Blog | Sacred Circle Holistic Healing

Being Highly Sensitive: How to Navigate Emotional Overwhelm

9/3/2023

The silhouette of a woman a sunset kneeling down into a body of water. The water illustrates the deep emotions that Highly Sensitive People (HSPs) feel.

HSPs and Intense Emotions

Raise your hand if you associate sensitivity with weakness? You aren’t alone. Many of us were taught that being sensitive is a negative thing, but in actuality there are many advantages to having a highly sensitive brain. One of those advantages is that we Highly Sensitive People (HSPs) feel our emotions more intensely than non-sensitive people.

You might be thinking ... and how exactly is that a good thing? It’s a good thing because
strong emotional responses can provide us with important information IF we know how to be with and process our intense emotions, instead of becoming overwhelmed by them.

Are You Close or Are You Enmeshed?: Differentiating Between Intimacy and Enmeshment

7/28/2023

Young black woman laughing with eyes closed. This represents the young adult clients that come to Sacred Circle Holistic Healing for online therapy in Lawrence, Kansas.

Photo by Prince Akachi on Unsplash

Intimacy or Enmeshment?

“My mom and I are so close; I tell her everything.” This is something I often hear from clients when I first begin working with them. But with time what we often discover is that what the client thought of as “closeness” was actually enmeshment. Enmeshment is a term that describes a lack of healthy boundaries in relationship. Read more about enmeshment in my article, What is Enmeshment and Why Is it Harmful?

How to Fight Well: It's OK to Disagree

6/30/2023

Young woman smiling, holding a white cat and flowers repesenting the young adult clients who come to Maggie Jones Boyle for holistic therapy in Lawrence, Kansas.

Photo by ☀️Shine_ Photos on Unsplash

Ruptures and Repairs

Relationships are simply a series of ruptures and repairs.

One moment you and your partner are attuned and on the same page. You’re making eye contact, talking fluidly, and feel comfortable and safe in your bodies. The next, you’re not. Something is said that rubs you the wrong way. You tense up. You feel annoyed. You withdraw from the conversation. There has been a rupture in your attunement and sense of connection. When you feel ready, you tell your partner that something he said upset you, and you check in with him about what he actually meant. You have a conversation about what happened and how you both feel about it. You feel connected again.

Rupture. Repair.

What is Enmeshment and Why is it Harmful?

5/29/2023

Young woman sitting on a path looking at the camera representing clients who have come to Sacred Circle Holistic Healing in Kansas for online therapy for childhood trauma.

Photo by Milan Popovic on Unsplash

What is Enmeshment?

Enmeshment is a family systems term that refers to families who do not have healthy interpersonal boundaries. Enmeshment is a form of relational trauma that is typically intergenerational and has negative impacts upon children’s ability to form a healthy sense of self.

Therapy as Reparenting: The Healing We All Need

5/12/2023

Young woman with blonde hair looking into the camera representing someone who has entered therapy with Sacred Circle Holistic Healing in Lawrence, Kansas for online therapy addressing childhood trauma, anxiey, and self-worth.

Photo by Dave Goudreau on Unsplash.

What is Therapy?

Therapy is difficult to define. There are many different types of therapy, and on top of that—despite the ongoing attempts to fit psychotherapy into the Western medical model—therapy is largely an art, not an exact science. It is based on relating, and relating is a fluid, intuitive, non-linear process.

It’s widely accepted now that the quality of the relationship between therapist and client—as opposed to the specific therapeutic modality being used—is the most important factor determining the efficacy and outcome of therapy. Having a good relationship with your therapist—feeling safe, seen, heard, and understood—is the most important thing.

So at its core, therapy is a relationship, a healthy (hopefully) relationship that exists for the singular purpose of facilitating your healing, personal growth, and wellness. Good therapy helps us individuate and differentiate, becoming the unique person we are meant to be.

What is the Fawn Response?

4/14/2023

Young woman holding flowers and looking at the camera representing young therapy clients who have come to therapy in order to heal their childhood trama.

Photo by Mihajlo Šebalj on Unsplash

What is the Fawn Response?

The Fawn response is a trauma response that is characterized by self-abandonment in relationships and overly-focusing on the needs of others. The Fawn Response is chronic, compulsive people-pleasing, which most often begins in childhood as a result of relational trauma.

Five Reasons to Revisit Your Childhood Trauma

3/31/2023

Young woman looking into the camera representing a client in Lawrence Kansas coming to therapy for childhood trauma.

Photo by Amirr Zolfaqari on Unsplash.

The Importance of Understanding the Past

There is a widely held misconception that therapy is all about sitting and talking about the past. In actuality, at its best, therapy is present and future oriented. However, we do revisit our past in therapy, and for good reason. We can’t fully and consciously participate in the unfolding of our lives in the present if we are still being unconsciously impacted by things that happened to us in the past.

Processing our childhoods—understanding through the lens of our adult selves, how our experiences impacted us and allowing our bodies to fully integrate the emotions connected with these experiences—is the key to healing pervasive issues such as low self-worth, perfectionism, anxiety, people-pleasing, and codependency. Most of us are carrying some level of childhood trauma, and everyone can benefit from processing their childhood experiences.

Six Things to Remember When Working Through Childhood Trauma

3/17/2023

Young woman looking into the camera. This illustrates that Sacred Circle Holistic Healing offers therapy and counseling for childhood trauma in Lawrence, Kansas.

Photo by Omid Armin on Unsplash

Remembering these six things can help when working through childhood trauma:

Not all trauma comes from a single, obvious source or experience.

Complex trauma is traumatization that happens repeatedly and chronically over long periods of time. Childhood trauma, or developmental trauma, is almost always complex and relational. Relational trauma is often more difficult to see and acknowledge because the trauma itself is unfolding within relational dynamics, which can be both subtle and pervasive.

For those of us who have developmental trauma as a result of pervasive family dynamics—opposed to obvious, overt forms of abuse—realizing and validating the source of our struggles with low self-worth, shame, guilt, people-pleasing, anxiety, etc. can be an added challenge.

Emotional Parentification: The Role Reversal of Parent and Child

3/3/2023

Photo by fotoweedio on Unsplash

What is Parentification?

Parentification, or role reversal, is a dynamic that occurs when a child is regularly tasked with providing emotional or practical support to a parent, instead of the other way around. Parentification is a form of childhood trauma that negatively impacts development and attachment.

Internal Boundaries: The Importance of Setting Boundaries with Yourself

2/17/2023

Young woman standing on the beach representing a therapy client in Lawerence, Kansas who healed their anxiety and low self-esteem.

Photo by Marie-Michèle Bouchard on Unsplash

What are Boundaries?

Boundaries are the guidelines and expectations we identify for ourselves about how we’d like to be treated by others and what actions we’ll take if someone oversteps those limits.

We learn how to set boundaries as children through modeling from the adults around us and through the experiences we have growing up. What were the messages you received about saying “no”? Was your “no” respected? Did you get in trouble for saying “no” to adults? These kinds of questions can tell us a lot about the training we received about boundaries and autonomy. For a more in depth discussion about different types of boundaries and how to set them, check out this blog post about boundaries that I wrote a while back.

Typically when we think about boundaries we think about the boundaries we have with other people, but sometimes the boundaries we need to set are actually with ourselves. These boundaries are called internal boundaries. In this post you will learn what internal boundaries are and why it is important to have them.

<<Previous

Being Highly Sensitive: How to Navigate Emotional Overwhelm

HSPs and Intense Emotions

Are You Close or Are You Enmeshed?: Differentiating Between Intimacy and Enmeshment

Intimacy or Enmeshment?

How to Fight Well: It's OK to Disagree

Ruptures and Repairs

What is Enmeshment and Why is it Harmful?

What is Enmeshment?

Therapy as Reparenting: The Healing We All Need

What is Therapy?

What is the Fawn Response?

What is the Fawn Response?

Five Reasons to Revisit Your Childhood Trauma

The Importance of Understanding the Past

Six Things to Remember When Working Through Childhood Trauma

Emotional Parentification: The Role Reversal of Parent and Child

What is Parentification?

Internal Boundaries: The Importance of Setting Boundaries with Yourself

What are Boundaries?

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