WORK WITH ME

We’ve been doing this talk therapy thing for a while now. We meet in a quiet room with a soothing interior, and we talk about what’s troubling us. (From what I’ve seen it looks more or less the same around the world, to the extent that western psychology is widespread.) For those of us who have access (another story in itself!), it’s worked great for some, and not so great for others. Some of us refuse to consider it and others wonder if we should, or wish we could. Some of us aren’t getting as much out of it as we used to, or are repeating the same patterns in spite of it.

I’m here to say that talk therapy can be both wonderfully supportive and appallingly harmful, depending on who we are working with, and our own lived experiences and identities. At best we will leave parts of ourselves and our experiences at the door.

At Here Too, we bring your body into the conversation so the story it is telling doesn’t get left behind. Sometimes that is enough to help you reconcile the difficulties, contradictions or confusion you’ve been experiencing in your life.

We might stop to breathe, listen to a song, sip our tea. We might stretch, or draw or hum. Practice some tools that can get things moving internally to shift what you feel. Learn how to tell which feelings are yours and which ones don’t belong to you. How to hold yours and turn down the volume on everyone and everything else. Learn how to listen to your body to help you know when (and how!) to say “no” without guilt, and “yes” without resentment. How to speak with strength and conviction when you need to and how to ask for help.

We learn how to turn up the volume on inner sensations when it’s helpful and use that information to guide the conversation. We look at your astrological birth chart to understand the supports and challenges in your life, transits that may be affecting you and the lessons they are asking you to lean in to. We talk about what you learned from your cultural heritage, and fill in the gaps together to put it in a wider context. We practice holding the strengths with the challenges. Suddenly, slowly, you see yourself with new eyes. Tears may flow, or insights come, or pain may appear or disappear. It’s all part of it.

From there you may decide you want to do a bigger purge of the old emotions that are hanging on from childhood, or from more recent traumas. By then we’ve done some rich work together that has built comfort and trust, and it’s not as scary to imagine revisiting those wounds with support at your side. Based on your preference (and state law), you may choose to use the added support of cannabis (as allowed by law), to connect with your body and let it take the driver’s seat. Or you may decide it’s time to just live your imperfect life without so much focus on healing what was never really broken to begin with.

In other words, we work together to create supportive experiences that help you put all of your pieces together to feel empowered in your own life. And to make choices that serve you, your family, your community and the work you want to do in the world.