More Fully Yourself
IFS + NERVOUS SYSTEM PRACTITIONER
A deeper relationship with yourself changes the way you inhabit your life.
We have relationships with every part of our lives: our partners, families, and friends; our work; our bodies; and our histories. Less obvious is the relationship we are having with ourselves while all of this is taking place.
We can extend enormous compassion to someone we love and have very little patience for our own struggle. We can understand another person’s behaviour while remaining frustrated by our own reactions. We can know that we need rest and resent ourselves for needing it, feel anger and immediately question whether we are entitled to it, sense that something is wrong and begin explaining to ourselves why it shouldn’t be.
MUCH OF OUR INNER LIFE UNFOLDS WITHIN THIS RELATIONSHIP.
My work begins there.
I work with women who want to understand what is happening within them and develop a relationship with themselves that allows for greater trust, discernment and choice.
Sometimes this begins with something immediate: a relationship, a loss, a decision, emotional overwhelm, work that has become unsustainable. At other times, it is harder to name. Something that once worked no longer does. An old pattern has become more visible. A growing sense that the way you have been living no longer quite fits.
We begin with what is here.
LEARNING YOUR INTERNAL LANGUAGE
There is a great deal happening inside us at any given moment, much of it beyond conscious thought. The body responds, emotions arise, parts of us move toward something or pull away, and the nervous system draws on previous experience as it makes sense of what is happening now.
I sometimes describe becoming familiar with all of this as developing your inner GPS.
Our internal signals still require discernment. Fear may respond to a genuine concern or recognize something that resembles an old one. An emotion can contain valuable information without dictating what we should do.
Learning to read these signals takes curiosity and practice. A broader emotional vocabulary can bring definition to an experience that previously registered only as stress or overwhelm. Sensation may draw our attention to something before we have language for it. A reaction that seems puzzling can begin to make sense once we understand the belief or protective impulse underneath it.
With time, your internal world becomes less mysterious. You become more able to recognize what is happening, understand where it may be coming from, and decide how you want to respond.
This is part of developing a relationship with yourself that you can trust.
Over the years, Allison has deployed many skills from her impressive arsenal to help me through various emotional and physical blocks. Our lively, funny, intense sessions always left me with greater clarity about life choices. Allison is an insightful, passionately committed, exceptionally trained practitioner, and I could not recommend her more highly.
ALEXANDRA COURTOIS
College Professor, USA
Over the years, Allison has deployed many skills from her impressive arsenal to help me through various emotional and physical blocks. Our lively, funny, intense sessions always left me with greater clarity about life choices. Allison is an insightful, passionately committed, exceptionally trained practitioner, and I could not recommend her more highly.
ALEXANDRA COURTOIS
College Professor, USA
THE INTELLIGENCE IN OUR ADAPTATIONS
Many of the patterns we struggle with began as intelligent responses to something.
Many of the patterns we struggle with began as intelligent responses to something.
We learn how to maintain connection, avoid conflict, earn approval, remain useful, protect ourselves from disappointment, or keep life under control. What begins as adaptation can eventually become so familiar that we experience it simply as personality.
The part that pushes you beyond exhaustion may hold very different beliefs from the part that desperately wants to stop. The part that struggles to set a boundary may understand perfectly well why one is needed while remaining deeply concerned about what will happen if you do.
Internal Family Systems offers a compassionate way of approaching this complexity. IFS also gives language to Self Energy: a quality of presence from which curiosity, compassion, clarity, courage, and connection become more available.
The work becomes less about managing ourselves and more about knowing how to be with ourselves.
WHAT SELF-TRUST ASKS OF US
Self-trust is sometimes confused with certainty; that said, I see it differently.
A trusting relationship with yourself allows room for uncertainty. You can listen to what you are feeling without needing to act immediately. You can take your discomfort seriously before you have assembled a case for why it is justified. You can make a decision knowing that no decision comes with complete protection from regret.
For many women, this relationship has been complicated by years of learning to orient towards other people first.
We become skilled at noticing what is expected, needed or preferred around us. We learn when our anger is inconvenient, when a boundary will create tension, when success earns approval, when being easy to be around preserves connection. Eventually it can become difficult to know where accommodation ends and self-betrayal begins.
I use the word self-betrayal carefully.
The habit of overriding our own experience usually has a history. At some point, it made sense. Understanding that history matters. So does noticing when an old adaptation is still making decisions on our behalf.
As the relationship with yourself becomes more secure, you can begin to catch the quieter moments when you are moving away from what you know, feel or need.
There is more room to pause before automatically accommodating, explaining, apologizing or abandoning your position.
Self-trust grows through the repeated experience of discovering that you can remain with yourself, including when another person does not understand or approve.
WHAT WE CARRY
Some of the most powerful beliefs we hold about ourselves are difficult to see because they do not feel like beliefs; they feel like facts. Being useful can become intertwined with being valuable, rest can begin to require justification, anger can feel unsafe, and achievement can become evidence that you are doing life correctly. These beliefs have personal histories, but they can also come from something larger: families, cultures, and inherited ideas about how much space women should occupy, what they should tolerate, and what a good life is supposed to look like.
Bringing a belief into awareness allows us to become interested in how it has shaped us. Sometimes insight creates movement. Often the belief is held more deeply, in emotion, bodily response or a part that remains convinced the old rule is necessary.
This is where the work becomes more than conversation.
We may work with language, emotion, sensation, a protective part, a nervous system response or an experience that needs to be met differently.
What matters is not allegiance to a particular technique, but responsiveness to what is happening in you.
WHAT HAS BEEN THERE ALL ALONG
There is an old story about a golden Buddha that was covered in clay for generations, its true composition forgotten until a crack revealed the gold underneath. I have returned to this story for years because we accumulate our own layers too: roles, expectations, responsibilities, defences, and beliefs that become woven into who we understand ourselves to be. None of those layers are false. They are part of our story. They are simply not the whole story.
THE DEEPER WORK IS NOT THE CONSTRUCTION OF A SUPERIOR SELF.
It is becoming more able to recognize what we have acquired, what we have needed, what we may be ready to release, and what remains as some of that weight begins to shift. There is something quietly radical about becoming less willing to abandon yourself. Your circumstances may not become simpler, but you meet them differently. More fully yourself.
WORKING TOGETHER
Women come to this work for many reasons: relationships and boundaries, self-worth, grief and transition, patterns they are tired of repeating, emotional responses they want to understand, a changing relationship with work or identity, or the accumulating questions of midlife.
Some know exactly what they want to address. Others arrive with a feeling that is much less organized. Both are welcome.
01
RELATIONSHIPS + BOUNDARIES
02
SELF-WORTH + IDENTITY
03
GRIEF + LIFE TRANSITIONS
04
PATTERNS + EMOTIONAL RESPONSES
FROM the WRITING
Reflections on the inner life, relationships + being human
PERMISSION TO BE A GLORIOUS MESS
On self-acceptance, the parts of ourselves we struggle with, and making room for the complexity of being human.
THE PARTS WE JUDGE MOST may need most love
On approaching our internal world with greater curiosity, compassion, and understanding.
WHY YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO BUT STILL FEEL STUCK
On the distance between intellectual understanding and the parts of us that may not yet feel ready to change.
BEGIN WITH A CONVERSATION
IF SOMETHING HERE RESONATES, LET’S BEGIN.
If you are considering working with me, we begin with a complimentary introductory call. It gives us a chance to meet and get a sense of whether we are well suited to working together.
WHAT THE CALL IS FOR
01
Meet and get a sense of one another.
02
Briefly talk about what is bringing you to the work.
03
Ask any questions you have about working together.
04
Consider whether the relationship + approach feel like the right fit.