Paths To Your Heart: A Guide Back To Vulnerability

Today is all about relaxing into your body and learning tools for safely experiencing your emotions. To prepare for your first deep emotional experience, you will create a visualized container that can hold emotions until it is time to take them out one by one for short periods. *Note: This session may include discussion around topics such as sexual assault. I acknowledge that it may be difficult to engage with this content. I encourage you to care for your safety and well-being.

Today we will look at the messages we got from our primary attachment figures about emotions and sensitivity. What did your primary attachment figures teach you about emotions? We will practice a reparative exercise to help you identify and shift any harmful beliefs about emotions.

Today we will explore avoidance itself, identify how strong our avoidance is, and where we hold avoidance in our bodies. We will learn WHY avoidance does not want us to feel. This session is a precursor to feeling emotions fully in future sessions.

Today we will build safety in our bodies to become more open to our emotions. We will use the acronym SAFE to explore the elements of safety: Story, Action, Feeling, and Embodied Sensation.

This is a practice of recognizing old, repressed emotions held in the body. We will pay attention to sensations and connect them to emotions. We will end the session by giving soothing self support to move emotions through us and from our bodies.

We will learn to separate our emotions from others' emotions through exploring the two extremes of enmeshment and isolation. We will create more balance and increase our ability to differentiate our emotions from others' emotions.

Today you will reflect on how to express your emotional and physical needs using assertive language. Assertiveness allows another person to choose how to respond with no pressure.

We will begin with identifying a nurturing person either from experience or imagination. We will consider how this inner nurturer might respond to our emotions. We will then practice listening to this inner nurturing voice to continue to encourage us to express our emotions freely.