Counselling Practice Website
Practice Information
INDIVIDUAL THERAPY:
Negative experiences leave emotions, beliefs, and sensations in the body that are locked away. Coping strategies are developed to protect against these negative experiences from being re-experienced again. Once there for protection, these coping strategies no longer help and may even conflict with each other, leaving one in chronic stuckness, impacting relationships within oneself and others. Through Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy, these coping strategies can be understood as 'parts' burdened with the responsibility to help the original negative experience. There are three types of burdened parts:
Burdened Managers:
These are the protective parts (coping strategies) that bring security by being proactive and controlling. They are responsible for keeping it all together. Focused on stability, they fear that relinquishing control will lead to worse outcomes. Managers protect against anything that leads to vulnerability, distress, or instability.
eg: Controlling, planning, achieving, analyzing, worrying, criticizing, shaming, judging, manipulating, caretaking, people pleasing, submissive, avoiding, blocking, numbing, tuning out, denying, rejecting, etc.
Burdened Firefighters:
These are the protective parts (defense mechanisms) who are very reactive to stop distress quickly. Without thinking, they are immediate and jump into action to stop danger cues automatically. Consequences don’t matter as they only care about immediate comfort. Firefighters are effective in removing stressors fast.
eg: Anger, shutting down, dissociating, distracting, panic attacks, cutting and self-harm, attempting suicide, abusing substances, addictive behaviours like overspending, bingeing, TV/social media, pornography, etc.
Burdened Exiles:
These are the wounded parts that Managers and Firefighters are protecting. Exiles are the "inner children" who have experienced hurt and attachment injuries. Stuck in the past, Exiles carry wounds that need to be healed and seen in the present, but they're suppressed by the protectors' defensive strategies.
eg: Wounds that feel: shameful, not mattering, not good enough, worthlessness, unlovable, being too much, dependency, loneliness, rejection, abandonment, taken advantage of, trauma, insecurity, etc.
“Where you look affects how you feel.” Where we visually orient affects us somatically and emotionally. Brainspotting (BSP) looks for a place in the field of vision to tap into the subcortical brain, helping access inner experiences that may have been difficult to access before. In this somatic approach, different eye positions help identify “brainspots” linked to certain experiences, emotions, or sensations. Accessing these brainspots in the subcortical brain helps process difficult emotions or experiences. Because Brainspotting is a fluid approach that is client-centred, it is an ideal approach to deepen one's access to parts and help unburden their extreme beliefs.
Path to Healing
The goal of therapy through IFS is to understand the good reasons behind all these parts and help them unburden their extreme roles and become more Self-led. With the unburdening of the protector parts, one can get out of stuck cycles and live a life with more harmony and balance. Protector parts (Managers and Firefighters) have agendas; they will ease their protective roles once the parts they are protecting (Exiles) are seen and healed.
- "All protectors aim to keep emotional pain out of awareness and don't understand that banishing vulnerable parts increases their panic and pain. When exiled parts panic and manage to break into awareness, protectors simply double down on excluding them. This repetitive, draining dynamic consumes a great deal of mental and emotional energy." (Herbine-Blank & Sweezy)
The length of therapy is guided by how much these burdened parts can let go of their extreme agendas and trust the Self to be the source of internal reassurance and guidance. Parts that were once stuck in old roles can now become:
UN-burdened Managers:
Take on a balanced approach to daily responsibilities. Are effective and collaborative, encouraging other parts and people. Advocate for growth, becoming more accepting and nurturing.
UN-burdened Firefighters:
Signal the Self when stressed. Use effective self-soothing activities and diversions. Advocate for fairness and stand up to injustice. Lend courage and confidence to act bravely in challenging situations. Have the confidence to risk and take on challenges that were once too scary.
UN-burdened Exiles:
Can experience vulnerability as strength, advocating for connection and care. Feel secure with Self as primary caretaker, feeling freer to reach out to others. Offer intuitions about others’ feelings. Enjoy being open and trusting.
Discovering the SELF
In IFS, the Self can be considered the "inner adult." It inherently embodies the 8Cs of IFS: Clarity, Confidence, Calm, Curiosity, Courage, Compassion, Connectedness and Creativity. There is comfort, balance, harmony, and acceptance within oneself and others. The Self doesn’t need improvement as it exists in everyone and only needs to be uncovered.
COUPLES THERAPY
You want connection with your partner. You want to be seen and cared for but somehow you feel misunderstood and lonely. No matter how hard you try, you feel trapped in this pattern of resentment and anger. Or you feel blamed and hurt and the only way to cope is to hide and withdraw. You are exhausted from trying to fix the problem, and you don’t know how to end this pattern. You would like to keep that intimacy and connection that initially brought you together.
When partners are overwhelmed, it becomes difficult to meet each other’s needs. In survival mode, it is hard to understand or be understood. Bids for attention can be misunderstood as cues of danger. Coping mechanisms that once helped can become patterns of fight, flight or freeze in the relationship; this can show up as blame or shutdown.
This conflict in the relational cycle affects the sexual cycle. For different partners, sex can have different meanings:
- Sex leads to connection: “I need sex to feel connected emotionally with you.” Desire is more spontaneous.
- Connection leads to sex: “I need to be emotionally connected before we can have sex.” Desire is more responsive.
When a couple struggles with sexual desire, it’s often not because there’s not enough ‘accelerator’ - the things that turn us on. Instead, it’s because there are too many ‘brakes,’ i.e., stress, trauma, body image and relationship issues.
In the safety of counselling, we will make sense of your relational and sexual cycles. Often it is not the absence of love in a relationship that causes anguish, but the unwitting ruptures between each partner’s protective parts. Healing in couples therapy becomes more effective when both partners can unburden their protective parts from their extreme roles with IFS therapy (see Individual page on this site). This will allow each partner in the relationship to:
- Focus inside and recognize which part is triggered
- Speak for the part rather than from the part
- Recognize that your partner’s behaviour may also be coming from a part in them
- Understand the good reasons behind your partner’s protective parts with curiosity and compassion
When wounded parts are healed, protective parts naturally relax, giving space to find an inner source of harmony and balance. By learning how to share and what to listen for, partners can become more accessible, responsive and engaged.
ABOUT ME:
As my client, your well-being will always be my guiding focus. In the safety of counselling, you will be valued, respected and listened to. Like the roots below affecting the tree above, the inner worlds of your mind and body affect the outer aspects of your lives. Guided by these values, therapy at Tree Roots Counselling provides a safe place to restore balance to your inner and outer worlds.
It is important to me that my clients feel safe. It is in this safety that you can reconnect with your vulnerability as strength and restore your sense of self to live life with more authenticity and intentionality.
My IFS training helps me guide clients to make sense of their inner worlds and the good reasons behind the coping strategies that have become stuck patterns. Similarly, EFT focuses on how couples fall into a negative cycle when partners rely on their individual coping strategies. When the strategies are understood, the meaning of relational distress can be reframed to understand how unmet longings for connection and protection can become danger cues. Empirically proven over decades of research, EFT is the best model for couple therapy, and IFS is described by trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk as the leading therapeutic model for deep healing in individual therapy. These approaches also inform my counselling work with children and families in schools.
I value the trust clients place in me to walk alongside their important journey. I live in Vancouver with my wife and three kids.
Visit my website for further information and resources - www.treerootscounselling.com