Three Strands of Healing

I used to braid my daughter’s hair in the mornings. Not any fancy braid, just the simple kind, the one everyone learns first. Three sections. You pick them up separately, each one distinct in your hand, and then you begin to weave. Over and under, over and under. And what you end up with is something you couldn’t have made from any single strand alone. Something that holds.

I think about that braid a lot when I try to explain the way I work.

There are so many words in the world of therapy right now. So many approaches, so many frameworks, so many acronyms. And I think that can feel overwhelming, or even alienating, for someone who is simply trying to find their way toward healing. So I want to try to say something simple, something I believe in deeply: the way I journey with people draws on three things, and they work together the way those three sections of hair do. Story work. Parts work. Body work. Each one is its own strand. And together, they make something that holds, something beautiful, something deep.

—

The first strand is story. Dr. Dan Allender, whose work through the Allender Center has shaped so much of how I think about healing, writes this: “Our own life is the thing that most influences and shapes our outlook, our tendencies, our choices and our decisions. It is the force that orients us toward the future, and yet we don’t give it a second thought, much less a careful examination.” Story work invites us to give it that second thought. To slow down and look, really look, at the experiences that formed us. The family dynamics. The roles we were handed without asking. The moments where something in us shut down, or learned to protect itself, or began to believe something about who we were.

I often say the past is never really past. William Faulkner said it first, and more beautifully, but I say it because I have seen it to be true. What happened to us in those early years is alive in us still. It shows up in how we respond when someone raises their voice, in what happens in our bodies when we feel unseen, in the patterns we keep finding ourselves inside of. Story work is not about dwelling in the past for its own sake. It is about understanding how our story is showing up right now, today, in the present moment.

—

The second strand is parts work, and it grows directly out of story. Because when we start to look honestly at our stories, we begin to notice that we are not just one thing. We are many. Dr. Richard Schwartz, the founder of Internal Family Systems, describes it this way: we each contain, as he puts it, “a society of people, each of whom is at a different age and has different interests, talents, and temperaments.” A part of you that is fiercely protective. A part that shuts everything down when things feel like too much. A part that is very young and very tender and still waiting for something it needed and never received.

What I love about parts work is the invitation it extends. Not to fix our parts or silence them, but to get curious about them. To ask what they are trying to do for us. Janina Fisher, whose writing has been so formative for me, teaches that these fragmented parts of ourselves are not pathological. They are adaptive. They were doing their best. And integrating them, as she writes, is “the cornerstone of trauma recovery.” I would add: not integration through force, but through presence. Through learning to sit with the parts of ourselves that have been carrying so much for so long, and offering them something they may not have received before.

—

And then there is the body. The third strand. The one that, in my experience, changes everything.

I have a firm belief that the body is the only part of us that cannot lie. Yvette Lalonde of Innerflow Counseling, a somatic therapist whose perspective I deeply respect, points to our capacity to be present with ourselves as the most essential thing. Not to analyze. Not to explain. Just to be there, in the body, noticing what is. And Jenny McGrath of Indwell Counseling, a Somatic Experiencing practitioner and movement educator, puts it simply and beautifully: she has come to see that our bodies know what they need. That by approaching the body with curiosity, we can begin to listen to the innate wisdom it has to teach us.

I find this to be true, over and over again. The body remembers what the mind has let go of. It holds our grief, our fear, our longing in ways that words sometimes cannot reach. Have you ever walked into a room and caught a scent that brought you instantly back to your grandmother’s kitchen, or to some moment from childhood you hadn’t thought of in years? That is the body, storing and speaking. And if we can learn to listen, if we can get curious about what is happening in our chest or our shoulders or our throat, there is so much that can begin to untangle.

—

What I notice is that these three strands are never really separate in the room with someone. A story surfaces, and with it, a part comes forward, and the body shifts, and we follow what is there. Over and under, over and under. It is not a formula. It is more like a way of being with someone, of trusting that whatever strand is most alive in a given moment is the one we follow, and that the others are always nearby, weaving in.

If any part of this resonates with you, I wonder: what strand might be waiting for your attention today? Is there a story that keeps showing up? A part of you that has been working very hard for a very long time? A place in your body that has been trying to get your attention?

You don’t have to have words for it yet. That is what the work is for.

Curious about narrative work, IFS, or somatic therapy? I’d love to talk. You can reach out through the contact page to learn more about individual sessions or upcoming groups.