Twig's Se Reflections

Play Episode 49 Here Referrals are critical to our work. They bring us new clients, expand our reach into different populations and pre-establish rapport with prospective clients. They also create some challenges of their own, like unmanaged expectations for the rare magic SE session. Without being formulaic about how to deal with these challenges I open up some things for us SE practitioners to be thinking about in relationship to referrals and referral sources.

Play Episode 48 Here When preparing my land for a big fire, a small fire nearly got out of my control. Similar to working with Global High Activation and other patterns that quickly lead to a conflagration, we often need to put in buffers or fire lines before working with flammable stuff. Here's a little metaphor story from my own fire and encouragement to you to create those contracts and buffers with your clients before things get out of control.

Play Episode 47 Here What can an SEP do when a "Natural Disaster" comes to their backyard? It's happened to a lot of us already, it will surely happen to more in the years to come. Here's some background on what I did when the largest wildfire in Washington State History, the Carlton Complex, started 5 minutes walk from my home in July, 2014 along with what I was able to offer my community as things started to cool down. I hope this will encourage other SEP's to think proactively about such things for the future. You can find the StressLess Series Here My first night of relief after the fire passed. Eventually I slept for 20 hours straight. So sweet.

Play Episode 46 Here When is crying productive? When isn't it? When do we encourage it? When do we avoid it? Those are good questions. None of which will be answered for you in this episode. Instead you'll feel more informed as you continue to search for more and more ways to answer those questions on when crying is helpful, when it's not and how to support it best.

Play Episode 45 Here One of the most common questions I've received is what to do after completing the official 3-year Somatic Experiencing training. How to deepen, expand or cultivate more skill with this paradigm for working with traumatic stress and integration of experience. Here is a ramble through the brambles of my thoughts on such things where I encourage it all: master classes for cultivating speciality or creating awareness of holes in your abilities, assisting for a thousand reasons most of which I don't name but a few that I do and my strongest suggestion to consider auditing at least 1 course from the training again to consolidate and see just how much you already know.

Play Episode 44 Here Cogitating, reviewing, pre-playing our sessions after hours, we're bound to do it. Taking work home with you is a known stress point in modern life and yet some professions demand it. The trauma recovery specialization is one of them. We do, and we need to, think intelligently about our sessions to improve our skills. We also need to think specifically about our client's in order to improve their session outcomes. Good. Great. Let's do that, let's just not do such dissection ad-infinitum. Here's one, admittedly rambling, proposal to both permit and simultaneously restrain chronically thinking about our work after work.

We attend to and pace the Red. But we're most interested in helping to balance the two by paying extra attention to the Blue. Play Episode 43 Here When listening to a storyline or following a somatic experiencing style investigation it's helpful to have a clear way to recognize what is less and what is more important to reflect. This episode is lifted straight out of the Tips and Suggestions section of Twig's Guide to the SE Language. Here's one way to name: The Formula.

Play Episode 42 Here Some sessions are going to go places we don't want them to. When that starts to happen we can hope to be skillful in moving things to the better direction. If we can see early on that we're not likely to be successful at redirecting attention later, it can be a good idea to pre-establish a contract so we'll have something to lean on when it comes time to ask for a pause or when we interrupt. In this episode I mention an earlier blog piece on the same subject of establishing and leaning on the contact which you can read here.

Play Episode 41 Here The clarity of our feedback is key. From timing, to amount, to directness and indirectness and so much more, the "correct feedback" matters most in a distressed nervous system full of noise and confusion. We can't, and shouldn't, expect ourselves to be perfect. We can hope to continually get closer and clearer at reflecting "the right direction" appropriately. Here's a completely sideways story to help you think about the clarity of your feedback.

Play Episode 40 Here We're going to make mistakes. It's a fact of the complexity of our work. Fortunately, as part of the learning process mistakes are profoundly helpful. Let's pay attention to them. “There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes” - Richard Buckminster Fuller

Certainly it's not only so that we'll give our clients the feeling of being in an interrogation. We ask all those questions for multiple reasons, the most important being that they help us direct attention without telling our clients what to do. This is a borrowed episode from a chapter in my Guide to the SE Language. You can learn more about this Guide to the SE Language below.

Play Episode 38 Here Let's face it. This stuff is massively complicated. Anyone who is going to get good at it is going to need to experiment and try new things on. You know, risk making mistakes! I think we can do that.

Play Episode 37 Here Closing this mini-series on Choice Points with a brief discussion on choosing when to go to sleep and other - outside of the session space - opportunities to elect for options that are more helpful to our biology.

Play Episode 36 Here To allow invite an involuntary experience with allowance or to wait and develop the attention more before doing so? That's the choice point behind the slightly tacky phrase Observational Sufficiency. You know, whether they're "paying enough attention."

Play Episode 35 Here The ease and completeness with which a person can exit the interior experience (Vortexes) and return to Orientation points to several different directions within this choice point and suggest what to do next. At least that's one way to see it: like coming to a choice point with multiple trails leading off from it and the degree and ease of Orientation helps name which path to go down.

On the deactivation/discharge side of a wave or arousal cycle, it's a good idea to be watching out for the choice point of whether we should "stay inside" or "get the attention out" as in continuous and intermittent tracking.

Play Episode 33 Here Our sessions often contain multiple rounds of activation cycles, each of which has a beginning, middle and end. Before going on to the next "round" it's a good idea to actively assess whether we should or not. This is a classic choice point.

Play Episode 32 Here The 1st in a mini-series on "choice points" in our sessions. First with a little review of these points of no return and what they signify followed by a discussion of the choice to allow freeze/immobility or to try to redirect out of it (before it comes on). I mention John Muir's adventures with the dog Stickeen. Here's a link to the Stickeen story. It's lovely.

Play Episode 31 Here Sharing a simple personal reflection on just how international the SE learning community has become. Good to remember that we're not alone.

Play Episode 30 Here An unappologetic peptalk for the SEP's out there who are looking to improve their confidence when needing to direct or redirect their client's attention. The Super Hero Pose might help.