your own therapist today. ✨

10/19/2021

Take charge of the narrative✨In ecology, snag trees are essential habitats for animals and provide vantage points for raptors to hunt (see next pic). It’s not just a dead🌲It is literally teeming with and sustaining life.
“We adapt to adversity by orienting to our strengths, attending to our pain, and taking charge of the narrative that defines our lives. I believe that we all have the capacity to overcome adversity. However, this requires that we have compassionate support and intelligent guidance. Our injuries do not occur in a vacuum, so our healing cannot occur in one either. Our hurts and losses need to be repaired interpersonally. We cannot heal alone.”
-Arielle Schwartz 💚

10/18/2021

As we move further into fall and this season of change, take 💚 that healing is possible! It’s brave to ask for help AND to support a friend who might need it.
https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/how-we-can-all-prevent-suicide/

Photo credit .a.prasad

10/15/2021

Happy Friday meme drop!

https://www.instagram.com/p/BsTUUf2HIdY/?utm_medium=copy_link

10/08/2021

For whole 🧠, whole body healing we need to activate more than our thinky parts.✨

Repost from
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When our energy is not used for self protection it can then be used for our aliveness and engagement with life. Learning how to release the bound energy of trauma allows us to finally release, let go, and rest. This rest is our guard being let down and a re orientation to safety in our nervous system and safety in our environment. This allows for our survival responses to no longer be stuck around events of the past that are triggered in the present. It allows us to be fully here with out having to protect. We are meant to experience overwhelming events, release them through our nervous system, and return to safety and well-being. The result is a sense of empowerment that we made it through and can now be fully.
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Register for the 2021 Somatic Experiencing® Virtual Conference! https://traumahealing.org/conf1
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