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· You don’t have to drink the Kool-Aid for your nervous system to do the work.
· Defining integration = having your secondary consciousness catch up to your primary consciousness.
· Sy: How do we create a space for respite while people are doing this work? Maybe it is something you just have to sit with this. How can we utilize ritual and other experiences to anchor someone as they go through this process?
· Tier two is horrendous – it’s diving into mind set of when trauma happened. Tapping into the early imprinting of the events.
· The model is going to get richer and richer – and people with different expertise are going to be bringing more richness to this process.
· Open this work up with non-medicinal version. When dealing with people with very early defense mechanisms, go in without medicine.
· When working with someone – go for the cold because that is where the most value can be. But do whatever creates movement, go for that. You can build an entire practice on working with states 1 and 2. If what you’re doing isn’t creating movement, stay with the cold.
· Nicki: client got stuck – couldn’t end the SI. Saj has never seen that happen.
o Exit protocol – take that deep breathe. Usually when they do that, that is enough of a signal to the system that there’s a shift.
o Once you break SI in once place, it breaks it all over.
o Next time, have her have a light version of SI – shorter time in it. Don’t have her go too deep into it. Be there for a few minutes and have her take the breath. “Let’s practice doing this” so she can get familiar with the process.
· Tightness is a hot symptom.
· When you see some tension going on but it isn’t going into a wave, their secondary consciousness might not be letting them hit the wave or that the wave is in the cold and it is building.
· What do you do when cold doesn’t change? Cold can take a long time to build, especially if this is their first time, or they are not tracking that well. Most people that have cold waves don’t have their feet in a bucket of ice cold. What happened in his feet was really significant. It will crawl up his legs and up into his thighs. It could take 30-40 minutes. For the cold to clear completely it may take multiple sessions. But when someone says their feet are in a bucket of ice, that’s significant.
· If you have major trauma, go slow through this process.
· Rule of thumb: If someone has hot and cold symptoms – go with the hot and see if it creates a wave. If it doesn’t, then you know that it is bounded in the cold. In that case, leave the hot entirely and focus on the cold.
· Can the client be bored? When you have internal movements taking place, people are captivated by what is causing this movement. It is like an interesting dream – it is just going slow. The only person that will be bored is the therapist.
· Don’t need to be goal oriented – let’s just see what happens. We all will have set ideas of what good work looks like, because you’re wondering Is this not working because I’m not doing an okay job? All of that is something we’ll encounter. The more sessions we do, the more we’ll realize that this is about the speed of the body and the speed of trust. All of these things have their own speed which is completely separate from our anxiety around ourselves.
· Is there any therapeutic benefit to not completing a wave? Yes – even if you didn’t complete a wave, you hit a wave. He is developing trust in his own process. The process will get deeper each time.
· How many sessions should we plan for when starting with a client? You can’t promise people anything. At a minimum three sessions, but have them leave room for more just in case they’re right in the middle of something big.
· What we’re doing is as much an art form as it is a science. Establish comfort with client saying no. When the client knows that they can say no, there is nothing broken in the relationship. If something is painful, yeah – keep going. But if it is too painful, they can say no. Do you want to exit this? If they say yes, that’s a win. If they say no, that’s a win. Allow this to be their dream. They intuitively can trust the pain.
· When you’re working with someone who is slippery, be a bulldog with the SI. Stop chasing, and find one piece, and then stay with it so they can undo that pattern. You ultimately have to contain the system. There’s nothing in someone’s secondary process that will want to go back in those hellish places. So, it does require some real containment to get to the waves. You may see some negative transference when that happens. If there’s a way to enter SI without a power struggle, that’s what you’re looking for.