Jo Ellen Fletcher, M.A., LMFT
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The Five Capacities of Connection

8/15/2018

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Living a life in a full and expanded way is one of the most difficult challenges we face as human beings.  Once we recognize our deepest selves and honor our core,
we allow ourselves to experience life without dependency on the approval of our environment. 

Growth and change happen as connection to the five core capacities of connection occur;
attunement, trust, autonomy, love, and sexuality.

Identity distortions dissolve and self regulation is re-established.  In a healing cycle, connection to our body, to our emotions, and life force allows for greater connection with others, and in turn, connection with others supports greater connection to ourselves. 

The connection that has always been our deepest desire is now no longer our greatest fear.

Nelson Mandela addressed the fear of living life to its full potential when he quoted
Marianne Williamson in his 19994 inaugural speech:


"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. 
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. 
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us."














Healing Developmental Trauma - LaPierre/Heller
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Supporting Our Capacity for Aliveness

8/13/2018

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Supporting a capacity for aliveness
underpins the capacity for connections.
Our greatest desire is to feel alive.
Meaninglessness, depression and many other symptoms
are reflections of our disconnection from our core vitality.
 
When we feel alive, we feel connected.
When we feel connected, we feel alive.



Although aliveness brings mental clarity, aliveness in not primarily a mental state;
nor is it sensory pleasure.

Aliveness is a state of energetic flow and coherency in all systems of the body, brain, and mind. 
Human beings respond to shock and developmental and relational trauma by dissociating
and disconnecting. 

The result is dimming down of the life force that leaves a person, to varying degrees, exiled from life. 

Working with the roadblocks that are in the way of reconnecting with aliveness is a
key organizing principal. The biological completion of emotional states
puts us progressively in touch with our core aliveness. One way is, identify, clarify and express emotions. 

Understanding how the child in us made adjustment and distortions in reaction to adaptations to environmental failures in our environment. That failure is in learning the capacity for self regulation. 

The healthy connection between a well regulated mother and infant is of essential importance
in sharing the development of the infant's capacity for regulation. 
Each time a mother successfully soothes her baby she is effectively regulating her baby's nervous system. 
Chronically depressed, anxious, angry, or dissociated mothers impact their developing infant;
the disruption of the connection between infant and mother is traumatic. 
If the regulation process between mother and infant is disrupted, the infant does not develop the core capacity for regulation.  If a mother's capacity for self regulation is compromised,
she cannot soothe herself and therefore cannot soothe her baby's nervous system. 

A compromised capacity for self regulation can negatively impact a person for a lifetime. 
If a healthy capacity for self regulation does not become an integral part of our early development, we become
de-stabilized, and without this essential foundational element, life can be a struggle. 

Emotional dysregulation is believed to be at the core of an individual's increased vulnerability to stress and trauma and is seen to be a foundational element of psychological and physical problems.

As adults, when in a state of dysregulation we turn towards those coping strategies to obtain the regulation we need, often at any cost.  For example, the need to feel regulated is so strong that people smoke despite the fact that they know it is damaging to their health.  Smoking seemingly functions as a emotional regulator becasue nicotine reduces anxiety and, for a short time, can relieve some depression. 

Dysregulated individuals smoke to gain a sense of relief even though they know it causes health risks.  Attempts to stop smoking or give up any sort of self destructive and compulsive behavior, such as drugs, alcohol, hyper-sexuality overeating, overworking, often fail becasue it is very difficult to give up a means of self regulation even when it is unhealthy until it can be replaced with a better form of regulation.

There is a healthy ways of regulating the nervous system by emphasizing the connection to the parts of the self that are organized, coherent, and functional.  Analyzing problems and the focus on what has gone wrong does not entirely support self regulation.  One of the first steps towards aliveness is to understand and work with emotions in context of increasing the capacity for aliveness, identify the distortions of the adaptation for self regulation and identifying support for regulative states that puts us more in touch with our aliveness.









Healing Developmental Trauma - Heller, LaPierre


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The Codependent Self and Relationships.

8/5/2018

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Codependency is the inability to express rights, needs and boundaries in a relationship.

A disorder of assertiveness, the individual attracts or accepts exploitation, abuse, or neglect. 
The codependent may accept sexual attention from a partner, however really wants love.

In times of fear, often the codependent passes by the fight response.  This comes from
parents who punished "talking back" which often extinguished the flight response in childhood.
In codependents the fawn response often takes over. 
The fawn response shows up as "cringe and flatter."  Again, a learned response in early childhood to remain emotionally safe and not to be rejected or abandoned by parents.

These aspects show up in our relationships today.  The harsh inner critic, perfectionism and other early means of remaining emotionally safe, loved and accepted. Showing up as our true selves is threatening because we are afraid of criticism, hurt, and rejection as we experienced in our early years. We are good enough, we are not perfect.

It takes true courage to reclaim your true self.  Learn to define your own needs and wants without controlling or manipulating others.  Acceptance of the self and others. 
Learning about emotional safety and allowing it in one's life is most important part of healing.

Unless there are clear signs of danger, committing to thought-stop the projection of ones
past bully/critics onto others. Trusting myself and those close to me, and accepting that the vast majority of my fellow human beings are peaceful people. This means challenging the old imprints of the past that created the original fear and the development of the false self or the codependent self.

Even thought it is sometimes frightening and one may get hurt by being vulnerable.
 We can feel so much more alive when we can connect and live out of our true selves.
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Understanding Disconnection in Couples

8/1/2018

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Contact with intimate others is the primary way humans have evolved to deal with anxiety and fear.
Proximity to an attachment figure tames fear and offers an antidote to feelings of helplessness and meaninglessness. 

The key issue in distressed relationships is each partner’s accessibility and responsiveness to emotional cues. 

The spouse becomes the primary attachment figure in the majority of adults and as such, their main source of security and comfort.  The attachment to one’s partner may be especially crucial in a times of where we live in “a community of two” rather than past societal rituals of living in the “bosom of the family or village.”  Today it is perceived adults have no one else to count on for emotional support besides their spouse.

Isolation, separation, or disconnection from an attachment figure is inherently traumatizing.  Distressed partners who are emotionally disconnected tend to become immersed in fear and insecurity, and adopt the stances of fight, flight or freeze that characterize responses to traumatic stress.  The more distressed and hopeless the relationship, the more automatic, rigid, and self-reinforcing the emotional responses and the interactional dance between partners will become.

We affect our partners profoundly.  Each of us is always looking for cues of emotional connection and safety with our partner.  In moments of disconnect, for the more secure couples, partners re-attune and reconnect when one reaches for the other and takes the risk of sharing vulnerable feelings, and the other responds. 

There are many strategies and much understanding we can obtain working in therapy to note the cues our partner sends to us, our responses which are successful and those which are not.
 
For example, the more each partner feels criticized, the more one defends by criticizing back.  Each partner is protecting themselves by attacking, accusing and blaming the other. Sometimes one partner is trying to connect and get a response that is reassuring, as one partner pursues, one partner may withdraw.  The more one may protest the loss of connection, the more the other feels the loss of connection, and feels criticized and distances.  The more one distances, the other protests and pursues. 

Thus the cycle of pursue/withdraw or blame/defend is the enemy here, not each other.  A trained therapist is the most equipped to identify these various cycles of disconnect.  The spiral of insecurity can be stopped with help, and basic safety recreated.

Connection can again begin for once distressed partners. You can learn to see the whole game, the whole dance that you and your partner is doing, not just the last step. 

Begin to see your dance, the cycle, as the problem, not your partner.







Taken from excerpts of writing of Dr. Sue Johnson
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    Author:
    Jo Ellen Fletcher, M.A.
    Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist


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