When EMDR Met My Body

On trauma activation, the window of tolerance, and what happens when a practitioner becomes the client

Starry by Karina Da Paixao Teixeira

I couldn't write for three weeks. For three weeks, the part of me that makes things went quiet. Not writer's block. The right brain, shut down by trauma activation. The system had other priorities.

Three weeks without words, without painting, without the thing that has been my most reliable form of regulation since I can remember. If you have read my previous reflections, you know what that means for me. Writing and painting are not hobbies. They are how I think. How I stay in the present. How I know I am still here.

EMDR took them from me. At least for a while.

I want to be careful about how I say what follows. I am a counsellor. I understand trauma treatment. I know the research on EMDR, I know Shapiro's theoretical framework, I know the ISSTD guidelines on dissociative presentations. I went into those sessions informed.

And still. What I experienced in the weeks that followed was not integration. It was rupture.

I am writing today partly because I am back. And partly because I think this needs to be said.

What I believe about trauma work

My view, formed through clinical practice and through living inside complex trauma, is this: working with trauma does not mean immersion in trauma. It does not mean the deliberate evocation of traumatic memories as a first move, or a fast move, or sometimes any move at all.

What it means, most of the time, is gradual and indirect approach. As Judith Herman understood and wrote about decades ago, it is fundamental to revisit traumatic experience from a position of safety in the present. That word, safety, is not administrative. It is neurobiological. Without it, the work cannot land. And it is the most precious word in my life.

Complex trauma presents with somatisation and dissociation, and both of these matter clinically and personally. Somatisation is not performance. It is the unconscious, genuine neurological consequence of chronic threat exposure: dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system and the HPA axis. The body carries the imprint of what the mind could not fully process. Muscle tension. Chronic pain. Visceral sensitivity. Altered interoception.

Dissociation is the psyche's defence against what is otherwise unbearable. A disruption of consciousness, memory, identity, and perception. And in complex trauma, the kind that begins early, before there is language for it, before there is any framework to hold it, dissociation is not a symptom that sits alongside the presentation. It is the architecture.

This is where EMDR, which I respect as a modality, requires a more honest conversation.

What Shapiro understood, and what I want to add

According to Shapiro's theoretical framework, traumatic memories are frozen in an unprocessed state, stored with their original affect, sensation, and distorted cognition intact. They cannot connect with the adaptive memory networks that would allow integration: the contextualising, the neutralising, the sense that this happened then, and I am here now.

Bilateral stimulation, the eye movements, the tapping, the auditory tones, is proposed to support dual attention. The person holds the traumatic material in mind while remaining anchored in the present. This dual awareness is what distinguishes EMDR from simple immersion, in theory. The adaptive information processing model is genuinely elegant.

But I want to bring awareness to something the research does not always foreground. EMDR does involve deliberate activation of traumatic memory. And for clients with significant dissociation, that activation, without sufficient stabilisation, without an adequately wide window of tolerance, without Phase 1 work that has actually done what it needs to do, can produce something other than integration.

It can produce rupture.

The ISSTD guidelines are clear on this: caution is required with highly dissociative clients, not because EMDR is immersion per se, but because trauma activation without sufficient stabilisation can trigger dissociative switching and destabilisation. A client with significant affect dysregulation, a fragile therapeutic alliance, or a narrow window of tolerance is not yet a candidate for trauma activation work. The question is not which modality to use. The question is whether Phase 2 is appropriate at all. EMDR's sophistication does not bypass that assessment.

I need to say something else here. Something I am still working out in supervision.

I may bring bias to this reflection. I am personally addressing pre-verbal trauma with active PTSD symptoms. I am the client I am writing about, at least in part. And EMDR has been a genuinely difficult experience for me, one that has led to repeated episodes of splitting between the apparently normal part of daily functioning and the emotionally charged part, where my hypervigilance activates and fixes in trauma time.

I am trying not to drop out of EMDR therapy. But I am close.

What I know from the inside

As many people living with complex trauma know: you don't always know whether a memory is really a memory.

When you are a child, a young adult, you carry suppressed anger and a suspicious relationship with everything, but you don't truly know whether what you remember is the truth. It is so fragmented. All those flashing images. I have them while awake, and occasionally just before falling asleep. I have wondered, for as long as I can remember, how it happens to others, that unpredictable recollection of traumatic moments, arriving without warning in the middle of the day.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons I became a nurse and a psychotherapist. I believe I can read people's silent suffering in their eyes, in their physiology. Even when I don't want to see it. A mirror you want to avoid, because you don't want to think that others have had experiences like the ones that surface, out of nowhere, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.

In complex trauma, people live between two extremes. Hyperarousal: explosive anger, intense shame spirals, panic, emotional flooding, rapid escalation, difficulty self-soothing. And hypoarousal: emotional numbness, flat affect, disconnection, the inability to access or name feelings, anhedonia. The oscillation between these states is cruel. The worst of it is the unpredictability, which destabilises relationships and creates a pervasive distress that becomes its own significant source of shame.

I return again to Siegel's and Ogden's window of tolerance, because in complex trauma this window is often so narrow it is barely a window at all. Learning, reframing, connection, and integration are only possible when the client is within it. And here lies the core of my concern about premature trauma activation. Not about EMDR as a modality. About timing. About readiness. About the difference between a protocol that is theoretically sound and a client who is somatically not ready for what that protocol asks.

What the body knows before the mind catches up

When I look at what happens in complex trauma, there is a sequence. An overwhelming experience. A nervous system unable to cope or integrate. Dissociation that splits off the unbearable. Unprocessed affect stored somatically. And then body symptoms, dysregulated emotion, intrusive memories, all of which are, despite feeling unbearable, precious information.

They tell you that what happened, happened. The intrusive memories causing the splitting are not imagination. They are cues. The material is fragmented, emotionally and psychologically disorganised. But it is real.

Even as a mental health practitioner with knowledge and personal practice in self-regulation, I have struggled with emotional numbing, identity confusion, and amnesia for trauma material. All considered moderate signs of dissociation. I have supported others through mental health crises, professionally, steadily, and yet I find myself at another step of post-traumatic growth while it is almost unbearable.

You are not alone in this. I am trying to navigate a specific chapter of trauma work, and it seems impossible to simply switch off the defensive responses that are disturbing to both brain and mind. These responses are not failures. They are the system doing what it was built to do, in conditions it was built to handle.

The problem is that the danger is no longer present. The system has not received the update.

The silence before this sentence

I usually write every day. The last two weeks were impossible, following the EMDR sessions.

I call it the silent despair: you function through life, but it feels as though the darkness never quite lets you go. You hold it through the workday, through parenting, through the clinical hours where you are present for someone else's fragmentation. And then you get home and there is nothing left for your own.

What I know now, clinically and personally: I went into those sessions carrying decades of complex, relational, and developmental trauma with attachment disruption. I went with trust. But without adequate Phase 1 preparation. And what happened was that trauma activation outpaced stabilisation.

I know this. I knew it before I could write it here. But knowing something clinically and living it are two very different things.

The fact that I am writing today matters. That is what I want to say to you, if you are in the middle of it: the fact that you are still here, still trying to put words to it, still in the room with your own experience, that matters.

The part that is also structural

There is something I want to say about access, because I think it would be dishonest to leave it out.

Medicare's structure, the limited number of sessions, the expectation that things can be resolved in a handful of appointments, means that people like me are sometimes sent directly into trauma activation work without the stabilisation phase that should precede it. The assessment of readiness gets compressed. The preparation gets abbreviated. And then the person is left holding what got activated, without adequate support to contain it.

I am a single mother. An immigrant. Building a practice. A registered nurse, three or more days a week. These are not obstacles I am listing for sympathy. They are the full picture of what I am holding. And the irony of being someone who understands trauma treatment deeply, while being unable to access the version of it I actually need, is not lost on me.

EMDR has brought suppressed material to the surface. I believe that. I hope it is ultimately for the best. But as a client, I feel that whatever integration I had achieved through previous therapeutic work, these sessions have significantly disturbed it. Perhaps it is simply too much adverse experience for the nervous system to organise calmly. What remains good, and I am looking for what remains good, is that I am learning. The limitations and the possibilities. And that before long I hope to reflect from some distance, and evaluate with more clarity whether EMDR is genuinely safe for most complex trauma presentations.

I have many grounding tools. For the first time, they are not working.

And yet, when I am stuck, as a client, as a therapist, I find I am also curious. Because being stuck always means more learning. More reframing. More understanding of what the brain is trying to do and why.

The researchers say the goal is to increase integration and expand the window of tolerance, so the client no longer needs to fragment in order to survive the present moment. I believe that. I am living toward it.

So, if today is a day when you are thinking of giving up on your trauma work, or on therapy altogether: you are not alone. Feeling my own affect dysregulation, trying to calm my hyperarousal after a flashback, it is suffering. But it is also informative enough to allow me to hold this pain and observe my own inner experience with something approaching compassion.

That, for today, is enough.

With curiosity and care for your story,

Karina

If you're curious…

Herman, J. (1992). Trauma and Recovery. Basic Books.

Van der Hart, O., Nijenhuis, E.R.S., & Steele, K. (2006). The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization. Norton.

Shapiro, F. (2018). Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy: Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

ISSTD (2011). Guidelines for treating dissociative identity disorder in adults, third revision. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 12(2), 115–187.

When the Body Remembers What the Mind Cannot Reach

On somatosensory approaches to trauma, and why the body has to be part of the conversation

Rose in Solitude by Karina Da Paixao Teixeira

I am writing a book on intrusive memories. It may become a fictional autobiography about my traumas and my ongoing experiences of disturbing recollection of fragmented memories from childhood. It has to be fictional, here and there, because my perpetrators are alive. In my own journey to survival, I became an artist, a registered nurse and a therapist. So, I have a theory that trauma can also lead you to a meaningful life, even when confusion still comes.

I have been studying Experiential Reframing and other somatosensory approaches because I see effectiveness on both chronic psychosocial and existential trauma. Before I go further, it is worth being precise about what those two things actually are, because the distinction matters clinically.

Chronic psychosocial trauma is repeated relational harm that accumulates over time, within the systems a person depends on for safety. This is where childhood trauma occurs. No way to fight or flight. It includes emotional or physical abuse, neglect, domestic violence, community violence, prolonged bullying. What makes it particularly complex is that the harm is interpersonal and often comes from attachment figures, which means the nervous system cannot fully distinguish between the source of threat and the source of safety. The schemas that form around this kind of trauma tend to be deeply embedded because they were built slowly, reinforced repeatedly, and organised around survival within a relationship. Van der Kolk's work is useful here: the body encodes this kind of chronic exposure differently from a single event, often producing a diffuse, pervasive dysregulation rather than a clean trigger-response pattern.

Existential trauma is different. It refers to acute events that threaten life or bodily integrity. A car accident, an assault, a medical emergency, a natural disaster. The threat is sudden and external, and while the nervous system response is equally powerful, the event itself has a beginning and an end. There is often a clearer narrative around it. The cognitive and perceptual systems, while disrupted, are working with a bounded experience.

The key clinical distinction is this: chronic psychosocial trauma tends to produce character-level adaptations, what Jeffrey Young would call early maladaptive schemas, because the repeated experience shaped how the person came to understand themselves, others, and the world during development. It is much more than a scar. The imprint of fragmented memories built the architecture. Existential trauma, by contrast, tends to produce a rupture in a previously more stable sense of self and world. The person knew who they were before. The work is different in each case.

Why the body has to be part of it

Traumatic memory is primarily perceptual and somatic, not narrative. It is encoded during high cortisol states when the hippocampus is partially offline, so it does not get stored as a coherent story you can simply talk through. It gets stored as fragmented sensation, body states, and conditioned fear responses. You can narrate the event without touching the encoded experience.

This is the neurobiological reality: trauma memories are not stored in the prefrontal cortex, where rational thought lives. Trauma is visceral. It is stored in the body, in the experience of fight, flight, freeze, or submit. When signals are sent to the brain, often as a wrong prediction of threat, those memories are triggered without conscious awareness. The individual feels them physically, not intellectually.

This is why cognitive restructuring can fail to reach the implicit and nonverbal components of trauma. It is also why a significant number of clients drop out of exposure treatments. They cannot sustain the somatosensory weight of what gets activated in the retelling process, leaving past trauma alive and activated rather than moving toward resolution. Talk therapy is not enough. Not here.

Rather than entering through narrative and thinking downward into the body, somatosensory approaches enter through the body and work upward. The body is the gateway, not the destination.

Experiential Reframing and the somatosensory search

Rogers and White's research on Experiential Reframing is interesting in this context. Their somatosensory search approach makes particular sense for chronic trauma, where cognitive search tends to either miss the material entirely or land on the wrong thing. The body holds what the narrative cannot access.

Rather than asking someone to cognitively recall what happened, you ask them to feel their way back through the body's memory. That is a meaningful clinical distinction, and it aligns with van der Kolk, Porges's polyvagal work, and Ogden's sensorimotor approach. Trauma work in this frame might begin with psychoeducation, discussing with a client the neurobiology of trauma, how conditions and environment cause nervous system injuries, how encoding affects both memory and response. And crucially, resources are identified first: the successful strategies a client has already developed, before moving toward traumatic material. The client's own experience of coping becomes part of the treatment.

I say this not only as a clinician. Because of my own intrusive memories and flashbacks, I understand from the inside what Rogers and White describe: trauma as the result of poor integration between the cognitive and perceptual memory systems. That is not an abstract definition. It is something you live.

On resistance, and what Erickson understood

Cognitive Behavioural approaches help, but not always with clients who are presenting resistance. This is where I borrow from Ericksonian paradoxical interventions.

Symptom prescription: a person with insomnia is instructed to stay awake as long as possible. Restraining change: the therapist advises not to move too quickly. By removing the pressure, ambivalence decreases and motivation increases. In reframing, we change the meaning of the symptom without changing the fact. Anxiety becomes a system of alertness rather than a malfunction. Utilisation takes this further: the client's resistance itself becomes part of the therapeutic process. If a client is sceptical, that scepticism becomes part of the induction. Whatever the client brings is useful material.

Erickson also understood that strategic positioning and contradiction from the therapist can disrupt rigid patterns of thinking, creating a cognitive opening in which new responses can emerge.

Why does this work? Because, as Victor Carrión's work on Cue-Centered Therapy makes clear, PTSD feeds on avoidance. Paradoxical prescription removes the effort of suppression. And when a client chooses to produce a symptom on instruction, they demonstrate control over something they believed was uncontrollable. That shift, from helplessness to agency, is itself therapeutic. These techniques often bypass the conscious, critical mind and speak more directly to unconscious patterns. Erickson knew this. Posttraumatic growth has a way of teaching it too.

I want to be clear about something. These interventions are most effective when delivered within a trusting therapeutic relationship and calibrated carefully to the individual. Used clumsily or without sensitivity, they can feel manipulative. Erickson's genius was partly in his exceptional attunement to each person, which made techniques that look strange on paper feel natural and even obvious in the room. They have since influenced strategic therapy (Haley), brief therapy (MRI/Watzlawick), and narrative approaches, and remain a rich area of study.

This is food for thought, drawn from research, from practice as a counsellor and registered nurse, and from my own survival. We still need further substantial research on the neurobiology of trauma to establish Experiential Reframing's effectiveness with the rigour it deserves. But the direction feels right. The body has been trying to tell us something for a long time.

With curiosity and care for your story,

Karina

If you're curious...

Carrión, V. G. (2016). Cue-Centered Therapy for Youth Experiencing Posttraumatic Symptoms: A Structured, Multi-Modal Intervention. Oxford University Press.

Erickson, M. H. (1985). Life Reframing in Hypnosis. Irvington.

Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy. Norton.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation.

Norton.

Rogers, S. D., & White, S. L. (2017). Experiential reframing: A promising new treatment for psychosocial and existential trauma. Practice Innovations, 2(1), 27–38.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin.

Young, J. E., Klosko, J. S., & Weishaar, M. E. (2003). Schema Therapy: A Practitioner's Guide. Guilford Press.

What Depression Protects

On rumination, the loop that won’t stop, and the frustration of trying to reach someone who has stopped believing they can be reached

Hyperarousal by Karina Da Paixao Teixeira

As a counsellor working across inpatient mental health units and private practice, I have learned that depression is one of the most complex presentation to work with, clinically. Because it is persistent. Because it returns. Because it organises itself around beliefs that feel, to the person carrying them, like simply the truth.

I want to write today about a frustration I feel in this work, one I think is worth naming rather than managing quietly. It is the frustration of sitting with someone who has been on medication for years, who is compliant, who is trying, and whose thinking is still caught in the same loop. Still returning to the same guilt. Still unable to leave the house without someone beside them. Still, after all this time, without hope.

As a therapist, this frustrates me. I am frustrated with what is being missed.

I want to explore what that is.

The system I work in

For context: in the mental health units I have worked in, the window for inpatient treatment is typically 21 days. In a private hospital setting, a multidisciplinary team has that window to help a person stabilise, begin to build capacity, and leave with something more than a revised prescription.

Twenty-one days is both a lot and very little, depending on what the person is carrying.

What I encounter most often in these presentations is not a person who hasn’t tried. It is a person who has been compliant with medication for years, sometimes decades, and whose dysfunctional thinking is still present, still organising their experience, still shaping what feels possible and what doesn’t. The biological treatment is addressing the neurotransmitter imbalance. Something else is not moving.

If the chemistry is being treated, what is maintaining the depression?

A case I keep thinking about

I want to tell you about someone I’ll call Anna.

Anna had not left her house without her husband in two years. She came into hospital following a deterioration that was visible in her body as much as her mind. Cognitive slowing. Psychomotor slowness. A quality of hopelessness that is different from sadness, more total, more certain of itself. She had been on antidepressants for a long time. They had not been enough.

Her history was one of profound early loss. A mother who was absent through repeated hospitalisation. A father who was abusive. From a very young age, she had functioned as her own parent, and in doing so had built a particular internal architecture: the belief that her needs were too much, that love was conditional, that the only safety available was the kind she could secure through vigilance and control.

That architecture had been running quietly for decades. The depression was not separate from it. The depression was, in a real sense, its current expression.

What struck me in working with Anna was how organised her suffering was. The rumination was not random. It returned, again and again, to the same beliefs. The same guilt. The same sense that she had failed in ways she could not quite name. This is what I mean when I say depression has an architecture underneath it. The thoughts are not symptoms so much as the structure speaking.

Why medication is not enough here, and what the research actually says

Aaron Beck understood something important early in his work on depression. The symptoms, the low mood, the fatigue, the withdrawal, were not the problem itself. They were the surface. Underneath was a structure: a set of beliefs about the self, the world, and the future that had become rigid, distorted, and self-confirming.

The depressed person does not just feel bad. They feel bad because of what they believe. And what they believe, they have believed with quiet certainty for a very long time.

This distinction matters clinically. Antidepressants work on the amygdala, our threat detection system, dampening the intensity of the alarm signal. That is genuinely useful. The person becomes available for the work that actually needs to happen. But the prefrontal cortex, where meaning is made, where the self reflects on itself, where the beliefs generating the depression actually live, that is where psychotherapy works. And they are not the same place.

A 2023 meta-analysis of over 52,000 participants, the largest of its kind, found that psychotherapy is equally effective as medication in the short term, and significantly more effective over time. I think medication does not build anything.

Medication removes a symptom. Psychotherapy installs a capacity.

The relapse rates on medication discontinuation are two to three times higher than for those who have also done the psychological work. I am not surprised by this. You cannot medicate a belief.

What rumination is actually doing

This is where I want to slow down, because I think rumination is often misunderstood as a symptom to suppress rather than a signal worth investigating.

Rumination is organised. It is loyal. It returns to the same beliefs because those beliefs are doing something, holding something in place that the system has decided must be held.

In Anna’s case, the guilt she carried about an inheritance dispute was not arbitrary. It activated a much older schema about not deserving care, about receiving love being dangerous. The rumination was, in a distorted and exhausting way, an act of loyalty to something. A vigilance that made sense once, in a childhood where not being vigilant had consequences.

Jeffrey Young’s schema therapy framework gives us language for this. The core schemas formed in early life, emotional deprivation, abandonment, defectiveness, vulnerability, these are not distortions to be corrected so much as conclusions that made sense given what a child experienced. The problem is not that they formed. The problem is that they never got updated.

Empathic confrontation is the term used in schema therapy for what is required here. Not confrontation in the sense of challenge or argument. Confrontation in the sense of gently, persistently, with warmth, refusing to collude with the schema’s version of reality. Chipping away, as I tend to think of it. Not breaking. Chipping. Slowly, carefully, over time.

The instinct when someone is in the loop of rumination is to interrupt it. But the more effective question is: what is this loop protecting? What does the system believe will happen if the certainty is released?

What the body holds that the mind cannot always reach

I have been reading Payne, Levine and Crane-Godreau on somatic experiencing, and something in it connects to what I observe in the room.

Levine’s work argues that trauma and chronic stress are not primarily psychological. They are a dysregulation of the body’s core response network, subcortical, autonomic, limbic. The nervous system under threat encodes the experience not as a story but as sensation, posture, the particular quality of readiness or collapse that becomes the body’s baseline.

This is why people can understand their depression intellectually, trace the patterns, name the beliefs, and still wake at three in the morning with a heaviness that does not respond to any of that knowledge. The story has been processed. The body has not received the memo.

For Anna, this meant that the cognitive work had to be accompanied by the body noticing something different. Not just thinking differently. Experiencing differently.

The walks outside the hospital

I want to tell you about the graduated exposure work we did with Anna, because it is the most concrete example I have of what I mean.

Anna had not left the building without her husband. The anticipatory catastrophising was total. Something bad will happen. I will lose control. I will not be able to manage.

We started with very small steps. And then she went for walks outside the hospital grounds. Not because the anxiety wasn’t there. It was there. The hyperarousal was present, the expectation of panic. The work was learning to stay with that experience rather than flee it. To discover, incrementally, that the feeling was survivable. That she could tolerate what she had believed she could not.

Each time she returned from a walk, something had shifted slightly. We don't find changes on her beliefs, yet. In her evidence. In what her own experience was beginning to tell her about herself.

This is what behavioural experiments do that cognitive restructuring alone cannot. They bypass the argument between the rational mind and the belief. They put the body in a situation and let it discover something new.

After many walks, she became confident in her own ability to self-regulate. That confidence did not come from thinking. It came from doing, from the nervous system accumulating a different kind of evidence.

Giovanni Liotti’s work on disorganised attachment and the therapeutic relationship is relevant here too. For someone like Anna, whose early attachment figures were also sources of fear and harm, the therapeutic relationship itself becomes part of the intervention. The experience of being in a relationship that is safe, that holds, that does not withdraw when things become difficult, is not incidental to the treatment. It is the treatment.

What I am still learning

I want to say something about rumination that I don’t have fully resolved.

The paradox of suppression is well established: the more we try not to think a thought, the more present it becomes. The standard approach, rumination postponement, scheduled worry time, creating distance from the loop without demanding it stop, helps. But I find the breaking of the rumination loop one of the more complex problems in this work, and I want to say that honestly.

What I observe is that the loop tends to break not through suppression or through direct challenge, but through the gradual development of a different relationship with the thoughts. The thoughts become less sticky not when the person stops having them, but when the thoughts stop feeling like facts. When there is enough space between the person and the belief that they can observe it rather than be entirely inside it.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy points in this direction. You are not the thought. The thought is something that passes through.

That shift, from identification with the thought to observation of it, is slow. It does not follow a straight line. And I say this from both sides of the therapeutic relationship: there is no quick fix here. But progress can happen in a shorter time than people expect, if the intervention is targeting the right level.

Why I keep studying this

I have seen cases of genuine recovery from depression that everyone, including the person, had stopped believing was possible. I have also seen people give up on their lives. Both realities stay with me.

The frustration I feel when I sit with someone who has been on medication for years and is still in the loop, is not frustration with them. It is a kind of urgency that I have come to think of as part of the work. It keeps me reading. It keeps me returning to the research. It keeps me asking what else is possible, what I might be missing, what intervention might reach what the previous ones haven’t.

Depression is not a simple problem. It does not have a single cause or a single solution. But I believe strongly, and the research increasingly confirms, that the architecture underneath the depression is where the work needs to land. The beliefs that were formed, the schemas that organise the present through the lens of the past, the body that learned to carry what the mind could not name.

That is where the heaviness lives. And that is where something can, slowly, begin to shift.

If you recognise this loop, the one that returns at three in the morning, the beliefs that feel like facts, the sense that the life you are living is not quite yours, I want you to know that the loop is not a permanent feature of who you are. It is a pattern that was learned. And what was learned can, with the right conditions and the right support, begin to be updated.

The painting above is Hyperarousal, one of my watercolours. The forms are in motion, distinct and restless, nothing settled into background yet. That is what this work looks like from the inside of it.

With curiosity and care for your story,

Karina

If you’re curious…

Beck, A. T. (1979). Cognitive Therapy of Depression. Guilford Press.

Cuijpers, P. et al. (2023). Cognitive behaviour therapy vs. control conditions, other psychotherapies, pharmacotherapies and combined treatment for depression: a comprehensive meta-analysis including 409 trials with 52,702 patients. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, 52(1), 1–25.

Gautam, M. et al. (2020). Cognitive behavioral therapy for depression. Indian Journal of Psychiatry, 62(S2), S223–S229.

Liotti, G. (2012). Disorganized attachment and the therapeutic relationship with people in shattered states. In J. Yellin & K. White (Eds.), Shattered States: Disorganised Attachment and Its Repair. Taylor & Francis.

Payne, P., Levine, P. A., & Crane-Godreau, M. A. (2015). Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 93.

Voderholzer, U. et al. (2024). Enduring effects of psychotherapy, antidepressants and their combination for depression. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 15, 1415905.

Young, J. E., Klosko, J. S., & Weishaar, M. E. (2003). Schema Therapy: A Practitioner’s Guide. Guilford Press.

Young, J. E., & Klosko, J. S. (1994). Reinventing Your Life. Plume. (If you’re looking for a place to begin understanding schema patterns in your own life, this is an accessible and genuinely useful starting point.)

The Fear Beneath the Ritual

On OCD, uncertainty, and what becomes possible when we name what is really happening

Finding Hope by Karina Da Paixao Teixeira

There is something that happens in the body before the ritual begins.

Before the checking, the counting, the returning to make sure. Before the thought that arrives uninvited and refuses to leave. Before all of it, there is a sensation. Urgent, relentless, impossible to reason with. Most people who live with OCD know this sensation intimately. Many have spent years trying to make it stop.

We call it anxiety. And we are not wrong. But there is a question I keep returning to in my clinical work, one that I think changes something important about how we understand what is actually happening.

What if the root is not anxiety? What if, beneath the anxiety, there is something older and more specific?

What if the root is fear.

Anxiety and fear are not the same thing

This distinction matters more than it might initially seem.

Anxiety is diffuse. It spreads across situations, across time, across possibilities. It is the hum of threat that colours everything without always having a precise object.

Fear is different. Fear has a target. It is the nervous system’s response to something it has learned is dangerous, whether or not that danger is real in the present moment. Fear says: this is the thing. This is what we must not let happen.

In OCD, that thing is usually uncertainty itself.

Chris Brewin’s dual representation theory, which I wrote about in my previous Reflection on intrusive memories, helps us understand why certain fears become lodged in the nervous system rather than processed and filed away. The same mechanism that keeps traumatic memories alive in the body operates in OCD. The amygdala, our threat detection system, has learned that uncertainty equals danger. And it responds with everything it has.

The compulsion, then, is not irrational behaviour. It is the nervous system’s most logical solution to an intolerable feeling. If I check one more time, I will know. If I repeat this sequence, the fear will ease. If I can be certain, I will be safe.

And it works. Briefly. Which is exactly why it continues.

What the ritual is protecting

I want to say something here that I think gets lost in most clinical descriptions of OCD.

The fear is not the enemy.

It is a protector. A part of the self that learned, somewhere along the way, that uncertainty was dangerous. That not knowing was not safe. That vigilance was necessary for survival. This part is not broken. It is loyal. It is doing exactly what it was shaped to do.

The compulsion is an act of loyalty to that frightened part. And before we can ask someone to give it up, I think we have to honour what it has been trying to do.

When I sit with clients who carry OCD, what I find most useful is not to fight the fear or to talk them out of it. It is to turn toward it with genuine curiosity. To ask: what is this part of you trying to protect? What does it believe will happen if the certainty is not achieved? What is the original wound beneath the ritual?

These are not easy questions. But they are worth asking. Because when the fear is finally seen, really seen, not as an enemy to be defeated but as a signal worth understanding, something begins to shift.

The joy of a different relationship

There is something that becomes possible when you stop treating your own complexity as a problem.

We are not simple. We are not supposed to be. The parts of us that developed compulsive patterns, intrusive thoughts, ritualised behaviour, these parts were responding to something real. They deserve to be met with the same compassion we would offer anyone who learned the wrong lesson under difficult conditions.

When a client begins to turn toward their fear with curiosity rather than combat, something opens. Not immediately. Not linearly. But gradually, the investigation itself becomes interesting. The question shifts from “why am I like this” to “what is this telling me about myself.” And that shift, from self-judgment to self-curiosity, is where something genuinely new becomes possible.

This is what I mean when I say that psychological exploration can be a source of joy. Not because the work is easy. But because knowing yourself, really knowing yourself, is one of the most meaningful things a human being can do.

The fear beneath the ritual is not your enemy. It is an invitation. To look. To understand. To meet the parts of yourself that have been working very hard, for a very long time, to keep you safe.

They are worth knowing.

This drawing is the source of the pattern I used in my previous Reflection. The original before the repetition. That felt right for a post about what lives beneath compulsive behaviour, something fluid and alive, waiting to be recognised.

With curiosity and care for your story,

Karina

If you’re curious...

Brewin, C. R. & Holmes, E. A. (2003). Psychological theories of posttraumatic stress disorder. Clinical Psychology Review, 23(3), 339–376.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Penguin.

Abramowitz, J. S. et al. (2023). Cognitive-behavioral therapy for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 46(1), 167–180.

Eisenbeck, N. et al. (2024). Intolerance of uncertainty as a cognitive vulnerability for obsessive-compulsive disorder. PMC.

Why Some Memories Refuse to Fade

On trauma, the body, and the strange persistence of the past

Intrusive Memories by Karina Da Paixao Teixeira

It arrives without warning.

Not as a thought, exactly. More like a shift in the room. A smell that doesn’t belong to the present moment. A tightening in the chest before the mind has caught up with what caused it. A flash of image, not quite a picture, not quite a feeling, that seems to come from nowhere and land everywhere at once.

If you have experienced this, you already know what I am describing. And you may also know the particular confusion that follows: the sense that something is happening that the rational mind cannot fully account for. You were fine a moment ago. And now you are not. And there is no clean explanation for the distance between those two states.

This is what an intrusive memory feels like from the inside. Not a recollection. An arrival.

I have been sitting with this question for a long time, both as a clinician and as a person who knows this experience from the inside. There is something in the clinical literature that begins to explain what is happening, and something beyond the literature that I keep returning to, something harder to name but closer to the truth of what I observe in sessions and in myself.

I want to try to put both of those things together here.

Why these memories are different

Most of our memories behave themselves. They sit in the past where we left them. When we recall them, we know we are recalling. There is a felt sense of distance, a recognition that this happened then and we are here now. The memory is a story we can tell.

Traumatic memory does not work this way.

Chris Brewin’s dual representation theory offers one of the most useful frameworks I have encountered for understanding why. The theory proposes that traumatic memories are encoded differently from ordinary autobiographical memories. Ordinary memories are stored in a way that allows for narrative recall. They can be placed in time, contextualised, told as a story with a beginning and an end. Traumatic memories, particularly those formed under conditions of extreme fear or overwhelm, are stored differently. They are encoded as sensation, image, and fragment. They live in the body and the senses rather than in the storytelling mind.

This is why they do not feel like the past. They feel like now.

Bessel van der Kolk describes how the brain under trauma encodes experience in the sensory and emotional systems rather than in the narrative centres. The hippocampus, which normally helps us place experience in time and context, is compromised under extreme stress. The amygdala, our threat detection system, encodes the fear directly, raw, uncontextualised, ready to fire again the moment a similar cue appears. The memory does not come with a timestamp. It arrives as if it is still happening.

Recent research in Nature Human Behaviour confirms what many trauma survivors already know from lived experience: intrusive memories are specifically linked to fear rather than to emotion in a general sense. This distinction matters more than it might initially appear. The fear is not a response to remembering. The fear is the memory. And that changes what we might need to do about it.

What I notice in the room

I want to be careful here, because I am aware that I am moving from research into something more personal. But I think this is where the most honest thinking lives.

In my clinical work, and in my own experience, intrusive memories rarely announce themselves as memories. They announce themselves as present-tense distress. A client will describe a sudden wave of panic in a completely ordinary situation, on a train, in a supermarket, hearing a particular tone of voice. They will often say, with a kind of bewildered shame: I don’t know why that happened. Nothing was wrong.

But something was right. Something in the environment matched a stored fragment, a sensory detail, a quality of light, a sound, a feeling of powerlessness, and the nervous system responded accordingly. Not to the present moment, but to the past one that the body still cannot quite file away.

This is not irrationality. This is the nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect you from something it learned was dangerous. The problem is that it learned the lesson under conditions that made precise encoding impossible. So it stored the danger signal without storing enough context to know when the danger has passed.

What looked like a malfunction is actually a faithful record. A record that has simply never been updated.

The body keeps the account

I am struck, in this work, by how little language has to do with it.

People can talk about their trauma for years. They can narrate it coherently, understand it intellectually, even make meaning of it, and still have their bodies respond as if the event is ongoing. The story has been processed. The body has not received the memo.

Peter Levine writes about trauma as incomplete action. The body prepared to fight or flee, and then could not, and the energy of that preparation was stored rather than discharged. The memory is not just a psychological record. It is an unfinished physical event.

This is why so many people find that understanding their trauma is not enough. They can explain what happened. They can see the patterns it created. They can trace the ways it has shaped their life. And still, without warning, the body takes them back.

The work, then, is not only cognitive. It is not only about making sense of the story. It is about helping the nervous system learn, slowly and with great patience, that the danger is over. That the body can put down what it has been holding.

That is slow work. It is non-linear. It requires more than words.

Sometimes that is what this work looks like, fragments finding each other, slowly, until something whole begins to emerge.

With curiosity and care for your story,

Karina

If you’re curious...

Brewin, C. R. (2001). A cognitive neuroscience account of posttraumatic stress disorder and its treatment. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 39(4), 373–393.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Penguin.

Levine, P. (2015). Trauma and Memory. North Atlantic Books.

Varma, M. M. et al. (2024). A systematic review and meta-analysis of experimental methods for modulating intrusive memories. Nature Human Behaviour, 8(10), 1968–1987.

What Integration Actually Means

On timing, readiness, and what it means when the body finally decides it is safe enough to feel

Borbo Pattern by Karina Da Paixao Teixeira

There is a word that gets used a lot in therapy circles. Integration. Therapists say it the way architects say structure, the way nurses say stable. It sounds clinical. Contained. Like something that happens on a whiteboard with arrows pointing in the right direction.

I have been thinking about what it actually means.

Integration, in the way I understand it, is not a technique. It is not a stage you complete and move past. It is something closer to what happens when parts of you that have been living in separate rooms finally begin to hear each other through the walls.

Daniel Siegel offers an image I find more honest than most. He talks about the difference between a fruit salad and a smoothie. Integration is not blending everything into one indistinguishable thing. It is allowing each part to remain itself, distinct, while also being in relation to the others. The apple does not become the grape. But they share the bowl.

I think about this when I sit with clients who carry childhood trauma into their adult lives. The child is still there. Not metaphorically. In the vocabulary they use when they are flooded. In the posture they take when they feel cornered. In the way they go very quiet, or very loud, or completely elsewhere. The adult consciousness has formed around the child, not through it. And at some point, the work is to let those two meet.

Recovery from trauma is non-linear. Most people who have lived it already know this, even if no one has said it to them directly. You do not move from wounded to healed in a straight line. You move sideways, and sometimes backwards, and sometimes you are fine for months and then something small undoes you completely and you do not understand why.

Iris Brooke Gildea, a survivor, poet and therapist whose autoethnographic research on flashbacks and poetry I find deeply resonant, describes what she calls the “emergency stage.” The period when intrusive memories surface with force, when the survivor is no longer certain what is real memory and what is imagination, when the body seems to be working against itself.

I saw this often in psychiatric wards. The flashbacks that made it almost impossible to stay in a body. The chronic effort of trying to remain in reality. The metabolic cost of years of unaddressed trauma showing up in blood pressure, in sleep, in the immune system. It is not worth it. I say this as a registered nurse and as a counsellor.

But here is what I have come to believe, and what I try to hold alongside clients when this stage arrives: the emergency is not an attack. It is a signal. The nervous system, in its strange and demanding way, is saying: you are ready now. The adult consciousness has arrived. Something in the system has updated, and it is asking you to look at what was stored before you were able to look.

As cruel as that sounds, there is something almost tender in it.

A case that stays with me. A survivor whose own trauma began very early in childhood, before there was language for it or any framework to hold it. For most of her adult life, the memories had been organised into something manageable. Not resolved. Organised. She described certain images from childhood as things she had always assumed were just “weird imagination.” The shaking that came and went. The nightmares that never fully left.

Then her own child reached the age at which the abuse had begun.

Something activated. Flashbacks arrived. Panic attacks. An overwhelming protectiveness that became its own kind of weight, overreactive and exhausting, extending into a parenting approach that carried all the vigilance of what had not yet been processed. The child she was trying to protect was hers. But the fear was older than that.

This is what the body does. It remembers the age, even when the mind has found other ways to file things. And when the calendar arrives at that number again, something in the system responds.

What looked like breakdown was actually the beginning of readiness.

The integration, when it begins, does not feel like resolution. It feels more like recognition. The adult self turns toward the younger self, not to fix it or silence it, but to say: I see you. I can hold this now. You do not have to carry it alone anymore.

That shift, from being flooded to being able to witness, is where something begins to change. Victor Carrión’s cue-centred approach, which I have used with both young people and adults, offers a way of reframing intrusive memories not as threats to be suppressed, but as cues. Information from a part of the self that is ready to be addressed. When we receive the imagery that way, something in the nervous system begins to settle. The nightmares become less frequent. The panic becomes less total. Not because the memory is gone, but because it has been met.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy points in a similar direction. Rather than fighting what arises, we learn to let it be present without letting it govern. We make room. We do not become the feeling. We hold it.

The connection to others, for survivors, can feel like it happens through glass. Even those who appear highly functional, who hold jobs and relationships and look, from the outside, completely fine. There is often a distance operating beneath the surface. Whether that is dissociation in a clinical sense, or something softer, a self-protective spacing that made perfect sense once and has simply not yet been updated. That question sits at the back of my mind often. Not as a clinical question, exactly. More like a human one.

Integration is not a destination. It is what happens when we stop asking the different parts of ourselves to pretend the others do not exist. When the child is allowed to be part of the adult story, rather than hidden underneath it.

It is slow. It is non-linear. It asks a great deal.

And it is, I think, the realest thing therapy can offer.

The painting above is Borbo Pattern. The same motif that began as a butterfly mid-dissolution appears here multiplied, interlocking, each form distinct and yet inseparable from the whole. That is what integration looks like to me.

With curiosity and care for your story,

Karina

If you’re curious…

Brooke Gildea, I. J. (2020). The emergency stage: flashbacks and poetry: an autoethnographic approach. Journal of Poetry Therapy, 33(2), 110–122.

Carrión, V. G. (2019). Cue-Centered Therapy for Youth Experiencing Posttraumatic Symptoms. Stanford University Press.

Siegel, D. J. (2010). Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation. Bantam Books.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Penguin.

Tell Your Truth in a Fiction Novel

On narrative therapy and the courage to rewrite from the inside

Her Novel by Karina Da Paixao Teixeira

Today I reflect on cognitive reframing, narrative therapy, and fictional autobiography as a therapeutic tool. Writing your story from a distance, especially in a fictional or third-person frame, is a well-researched pathway for trauma processing. The narrative distance helps the nervous system engage with complex and difficult material without being flooded by overwhelming somatic experiences. When you write, you are out of automatic mode. The automatic mode that Daniel Kahneman called, in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, "System 1" of the cognitive architecture of the brain. Creating a story, even one about your trauma, requires the activation of Kahneman's "System 2": the effortful and deliberate part of your brain that demands attention and mental energy.

I remember a patient I was seeing at a mental health unit who would shake non-stop, suffering from prolonged grief after losing his wife. The doctors were worried about cognitive deterioration. I introduced a few games with him, and since we started playing, the shaking stopped completely. I administered the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) to collect evidence, and he did not make a single mistake. No signs of deterioration in cognitive function, orientation, language or memory. I repeated the same approach with war veterans. We played games of creating stories, and again and again, people emerged from their suffering and physical symptoms of trauma. I understood that relief comes when we engage the creative, meaning-making part of the brain.

What if you didn't have to tell it as fact?

The woman in this artwork, surrounded by colour and growth, is my attempt to show what I believe about how narrative therapy works. The invitation is to write your story from the inside. This illustration came to me while I was reading How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee, a collection of essays about truth, memory, and the self that is brave enough to put itself on the page. It is not official research, but I have been learning that the story we carry doesn't need to be told as fact in order to begin the healing process. It is not about avoiding the truth, but finding a form that can hold the truth without collapsing under its weight.

Narrative therapy was developed by Michael White and David Epston, and it invites us to understand that we are not our problems. We are the authors of our own stories. Authors. Do you see the shift in perspective? It is about giving a different ending, or at least, a different relationship to the beginning. I believe that cognitive reframing works in a similar direction, because when we look at a painful memory or a difficult belief from a slight distance, when we step outside it even briefly, the nervous system gets a moment of relief. The memory, which has been living in the present tense, begins to find its place in the past. It becomes something that happened, rather than something that is always happening.

This is what I mean when I say: tell your truth in a fiction novel.

James Pennebaker spent decades studying expressive writing and what happens when people write about difficult experiences. What he found, consistently, across many studies, is that expressive writing reduces physiological stress, calms the nervous system, and over time, decreases the intrusive quality of painful memories. The body responds. Not because the writing fixes anything, but because giving form to what has been formless is itself a kind of relief. Peter Levine, who has written so beautifully about trauma and the body, describes how traumatic memory is often stored not as a clear narrative but as sensation, image, fragment. Bessel van der Kolk, whose work I return to often, reminds us that what we cannot yet say in words, we carry in the flesh.

And this is where poetry, fiction, image, where art enters as something more than metaphor. It enters as a genuine therapeutic tool. Because art doesn't need linearity. It doesn't need a beginning, middle and end. It can hold the fragment. It can be the fragment, and still make something whole.

Iris Brooke Gildea, a survivor, poet and therapist whose autoethnographic research on flashbacks and poetry I find deeply resonant, describes the act of writing through trauma not as constructing a cohesive narrative, but as becoming the author-witness of your own experience. That small shift, from being inside the storm to also watching it, naming it, giving it colour, is where something begins to change.

I recognise this from my own practice and lived experience. Not clinically. From the inside.

The fictional distance is not a lie

When I first encountered the idea of fictional autobiography as a therapeutic form, something settled in me. The idea that you can write toward your truth through a character who shares your history, your body, your fear, but has a different name, a different face, enough distance that the nervous system doesn't flood, felt like both a creative and a clinical insight at once.

Alexander Chee does this. Many of the writers I admire most do this. They tell the truth slant, as Emily Dickinson once said. And in that slant, they find something truer than a direct account might have reached. This is not avoidance. Avoidance keeps the story locked. This is an approach, careful, creative, at a pace the body can tolerate.

When we write in third person, or in fiction, or in metaphor, we create what researchers call narrative distance. And that distance is not a lie. It is a way of staying in the room with something difficult long enough to begin to understand it.

As I have shared from my own experience as a counsellor, somatic symptoms, the body's way of carrying what the mind hasn't yet processed, can begin to soften through this kind of writing. Not always. Not for everyone. Not as a replacement for therapy. But as a companion to it, or sometimes as a beginning.

What this looks like in practice

It doesn't need to be beautiful. That is the first thing I would say.

It doesn't need to be coherent or literary or finished. Brooke Gildea wrote her way through her own emergency stage in coffee shops and on floors, in fragments and verse that broke every grammatical rule, and that fragmentation was the point. The disjointed form mirrored the disjointed experience. The writing didn't clean it up. It witnessed it. And witnessing, it turns out, is enough to begin.

I know this because I have done it myself. I write, I paint, I rewrite. I find myself, as I said in my first reflection, enchanted by my own system. Not because the system is perfect, but because it is mine. It emerged from listening to what my body and my creativity needed, rather than from following a formula.

I encourage the same for you. Not my system. Yours.

What form wants to come? A letter to your younger self, written in the third person? A story where she has a different name but your hands? A poem that doesn't rhyme and doesn't make complete sense and says something true anyway? A painting of the feeling, before the words for it arrive?

There is no wrong way to begin.

An invitation

If something in this reflection has stirred something in you, a memory, an image, a sentence that wants to be written, I invite you to give it five minutes. Not to fix anything. Not to produce anything. Just to begin.

You could write: She was the kind of person who… and see what follows. You could give her your history and a different name and let her speak. You might be surprised by what she has been waiting to tell you.

The painting above is Her Novel. A woman, close to the ground, writing in a field of wild colour. That is the invitation. Not upright and productive. Close to the earth, close to herself.

Writing anyway.

With curiosity and deep respect for your story,

Karina

If you're curious…

Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions. Guilford Press.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Levine, P. (1997). Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Penguin.

White, M., & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. Norton.

Brooke Gildea, I. J. (2020). The emergency stage: flashbacks and poetry: an autoethnographic approach. Journal of Poetry Therapy, 33(2), 110–122.

Chee, A. (2018). How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. Mariner Books.

Reframe Within Reflections

On the difference between surviving and self-realising

Morph by Karina Da Paixao Teixeira

Welcome to the calm disorganised chaos of my reflections. Please don't expect reflections as per scientific literature or medical framework. I do those too, but not here. This is a safe space for the exploration of self, and to bring empathy to the confusion, because I want to show and observe a process. The writing helps me with the discipline of ongoing evaluation and regulation.

Although based on multiple research papers, because I love reading them, what I write here is probably just my opinion, so take it as food for thought rather than clinical guidance. I am doing this because I have to do it. The same way I listen to the urge to draw or paint something, when I feel it, I have to do it. Counselling as a practitioner illuminates my curiosity for universal human experiences, and I will discuss what my heart wants to put into words.

This week, something surfaced in a conversation with a client that I keep returning to: the difference between surviving and self-realising. I believe in creativity as a way of processing and understanding, and I say that from both sides of the therapeutic relationship.

There are stages. First, you may act in response to trauma, always reacting in survival mode. But I don't really believe that it is all wrong with that. Because as we try to escape, sometimes we also build a meaningful life. By trying to leave a toxic environment behind, even if you don't know what you are doing, you can end up living in different countries, choosing challenge and growing. Later, when we are ready, we do the deeper work. The parts that have been keeping us from fully living our own story. I know it is confusing. That's why reflective thinking and creative practice help.

I have a rich background of professional experiences and adverse events, and I was encouraged by my own inner child to follow my interests with full power and courage. Architecture taught me structure and problem-solving. Nursing gave me practical resilience and the ability to stay emotionally regulated when complex problems arise. A life woven through art, fashion, and design has kept my creativity alive. I rebuilt myself in a country not my own, not once but many times.

These aren't credentials I list. They are the different survival modes I moved through. I believe that becoming a counsellor gave me language to everything I understood from the inside. And that language, that finally having words for the interior life, is part of what self-realisation feels like.

I read, I write, I draw, I paint, I rewrite, I read more, and I find myself enchanted by my own system. I could say this system was put in place as a goal a long time ago, but it is not true. Once, this system was part of a survival strategy. A way to survive childhood.

I listen to feelings and observe my flow, what makes me feel in a state of contentment and like myself, and more or less that is how I established a protective system. Protection for my mental and physical health. And I encourage clients to develop their own tools, because when it feels true to yourself, when you are not forcing, the change happens.

Change is not a clean line. People come to counselling carrying the weight of who they've been, uncertain about who they are becoming. That uncertainty is not a problem to fix. It is the investigation itself.

So, I invite you to meet the wonder, allow it, rather than living in judgment of it. It is worth it, your self-realisation.

We are transformation, morphing into something else. Beautiful imperfections.

The painting above is Morph, my own watercolour. The butterfly mid-dissolution, colours bleeding into each other, not quite one thing yet. That's the space this reflection lives in.

With curiosity and admiration of your emotional and cognitive exploration,

Karina