The events of our lives happen in a sequence in time that seems like the truth but is only significant to ourselves. The order of them is created, and they are not facts on how we have lived, how others are, or how to exist. We need tools for reprocessing life through a more watchful and present version of ourselves that has decided to go inward and heal this false narrative. Afterwards, other phases of healing unfold more naturally. The phases of healing found in The Toolbox Approach are: Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing. Empower yourself to go inside your life with the tools that were meant to be in your hands all along.
The truth is that the things that happen to you in life are like electricity. Good connections occur, bad ones too, and faulty wiring is inevitable. Sometimes, specially coated wiring is established, but just as quickly, short circuiting can occur. Our experiences land in us, and they are electricity for the operation of our lives. Our lives require intricately wired power grids that we have to believe are embedded within in order to care for them. The operation of our entire experiential grid, which is essentially an emotional grid, is up to us, however, this grid is also highly prone to damage. It all requires steady monitoring. While I am a therapist of nearly two decades, I can assure you, none of us have really learned about the care our grids need until something goes wrong, so no one is tasked with watching it with expertise.
At the start of life, we outsource the monitoring to family or some type of caregiver system. These people who are meant to have already learned the watchfulness they need to monitor our emotional grids, but they don’t know about the electricity in themselves entirely and haven’t learned enough about monitoring themselves to expect this of them. This can fry the emotional grids through decades of families. We expect people in family making mode to be watchers and have watchers in the making in their ranks, but no one knows about the electricity of experience and how skilled we are meant to be. We are meant to establish electrical engineering-like expertise, we all fail. We are not invited to learn but we are changing. That is why you are reading, that is why I am writing. That is why therapy is going viral through self-helping posts and podcasts. It can take generations before repair is called for. But that is happening now, can you feel it? Maybe you are one of those calling for it, and you want to know about the tools. You sense generations before you missed the call to heal but you can claim it!
I believe that if I can get to you, reader, and provide the tools to individuals like you who feel it, it creates growth and healing for everyone. If you do feel it as you read, I am calling to you; we all need you to start your inner work. Each person who lets themselves feel the calling to heal is another person accepting the invitation, and that gives the next person permission. This is also electricity, collective interest and effort in healing, and it transfers without language. Can you feel this is possible? We can all learn the tools because each person out there is a learner waiting for the invitation to a new type of classroom. I could feel this in myself as a therapist, this call to do more creative sharing of tools that transfer the therapist’s skills to the individual.
It came to me like a bolt of truth; how profound it could be if we were all developing tools for our toolboxes. That power bolt brought me the electricity I needed to restore my own damaged emotional grid that was still healing in The Relational Healing Phase, where I realized that being a therapist was one way of relating to people and myself as “good”, but also a profound hiding from life as well. I wanted to teach myself, and now I want to share these tools with you as that teacher who relates to the students but confines the boundaries of both parties by saying, “It’s up to you to claim your classroom experience, I am only a tool to you as well”.
We Mourn the Self We Abandoned
The suicide of the “nice-good self” we have been presenting to the world is a large part of The Relational Healing Phase I am writing about here. To indicate that a self-death will restore your spirit’s electricity and heal your emotional grid may seem counter-intuitive but remember that a facade self is a large pull on the system. It takes a lot of energy to generate the mask. It doesn’t mean it comes from a bad or even false place; it is well meaning to create a self that you make do things in the world that seem your own unique version of “nice-good”. Even if you align more with being independent, strong-willed, or rational, terms that may not be associated with warm or understanding, that is a version of “nice-good” for you. We all have our versions of ourselves that need to have a death. They need to die because they drain the system, we need the electrical channel to go dead so that it can’t be used, it’s too tempting to send it our power. It’s too open as an option to lead our lives. Grief is part of The Relational Healing Phase. Tears, sadness, depression, without this period of pain striking us, we can’t feel the death that is needed. Feel it going dark but don’t be afraid on the edge of it, move in. This is useful pain, it illuminates the other channel because of its darkness.
Consider allowing your other self to die right now. I know you know what I am talking about. Don’t overthink it. We will use a meditation now, The Medusa Mask Meditation. It is embedded below in this article through a video from my YouTube Channel. Like the goddess Medusa, we all must know that we wear a crown of snaking thoughts on our heads. It is a tremendous burden, but we have tools to stop the snaking thoughts that snake down and bleed into our spirit, drain the lifeforce there and misuse the emotional grid with a bad energy source.
This weight on our heads, often inside our heads, becomes a false voice of reason. It is a blocking device we have to clear. Hear it now for what it is, fear and despair. It literally is the block, not a voice of reason at all. People tell me, “How did you learn this”, or they ask, “why do this?”. In both instances, I say it got me to the other side of myself, and I just had to keep doing it, that is both how I learned and why I do it, and lastly why I teach and promote it. A therapist cannot get you to the other side of you, it’s up to you considering tools that stop the censor, manager, and reasoning side of your mind. It gets you to the other side of your mood, negativity, and fear.
Do not feel bad you have this draining part of you. It is leftover survival brain. It was in charge of deciding whether it was safe or not to move towards thrive and often it says don’t until you……fill in the blank. Along the way we pick less than thrive, assured that it just wasn’t safe enough but what we are doing is still “nice-good”, because it is safe. Consider the meditation below, it is very simple clearing out. Then, simply sit down and write at the top of a page: “Fears, Anxieties, Resentments, or Pressures” as a question to yourself. There is another tool I use from another article that talks about a different way to use this writing prompt.
Medusa Mask Meditation
This video post showcases a simple way to include body-based or somatic methods for emotion regulation into your healing journey. Any healing journey is profoundly a wakeup call to the need to move beyond talking and basic understanding of problems with labels such as “my anxiety”, “my control issues”, “my addictive personality”, “my trauma”, or any other way we label and point a finger at ourselves, others or situations. This meditation can create a pause from the mental chatter, and in that pause is an entire opportunity for a whole other you to emerge. Come to it with the curiosity that it may become your tool. We need to collect tools for Daily Regulation and Integration Practice (DRIP). We do not want to get drippy with ourselves, we need these practices to be contained and stable but connected and able to integrate with what happens within and around us. Take a moment to “tune out to tune in”. Don't pass this up!
Areas of Electrical Impact
Our traumas impact us in one or more zones of our emotional grid. Some may know this as the seven chakras, others may have heard about the polyvagal nerve and the way our body holds trauma in the central nervous system’s three main areas of the polyvagal ladder. I am going to do what I am known for, making it self-help digestible because I don’t want you to take my path, becoming a trauma expert in order to heal. It was a valuable path, but it is not required to heal. What has happened that may have blocked up your grid and caused a “nice-good” self-drain, leaving you operate with less electricity, leaving your true spirit flatlining is in these areas. Look at them now and mentally note on a scale from mild, moderate, to severe; how much you were affected in this area.
Root/Seat/Genitals Area: Lifeforce and safe to be. Able to take time and trust there is enough time, resources, and support.
Pelvis Area/Lower Bowels/Core Area: Where digestion allows us to be nourished and we sense we are cared for, loved.
Gut/Lower Rib Cages/Willpower Area: Where we sense we can do things, have agency to complete and accomplish.
Heart/Breastbone/Chest Area: Where we sense we belong, can love and form connection through sharing ourselves, initiating.
Throat Area: Where we sense we can use our words and voice to be heard and to communicate. Where we can ask, share, validate our experiences.
Forehead/Third-Eye Area: Where we sense we see ourselves and our purpose as good, meaningful, impactful, or valuable.
Crown or Top of the Head Area: Where we sense there is a higher meaning to why we are here, appreciate connections to beauty beyond ourselves, accept our smallness and still feel calm and part of all things.
If you take note of mild, moderate, severe impact in each of these areas very gently and consider clearing out with the meditation above or others I have shared in the past and will continue to share, and then commit to writing, I guarantee, you will start to have just the right kind of death. This is a dedicated practice however, I suggest at least 3 months, at least 4 days a week. The time meditating is pretty short; the time writing is up to you. Both will likely grow over time naturally.
Tips on Restoring from My Story
In my exploration of the seven areas, I found severity in the lower two regions, my gut area was more physically blocked with gastrointestinal challenges that affected my willpower at times because I feared unstructured eating outside of what was “safe”, but my willpower was very strong for personal growth, change, being a healer personally and professionally. My heart area had severe blocks early on that moved to moderate, as did my throat area. My vision and higher purpose oddly seemed open and free of blockages; however, I realized that was in comparison to the other blockages. It was good to really feel a hint of free and open in the areas of vision and connection to nature and beauty, it gave me a lot of hope, as did my sense of a strong willpower underneath the moderate blockage. I cannot be sure how my focus on it just created all this awareness, but it does. Stay at it. It will come. Then I started to write. I wrote in my journal; I started to write a book. I became a podcast host, an author, a content creator, a poet, I dabbled in songwriting and joined a group for a while. I got to the other side of myself; I am still going.
Here are some additional notes:
It doesn’t matter if only one area is severe, many are, or none. You are detecting the spectrum of holding things. It is the blueprint that you start to see. You used this blueprint, the blocked up emotional grid version of you, as a guide to live life, unknowingly. We need tools for looking at this more than we need to talk, reason, and analyze.
No one can ever really take an X-ray for you that explains your emotional blocks, the healing that is needed, or prescribe your solution. We need tools to see things gently, without a fixing mentality. Healing is a lifelong commitment to caring about how you hold things.
Allow yourself to feel it the fear of doing this. Most likely, you are asking “what will I get out of this?” right now. “What will happen if I do this?”. That is exactly what the block is, always wanting to know is it safe, because if it is not, I don’t know if I can do this. But you do know safety is waiting inside you, you do know. You want to get to the other side. We write after and every day we can not to remove things but to connect to what is there. Often times, that does lead to letting it go, other times it is so obvious you tried to remove something that you have to accept is profoundly you in your own way.
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Share this post