Come back home to your wholeness.
I help sensitive humans learn to tend to their inner experience, so they can have a more compassionate relationship with themselves and fulfilling relationships with others.
When we’re taught our sensitivity is a flaw, we’ll think we’re broken and need to be fixed. I believe there’s medicine in your sensitivity and that it’s not something to be seen as faulty. In fact, it can be your greatest strength when you change your relationship to it.
Maybe you’re struggling on an intrapersonal level with your self-esteem and confidence. Maybe you find yourself stuck in old coping patterns like emotional eating, the diet-binge cycle, over working or perfectionism. Maybe you feel disconnected from your soul path. Or, maybe you’re feeling challenged in your interpersonal relationships and want to deepen and discover more intimacy. Perhaps you want to get better at communication and repairing conflict, understanding boundaries and needs, or move through people pleasing or ambivalence. Most likely, the intrapersonal and interpersonal challenges are connected. You see, our sense of self and how we view other develops in relationship during our early developmental years.
I don’t see your coping patterns as something wrong with you, but something wise with good intentions. For most of us, we try to change and control these patterns with a top down approach. I like to bring curiosity to these parts of ourselves and get to know them bottom up. When we can bring curiosity, it often opens us up to learning more about the wisdom and gifts these patterns, strategies and parts of us hold. Often, it’s in not forcefully trying to change something, that it changes naturally. In MindBody approaches there’s a realization or assumption that “doing” does not aid or support a change process, where qualities of being, seeing, acknowledging, observing are more supportive of allowing change or creating conditions that support change.
“People have two needs: Attachment and authenticity. When authenticity threatens attachment, attachment trumps authenticity.”
~ Dr. Gabor Mate
Coping Strategies help us survive when we’re young, but prevent us from thriving as adults.
So many of our coping strategies are developed to help us maintain the attachment that Dr. Gabor Mate speaks of in his quote about attachment and authenticity. They are adaptive strategies that help us survive by maintaining connection when we’re young. As we become adults, they and how we relate to them, prevents us from being our most authentic self and creates a gap in who we are and how we show up. We might stay in these strategies because it’s the only way we know how to belong, yet it’s not true belonging when we have to abandon our core Self.
This creates an inner conflict and can prevent us from thriving. In parts work, these strategies are seen as protectors. All protectors have good intent and in my work, I support you in getting into right relationship with these parts of yourself and changing that relationship, rather than getting rid of. Through coaching, parts works and somatic work we learn how to relate to ourselves and parts differently. By including and integrating all parts of ourselves we can begin to close the gap from strategy to authentic self.
We can also learn how to bring this into our relationships as well. How to relate from honesty and vulnerability in our high stakes relationships. These are our closest relationships, which might include family, friends, partners, our children and our co-workers. I believe, as we learn to relate to our inner experience more compassionately, it supports us in the realm of relating to other differently as well. Whether, we need more empathy for other, or we need to be more firm in our boundaries and not let understanding of other lead to self-abandonment in the process, and all the nuance in between.
“We can never solve our lives. Life is not a thing that can be broken and then fixed. Life is a process, and we can never solve a process. We can only participate in this process, either consciously or unconsciously.”
—Bruce Tift
What is Somatic Coaching?
The Soma is the body, as perceived from within. Somatic coaching uses internal awareness to bring unknown parts of yourself and your experience into the known. Unlike talk coaching/therapy, we value the implicit information that might come through the body in the form of sensation, feelings, images, inner dialogue and/or inner knowing. We can also work with impulses for movement or sound and the associations that might rise as we intentionally follow the impulses. My approach is trauma informed, and I’m currently becoming trauma trained in Somatic Experiencing. This means that I aim to work within your window of tolerance and support you in gently growing your capacity. I am aware of and tracking different autonomic nervous system states, while teaching you about these states.
In Somatic Coaching we are deepening connection with our 8th sense, interoception. Interoception is the sensory system that helps us assess internal feelings. To be able to self-regulate, requires that we can perceive our inner state. Self-regulation is needed for inner child work and reparenting. For many of us, we may not have received the attunement to our needs that supported enough co-regulation, for us to develop the skill of self-regulation. Instead, we learn to turn to auto-regulation to deal with our inner states. Eating disorders and disordered eating can be forms of auto-regulation, as can many addictions. Over time the neural pathways that support interoception become pruned making it harder and harder to sense our inner state.
We become more and more disconnected from our body and what it’s communicating to us. We just see the behaviours on the surface and try to manage them through willpower. The good news is that with repetition and practice, we can build new neural pathways and regain or deepen our internal sense. As a Somatic Coach, I support you with co-regulation, while teaching you how to self-regulate, so that over time, your need for behaviours you’ve used to soothe or numb decreases. This doesn’t mean we completely get rid of the parts of us that used different coping strategies, but rather we learn to change our relationship with these parts.
Once we get here, we can begin to deepen into relationship with our emotions and body sensations. We can start to discern wounding from intuition and triggers from the core emotion anger. We deepen into self-trust and start to feel pulled inwards more for answers or guidance. We connect with our soul, through our connection with the body. We expand our capacity to be with the bigness of our inner world and start to feel more courage to communicate our needs and set boundaries. We begin to access our creativity and expression.
Somatic Coaching is less goal oriented than other types of coaching and focuses more on uncovering resources, expanding capacity to be with inner experiences, and moving beyond deep-rooted strategies in a gentle and safe way.
“Somatics is the study of the self from the perspective of one’s lived experience, encompassing the dimensions of body, psyche, and spirit.”
~Thomas Hanna
Practitioner of MindBody Therapy
-Recognizes that each person is intrinsically whole and the role of the practitioner is to help the client clear the debris that is obstructing a person from living from that place of wholeness, ease and flow.
-Works in a way that recognizes client’s strengths, while helping them address imbalances in themselves and/or in relationship to others and the environment.
-Promotes the enhancement of resilience, awareness/embodiment, capacity building, adaptation, connection, agency and well-being.
-Helps client recognize symptoms as signals that can become the pathway to change.
-Support others in accessing more awareness and experience of themselves, enhancing inner attunement to sensations and feelings, and through that inner communication helping them to discover that they are the agent of their own healing and transformation.
-MBT uses various percentages of time spent in experiencing in the present moment & reflecting on these experiences.
-Advocates for ‘present moment’ stance towards experience, & lessens time spent in reflecting on the past.
-Works for graceful transitions between HAVING experiences & TALKING ABOUT experiences.
-Values sensory tracking, relating to practitioner, direct emotional expressing, as well as conscious breathing & moving.
-By experiencing bodily states directly we can expand or reshape our sense of meaning beyond what we think we know about ourselves.
-Body states are both the messages and the resource for change – by working with bodily states we can ‘work through’ old wounds and current stressors.
“Go to the heart of pain, and you won’t find more pain, but freedom that doesn’t require the absence of pain.”
~ Robert Augustus Masters
Relationship Coaching
Focuses on both your relationship to self and others. Can support you with communication, how to understand what your needs are, boundaries, relating from a more authentic place, rather than from your protective strategies. Uses the here and now to take personal responsibility to work through relational challenges. My approach in coaching is also relational, meaning that I use the relationship between myself as the coach and the client. I first learned about this style of coaching when I did a mentorship with Thais Sky. I deepened into this style and continue to through mentorship with The Relationship School. As coach and client we are co-creating together.
When it comes to safety, I aim for safe enough and invite bravery, as I know that we cannot guarantee safety for anyone. Trauma makes all sorts of things feel unsafe for people. Anything can create a rupture and I welcome them, if they happen. My aim with relational coaching is to use ruptures to practice repair and support clients to learn more about themselves around what activated them. I get to model a different way of doing relationship when this happens and teach you how to bring this into your high stakes relationships. Relationship Coaching focuses on the goal/intention a client brings and uses both support and challenge to grow, evolve and take action. My style of challenge is gentle and curious. The relationship between coach and client is dynamic and collaborative. As a coach, I am not here to fix you, do the work for you, or even have all the answers. The intention is for us to work together to help you move towards your goals from a place of inner empowerment. At this time I work with individuals only, and not couples.
“We are born in relationship, we are wounded in relationship, and we can be healed in relationship.”
— Harville Hendrix
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There’s no commitment, pressure, or obligation.
To book email me at info@richelleludwig.com
