On Being Enough

July 13, 2022 Sarah Humphreys

When I started in my career I was focused on knowing the most up to date evidenced based practices necessary for treating --- well all things. I craved to know ALL OF THE THINGS.

It was a tall order. Hindsight and a whole lot of experience has taught me that my thoughts while good intentioned didn't do justice to what the experience in sitting in the joys and suffering of others would teach me.

AND what the ability to sit in the depth of my own pain (on repeat) and eventually joy would teach me about what beautiful corner of the psychotherapy world I needed to sit.

At the core of my work I have found one core common issue:

Somewhere along the way we forgot we entered the world entirely enough, whole and completely enough. The events of our lives, other's unhealed pain and trauma, and above all else fear (our own and others) have doused us with layers and layers of untrue evidence that we are to earn our enough-ness through productivity, ladder climbing, financial gains, or a whole host of other action oriented task items. In other cases these experiences left us with the notion that we never were enough and never will be so there is a constant search for the “bad,” or “wrong,” parts of ourselves. While it is is true that we as human being all have the ability to be dangerous (I will save that for a different post), this is not the same as the constant searching for how we are inherently identifying with our darkest shadow.

I think back to a four-year-old version of me who reveled in the joy of tying random lyrics to strung together notes despite lack of both melody and sensical word choice. It didn’t matter. It didn’t carry the weight of the world on its shoulders. It just was. I just was. It all mattered and none of it mattered at the exact same time.

When peeling back the impact, impressions, and story lines that these events left us with like the layers of onion I find it always reveal one thing. When we KNOW our enough-ness, we live from our enough-ness. It fills us so greatly that it pours out onto others like tea from a kettle, warming our insides and providing a comfort that tethers us to our ability for unconditional love. Here is a secret: once you know this, you get to change the story.

While of course I still practice psychotherapy using evidenced based modalities, over the course of the last 17 years (I just did the math and my jaw dropped), my understanding for the need for spirituality (in no way is my use of this term reflective of a specific religion) for grander more long lasting healing - has become an integral part of my own human experience and in turn my human service.

This quote by Ram Dass does a beautiful job of summing up for me, the "why," behind my treatment of the whole person to include mind, body, and spirit.

I am practicing this today- remembering that no one can take this love away from me, that it will always be here, that I don't have to do anything to earn it. None of my imperfections matter. I am loved just by existing.

I needed the reminder today so I imagine others do to.

The light in me sees the light in you. The pain in me sees the pain in you.

Sitting In love,

Sarah Humphreys

Combating Seasonal Depression - Part 2 - A Mindful Relationship with Winter

December 1, 2021 Sarah Humphreys

My relationship with Winter and the changing of the seasons has evolved over the years. I was no stranger to the feelings of depression and cabin fever that can accompany cold days and long, dark nights. Over the past decade or so, I have come to love and appreciate Fall and Winter as much as Spring and Summer. Simply reframing the way I related to the aspects of Winter that were difficult sparked a process of exploring and learning that blossomed into a deep feeling of connection to the Earth and Seasons.

Combating Seasonal Depression - Part 1

November 11, 2021 Sarah Humphreys

Seasonal Affective Disorder is believed to impact about 5% of the population, however this may not account for those who already suffer and/or are diagnosed with other mental health disorders including Major Depressive Disorder (non-seasonal type) and Bipolar disorder- both of which complicates and increases risk for SAD.

Before you accept the narrative that you are "Self sabotaging," ask yourself: Do I really want the goal?

November 11, 2021 Sarah Humphreys

The idea of self sabotage as a trendy topic in the mental health world is age-old. I have always had a subtle aversion to it mainly because the definition of it seems to undermine almost everything else we know about human protective factors. Even if coping skills are no longer serving us, at one point they did- often helping us physically or emotionally survive; so why talk about survival tactics or coping skills under the guise that there is something inherently wrong with us?

How to Journal Your Way Out of a Shame Spiral

April 2, 2021 Sarah Humphreys

You know the voice well. The relentless one that we listen to for far too long (because even a few seconds is too long). The harsh critical voice sending us in a downward spiral of thoughts triggering dread, anxiety, and ultimately shame. Let’s call the The Shame Spiral, shall we?

A Mission Statement (of sorts): A Foundational Truth

March 29, 2021 Sarah Humphreys

As the year anniversary of the COVID pandemic approached I anticipated the flood of reflections on the collective trauma that has been endured. These hard dates that trigger evaluation of where we have been and how “successful” we have been at making it through difficult times made way for appraisal of what we believed we made or didn’t make of it. The outlines of success decided by a set of rules whose origin is often unknown. The “I should have’s,” “I could have’s,” “I must’s, ” and on the good days legroom for the “from here I wish,”, “I hope,” and, “I desire.”

My appraisal of what this practice has meant to our clients, the therapists who joined me on the front line of a mental health crisis and to me began to take on shape.

The, “where I was when this all started,” flowing as we mirrored to ourselves and each other the mega shifts that have occurred in our lives. Consciously, I can rattle off what I remember about mid-March 2020; talking with my family about N-95 masks, canned foods, and toilet paper shortages though unconsciously unable to fully comprehend just what it was that we were preparing for.

I opened Sacred and Free two months prior to the lockdown and on the precipice of some of the most important human and civil rights movements of all time. Fear showed up. Was this practice being built on solid ground or was it all quicksand? Could I build a foundation while the world was seemingly ripping apart? How do I show up authentically in a field that historically asks therapists to be a blank slate? Mounting questions with little to no ability to create educated guesses while floating in unchartered territory.

And just as the tides behave, reality washed over, and my virtual office become flooded with requests for a safe place to land from the constant heave back and forge forward that change and repetitive trauma require. What grew to be true for most was a simmering state of fear that had become the undertow of this collective trauma. Fear of dying, fear of others dying, fear of living, fear of loss, fear of the compounding losses, fear of grief, fear of the pandemic continuing, fear of it being over...

Fear of Fear.

Beloved session after session I sit inside stories as we challenge what is old and what is new. What is current and what is pain triggered. We wonder what it would mean to allow the fear to take the ride but to make our choices from love. To ask ourselves, “if I was coming from a place for love rather than a place of fear- which choices would be the same and which may be different?”.

One thing I know for sure was this age-old concept that fear “is not real,” was harming people left and right because everything in our bodies tells us when danger abounds. Refusing to acknowledge its’ presence creates angst and anxiety. Reactions that were either foreign to us previously or so interwoven in an unsafe part of our history that it triggered another layer of fear. “I can’t go back; I won’t go back.”

Getting still. Getting quiet. Simply said. Not so simply done. This has been my answer the whole way through and especially as of late (because when hope starts to arise the fear tends to rear its self-protective head). To weed through this chaos, the attachments, the intrusive thoughts is work when we take the challenge.

To get still and silent is an essential tool often used by psychotherapists. The silence I would argue is one of the most uncomfortable skill sets to learn and in my sixteenth year of practice I find myself more silent than ever. Silence is a space that we have to consciously allow and be awake enough to exist in. The pull to fill the silence is unease luring us out of the present moment and into troubled water. When we allow it, the silence becomes comfort to loneliness. It is the space for truth to be liberated and the stadium for more than one truth to exist at a time. It is the bench for us to allow the fear to show up, look at it and choose consciously how we desire to respond. It is the exhale into the unfolding.

And in this unfolding I know that the work that the mental health field has been doing during this pandemic is far from over. And in this practice’s corner of the world our mission burns brightly to shed light on ALL of the parts of ourselves and accept them without condition. Our intention is to continue to build a community of acceptance and challenge the beliefs that stop us from finding liberation or affording it to others by looking within, one person at a time. We will continue to make room for you to live from your most authentic enough-ness.

We have created an enclosed space that has no walls where fear is the idea of not living from our truest selves and combat it by learning to live well. A space where adding pain to our pain is an option because we have freedom of choice, but it is not our first, second, or third choice because nurturing ourselves has become reality. A place to move through the parts of yourself that have yet to fully be embraced as deserving of living well and outloud - in order to touch down on the very true story that you have always been deserving of both living and dying well.

The foundation of this practice has been built during both a pandemic and the shifting tides of unrest and uprising. It has been built in the midst of others as well as my own brave and vulnerable unfolding. What may sound like shaky ground is the most solid foundation I could have hoped; a sacred space to shelter, ground, pause and unfold. I hope to meet you here.

Pause. Unfold. Pause. Unfold,

Sarah

P.S. A special THANK YOU to Jessica Kirk and Mallory Grivner for believing me and allowing themselves to unfold into this space. You are true gifts to this world- and to me.