Shit I've Said to Clients, Take 1

“It sounds like your friend is addicted to the male gaze. And when she’s not getting enough of it, she goes into this deep pain of unworthiness she’s been carrying in her heart and she’ll keep running from it (through the male gaze) until she eventually decides to go into it, sit with it, explore it and understand it, which suuuuuuuuucks, but that’s everyone’s journey :) " [cheesy smile required to soften the blow]. I did actually say this to a client a few weeks ago. And “addiction to the male gaze” is only one of an infinite variety of ways we all sedate, control or numb out from our emotional truth and/or from our deepest wounds (when those wounds are speaking, or are being invited forward by some aspect of our current life). We tend to have our “go-to” methods, and they work only temporarily before we are plunged back into harbingers of the same emotional challenge we desperately want to avoid, so then we have to re-up with our “go-to” method(s) until we are exhausted. We are not taught in school to relate to our emotions as a guidance system, alerting us to the fact that we are either on track with all that promotes our wellness, love, truth, connectedness, joy and unique purpose, or off track. I don’t want to simplify emotions to that statement alone (because there are, of course, additional nuances) but this is a good starting template. People tend to have patterns (in terms of the emotions and wounds they categorically want to avoid, and the ways in which they do that avoidance dance). Life tends to turn up the volume on the rejected emotion (which we could also think of as a complex or an exiled, vulnerable child part) to the point that our preferred avoidance method doesn’t work or fully mask it anymore and we are forced to sit with the abyss of loneliness we’ve been carrying in our heart since childhood, or the deep shame and inadequacy, or whatever it is. This can truly be an underworld journey. And psychedelics tend to facilitate it quite naturally (this process of facing and integrating our actual emotional truth and rejected child parts). But it is absolutely worth it because it is as though the rejected emotions have become a frozen emotional energy in the body (literally sometimes locked into the “freeze” side of the sympathetic nervous system shut down state), and when that emotional energy thaws through the sunlight of our loving attention to it, we suddenly have more childlike spontaneity, creativity and joy, and more fuel for pursuing all that it is we feel we are really here to do in this life. Book a free call if you're interested in exploring this process further.