Jessica Saperstone LCSW

02/21/2022

Sharing today about an instagram site/podcast that I think is wonderful.
is on Instagram, authored by psychotherapist Julie Menanno MA our of Bozeman Montana. If you don’t use social media, her website is the same www.thesecurerelationship.com . Her teachings and illustrations about attachment, managing triggers and emotional reactivity are user friendly and truly a road map for understanding and navigating relationships of all kinds.

Another author I have recently discovered is Beau Christopher Taplin. His writings are inspirational and demonstrate a deep understanding of the human spirit and psyche. Www.beautaplin.com

I’m reading Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart and though only 1/3 in, it’s great! I understand she just put out an audiobook narrated by her.

I am not endorsing anybody here nor do I know any of them personally. Just sharing….

A guide to getting unstuck from a negative cycle & finding attachment security with your partner.

07/08/2021

We’re at the halfway mark of our six-episode Summer Sister Series on “The Gifts of Imperfection,” and this week Ashley, Barrett, and I talk about how scary it can be to lean into joy and how many people “live disappointed” rather than risk “feeling disappointed.”

Constantly planning and preparing for pain doesn’t make the hurt go away when hard things happen. Squandering joy just means we have fewer stored-up moments of goodness to fall back on when we need them.

Practicing gratitude allows us to lean into the moment rather than be derailed by our fear that joy is only temporary. spoti.fi/UnlockingUs

12/03/2020

Yes, this is important to understand.

... any why it's easy for us to confuse them anyway.

09/11/2020

Love this!

You can't spell wholehearted without A-R-T.

Thank you Andrea Pippins for using your talent and creativity to help us celebrate the 10th anniversary of the by bringing the 10 guideposts to life.

You can download this gorgeous flower and a version YOU color here: https://bit.ly/2GN8MAp

03/25/2020

These are excellent resources💗🙌

Dear Friends ~ During this global crisis we all need pathways to calm, clarity and openheartedness. While it’s natural to feel fear during times of great collective crisis, our challenge is that fear easily takes over our lives. Mindfulness and compassion practices can help us find an inner refuge...

03/25/2020

https://hbr.org/2020/03/that-discomfort-youre-feeling-is-grief

The coronavirus pandemic has led to a collective loss of normalcy.

03/22/2020

So many great questions and comments about our first Unlocking Us podcast episode on FFTs (effing first times) and how hard it is to be new at everything - from small things to pandemics.

I especially appreciate all of the comments from teachers getting ready to take their classes online for the first time and parents navigating all of the uncertainty. �

I’m sharing my thoughts in an article on the website: Collective Vulnerability, the FFTs of Online Learning, and the Sacredness of Bored Kids.

https://brenebrown.com/blog/2020/03/21/collective-vulnerability/

Open hearts. Clean hands. Spread calm.

03/19/2020

Join us for a unique online session with author, scientist, and mindfulness teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn.

11/19/2019

I love this! 🙏 once again Matt Licata.

It is not an error
that you have been born
a sensitive human being,
with a tender nervous system
and a heart that is sometimes
broken.

Inside the wound, a spiral.

The tenderness there,
the shakiness, the grief…
not an error
to be remedied
or cured…

But a doorway to essence,
a portal to life.

Photo by Matt Bluejay

11/15/2019

If you go down to the woods today, it won’t just be your legs and lungs that will benefit - your grey matter will also get a very pleasant surprise.

09/21/2019

Once again, Matt Licata’s words resonate so strongly and ring so true that I am drawn to share them.

Within the spiral of healing, we will be asked to revision core beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world. To become a poet, painter, and sculptor of new life.

So many of our limited beliefs arose from an environment of empathic failure, where the brilliance of a little heart was unable to be held, where the majesty of the emotional landscape was unable to be recognized and mirrored back… seeding pathways of unworthiness and shame.

Even if we did not experience overt neglect or abuse, an environment of consistent misattunement accretes in the psyche over time, where even subtle traumatic organization can take root and flower.

Yes, these narratives and feeling states have their origin in the past. But they must be maintained in the present to stay alive. This is a liberating discovery as while we cannot change the past, we can reorganize perception in the here and now.

This is not easy, and requires the capacity to tolerate, contain, and integrate the underlying anxiety that these beliefs, feelings, and behaviors helped to keep us out of.

Though we may genuinely wish to transform our experience, we simultaneously remain invested in certain ways of thinking and feeling, in order to maintain the protective function they have served. As painful as this is, it has adaptively kept us away psychic experience that threatened to take us down.

We must discover to what degree we still require this protection, or whether it is no longer serving our deeper longing to feel alive, connected, intimate, and free. To what degree it is keeping us out of life, out of full embodied participation in the magnificence of the human form.

We can’t just tear the old organization down in one great enlightenment experience, think our way out of it, or “manifest” it away in five quick steps. It happens slowly, by way of the activity of love.

As always, just what this “love” is cannot be revealed to you by another, but only by way of a secret language that has been placed inside you, awaiting your discovery. It is by way of attunement to this whisper that the poetry of new life will flow.

Art by alto2

08/12/2019

This is so spot on! Another one by Matt Licata.

Early relational experiences are encoded in neural circuitry in the first 18 months of life. Stored as implicit memory, they are inaccessible by ordinary awareness, forming templates through which we engage the world. In a moment of activation, the templates come surging online. Before we realize it, previously sequestered material has flooded our perception.

Our expectations in relationship – whether we can count on others, are worthy of love, will allow another to matter or whether we can take the risk to lead with our vulnerability – are organized in a fragile little nervous system that yearns for connection. The neural pathways are tender and responsive, as we seek attuned, right-brain to right-brain resonance with those around us. We want to feel felt, have our experience held and mirrored, and for pure space in which we can explore unstructured states of being.

While this encoding is deeply embedded, it can be rewired. While it may feel entrenched, it is not as solid as it appears. Even if your early environment was one of empathic failure, developmental trauma, and insecure attachment, it is never too late. The wild realities of neuroplasticity and the courage of the human heart is unstoppable and an erupting force of creativity.

Through new relational experiences – with a lover, a friend, a therapist, a baby; a star, a mountain, the moon, an animal-guide from the other world – love is hidden inside the caverns of neural circuitry. It is the substance which forms the neurons and their synapses, lighting up heart-cells in a moment of connection. Each time you attune to another – or to the unmet inner “other” within you – a new world is born.

As long as breath is present, you can update the narrative, recraft your perception and re-envision a new story. You can make new meaning of your life, re-imagine your purpose, and renew your commitment to being here. Slowly, you can revise your circuitry with pathways of holding awareness, flooding it with empathic attunement, presence, and warmth.

No matter what is happening in your life, you can start right now, in this moment. The opportunity for reorganization is always here and wired deep within you. Don’t give up. Love will never give up on you.

Art credit: Moose as guide and portal by Krista Marleena