Maarja Lall - Holistic therapy

WHAT IS INTEGRATION

The goal of any self-empowering healing practice is integration.

Integration means becoming more whole, which also means becoming more coherent, aware and efficient as a person. It means healing those aspects of us that are not connected to the rest us, that are hidden away - residing in our subconscious - and bringing them back. By doing this, we gain back our sense of strength, resiliency, we connect to our gifts and talents, and we become more aware of who we really are underneath trauma and conditioning. This allows us to act with a sense of freedom and integrity in our lives.

It’s easy to see how socialization and trauma affect the psyche. No one is immune to this. So many traits and feelings are pushed to the edge of awareness. They are made wrong and they can cause havoc on our lives. We are too often asking ourselves ‘What’s wrong with me?’, instead of asking ‘What happened to me?’. Full integration means recognizing and accepting all of yourself, the bits that were rejected, suppressed, denied or disowned by yourself and others; and this is also what transforms them into their most positive form. For example, healthy anger can become a source of self-assertion, instead of source of conflict.

The standard model for dealing with strong negative emotion is to think thoughts or to take action to subdue the negative emotion and thus make you feel better in the short term. This is what coping is all about. For lasting change, an entirely different approach is needed, where negative emotion is invited to act as a doorway through which you can connect with the aspects of yourself that are lost or unresolved. Diving into and finding resolution for a root of a negative emotion, is what creates relief and a lasting, long-term solution. It allows us to accept what we have experienced, which brings a sense of closure and opens up a way forward.

Integration requires a willingness on your part to feel emotion, including the difficult and intense ones. My role will be to create a safe container and to gently guide you one step at a time towards resolution and transformation.

You are so much bigger than your personality or your trauma. Once you commit to yourself and your own journey, you will start to see evidence of it. 1-1 integration session is a powerful support to help you along the way. It opens up new awareness, new level of feeling and alignment in your sense of self. Ask yourself: in which area of my life do I deeply crave resolution or improvement? After that, see what would be the first available step that you could take towards it, with where you are and with what you have.

WHAT IS PARTS WORK

Parts Work (same as Parts Integration) is a term that covers a number of therapies that view a person as an ecosystem, containing multiplicity of different parts.

For example, you might have a part of you that is completely self-sufficient and yet, there is another part that craves being taken care of. Given that these two parts are in opposition to each other, while existing in the same person, it’s obvious that when one is prioritized, the other can become compromised or suppressed and vice versa. Parts Integration helps the dynamics within the inner system to heal in a way where no part gets bulldozed. This makes it so that the 'whole' (your personality) starts to function in a more cohesive and collaborative, healthy manner.

When you see yourself as a system of these sometimes opposing or conflicting parts, you start to see that the roles of some parts of you developed as adaptations to life experiences. Internal Family Systems brings a good analogy to understand how these experiences can reorganize the system in unhealthy ways:

‘In an alcoholic family, the children are forced into protective and stereotypical roles by the extreme dynamics of their family. While one finds similar sibling roles across alcoholic families (e.g., the scapegoat, golden child, lost child), one does not conclude that those roles represent the essence of those children. Instead, each child is unique and, once released from his or her role by intervention, can find interests and talents separate from the demands of the chaotic family. The same process seems to hold true for internal families - parts are forced into extreme roles by external circumstances and, once it seems safe, they gladly transform into what feels more natural and healthy. What circumstances force these parts into extreme and sometimes destructive roles? Trauma is one factor, such as effects of childhood abuse and neglect. But more often, it is the values and interaction patterns in a person's family of origin, which escalate over time and are played out in other relationships.’

Parts Integration helps unhealthy roles that parts have adopted, to readjust and heal. We all hold qualities such as being creative, inclusive, resourceful, and calm, despite the fact that many of us, initially, have very little access to these qualities. Parts Integration will also help re-connect to those kind of positive qualities as well as turn any quality that a part has into it's most exalted form.

With practicing Parts Integration, you will develop an ‘Aware Self’ (which is not a part) and self-leadership will become the norm for your inner system. You will know through internal communication, what each part of you needs to feel safe, release its burden, and you will be able to provide what the parts need. There will be a point, when you no longer get stuck in individual perspectives. Perspective of a part will still be valid and important, but you will easily and quickly tap into an objective, loving, compassionate stance towards it and towards your inner family in general. This is self love in action!

Parts Integration is very efficient as a tool for releasing resistance to what is wanted. For example, you may have a desire, but you are stuck or feeling there is something that is preventing you from going for it. Chances are you have parts within you that feel resistance to that very thing – with valid reasons. Parts Integration helps you become a match to your desire or find clarity as to what it is that you really want.

Many people find it easier to initially work with parts instead of diving into trauma work that is based on emotional processing. It’s perfectly okay. The two can also be successfully combined for deep healing and transformation.

WHAT IS SOMATIC EXPERIENCING®

Somatic Experiencing® is a body-oriented approach to heal trauma and stress-induced symptoms.

Originally created to address PTSD specifically, it is nowadays widely used for developmental trauma and other types of trauma including intergenerational trauma. SE is developed by Dr Peter Levine, who has made it his life's work to advance our understanding of trauma and healing. He points out that ‘trauma is in the nervous system, not in the event’. Luckily, the body has an innate capacity for healing and resilience. SE works with the body’s natural self-regulating system. In an SE session, the goal is to discharge activation from the body. So in this sense, it is less about the story and more about what the body is still holding on to.

Most likely everyone has experienced some level of trauma in their life. It’s the situations where something that happened was too fast, too much, too soon, we just couldn’t cope with it. So we experienced overwhelm and our survival responses couldn’t successfully complete. Overwhelm in the nervous system puts us into freeze. As a result, coherence of our experience becomes fragmented. In essence, our trauma experiences create both, rigidity and over-flexibility in our response to events in our current life.

SE has developed a great tool to explain what goes on in this state of fragmentation. It’s called SIBAM. SIBAM is an acronym for elements of an experience, namely: sensation, image, behavior, affect, meaning. In a healthy state these elements connect to each other in a fluid way, we easily move from affect to meaning to sensation. And so on. But with trauma, some channels of perception become more or less available, because of coupling that happens. For example, in a panic attack, affect and sensation dominate (over-couple), while other elements become less available (undercouple). In an SE session, you are led into repeated cycles of activation-deactivation, where these connections start to re-organize in a self-regulatory way. This can feel like a relief and often makes way for new awareness. This kind of whole-person approach to bring in coherence and fluid connection between our perceptive channels is one of the central parts of the SE journey.

It is easy to see, given this framework, that some other therapies, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, disregard the importance of somatic elements of our experience and therefore lack the depth to renegotiate traumatic activation. When working with material that has been stressful to a level, where cognition is inhibited, where we were highly emotional, or in a survival response, we need to look at somatic elements to complete the cycle of self-regulation. If we talk about the activation, it is like pointing to it from distance, while it needs to be worked through bottom-up, using felt sense - in a gentle, safe, step-by-step way. Once this groundwork is done, we will inevitable once again become more present and available for a fuller range of experiences.

The long-term goal of SE is to support you to live a rich and full life, by building more capacity to contain intensity while teaching the nervous system new positive experiences in the felt sense. This shift will take time, Peter Levine says: “Taking time is very important—body time is much slower than cognitive time or emotional time.” With SE work we are fundamentally changing the way we connect to felt sense, which in essence is what life feels like to us.