Website Glossary: A deeper dive

Below you will find a deeper treatment of some of the terms used in my practice and highlighted in this website’s glossary. Keep reading to learn more about what I mean by attachment, nervous-system-informed practice, shadow + parts work, somatic awareness, and trauma-informed.

Attachment

Attachment refers to the very human need to be connected to others, particularly primary caregivers, during the earliest years of our lives.

How we connect with others and ourselves in our adult lives is often influenced by the ways in which our safety, survival, emotional, and psychological needs were (or were not) met as we developed.

Our attachment styles can be secure or insecure, and they can vary from relationship to relationship. While insecure attachment styles are quite common, we can all move towards secure relating through healing work and skills development.

Nervous-System-Informed Practice

In my nervous-system-informed practice, I recognize that each of our nervous systems has been significantly shaped by our life experiences, and that our physical responses to real and perceived threats are automatic and worthy of compassion.

Fight, flight, fawn, and freeze are are some of the most well known threat responses, and when we are faced with a life-threatening event they are vital.

However, these activated responses can also occur in response to many common stressors—traffic, social interactions, disagreements, deadlines…

And the particular things that activate our individual nervous systems vary from person to person, depending on past experiences.

In my practice, I invite you to bring awareness to the situations that ignite your nervous system, turn lovingly toward the activated parts, and engage in practices that can soothe your nervous system and reduce your suffering.

Co-regulation is another key component of my practice. Co-regulation is the formal term for what we know to be inherently true—we are sensitive to other people’s energy. And if one person brings a calm and grounded presence into a space, it’s much easier to sink into that place ourselves.

I believe it is my responsibility as a facilitator to show up from a clear and grounded place so I can be a co-regulatory presence for each individual and group I work with.

Shadow + Parts Work

You know how people often say things like, “A part of me wants… but another part of me knows…”? Well, that’s the natural seed of parts + shadow work!

Parts + shadow work embraces the intuitive understanding that we all have many parts, and that they often want different—and sometimes conflicting—things.

These parts often live in a realm outside of our cognitive awareness, and they can drive us to behave in ways that are often confusing, contrary to our stated desires, and cause further suffering. Because they are often inaccessible to our conscious minds, these parts are often called shadows.

Parts + shadow work also holds that we all have a loving, integrated, compassionate Self or Wise Adult or Self-In-Presence. The name for it varies depending on the modality and practitioner, and you can make up your own!

When this wise part is able to be in loving relationship with the younger, tender, shadowed parts, great evolution can occur.

Popular parts + shadow work modalities include Internal Family Systems, Inner Relational Focusing, and Somatic Parts Work. I draw upon all of them in my work.

Somatic Awareness

Somatic awareness means, most simply, an awareness of the body. Somatic approaches to healing are becoming increasingly sought-after because they help us access and offer support to stored wounds and traumas in a way that the mind and words just can’t.

The work of Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk, Gabor Mate, Daniel Siegel, and many others teaches that our deepest wounds were often created early in life without a cohesive narrative to help us understand them. Instead, they became stored in our bodies as nervous system imprints and internalized stories we are often not cognitively aware of.

While I use plenty of words in my practice in the form of conversation and writing, I will also invite you to slow down and notice the bodily sensations that arise as we work together. From there, you may gain access to parts of yourself that have been out of reach yet longing for compassionate attention.

We may also work with somatic practices that can help bring grounding and regulation to your nervous system. You may find that, over time, your capacity to be with the internal and external challenges of life broadens.

Trauma-Informed

My trauma-informed practice is held in the awareness that each of us has experienced some form of trauma in our lives. No matter how “perfect” or privileged our childhoods were, I believe that we’ve all had at least one experience of feeling abandoned, rejected, unloved, unseen, unworthy, and therefore—-because we are inherently relational beings—-deeply unsafe.

And then, of course, many of us have had much more obvious traumas—-emotional and physical abuse, terrible accidents, enduring poverty, loss of beloveds, systemic oppression, and more.

I believe that much of what causes us suffering in our daily lives and relationships can be traced back to these deeper, and often unknown and unseen, traumas.

And so, it is important to me to create a safe space for you to work with the pain points, wounds, and traumas that manifest as present-day challenges and threat responses.

It is equally important for me to hold space for you to connect with your wise, loving, and compassionate parts—-for they are the true healers that you can call on in every moment.

For a deeper understanding of my approach to trauma-informed practice, please read the entry for Nervous-System-Informed Practice.