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Welcome back to the read-a-long of The Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma. This week we’re exploring the end of chapter 5 (finding agency - the thing we all want!) and chapter 6 (reflecting psychobiological shifts aka noticing what happens in ourselves as we shift)! You can join at any time, even if you aren’t currently reading the book - I’m here to recap and break things down for you so you can take this and apply it to your life. Thanks for being apart of this community, I’m so glad you’re here. (By the way, if you didn’t know already, you can listen to this episode on Spotify or Apple Music - if you’re like me and love to listen to podcasts on your walk, add it to your listen list over on those platforms, too!).

By the way, I wanted to let you know I am hosting Part Two to my “Let's Talk About Getting Unstuck” on August 30th at 7:00 pm EST. It will be recorded if you can't attend live and I'm so excited about it.

Part One was wonderful and so uplifting to get to do. And that recording is available on my website. You don't need to have been to part one to join us for Part Two, but you might find it interesting in Part One I'm talking a lot about nervous system flexibility, how our nervous system and brain work together. Part Two will be about putting it into practice. So I would love to see you there. I have a little coupon code for all my Substack readers. If you'd like to join, you can get 20% off (coupon code is: bookclub). Have a great week and I'll see you back in two weeks!

Welcome back for our reading of the Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma. Wherever you are in your reading process is just fine. Or maybe you decided not to read the book at all, but just to join in the discussion. Either way, I'm happy you're here.

We left off talking about the very, very powerful pillar in NARM of reinforcing agency and really getting curious to start to notice how some of the experiences we’re having may be internal processes that we learn to land on ourselves. For example, instead of saying I feel guilty or I felt ashamed, we could notice that maybe there's a way we are guilting or shaming ourselves.

And there's a little reflective exercise at the end of chapter five to notice the shift from I feel pressure to I put pressure on myself. I feel burn out. I burn myself out. This is such a critical, critical piece of understanding what it's like to live with developmental trauma, where for many of us, we didn't have a say over what happened as a child and so we developed these protective survival strategies. As adults, we become the ones who pick up the torch and use those things against ourselves to stay disconnected from our agency, from our capacity, from our ability to move forward because of that internal dilemma where moving forward feels like it's a risk to our connection. So it gets that pathway going in our brain that says, oh my goodness, a tiger is trying to eat me.

So becoming aware of the ways that we set our own agency down by doing things like shaming ourselves isn't to make you feel worse, but to help support you in understanding how some of the roadblocks (not all of them), are things that we can start to be curious about slowing down and getting underneath.

There’s a great dialogue here between therapist and client that can be really helpful for us to start to understand how to add this NARM lens onto things, how to add a developmental trauma lens onto things, to notice how so many of these subconscious predictive patterns are happening all of the time. For example, maybe we start to feel anger and we use that shame to shut ourselves down, or we have a need and we guilt ourselves for having the need again to shut down our agency. And all of this is because of those learned patterns that we learned that we had to do as a child to maintain connection with our caregivers and in our early environments.

But as adults, those same patterns are now getting in our way of feeling our feelings, expressing our needs, connecting safely to our body, and just having the agency and choice to do those things.

It's one of the scariest and best thing that I've ever done, is to start to accept my role in my current life of where I get in my own way- to own my part of the dynamics in my life. And that doesn't mean that there aren't other dynamics happening around me, in relationships and in the systems in which I live. But to be able to own my part and consider that maybe, possibly, potentially, I can do something differently is the best gift.

Some of this sample language here, while again it's suited towards therapists, can be wonderful for us in our own processes to be curious, to notice: Hmm, I wonder if I'm starting to feel shame when I feel angry, or when I feel sad, or I wonder what I'm telling myself about that experience. I wonder how I'm relating to this situation. So powerful for this process of internal curiosity, internal observation, which we know is what allows us to reconnect to that agency.

I really love this practice exercise at the end, and if you don't have anyone you could do this with, perhaps you could do it with your therapist, or you could even do it written in a journal to notice an area where you're feeling stuck. And then let yourself be curious at this question what else is true? Not because we're trying to override the area where you're feeling stuck, but because we're curious.