In the last two posts, I’ve tried to explain how core emotion drives our on-the-ground behavior in the face of challenge, and how on-the-ground experience then generates emotion that reinforces the core emotions that have helped generate it.  Because of this feedback loop, to heal at a core level, we need to begin healing internally so we can start to have healthier core emotions driving our behavior.  Then we need to learn how to use our building emotional strength and skill to behave differently in the face of challenge so we can change distance and conflict into connection and flow with the things we’re a part of in our lives. 

There’s one more part of on-the-ground work I need to explain so you can fully understand its role within the larger core healing process.  It has to do with how we strive to use pressure as we step into on-the-ground challenges.  As I’ve explained, when you begin the core healing process, you’re immediately challenged because the process is demanding and there’s a lot to learn.  We initially strive to reduce the pressure created by being in session and with doing release work so you can get started in the shallow end of the pool with these challenges and find your footing with them.

This initial drive to reduce pressure in the face of challenge can lead one to believe that the less pressure that’s applied to a struggling core that’s trying to heal the better.  This is not the case.  This initial drive is focused on putting new clients in a middle zone of pressure that sits between experiences where there’s too little pressure and emotional stimulation and too much.  When you place someone in this zone, the person can handle the burden of the pressure without creating aggravation to the backlog.  This creates a constructive, rehabilitative push on my client’s core healing process, allowing emotion to surface sustainably that they can then learn to meet and digest with their release work.

The title of Phase I is ‘Waking up and struggling into healthy relationship’.  There are two drivers that help my clients wake at a core level emotionally.  The first is the progressive use of the songs of Life, which helps the system wake up from a shutdown state.  The second is a balanced experience of on-the-ground pressure, which then helps nudge layers of negative emotion that are waking up to the forefront of your awareness so they can be met and worked with. 

The key here is balance.  Too little pressure won’t help the core emotions to surface, while too much pressure will drive you into an overloaded emotional state.   It’s the middle zone of pressure that allows you to use the challenge of a situation to access and work through the negative emotions that are driving you to struggle emotionally within it.  With the skillful use of release work, this type of pressure allows you to heal as you move through an on-the-ground challenge, turning it in to a rehabilitative endeavor that allows you to build in emotional strength instead of adding more negative emotion to your backlog as you traverse it.

Let’s look at an example to explain how the rehabilitative way works.  Let’s say I had a client named Jane that had begun her Phase I work.  She was up and running with her anger release work, which meant it was flowing well, and she was using the guidance in the Phase I manual to learn how to take it deeper as she tested out the overall effectiveness of the work.  She had started doing some sadness release work as well but was struggling to find flow with it because it wasn’t as natural and easy for her. 

Her tendency within relationship was to stay peripheral so she didn’t need to be seen, judged, and challenged.  My initial read on her was that she needed some time with our relationship—I gave her 4 months—to stay peripheral so she could experience me and test me out.  In the tail end of this timeframe, she started gently stepping up on her own and engaging with me the more she started to build trust in my ability to meet her in a healthy way.

Jane’s building success with her anger release work, and her natural drive to step up more in session were both indicators that she was ready for more on-the-ground pressure.  Because her sadness release work wasn’t easily opening up, it served as the ideal place to increase the pressure.  This involved introducing something I call navigation work, which is where I have clients do emotional release work in session while I connect to their emotional systems so I can see into and help them navigate through their challenges with it.  It’s work that is emotionally intimate and vulnerable, and therefore that inherently applies pressure to the person that’s doing it. 

Jane was ready for more pressure, but how I applied it would matter.  If I simply told her that I felt we should do navigation work so I can help her with her sadness release work struggle, her fear and worthlessness related to struggling with being seen would almost certainly spike, and she’d be left with a lot of emotionally based resistance to moving forward with it.  But, if I explained what navigation work was, how we could modulate the level of emotional intimacy it created, and why I felt she was ready for it, she would have the chance to see that she’s being given an opportunity to step further into pressure in a supportive way with a challenge that she could use help with.

The first option would tend to overwhelm Jane, pushing her core into a place of emotional overload with emotions that she wasn’t ready to work with.  The second option offered a type of regulated pressure that was more supportive and would tend to push her core into the middle zone of pressure.  It offered a helpful and supportive experience of human interaction for a person that had had to stay peripheral and isolated for much of her life.  The more this experience worked emotionally, the more it weighed on Jane’s core sadness because it highlighted what she had missed out on for so many years.  This pressure helped her connect with and work with her negative emotional water so it could start to surface and flow in a rehabilitative way.  The more she healed through this hurt and sadness, the more her emotional system could handle stepping up and into relationship in a healthy way.

Phase I on-the-ground work teaches my clients how to use pressure and challenge in a rehabilitative way in the shallow end of the pool.  This is something they’ll need to know how to do well by the time they reach Phase II where they’ll be stepping into more consequential challenges in their lives in a more focused and structured way so they can start to move towards the challenges that sit at heart of what has brought them to this work.