Allyship in Healing
How often are you overriding yourself to show up in the world?
Do you ignore your body's felt sense while with other people?
Most of us do this to some degree. The world, and other people, can be quite demanding. Especially as adults with responsibilities, we can easily push past our own needs to meet the outside world.
For those of us who have suffered relational trauma early in life, this experience is often exponentially intensified. If you were not attuned to in an emotionally safe way enough as a kid, or if you are culturally marginalized in any way, there are likely many strategies you employed to be as functional as possible in the world while believing your needs do not matter, making this capitalist, industrious society we live in feel harsher than it already is.
This is why allyship is the key for healing in the therapeutic relationship.
The therapeutic relationship is not another place where you should have to override yourself.
This is a space where we go at your pace, where your inner rhythm and intuition are attuned to and honored.
Allyship can look like the following:
Allying with the somatic intelligence of the body – Tuning into the felt sense of your animal body, and following the natural impulses.
This could be moving, breathing, yawning, emoting, or making sounds in a way that intuitively feels good. Like a cat or dog getting up from a nap and doing a full body stretch and taking pleasure in it, we too know how to follow our body’s impulses of pleasure and what feels just right.
This could also be your capacity to notice where and with whom you feel safe. One of my teachers talks about paying attention to “hot spots” in the environment – like the next time you are in a room or place, notice what part/section of the room feels like a ‘yes’ to your body as you move around the space. This can be a supportive tool for entering social situations if you struggle with social anxiety as a way to stay tuned into yourself while with others.
Organicity as allyship – Organicity is one of the principles in Hakomi Somatic Therapy – trusting the natural unfolding and emergence of what is wanting to happen.
In the therapeutic relationship, the practitioner allies with the client by letting go of agendas, and honoring and trusting the client’s wisdom and natural unfolding process.
You can also do this with yourself in the way of trusting your body like a plant that inherently knows how to reach toward the sunlight. Given the right conditions, there is an innate intelligence within all of us that gravitates toward healing. This is a knowing we can trust.
When I extend that trust to the organicity of my client's process, I find myself in collaboration, rather than pressurized to know what’s right for them. I trust their knowing and effectively support it.
Allying with the protective parts of ourselves – Most people come to therapy because there are protective parts of self that are dominating, doing more harm now than they are helping.
Whether that’s OCD, chronic pain, addiction, or conditioned tendencies to withdraw, grasp, be overly self-reliant, charm people to avoid vulnerability, and the list of strategies goes on.
These protections can show up as body sensations, perceptions, unconscious beliefs, and behaviors. As much as we want to change and transform these protections, the first step is to ally with them. To acknowledge and honor them without trying to change them yet.
These protectors had to step up and do an important job prematurely, and they are desperate to be understood. They deserve to have space and time in this process of receiving understanding. And until they have been given adequate time and space to feel seen and safe, they will keep doing their job just as rigorously.
In Hakomi, the way we ally with inner protections is to support them. For example, if there's an impulse to curl the shoulders in and hide, we support that impulse. You might be offered a blanket to wrap around your shoulders to support the physical protective impulse to hide and curl inward. Or if there's a protective way that you are constantly scanning your environment for safety, the practitioner may offer an experiment of "taking over". The practitioner then may "take over" scanning for you, so that the part of you that scans can relax a little, knowing the job is still being done.
This is to support you to become more aware of the protective impulse, and to give it the support and protection it's trying so hard to do on its own. Most of the time, these protective impulses initiated in a state of isolation and overwhelm, and so when we help them do what they are trying to do, they can gradually begin to relax, trust, and ease their intensity.
Allying with the more vulnerable parts of self – In Hakomi, we can draw upon the skill of bringing in a “magical stranger” to reprocess traumatic memories from the past when we were vulnerable.
A magical stranger is an imaginary ally we can bring to our younger self in a specific traumatic memory. It could be someone (or even an animal, plant, or spirit) you love and trust in your present life that you didn’t have back then to provide understanding, support, protection, or whatever was missing at the time.
Every time you bring this ally into a specific sequence within the memory, the memory changes. This means there is a shifting in the neural network that laid down the cluster of connected images, body sensations, and perceptions into a solidified memory. In other words, your brain literally changes, and neuroplasticity is on your side.
I hope this gave you some food for thought, and perhaps an invitation for compassionate self-awareness.
What does allyship mean to you?
I believe that every person's heart and spirit deserves to be supported, encouraged, and celebrated. I take pleasure in seeing, honoring and supporting my clients' strengths and unique gifts they carry, and I am honored to be an ally to help bring them forward.
Next time you find yourself in a challenging place, see where allyship is needed.
And if you need support in that process, please reach out for a session.
I would love to ally with you.
