The title of Phase I of the core healing process is ‘Waking up and Struggling into healthy relationship’.  The waking up part involves waking up to your core debilitation as you work your way into your emotional release work.  Struggling into healthy relationship is the on-the-ground side of Phase I, which begins with me in session.  It’s grounded in the understanding that new clients won’t gravitate towards an experience of healthy relationship with me and their work because they’re being challenged just by beginning the core healing process.

Core healing is demanding and difficult.  Because of this, it’s critical that my clients receive the support and guidance they need to be able to promote success with it from its beginning.  If this didn’t occur, new clients would organically orient towards behavior that would nurture conflict, distance, and failure with both their emotional systems and with me.  This can mean they might need to stay peripheral within session and with their release work, which would mean they’d never really test these parts of the process out and make them their own.  Or they might gravitate towards pushing too hard too fast, which would lead them to miss the subtleties of the work and not become very skilled with it.  Or they might need to control everything instead of learning how to meet and flow with things, which would also hamper their ability to be a part of things in ways that works. 

There are plenty of dynamics that can play out, but what simplifies things is that all of us tend to be one trick ponies behaviorally when we’re put into these types of situations.  This means we tend to have the same core emotions get pressured and triggered, and they tend to drive us into the same basic behaviors over and over again. 

We start our on-the-ground work in session so I can help my clients understand how they tend to naturally gravitate towards these behaviors.  It’s not all negative.  We focus on strengths and weaknesses—which we all have—and strive to use the former to help deal with the latter.  Because my client’s negative behaviors will inevitably show up in session, my goal is to be able to identify this behavior as it’s expressed so my clients can see and get a feel for it in real time so they can start to connect the dots between certain types of behaviors they’re gravitating towards, their torn-up core emotions, and pressure. 

In the early part of the work, we can’t do a lot to bring a lot of change to their torn-up emotions, which is at the root of these dynamics.  But we can strive to regulate the pressure that’s applied to them so they’re able to get started with things with a level of pressure and expectations that they can handle. 

Gauging how to regulate the pressure placed on my new clients begins as my job.  It means I have to be able to read the early emotional challenges my clients are facing so I can help set them up to be in a certain zone of pressure that challenges them, but that doesn’t overwhelm their cores.  I do this in session as I’m engaging with them, and I set up their work up between sessions with the same intent.  The goal is to then have my clients learn from this experience so they can start to get a feel for how to do this with their ongoing challenges with their healing work, as well as with other challenges in their lives. 

If a new client orients towards diving into their release work with the intent of creating results they can use to get praise from me in session, we both need to identify and address this situation so we don’t go down that path.  My clients tend to have some sense of their patterns so I build on what they know, and then I strive to identify their main dynamics, lay them out as they play out, and to show why they’re not healthy.  In this case, the dynamic isn’t healthy because it’s driven by negative core emotion that strives to medicate my client’s negative emotions (grief, anger, fear, worthlessness, and feelings of rejection) and to disempower her. 

Let’s say my client has been chasing after authority figures so she can get them to make her feel worthwhile and good enough since she was a child and her father kept at a distance from her emotionally and berated her every time she sought out his affection and recognition.  I’ll want my client to orient her anger and sadness release work towards this trend as soon as she gets up and running with them so she can start to meet this challenge emotionally.  At the same time, because she tends to push too hard too fast out of the gate, the goal will be to create reduced expectations from her so she doesn’t feel so pushed to have something to give to me.  This is how we’ll strive to reduce the pressure being placed on her core.

The more my client is able to layer into the core anger and hurt she’s stored up with the lifetime of experiences related to this trend, the more she’ll start healing through this dynamic and being able to connect the dots between how she feels at a core level and how she’s acting.  The initial goal will be for her to strive to meet the release work for herself, not so she can use it to get something from me.  She’ll struggle with this during Phase I, but that’s fine.  It’s better for her to get into this struggle early and to learn from it than to ignore it, which will lead her to only care about release work in relationship to how it impacts me, not her.

The more my clients and I can struggle into healthy relationship, the more we’ll be able to work as a team from the early part of their work.  They’ll also be able to take the things about relationship they learn with me and transfer them to their emotional system so they can start figuring out how to dance skillfully with it as well.  I don’t expect their behaviors to change overnight, but with a skillful regulation of pressure and the implementation of a sound and focused healing process, my clients will be on their way to gaining the ability to engage with on-the-ground challenges in new ways from the inside out.