What brought me to core

I was drawn to Core Energetics through my own healing journey. As a child and adolescent I worked very hard to fit within the high demand religious expectations of my family, which go back four generations on all sides in the Mormon tradition and farther back in patriarchal Christianity and oppressive colonialism. I “left” the Mormon church around age 22, but the mind/body split and spiritual betrayal I felt took many years to unpack.

 

While working on my Master’s degree in English, I was diagnosed with ADHD, math learning disability, and “traits of Borderline Personality Disorder”. The University health center therapist working with me shared that BPD is a problematic label, frequently used to pathologize adolescent female behavior. My own insight adds that “BPD traits” can particularly appear for femme-presenting young people struggling against patriarchal culture. Dr. Ramani Durvasula renamed BPD to Chronic Affective Instability Disorder, working to remove the stigma and provide a more useful and descriptive label. While completing my Master’s, I attended weekly therapy sessions and twice weekly group therapy classes in Dialectical Behavior Therapy, a type of cognitive behavioral intervention created by Dr. Marsha Linehan. Designed for clients with emotional regulation disorder (Dr. Linehan’s re-label of “Borderline”), Dialectical Behavior Therapy focuses on mindfulness, distress regulation, and interpersonal communication skills. 

 

My commitment to DBT helped soothe, mature, and retrain my nervous system, freeing up some of the black/white, good/bad belief systems that I no longer needed and no longer served me. I am deeply grateful for DBT and the strategies and maturity it helped me build.

 

In the years following DBT I built a successful career as a public educator, developed a healthy romantic partnership, had two beautiful children, and formed a solid friend community. Yet something was off. Physical symptoms of anxiety plagued my daily routines. I saw myself erupt in disproportionate anger at my children and partner, just like my own father used to do, and I felt harrowing guilt and shame at not being able to force myself to be better. As in my adolescent years in the Mormon church, I felt like I was breaking my body against my self-will, but now I had nothing to leave or “blame” but myself. I have always been a seeker, and when a neighbor told me about the Seattle School of Body Psychotherapy, and the impact it was having on her life, I followed that golden thread and became a student at the school.

Each wound is an opening,

and an opportunity--

stay soft and bear witness with others,

or harden and close off feeling.

How core helped me and why I continue the practice

Training in DBT prepared my nervous system to handle the unique healing practices offered by Core Energetics. I was guided, supported, and witnessed in expressions of feelings that were not acceptable in my family of origin. As a result, my anxiety abated, my rage dissolved, and I was even able to wait in a long line without losing my mind. While I still experience stress, my capacity for handling it has expanded. Things that previously would put me into panic or rage I can now weather and negotiate, and the difference is in my body. It is not only cognitive; core has helped me reprogram my whole body system to have more capacity in stressful situations. Dearest to my heart is that my relationship with my children has improved dramatically. I am able to be with them exactly as they are and parent from a place of capacity, love, and more freely flowing energy. 

 

I continue my own practice with core because it offers a community of authentic, fully alive people who are committed to their own truth and building a vibrant, embodied community. My public school career was dedicated to anti-racist education, and Resma Menakem’s book My Grandmother’s Hands was a game changer for me. He writes how important it is for white-bodied folks to build culture together. I have sat in many meetings with well-meaning white folks (including myself) wanting to skip steps of relationship and reflection and just DO something. But as Menakem points out, culture beats strategy every time. In February of 2025 I attended a Masterclass at the Netherlands Institute of Core Energetics (NICE) and was blown away by the beautiful, embodied, messy, fully present culture alive in a majority white-bodied community. I realized this can be a piece of the culture Menakem writes about. NICE is fostering the kind of culture that white-bodied people need to build in order to truly shift collective power dynamics and create meaningful, lasting social change. As we transform our own lives, we transform the world, and heal ancestral wounds as we go. When politics and systems make me feel angry and powerless, I remember that systemic transformation is interdependent and inseparable from personal transformation. Core can play a part in helping dismantle internalized power-over belief systems that are inescapable when living and breathing in this culture. Disembodiment is a primary tool to serve power-over systems. Connecting to our bodies and our joy is resistance.

 

Musings on communicating with my family of origin

The silence is deafening.

The swoosh of the shell game swap echoes on repeat, mirroring the swoosh of my pulse.

I hear pounding like a tide against a seawall, like the sound of my heartbeat in my ears when I migraine and the hard bone bulwark of the top of my skull crushes down as I battle with "What if I said to this?" or "What if I do this? Or maybe if that?"

Puzzling and puzzling a 10 sided Rubik’s cube to crack the code of how to connect with my siblings with my full self.

I am not a problem to be fixed

I no longer want to break my soft body against the iron bars of my self will

Connection comes with radical acceptance of what is

What feels is an ignored child

A noisy problem papered over

An avoided voice, too loud, inconvenient, don’t catch the ball that was lobbed in longing for you to catch and return

What feels is that ball dodged like a hot potato and rolling far a field, smoldering to ash

So many potatoes.

Rocks. Ash. Do they wait patiently for transformation? Do they sit and rot? Do they compost into daffodils? Or get carried away by crows and rats?

Perhaps I am surrounded by my own field of missed balls, lobbed in another language; a lacrosse team trying to play against a figure skater on a baseball diamond.

 

I'll give another phone call next Tuesday.