What Do You Do Once You See It?

I sometimes picture certain clients as little kids walking around in their grandmother’s raincoat.

They look grown.

They’re functioning.

They’re trying to make adult relationships work.

But the thing actually driving the relationship is much younger.

I was talking through a case like this recently.

The client desperately wanted connection, but people kept misunderstanding her. She’d get frustrated quickly, relationships would fall apart, and the therapist was trying to help her with boundaries and relational skills.

Which makes sense.

Except the more we talked, the less I thought this was really a relational-skills problem.

There was a much younger part underneath all of it that had spent years reaching for something emotionally that simply wasn’t there.

So now she wasn’t just reaching.

She was grasping.

And if we simply teach that client healthier ways to reach, without working with the state that is doing the reaching, we may just give the same old pattern better vocabulary.

That distinction matters.

Because once you learn the five movements, you start seeing them everywhere.

And that’s incredible.

I watched it happen during the first Movement Vocabulary workshop. I originally planned about 90 minutes and somehow we ended up going for roughly two and a half hours because there was simply that much to unpack.

But even with all that time, there was another layer I couldn’t possibly get into properly:

What do you do once you see it?

Which state are you actually working with?

What needs to happen first?

How do you prepare the client so the movement doesn’t become another thing they “fail” at?

That’s what we’re working through in the Movement Vocabulary Implementation Workshop.

Not more vocabulary.

What to actually do with it once you can see it.

That’s the part I want to slow down and actually work through with you.

Because once you can see grasp, reach, push, pull and yield, the question stops being:

“Can I identify it?”

And becomes:

“What am I actually treating here?”

That’s what the Movement Vocabulary Implementation Workshop is for.

We’ll are live last Thursday, August 27 at 12:00 PM Eastern, and the recording is included if you can’t join us in real time.

Join us here:
https://buy.stripe.com/28E8wPgxf7YqbDc1Fn73G3k

Esther