12d • General discussion
Why I call my coaching business the Joy Recovery Project
Hi everyone, I thought I'd share how the Joy Recovery Project name came to be since more than one person in this community has found the name inspiring.
I had had 12 years of therapy for PTSD (which was probably CPTSD) without a real plan behind it, including phone sessions after I moved out of town in the wake of my mother's death. I should have stopped since it wasn't actually doing anything, but I didn't know that much about therapy and I thought I was doing something. To make a long story short, my therapist, who was a LHMC, all of a sudden left. I was really turned off by therapy due to that looked for alternatives to talking on an on with no result.
Mindfulness felt like a game changer and I felt much better. Then I went to a program at the Kripalu Yoga Center in Lenox, Massachusetts, about a year before the pandemic called Breath, Body, Mind, which was created by a psychiatrist, Dr. Richard Brown, and co-taught with his wife, Dr. Patricia Gerbarg, another psychiatrist. It was two and a half days of coherent breathing, Qi Gong and guided socialization. I was becoming aware enough of polyvagal theory to realize he had carefully planned each element of the routine to tone the vagal nerve. I also became aware that I was pretty dysregulated because I found the coherent breathing challenging.
After two and a half days of this, however, I got home and suddenly had the realization that I was having zero negative thoughts. Zero! I also saw that I had access to a feeling of joy I hadn't felt since before my mother died of pancreatic cancer 8 years before that.
Wow! That showed me it was possible to heal from PTSD (the last words my therapist had said to me were, "you'll always have PTSD." That was really her failure and not mine, and I suddenly knew that as well).
Now, the truth of that practice is that if you have PTSD you have to do the routine, or at least the breathing, every day to maintain that feeling, and I got a new demanding job and dropped off on the breathing, so I did some backsliding. Then life stress happened and I jumpstarted myself with neurofeedback, but in the meantime, I literally had physical proof that you CAN recover your joy after trauma.
First lesson - you have to keep up the work.
Second lesson. - I believe if you have PTSD or CPTSD like I did you also need to do some emotional work around grief, boundaries, attachment wounds and toxic shame/self concept, so the nervous system work can "stick" more better
But all in all, the feeling of joy I was able to access again gave me real hope that healing is possible and that it is possible to feel like yourself again after trauma. If you have childhood trauma and grew up with a lack of safety, you can discover your true self instead of uncovering it - and feel that joy.
This story is why you'll always see me lead with nervous system regulation and establishing a sense of safety when I talk about recovery, which is really joy recovery!
It really does work.
How about you?
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Why I call my coaching business the Joy Recovery Project
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