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 starting the work from a debilitated and unskilled place.

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 lead them to never really test these parts of the process out and make them their own.  Or they might gravitate towards pushing too hard and 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 a way 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 under this type of pressure.  This means we tend to have the same core emotions getting 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 their negative behaviors.  My job is to isolate behavioral strengths and weaknesses so you can learn to use the former to help work with the latter.  Because my client’s negative behaviors will inevitably show up in session, my goal is to identify this behavior as it’s expressed.  This gives them a chance to see and get a feel for it in real time, in a safe and caring way 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 our work, we can’t do a lot to change the emotional drivers that are at the root of these dynamics because core healing takes time.  But we can strive to regulate the pressure that’s applied to your debilitation so you’re able to get started with things with a level of pressure and expectation that you can handle. 

Gauging how to regulate the pressure placed on my new clients begins as my job.  The general goal is to figure out ways to reduce the pressure to a level so my clients can start to meet the challenges that come with the early part of the work in the shallow end of the pool.  I do this in session as I’m engaging with them, and I help set up their work between sessions with the same intent.  This then allows clients see that they have the support they need from me from the outset of this difficult journey.

Here’s an example of how this works.  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 as they come into this work, so I build on what they know.  I strive to identify the main behavioral dynamics that are being driven by their debilitation, to 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 my client’s need to medicate her core debilitation in a way that disempowers her. 

Let’s say this pattern was initially established by her father, who chronically kept at a distance from her emotionally and berated her every time she sought out his affection and recognition.  This led her to chronically chase after authority figures so she could get them to make her feel worthwhile and good enough since she was a child.  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 it 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 with her release work so she doesn’t feel so driven to have something to give to me.  This is how we’ll initially 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 her dynamic, the more she’ll start healing through it and be 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 so she can use it to learn how to use the process to start to blaze a new trail behaviorally.  If we ignore this dynamic, she’ll only care about her release work in relationship to how it impacts me, and this will lead to it not being of much use.

The more my clients and I can struggle into healthy relationship, the more we’ll be able to work as a team from the beginning of the work.  What they learn about healthy relationship with me can also be transferred to the relationship they’re building with their emotional system so they can start figuring out how to dance skillfully with it as well.  Negative behaviors that are driven by core emotion won’t change overnight.  But by skillfully regulating the pressure of the early part of the work, my clients are given a chance to work their way into their Phase I challenges in a healthy way that’s already setting the foundation for them to blaze new trails behaviorally.