The Toolbox Approach to inner work is something I re-harvested, so to speak, from the fields of trauma-informed tools and modalities that many mental health professionals feed from. Professionals nourish their helping practices, but we do struggle to use these tools on ourselves, just like our patients do outside of session. I hear this all the time, “Can you give me a way to do this on my own? Can you give me more things to do?”. I never wanted to be the kind of therapist who misleads themself about the limitations of therapy. The truth is that self-help is the true healing, and you are your best helper. What happens in therapy is you learn to trust yourself to see things about your feelings, thoughts, or actions, let the discomfort bloom as you face looking at these things, and grow a sense of responsibility to take more care in developing yourself.
Harvesting, as a verb, means to gather and collect, so as a therapist, if I say I re-harvested the tools for self-help, it means I gathered the tools together and looked at them through a lens of aloneness. I possessed aloneness, realizing that so many of us struggle to face the pain we feel because it does have to be faced in the alone moments to really know it well. We come to therapy to learn from our pain only to the degree we have done some “knowing” already so the self-help tools can help us come to the tool of therapy with MORE knowing.
I realized it was a re-harvesting process when I noticed the vast amount of self-nourishment I needed for my inner work, despite having the tools as a professional, I needed them in a self-helping mode. The Toolbox Approach (TM) highlights inner work and healing as a journey that has three phases. They are non-linear and unprescribed, so can be done in any order, repeated or cycled through. The three phases: Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing can combine in a way that is a lifetime approach if you want it to be, or used for only those times in life that demand them undeniably. The highlight written about here is The Reprocessing Phase, and inside that phase, the somatic or body-based tools that reconnect the mind/body connection from one that only detects danger to one that could not only detect safety but establish it in any situation and recognize one’s ability to establish it within. This inner re-regulated system that is your safety becomes a tremendous source of stability that has healing power.
People needed to feel trust in themselves to continue “the work” outside of therapy sessions or their own natural healing moments. Natural healing does occur for any trauma, with time, but there is significant non-recovery from things that have happened inside you and no one can determine if it is an objective trauma or not, the un-healed or non-recovered places are unique and are what I call “your holding trauma blueprint”. This is an imprint on your nervous system that forms a plan of how to go about your life. You think your executive functioning “smarty pants” part of your brain is doing all the deciding and planning, knowing and navigating, but it’s the blueprint inside your nervous system that is the real information highway of you, holding the history and knowing what it does with it all as you seem to think you live in the present all the time.
That is why the somatic and body-based tools need to be in your hands. When we face ourselves, it can be like we have raised fists, clenched and ready for a fight. The fists you uncurl as you heal, need to pick up these tools outside of therapy and natural healing moments. We must know our blueprints were not done in permanent ink and can be redrawn in places. Our bodies hold these pieces of unprocessed emotional content. To imagine it, you might see it as fragmentation, and we hold it there, in our bodies, as we move on timewise. The Reprocessing Phase of Healing holds space for only this form of healing so that you have permission to focus on it with only those tools. Trust that you choose any phase of healing, and it cannot be prescribed. You simply read on and decide.
The phases of healing are non-linear and up to the individual, however suggesting they are phases can give you focus and permission to be inside one phase and avoid thinking of healing everything all at once. We all love the butterfly metaphor of healing; it inspires transformation and a time of darkness before emerging and taking flight, but it can be a misconstrued one. A cocooning time is a helpful concept where output is not an option and inner work is all that the cocoon holds space for, however, the body of a butterfly emerges weak. It emerges without the wings fully expanded or any knowledge that it will fly a very short distance before needing nectar for fuel to stay alive. In reality, butterflies do not live long, they are the symbol of our transformation but not the transformation itself.
In The Reprocessing Phase of Healing, we are outside of the cocooning concept. The cocoon is more of a Narrative Healing Phase where we give permission to know the parts of our story that are non-nourishing and take that time to see it. As a therapist, I often hear the stories people tell about what happened to them, inside The Narrative Healing cocoon, we hold space for seeing it and telling it in new ways. However, there came a time when a new skill started to bloom inside me that brought my awareness to a new level.
The New Form of Listening
In my work as a trauma therapist, real person self-helping myself, trauma coach/teacher, and now author, this skill became a listening and noticing of where things happen in the body. Now, as I am listening to what happened, I can also notice where it happened and become aware of an entirely different version of where people are getting stuck in what I call “non-healing”. It is in the smaller moments of noticing with people that we can guide to the larger ones and help people notice what they have been missing in their somatic or body awareness story and truly heal reactions that form patterns of relating to yourself, others, or the world’s systems (like work or government or healthcare) that may be keeping you in survival mode and like most things are a threat. For example:
My ears were burning and red with embarrassment, but I didn’t know why I couldn’t just brush it off.
She makes me sick, she is so self-centered, but I am going to help her and let the chips fall when it doesn’t work out. I just can’t believe this!
I was totally stressed out by the delay, but I don’t know, all I could do was turn to my phone, and then I just couldn’t stop scrolling. I stayed up too late and I am so off.
If this sounds familiar, you’re certainly not alone. I still catch myself tuning out my nervous system’s messages. I am rushing out the door when I have spent the whole morning in a calm meditation, erasing it all just because “get to work” is suddenly on my mind. Or rolling my eyes at an email I have decided to check from home, pretending it is the email and not myself that has blurred the boundary between home and work.
Yet, I also know that when we befriend our nervous systems, we can return to regulation and readiness, even if it seems impossibly true that you “have to rush” or “have to check”, or even are swamped, disappointed, annoyed, busy, or overwhelmed by things outside yourself. This friendliness reminds you, “you are the house cleaner”. You live inside your body, you clean the house, and the stuff happening outside you is not in your home unless you let it be. Home is a place for lighting candles, playing the music you want, cooking, cuddling…..you get the point. We forget our housekeeping in the traditional sense, so it only makes sense we forget it as related to our inner cleanliness as well. Even meticulous cleaners know that is not about a clean house but a temporary relief in the mind.
That’s why I’m excited to offer you an immersive new way to experience science-backed somatic or body-based tools for cleaning your nervous system each day, even throughout the day. When you look around your life, it will be from a cleaner place internally, and you will be able to feel the external versus the internal and better care for that balance. I often use the metaphor of pointing a finger. When we point a finger at a situation, problem, or other person, there are three fingers pointing back at you. In this body-based instance, these three fingers are: Breath Awareness, Sensory Awareness, and Intentional Awareness. I am developing a course showcasing tools that are backed by Polyvagal and trauma therapy research for nurturing these three things and greater internal safety, resilience, and connection. I want to deliver this all in a relatable way starting with you just being curious with me here now.
This is a brief program I created for two reasons:
First, you may have read, scrolled or viewed Insta, TikTok or other social media posts about these practices and tried them on your own and end up struggling to feel their full benefits. Why? Because sometimes we need the intentional space that helps you stay accountable through registration to a personal classroom. Here you get the support of a calm and well-regulated guide who has been through the “trouble spots” in herself and with others and makes presence not perfection a priority.
Second, you deserve these tools! Healing emotional wounds in a world filled with so much stress and overwhelm today can be a pendulum experience. We swing towards so much progress only to feel we swing right back to dysregulation when stress re-occurs, or deeper triggers make us feel like target practice. We all need to stay grounded and courageous by tuning into the language of the nervous system, returning to a state of safety, and regaining the drive to fearlessly and joyfully fulfill our greater intentions and purposes.
Helping you to do so is my deepest intention and purpose, and I’m honored to take you on this journey home to a refuge within that will invite you to feel safe enough to fall in love with your life again.
If this sounds useful and inspiring to you, I hope you’ll join us on Patreon for “Enter the Phases of Healing with the Toolbox Approach” courses. There are several offerings based on the phases of healing for you to explore. This one is a guided somatic-based and polyvagal immersion to calm, regulate, and strengthen your nervous system, such that you reprocess the messages you send yourself and become more intentional in your life. Once membership is established, you will receive an enrollment alert to access the content and updates on when the Live Q&A Sessions are. Check out “Creating a Safe Haven Within”
SNEAK PREVIEW OF REPROCESSING & SOMATIC TOOLS
Accupressure & Intentional Awareness Exercises are listed below. Please watch the demonstration. You will notice each exercise listed below has an intention you can use to add to your practice after you view the demonstration and get the basic mechanics down.
Light Fists Pressure Points- “I hold myself in awareness, I face it all calmly”
Collarbone Corner Pressure Points- “I am the powerful person that guides my life, I choose my path and my direction.”
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