Venture Free Counseling

01/14/2025

"The opposite of belonging is fitting in".
Thank you, Brene.

10/18/2024

So helpful for us to understand this as we heal.
Returning to the body. 🙏

10/17/2024

https://venturefreecounseling.com/my-journey-to-truest-self/

Before I was ever a Masters level psychotherapist, I had mastered living with intense emotional pain. For much of my life, I lived with severe and chronic anxiety, depression and unresolved trauma.

10/05/2024

07/14/2023

🙌🌱

05/26/2023

05/20/2023

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/harnessing-principles-change/202010/the-key-skill-we-rarely-learn-how-feel-your-feelings
Great read. Things that make you go hmmmm.

We are wired to avoid our emotions, not mindfully embrace them.

05/16/2023

For years, clients have presented with defensive adaptations to trauma that don’t fit within the fight-flight-freeze model you learned in grad school.

04/21/2023

Feelings and emotions are such important guides for us. The question is often asked why. Why is it so important to be able to identify what I'm feeling. Why do I have to feel these feelings when they don't feel good to feel. Why can't I just think my way through this with my brain instead of have to feel my emotions. How can emotions be trusted when they can feel so overwhelming, volatile, unreliable, distressing, etc.
I'll never forget during my training as a therapist when I realized how severely emotionally suppressed I had been for most of my life.
What a shock!
And what an arduous process of coming back online again emotionally.
Now I deeply enjoy the vibrancy and vitality of feeling my feelings. All of them.
It is perhaps my favorite part of living.
Allowing one's self the permission to feel the fullness of feelings and experiences helps confirm their reality of living.
When we are denying, avoiding, minimizing or distorting our feelings, we are not in our full reality.
We need to be grounded in our true reality at all times for good health, emotional, spiritual, and psychological wellbeing. 🙌

... and the emotional confusion of the neglected.