The “Let Them” theory has gone viral, but before that, I was deep in my inner work healing backwards. I had been a trauma therapist helping people sense the complexity of healing that needed to occur beyond the “what happened to me” for 15 years, and a pandemic hit. I had already seen countless people in therapy sessions try to pick up tools for looking inward, find a new lesson waiting inside their own story, and make some sense of “better” happen for them. Was everything fixed? That was never the goal, although it starts out the premise often, “It feels like something is broken inside me because………”, they would all indicate. Suddenly, I was seeing people attempting to heal trauma inside a collective trauma, and it triggered something inside me. I had been healing too slowly inside the collective traumas for too long. I wasn’t sure what that thought really meant at the time, but I started to uncurl the tools I had inadvertently been using on myself and found a whole separate life there beyond the steady healer I thought I was. These tools that hid me from my life’s classroom were suppression, repression and dissociation. So, I let me find new ones, I didn’t have a choice.
Let Me:
Know myself and retrace the steps of my life for a new perspective on what happened that points inward at the main character, me, and helps me come home.
Heal the fragmented beliefs that are making my decisions and heading me in directions I go in but don’t thrive inside the destination.
Find the safest parent, sibling, child, neighbor, friend and partner is me and when I am not, use tools to understand what pattern I reverted back to.
Give from who I am, not who I should be, or someone who performs themselves so as not to be hurt.
A Memory
I am not sure why I was in a Catholic pre-kindergarten is a widely accepted way. I have the memory now, it has been restored from the suppressed feelings, repressed memories, and dissociated body that held my story back from myself. So, the why I was there is an inner world unique to me. I allow this to be the truth without asking family to validate my perception because I know now that is the way it felt. The way it felt was I was there because something about me did not start out quite right. Mom said, “Melinda, you make us a family” and put me at the table to perform some act of cuteness. I tried, but it felt off and my siblings didn’t want to come to the table as moody 14 and nearly 17-year-olds. They were from a different life, when my mother was married to ‘not my father’, it felt dark and I wasn’t supposed to ask too many questions, but I had thousands. I felt the story, “Melinda, make this work, help us”. That’s the way I felt it but also that’s the way I was born. My personality is “the helper”. I’ve done the inner work. “You Are Not Broken”, my book that helped me understand the phases of healing talks about this tool, understanding your character untouched by what happens, but also somehow predicting it.
So, I remember that I was repeatedly devastated that nothing inside me seemed to help anyone. I had more than I was showing, it seemed everyone wanted the performance of Melinda, and my name means “Sweet”. Most commonly, all the times I have looked it up, that is the one constant, that and some mention of beautiful. I could feel it, the pressure to be an antidote to some darkness that was there. I was too young to understand it wasn’t me that wasn’t working to lift it. I didn’t have the handed down tools of suppressing feelings, repressing the hard days of memory, and dissociating from my body. So, I experienced it all and eventually took to the tools in mega-doses. But I remember past the larger repressed sexual violation traumas now, that I recovered, and I remember pre-kindergarten Catholic school.
The teacher asked, “Why do we go to Church?”, and I shot up my eager hand and told the whole class my answer. I said, “To feel good inside when people sing”. That was the wrong answer. I remember how it felt. Like it was more than the wrong answer, like I was wrong. That happened a lot. I think people thought I was attention seeking, but I just knew connection, I felt it inside me, the creator I was supposed to be. I never ended up dreaming about being a mother, the things that went unshared with my mother, when she knew I had been too open again and gotten hurt but did not want to know how badly, it created a silence that I know was her protection and not my rejection, but that is the way it felt. I held it, it held us both, apart. Now, I think my inner work is basically that, “to feel good inside when people sing”. When something about what I am doing in the world, helps people use tools to sing themselves back to life like I feel I am doing, I think that will feel good. I am no longer afraid to say I want to feel good in connection. I have already done it the entirely wrong way, so what do I have to lose now?
To Let Me, You Have to Let Go
To let yourself do inner work, you will slowly have to let go of suppressing feelings, repressing your experiences into partial memory one dimensionality, and dissociating from your body experience (rest, hunger, pain, tension, bracing, etc.). The you that is beneath this tells a more complete story of the experiences you’ve lived through. Life is a series of entering all these little classrooms, if you can’t remember them, don’t know how they make you feel, pine for different ones, and float through the halls alone, you can’t feel the Earth School we are all in. The “Let Them” from the theory may be exactly that, let everyone be at Earth School, we all learn our lessons someday. In the meantime, let yourself pick up new tools for reprocessing feelings that come in quite dysregulated, restore remembering inward parts of your experience and not only the finger pointing what happened to me part, and integrate back into your body to reverse shame, shrinking, resentment and loss.
So, let them, let me, and let go of suppression, repression, and dissociation. The way I am doing it lately is through body-based messages I send myself. Professionally, I call this Somatic Experiencing, and I am trained as a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional, Level 2, to provide this. When I do it on my own, it looks like this, follow along:
Sit comfortably in a chair. Sway side to side to access the ability to more deeply find balance and center as well as feel the chair beneath you. Press into the chair with the sitting down muscles. Inhale into the top of your head, hold two beats, exhale for 6.
Place a hand on your forehead as if to hold it. Slowly lean your head into the palm of your hand until you feel it take on the weight of your head. Exhale the weight of your head into your hand.
Whisper to yourself, “okay sweetheart”. Then, “Okay, [fill in your full name]”. This is like an inner mother, the best mother, from inside you, telling you to just let your head go.
Stay here a few beats and then press your head back up with the hand and no effort from your neck.
Place your left hand over your heart, the right hand below your bellybutton and allow these anchors to mark the path of your breath. I call this breathing into the “Column of You”, which is the space you need to know yourself.
Then You Write!
I know it is hard to accept, but eventually you are going to have to sit with yourself and hear you. To break the cycle of suppression, repression, and dissociation the following writing experience needs to be done daily for three months. I know this sounds daunting but really the tools of suppression, repression, and dissociation have been with you your whole life and were passed down to you through generations so really what is 90 days to begin the reprogramming?
Take 15 minutes to use the following writing prompts:
What would you have me know about fears and anxieties I have?
What would you have me know about anger and resentment I have?
What would you have me know about the pressures I put on myself?
What would you have me know about one of these being entirely removed?
At the end, repeat the somatic exercise with a twist. At the point when you whisper to yourself, change it slightly to, “Okay sweetheart, your clear now, good job”. This is not to indicate you are cleared of problems, you are still holding your messy life, but you are not dysregulated. On some level, the “stuff” is held without buffers that leave you less present in your life. Over time, that is the solution, presence!
Holding Space
Holding Space, Melinda Zappone is the name of this subscription and doubles as the ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always podcast on Spotify. The author’s website and the You Are Not Broken introductory book that highlights the phases of healing and The Toolbox Approach® as well as the companion workbook, all are forms of presence.
The Toolbox Approach® and its Phases of Healing foster presence through inner work, by gently reprogramming repression, suppression, and dissociation. The tools and phases within The Toolbox Approach® are designed to guide individuals back into their bodies, their stories, and their relationships—slowly and safely. Presence isn’t just about mindfulness; it’s about being able to stay with yourself in the moment, even when that moment is emotionally charged or historically painful.
Each phase—Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing—offers tools that:
Interrupt patterns of repression by helping you name and validate your experiences.
Undo suppression by creating safe containers for emotional expression and truth-telling.
Gently rewire dissociation by reconnecting you with your body, your memories, and your relational instincts.
These tools don’t force change, they invite it. They work like slow, compassionate reprogramming, allowing you to reclaim the “life classrooms” that repression, suppression, and dissociation once stole. Instead of bypassing pain, you learn to sit with it, understand it, and transform it into wisdom.
In doing so, you become more present, not just in your healing, but in your relationships, your choices, and your sense of self.
You can help me greatly by following the podcast, subscribing at a $5.99 membership and sharing the posts or visiting the above links, HEAL ON! While I won’t know for sure if you are, I like to think I will hear you singing and feel good.
