Coast Mountain Support Services

04/18/2026

Standard shadow theory tells us we exile our anger, our sexuality, our grandiosity. But in trauma work, we encounter something more intricate, shadows that contain not just qualities, but memories, sensations, and survival decisions made in the body under threat.

A trauma fragment is not simply a bad memory. It is a piece of the self a way of being, a quality, an aliveness that became fused with danger at the moment of wounding. When a child's expressiveness, joy, sensitivity, or need is present at the moment of harm, the psyche can make an unconscious conclusion: that quality caused this.

The exile is then not just of pain, but of the self-state that preceded the pain. The child buries not only the wound but the song they were singing before it was inflicted.

03/20/2024

When children are uncertain or pessimistic about their value, they strive to understand what will please their parents and they try to become that. The normal need for approval grows into a craving, and they take the extreme messages they are given about their worth to heart. If a child is told, verbally or non verbally, that he has little value, his parts organize around that premise. His parts feel desperate for redemption in the eyes of the person who is withholding love, which can include any person on whom the child depends. Thereafter, carrying the burden of worthlessness, the child’s parts believe they cannot be loved, a belief they will maintain regardless of contradictory feedback, as if the devaluing person holds title to their self esteem. Burdened young parts who seek redemption from worthlessness exert a powerful influence over intimate relationships, either returning to the person who stole their self-esteem, or finding someone who resembles that person. Often this results in a long string of abusive or unsatisfying relationships . This can also look like a learned adaptation of fawning, people pleasing and abandoning the self in order to be what others need at the cost and expense of themselves.

Internal Family systems therapy can help

04/12/2023

Initiation occurs at all stages of life. We are constantly in a process of birth, flowering, fading and death - the sacred transformative state of our individuating from family and later from the over culture. Growth is circular and we heal in every growing spirals. If you are returning to something that needs healing you thought you had released and integrated, consider that your healing is like the layers of an onion- you are deepening and coming with fresh and wiser eyes. In this way we gain deeper, more expansive perspective. We come to old wounds with new reference points. Our healing and growth is never complete.

12/31/2021

Truth Telling



Most of us understand what it means to meet someone where they are at and how to hold space when it pertains to our approach with others. We don't often think of these two ways of being when it comes to relating to our own selves. One of the hardest things about showing up for ourselves in this way is that we have tendency to view our own lives with a future framework in mind. Our mind’s looks out to the distant horizon of our aim and rarely lands for long in the current landscape of our lives. It is our very human nature to be striving.

This constant endeavoring toward a future goal that most of us live with, can create a sense of impoverishment in the under currents of our being. This becomes most clear when some unfortunate incident or interaction takes place and the mind immediately uses the situation as an affirmation for the broken record of “not enough”. In turn, this “not enough” immediately pulls us out of the present and back into the cycle of ambition and the distant horizon. How do we find the grace to be present and accepting of all that life puts in front of us? How do we find our own starting point and arrive there with compassion? A place where we can greet ourselves with gentleness, making space to explore where we are at with peace, rather than judgement? The judgement feeds the scarcity, which fuels our drive with negative emotions and keeps us shackled to the voice that demands us to be more, to pull up our socks, sacrifice our time, our values, for success, to be worthy of love, to be seen, to have our needs hold as much value as whomever or whatever is standing before us.

We must to be willing to take an honest look at our lives. We must have the courage to be truthful about what is not working and take ownership of the ways we continue to say yes to those things that we know in our hearts to be no. We must acknowledge our choices, especially the ones that we make with our souls pressed between a rock and a hard place.

We can learn to recognize the ways we negate ourselves in order to be palatable to the world beyond our skin. Explore and deconstruct our reasoning behind our self- negation. There may be a part of us that is deeply afraid that if we say yes to ourselves, we will be alone, without friendships, seen as selfish, unable to have the little luxuries we so desperately need to soothe the constant fray of tenderness we live with beneath the surface.

It is through acknowledging and validating the existence and details of what is not working for us and the choices we make to keep those in place that we can begin the process of change. Most of us do not come to that place voluntarily but find ourselves pressed painfully against a crisis in which wecan no longer escape disconnect or disengage from our truths. Those moments that come down to no other choice but to say yes to ourselves even if we are angry at life for leaving us no other options.

Here lies the sacred moment where we are invited to enter into a state of trust, to meet ourselves where we are, to hold the space to examine what narratives we are in service to, and take ownership of the creativity we have to design our lives and relationships through conscious awareness and choices.

08/11/2021

https://www.lionsroar.com/the-buddha-taught-one-thing-only/?goal=0_1988ee44b2-68c8badc3f-24894539&mc_cid=68c8badc3f&mc_eid=80742399d8

Sharon Salzberg on opening to the truth of suffering, the core of the Buddha's teaching.

05/19/2021

The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self: the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.
~ David Whyte

04/11/2021

http://www.new-synapse.com/aps/wordpress/?p=2171

This is a cartoon of something I actually said to my boyfriend the other day when we were lying outside on a blanket getting sun.

10/27/2020

https://hbr.org/2020/03/that-discomfort-youre-feeling-is-grief

The coronavirus pandemic has led to a collective loss of normalcy.

09/15/2020

09/13/2020

We all have survival resources that we lean on during difficult times but if we have experienced or are currently experiencing trauma, those resources can become a habitual groove we settle into that becomes ingrained. When this happens and it becomes our "normal" we are unconsciously living in a contracted state and we miss out on full, robust lives. Developing an understanding of our creative resources and engaging in those things that bring pleasure, play, trust and joy are vital to our healing process so that they do not become casualties to the things that happen or are happening to us. Survival resources are the things we do to get us through and our creative resources are those things that assist us to move through with resilience and connectivity - they are the things we do that create exuberance and flow that help us to live fully.

09/12/2020

https://vimeo.com/410243093?fbclid=IwAR19Vv1s_x2pJdXVKW0-_8eoOhqBg1_gluVg6XPlAYoERVQ4jw_xk3k1wO8

Earth Day is typically when we tell our planet how much she means to us. But today, Planet Earth has a message for us. With people feeling more isolated than ever,…