Self-regulation skills are necessary
Depth therapy is a collaboration between the therapist and client that involves listening deeply to your feelings, thoughts, behaviours, and body sensations to gain insight into how you might unconsciously be participating in the challenges in your life.
The depth therapy I offer online is a loving process of accessing painful emotions emerging for healing from the past and then returning to the present to build upon your strengths. Feeling, expressing, and releasing emotional pain is necessary for healing. However, your ability to reasonably regulate your nervous system is a primary skill that you will need to participate in the depth therapy process.
Self-regulation is especially important in online therapy. Online depth therapy could be a good fit for you as long as you can maintain emotional self-safety and self-care at home. I aim to encourage you to expand your strengths as you learn how to navigate the hard places in your life in the depth therapy process. This will largely involve us compassionately attending to your emerging growth edge, listening carefully to how you need to unfold next.
How Do You Know You Are Dysregulated?
While I do not specialize in long-term nervous system regulation, as a depth-oriented therapist, I aim to help you safely explore painful and confusing experiences so you can connect more compassionately to what you are struggling with. If your nervous system is too overwhelmed, however, it can feel difficult to self-reflect. Or, if you feel too anxious, it can feel unsafe to collaborate.
If you are locked in dysregulation (fight, flight, freeze or fawn), it might be difficult to self-reflect because your nervous system's prime concern is protection. If your self-protection mechanisms are overly activated, it is more important to tend to your nervous system with a therapist who specializes in Polyvagal regulation first so that you can feel safe enough to collaborate in the depth therapy process later.
Your Commitment to Healing Brings Results
All emotional healing is self-healing, so the willingness to take responsibility for your well-being is important for depth therapy to work. While I cannot motivate you to change, I am deeply committed to supporting your emotional healing process. If you are equally committed to your growth and are motivated to make positive changes in your life, your depth therapy sessions will most likely be progressive and profound.
Depth therapy seeks to look deeply into your life's challenges to understand and treat the root causes. Bringing consciousness to unconscious feelings and patterns playing out in your life facilitates deep insight and healing. Depth therapy is a commitment to honestly examine your existing personality structure, impulses, and tendencies to discover your unconscious thoughts and behaviours so that you can better understand how you are creating and miscreating your life.
Taking the journey into your inner world can feel challenging sometimes, as it requires a willingness to honestly self-reflect. Interpersonal engagement, self-responsibility, readiness to define growth goals, the interest to look for the deeper roots of your painful symptoms, the willingness to share vulnerably about what is not working in your life, accountability about how you might be playing a part in your relationship challenges, and a sincere interest in learning how to self-parent your inner child will greatly enhance your experience of depth therapy.
Calling All Parts Of You Back Home
In your therapy sessions, you will be compassionately invited to go deep within your mind and body to gain insight into how maladaptive behaviour patterns from childhood and unhealed hurting younger parts of yourself are clouding your ability to actualize your true dreams and desires.
Depth therapy aims to support you to become aware of what has been cast out of your consciousness. Neglected and unloved aspects of self are most often at the root of emotional distress. Healing happens when what has been repressed, rejected, denied or ignored is allowed to come forward so that you can understand what you need. Once you find the emotional needs you have neglected, you can learn how to care for them and become the author of your transformation.
With love,
Shelley