Inner Work: Part 1 – The Pull Toward Therapy
You may remember me mentioning last year that I’d been training and practising as a therapist. Not the clipboard-and-couch kind - this was bodywork, with a focus on emotional processing.
I’ve always been curious about what’s going on beneath the surface - in life, in others, in myself. And for a while, jewellery wasn’t quite reaching that part of me.
So I began offering sessions. Not for money - just to learn and gain experience.
The work was deep. Often moving. Sometimes surprisingly raw.
And somewhere along the way, something shifted in me.
There’s a saying: "When you point a finger at someone, three fingers point back at you."
That hit harder than I expected.
I realised I was holding space for others… while quietly avoiding the same work in myself.
Inner Work: Part 2 – Breaking down in Oxford
The next piece of the puzzle came last year at ‘The Master Series’ in Oxford, a 4-day intensive symposium led by such luminaries as Gabor Maté, Richard Schwartz, and Bessel van der Kolk.
I was there wanting to learn as a therapist but also for my own benefit, and I immersed myself into talk after talk, modality after modality. By the second day, something sort of cracked in me! I was a jibbering wreck – such raw emotions were coming up – totally unexpected. And the reason I believe was that my system was saying yes to something…
And that was Internal Family Systems (IFS) – founded by Richard Schwartz, a therapeutic approach based on the idea that we’re not one single self, but a system of ‘parts’ – all trying to protect us, lead us, soothe us. When I heard this, and more about the method, it was like someone handed me a mirror.
It explained so much about what I’d been feeling – so much conflict inside - and there was a part in me which said “this is what you need right NOW!”
