What’s it like to work with me?

What’s it like to work with me?

This is a question I get a bit, given all the different things I offer, so here’s an idea of what you might expect.

Every client is different.

Every person’s nervous system is different, so every journey is different. Below is some thoughts about the different things we’ll focus on together, but how they fit together for you will be unique to you. 

It’s a team effort - you bring yourself and the parts of you who are showing up (more on that below), and I bring my curiosity, wealth of theoretical knowledge and useful tools, and together we listen to your unique nervous system and your body and to let that wisdom be our guide as we forge a path towards healing and growth.

Parts of self (young selves, teenaged selves, adult selves, inner critics, inner dreamers etc)

If you’re a human in the world, it’s likely that you have lots of different parts that often want different things - perhaps you want a relationship, and there’s part of you that’s excited, part of you that’s scared, part of you that would rather be a hermit forever, a part that feels like you have to do all this work before you’ll be ready, and a part that wants it now.

Through identifying and listening to each different voice - what they want, what they’re afraid of - we can start to gather everyone together and getting what they need in order to feel comfortable and safe all pulling in the same direction, so there’s much less self sabotage (which is often one of our parts trying to protect us from something it doesn’t feel safe doing) and more ease as we work towards the life we want.

Think of it like a big round table with all voices having a seat and being heard. We might not act on all of them, but they all get some time and space.

Parts of self (body, emotions, mind)

Along with different facets of our identities, different parts of our brain move at different speeds and need different things too. In a very simplified and generalised way, we could break this into three:

Our minds:

Our minds go fast. They’re thinking all the time, and they’re able to jump through time to the imagined future. They worry, they dream and plan, they want things to be fast.

Our emotions:

Based on what our mind is doing, we feel how we feel about it. Excited, scared, anxious, numb.

Our bodies:

Our bodies are only ever in the here and now, and they move more slowly than our minds. It’s very useful to make a practice of tending to our bodies in the here and now. It’s like when you’re hiking in a group - generally, you move at the pace of the slowest member of the group, so they’re not left behind. If we take this approach and move at the pace our bodies can go at, we are more integrated, more whole, we’re not leaving ourselves behind when our minds rush into the future. This is a very solid foundation to build on, and tends to make healing and growth more sustainable.

More parts?! Yep. We’ll also explore parts of our present moment experience:

Sensations:

What our body is feeling. Hot, cold, tense, relaxed, tingly or buzzy, numb - anything that is felt with our body in the present moment we pay attention to, as this is all great information about what’s really going on under the surface of our thinking mind.

If you think about it, the language of our bodies is our first language - when we’re born, before we develop the capacity for spoken language, we experience everything through our bodies. As we grow, we tend to focus less on what our bodies are telling us (and communicating to other bodies), and we’re taught to pay more attention to words.

Sensations can feel foreign (or sometimes it’s hard to feel them at all) when we first start paying attention again, but we’re not starting from scratch. It’s a process of remembering and refining, and when we finely tune our awareness of what our animal body is telling us, we have better boundaries, better intuition, and a better idea of what we need in order to move towards what we want.

Internal images:

What’s happening in your mind’s eye? Colours, shapes, images - these are all really useful things to pay attention to. Some people have more access to this than others, so if this isn’t a channel that’s very bright for you, nothing’s wrong - your brain just processes things in other ways.

Movement:

What does your body want to do? Does it want to stretch, lean in, move an arm, curl away?

Emotions:

What emotions are coming up?

Meaning:

Here’s where we recruit our thinking mind - what meaning can we make of all this new information we’ve been exploring? Is there a way to understand things differently now, having had all these experiences?

How does all this fit together? What do we do with all this?

Presence, curiosity and kindness:

The first thing we ‘do’ with all this isn’t really a ‘doing’, it’s simply noticing what’s happening and giving it some time and space. Sometimes this is enough for things to unwind on their own.

Processes & practices:

If it feels relevant and useful, I might suggest a practice or a process we could explore to work with what’s shown up in our time together. These might be somatic practices involving the body, guided meditations or breath practices, journalling or art making practices if that’s something you’re interested in. The purpose of these is to help deepen insight and understanding and move closer to where you want to go.

Also:

If it’s something that you’re interested in, we can use more traditional art therapy as a way to explore some of these parts of self, making images and exploring insight and understanding that can come from expressing your internal world externally on the page.

If you’re local to Cairns, eco-psychotherapy is an option. What does that mean? It can be many things, ranging from having a session outside - sitting in a park, or walking and talking, for example, to including nature as a ‘third person’ in our session - asking for input from trees, rocks, water, clouds… starting to create a supportive relationship with the natural world.

Want homework?

Some clients love having something to work on in between sessions (a practice, or something to pay attention to), and others don’t. Either is fine. I can give you homework, or we can just have our time during our sessions, and that can be enough.

So there you have it - some of an idea of what we focus on, when you are a client of mine. If you’d like to find out more about what this might look like for you in particular, click here to book in a time to meet, and I can tell you more specifically what you might expect in your unique situation.