Your dysfunctional behavior was created to protect you.

You can’t expect to change your dysfunctional behavior without acquiring some tools for nervous system regulation since your functional behavior is helping you manage your dysregulation.

Harmful and unhealthy behaviors like consuming violent content, consuming too much media or working in a job that produces high levels of stress, are actually providing you with self-soothing.

So it’s counterproductive to expect you to give up these behaviors without increasing your capacity to tolerate discomfort.

These behaviors have been helping you manage the tension that’s part of your natural trauma response.

Increasing one’s capacity to tolerate stress is akin to creating a larger container to hold your experiences.

It starts with creating an experience of safety which begins with noticing where things already feel ok.

When you spend enough time doing that, you learn how to support your body in being able to notice unpleasant sensations and feelings.

When the right conditions of safety are created, the body goes into the natural process of pendulating. It will swing between the uncomfortable and challenging sensations to a felt sense of safety. Discomfort → safety. Safety → discomfort. Back and forth for just a bit.

A skilled therapist is there to support this pendulation in a titrated, gradual way.

This movement between the comfortable and the uncomfortable is what enables the container to grow.

This work is life changing and in some cases when the dysfunctional behavior is very unhealthy, life saving.

*I’m a registered Somatic Therapist and I practice body-based psychotherapy which combines talk therapy with feeling and sensing techniques.

I’m an expert at finding the core of your destructive patterns so you can find the next best step.