If you are like me, you are looking for answers & explanations – for pretty much everything.

I experience life by what everything means.  Personally that is how I try to make sense of actions, interactions, responses, behaviours – to find explanations, that then help me interpret what it means, how it originated and why and then helps me to decide what actions I have to take to “deal” with it.

As part of my learning – I wondered what brought myself and others to coaches and counsellors.  Obviously something wasn’t working in our lives, but was it ability based or understanding based?  For me, I realized that we come because of our behaviours or emotions (or a combination thereof) not because we don’t know how to think about things.

So going with that thread, I thought I would look at the brain to sort of work backwards to see if I could make sense of it that way.

Paul McLean’s model of the brain having three parts, makes sense for me, to answer these questions.  We have our reptilian brain that forces us to take action, our limbic brain that works with emotions, relationships etc., and finally our prefrontal cortex which helps the mind make sense of everything.

Ok so that all makes sense, but in traditional therapy what happens?  Most therapy is talk therapy and while that is absolutely fantastic, great and needed, is it enough?  In my personal experience, no. In my professional experience, also a no.  Why?

How can the brain possibly “talk” about what happens in the “non verbal”areas of our brain? At best, it can help us to provide words, emotions etc., that can attempt to explain, but how is that accurate enough for real healing?  In my opinion, it can’t.

As I recently shared, I am also obtaining my Somatic Experiencing Practitioner Training and this validates my opinions personally and professionally.   On a basic level, your physical body also experiences the trauma.  Your mind handles it one way and your physical body handles it the other way.  So if we focus only on the “story” told by the mind, how is that going to heal the “story” of the body?  Quite simply, it can’t.

It makes complete sense, as if we could think our way to healing – we obviously would have done it long ago.

So having two different, yet complimentary ways and means to heal from trauma, to heal both systems, makes total and complete sense to me.

I have so much more to share on this and I am really excited to look at it all a bit closer with you, as we move forward together.