Does any of this sound familiar?  

• People get mad at you because you didn't express your feelings/thoughts/desires while something was happening.  You brought it up later, and they just wish you had brought it up at the time.

• You frequently figure out that something in your life isn't working for you when you fall apart or explode.  Before that, it just feels like a jumble.  

• When there's a decision to make with someone, you often go along with what the other person is wanting or vying for because it's too complicated to figure out your feelings or desires about it.  Or maybe it's too hard find the words and (supporting evidence) to explain why you want what you want.  

• Not infrequently, you wonder whether a physical sensation you're having has a physical origin, like being sick, starting a migraine, indigestion, tiredness from not enough sleep, or is emotional in origin.

• You feel like you live about an inch away from life and have no idea what to do about it.   

If these sound familiar to you, you may be among the 10% of people who have significantly less awareness of your emotions and significantly harder time finding the words to talk about your emotions than is typical.  

You may also have sought help with emotional healing from therapists or other practitioners and been confused why, over and over again, what they're promising and offering just doesn't seem to work for you the way it's supposed to.  Maybe, like me, you've literally been on a quest to find a modality that works for you for decades, and have a good dozen or more practitioners in your history who just didn't seem to know what to do with you when your results weren't what they expected.  Maybe, like me, you've metaphorically screamed against the proverbial brick wall, “How is it possible they don't know how to help me?  I can't be that weird.  My childhood can't be so broken that they haven't come across plenty of people like me in the past.”

If labels are your thing, it may be that the term “alexithymia” describes your experience.  Literally from the Greek: no words for emotions.  Real life is more complicated than the absoluteness of that term.  But, if you look for resources about alexithymia, you may find yourself reflected in profound ways.   

(Here's an online assessment, if you're curious.) 

Research has shown that about ⅔ of the causal factors for alexithymia is developmental, as in how you were raised.  And, it's highly correlated with emotional neglect and abuse.

The evidence-based treatments for alexithymia are mindfulness (developing the skills of being more aware of your in-the-moment experience) and psychoeducation about emotions (developing intellectual understanding of emotions) .  Which, I would say, I've given myself both of those for the last two decades, and it has helped, for sure.  

But, I also feel offended and kind of sick knowing that that's the best that most of the world of healing has for people with alexithymia.  

Because if you're alexithymic from developmental influences, most likely you determined at a very young age that it was dangerous to know what you feel and dangerous to be able to speak about your feelings.  Which means that parts of you have taken on the job of keeping your emotional experiences away from your conscious experience.  Neither mindfulness and psychoeducation about emotions addresses that (potentially pretty subconscious) sense of danger and the determination that parts of you have to protect you from that danger.  And they both are asking you to do a lot more work in your daily life to deal with emotional & relational situations on top of the massive amount of work parts of you are already doing to make you less aware of and less able to speak about your emotions.  It’s exhausting! 

I know you’re craving a different way, a way that works with your current strengths, qualities, aptitudes instead of the ones that the mental health world wishes you had.  

Thankfully, there are other ways.  

One of those ways relies on the following truths: 

• Each of us have many different parts of us that express different qualities, have different inherent talents, etc. 

• Those parts of ourselves can be injured by our life experiences which make it impossible for them to express their inherent qualities and talents in service of you. 

• Helping these parts heal requires these parts to receive compassion, witnessing, and holding

• There is more than one way for our parts to be witnessed:

• The most common way, where the person pays attention inside to what the parts are trying to communicate, doesn’t work for everyone, particularly those who have trouble knowing what they feel

• But, thankfully, parts can be represented by other humans in ways that allow them to be witnessed intimately and intricately even when we can’t access them to describe it ourselves

I’ve been in this struggle with you.  

After many years of having modalities fail me over and over again, I started paying very close attention to what seemed to work for me and what didn’t work for me.  What I learned from all of that observation led me to bring together the qualities of two different modalities that I’m trained and skilled in to work toward healing by working with the strengths of people who struggle to know what we feel.  

One of those modalities is Internal Family Systems.  It’s a fast growing and evidenced-based modality that works with parts of people to help them heal.  Since I was trained IFS Level 1 in 2014-2015, as a practitioner, I’ve been passionate about how IFS helps us find our core of love, compassion, care, curiosity, clarity, confidence, and joy, whereby giving us the tools for how to approach the ways that we’re stuck with genuine self-love and self-compassion.  I’m also passionate about how it slows down the cacophony that so many of us experience inside so that we can deeply and specifically understand what is driving each of the voices that make up the cacophony.  As a client, I found it frustrating and disappointing.  

As I looked for modalities that didn’t require me to be aware of things inside me that I didn’t have access to, I found Family Constellations.  Family Constellations most often works outside of a person, inviting other individuals in a group to represent family members or ancestors of the client in order to work through hidden patterns that are impacting the client.  As a client, I love being able to witness the healing work happening outside of me.  And the impact of the work is deep and profound.  

I’m a Level 2 IFS certified practitioner, and have facilitated over 800 IFS sessions.  And I have advanced training as a Family Constellations facilitator.  

I am passionate about bringing strengths of these two modalities together as Parts Constellations to allow people like me, people who struggle to know how we feel, to be able to access the healing powers of Internal Family Systems by giving them the space to get to know and witness parts of themselves outside of themselves, as represented by loving representatives.