Art Therapy with Jane

02/01/2026

01/30/2026

IFS explained

Book summary of No Bad Parts written by Richard Schwartz, it's an introduction to Internal Family Systems model aka IFS Therapy.Mapping Your Parts video: htt...

01/29/2026

Recently, I’ve become acutely aware of the energy around me because it feels heavier than it's ever felt before. People are carrying pain, exhaustion, and so much grief. I notice it in conversations I overhear at cafes. I feel it when I walk through the grocery store. There is so much fear in the collective field we all share.

And rather than judging it or trying to fix it, I’ve been sitting with one simple truth: the world is asking for love.

Not dramatic love, or performative love intended for likes on social media, but grounded, embodied, steady love — the kind that simply is.

Many people believe that to make a difference, we must be loud, visible, or constantly “doing.” But from what I experienced during my near-death experience, I know that energy speaks before words ever do. Consciousness communicates without effort. Presence itself is powerful.

You don’t have to be an activist. You don’t have to have a public platform. You don’t even have to leave your home. You can be a force of healing simply by embodying love.

When you soften your body, breathe with compassion, and choose kindness toward yourself, you send a ripple far beyond what you can see. So today, I want to invite you into a gentle commitment to consciously send love and healing into the world. You might imagine light moving through your heart and outward into the collective. You might silently bless the people you pass.

You might sit quietly and hold the intention: May all beings feel supported, safe, and loved. There is no right way to do this. There is only sincerity.

And please remember — you don’t need to drain yourself to uplift others. In fact, the most powerful energy you can offer is one that is grounded, nourished, and at peace. When you care for yourself, you raise the frequency of everything you touch. This is how healing spreads. This is how love moves. Quietly. Naturally. Effortlessly.

Thank you for being part of this shared field of consciousness.

01/28/2026

01/25/2026

“The trauma research was built on men. The healing protocols and tools were tested on men. Then they were handed to women without asking if our disconnection or disembodiment looked the same.

It doesn't.

Van der Kolk began his career studying combat veterans returning from Vietnam. Levine developed Somatic Experiencing by watching animals escape predators. Porges built the polyvagal theory from mammalian biology. Their work expanded over decades. Brilliant work. Important work. But the foundational frameworks, metaphors, and assumptions emerged from bodies in acute crisis. Men at war. Animals fleeing predators. Mammals under threat.

Here's what I perceive their work has missed.

They missed that women's disembodiment often has no origin story. No single event. It is often the slow accumulation of learning that your body belonged to others before it belonged to you. The research assumed a before. Some of us were shaped from the beginning.

They missed that we were never allowed to learn the fight or flight responses. "Don't be aggressive." "Be nice." "Smile." Girls who fight back get labelled difficult. Girls who flee get called dramatic. So the nervous system learned a different way: please. Appease. Disappear into accommodation. Fight, flight, freeze came from watching animals. Fawn came from watching women.

They missed that you can't ‘discharge’ or ‘release’ what was never a single event. Shaking. Tremoring. Completing the interrupted fight-or-flight sequence. These tools assume a charge that built up and needs release. A tiger you couldn't escape. An accident you couldn't process. But how do you shake off twenty years of sucking in your stomach? How do you tremor out a lifetime of making yourself easy to be around?

They missed the impact on the nervous system of being constantly assessed. Research now shows self-objectification impairs interoception, the ability to sense your own body from the inside. Women who learn to monitor their reflection lose accuracy in detecting their own heartbeat. Their own hunger. Their own fatigue. This isn't trauma with a capital T. It's ordinary girlhood.

They missed emotional labour as chronic activation. The constant low-level scanning. Anticipating needs. Managing moods. Smoothing tensions before they surface. This isn't hypervigilance in response to a single threat. It's hypervigilance as a way of life. The research saw dysregulation. It didn't see the impossible demands creating it.

They missed how women's capacity for connection becomes the very thing used against us. We have been trained to be so focused on co-regulation that we abandon our own emotions and body signals to keep the peace. We learned to feel for everyone but ourselves. Then what kept us safe becomes our pathology. The same behaviour that gets called "selfless" at home gets diagnosed as "codependent" in therapy.

They missed that women's bodies are cyclical. The research treated the nervous system as static. A baseline you deviate from and return to. But women's bodies shift, hourly, weekly, monthly, across decades. Hormones rise and fall. Capacity changes. What feels manageable on day 10 feels impossible on day 24. Dysregulation isn't always dysregulation. Sometimes it's a body moving through its own rhythm.

They missed what gets passed down. Trauma doesn't just live in your body. It lived in your mother's body. Your grandmother's. The women who came before you and never had words for what they carried. The nervous system patterns you inherited aren't just yours. They're echoes. Survival strategies passed down through generations of women who did what they had to do to endure.

You're not just healing your own story. You're holding theirs, too.

They missed that the beauty industry is a nervous system assault. Constant assessment. Endless correction. The message that your body, as it is, is a problem to solve. This isn't vanity. It's chronic activation. A nervous system that never rests because it's always being evaluated.

They missed that the beauty and wellness industries are the same system.

One keeps you assessing while the other sells you the solution. The nervous system never rests, because first it's being evaluated, then optimized. But neither invites women to be in their bodies, just as they are. Because neither system does, these women’s nervous systems never rest; it's first evaluated, then optimized... constantly.

This is why "the body keeps the score" doesn't fit.

Score implies tally marks. Countable events.

Women's bodies don't keep score. They keep the story.

The story of being shaped by forces that started before memory. Of learning to hold a form that prioritized everyone else's comfort. Of abandoning yourself so slowly you didn't notice it happening.

The difference between score and story.

Score asks: What broke you?

Story asks: What were you shaped to hold?

Score implies: Damage to repair.

Story implies: A narrative to understand.

Score treats symptoms as malfunction.

Story treats symptoms as testimony.

I'm not discrediting their research, work or legacies. I'm naming what I see got missed. Van der Kolk, Levine, and Porges ' work changed the field. But frameworks built on combat veterans and fleeing animals were never going to fully capture what happens to a girl who learns that how her body looks is more important than how it feels to live inside her one and only body.

Your body keeps the story. And a woman who finally hears her body becomes dangerous to everything in the world that has tried to silence her body.”

-Ailey Jolie (Thank you Carmen Cool for posting about this psychotherapist. You’ve once again expanded the space with your focus 💕)

01/17/2026

Please take from this what you need. Posted with love.
A friend of mine posted this from Mel Robbins.
When someone asked why I no longer speak to a certain person, I gave an honest answer. Their response? “Why don’t you be the bigger person and reach out?”
People often confuse being the bigger person with constantly reopening old wounds, hoping for a different outcome. But real growth means knowing when to step back. It means recognizing when a relationship has become toxic, when conversations lead nowhere, and choosing peace over endless cycles of frustration.
Reaching out over and over, only to be met with the same disrespect, broken trust, or unresolved issues, is draining. Being the bigger person doesn’t mean tolerating mistreatment—it means prioritizing your own well-being. It’s okay to leave behind relationships that no longer serve you, to protect your peace, and to love people from a distance when closeness only brings chaos. Some chapters don’t need revisiting and some doors are meant to stay closed.

01/09/2026