The Women I Work With
The women this work has taught me to recognize.
These are portraits I’ve drawn slowly, over years. The women they render have arrived in my practice in different seasons of their lives, from different histories, carrying different weights. And yet something in the work has taught me to recognize them, not as types, but as recurrences. Each of them is particular. And each of them is not alone. If one of these feels like a room you have been living in, that is often where the work begins.
The Tracker
She knows the shape of her partner's footsteps before she sees him. She tracks the mood of a room before she enters it. She’s been doing this so long she thinks it is part of who she is.
She learned it early, in a household where someone's mood determined how the day would go, or in a moment that taught her nervous system to never stop scanning again. The watching has kept her safe. It’s also kept her tired in a way sleep just doesn’t reach.
The work is teaching her nervous system that the room is no longer the room she learned in. That the person across from her is not the person she once had to read. That she’s allowed to stop scanning without having to explain why.
The Attuned One
She can feel what someone else needs before they know they need it. She’s been doing this since she was small, and she’s good at it. So good that most people in her life have stopped noticing she is doing it, including her.
Her attunement is not a skill she developed. She arrived in her family already attuned, shaped by her environment. It became the shape of her nervous system before she had words for any of it.
The cost is a body that hasn’t had a turn in a long time. A self that has learned to locate itself in the mood and needs of others. The work is letting her attunement stay, because it is real and it is hers, while teaching her nervous system that she no longer has to disappear into it.
The One Who Makes Room
She arranges her life, her tone, her breathing around the comfort of others. She is genuinely kind. This is not performance. It is the only way she has learned to be safe.
Her kindness has kept relationships steady that needed to be steady. It’s also run without her permission for so long that she has forgotten what it would feel like to stop.
The work is not to make her less kind. Her kindness is not the problem. The work is to let her nervous system rest while she is being it. To teach her body that she’s allowed to make room for herself while she is making room for others.
The Quiet Keeper
She has held what happened without telling many people, or has told it only to the ones who could bear the least weight. She’s not hiding. She’s protecting, the story, the people in it, the peace she has worked for.
She has good reasons for the holding. She’s had to be the one to hold it for a long time.
What she hasn’t yet been able to protect is her own body from what it is still carrying. The holding has moved into places below speech, into the parts of her that did not get to speak at the time and have not been asked since. The work is giving those parts a room.
To let what’s been held have somewhere to go.
The Archivist
She can tell you exactly what happened. Dates, sequences, the color of the wall. She has worked with it, written about it, tried to make peace with it on paper.
She has read about this. She can name her attachment style and her family system. Her intellect has been her most reliable companion in the work so far.
Her body hasn’t signed the agreement. The part of her that still lives in the room she can describe so precisely is not reachable by more description. The work reaches what the articulation has not yet moved, what is still stored where language has not been able to find it.
Most of the women I work with recognize themselves in more than one of these. That is not a flaw in the portraits. It is a feature of how the work actually goes. The nervous system holds what it holds in more than one layer, and the modalities I work with reach different layers.
Where the Work Goes
The Tracker
She finds her way, most often, to [EMDR] and [Clinical Hypnotherapy]. EMDR for the memories her body is still running. Hypnotherapy for the watching that has become a rhythm.
The Attuned One
She’s most reached by [Brainspotting], which goes where her attunement was formed, before words, below language.
The One Who Makes Room
She often leans towards [Brainspotting] and [Clinical Hypnotherapy]. Brainspotting for the pre-verbal shape of her accommodating. Hypnotherapy for the patterns that now run without her permission.
The Quiet Keeper
She’s often reached by [Brainspotting], where what she has not told can find somewhere to go that is not more telling.
The Archivist
She often finds her way to [EMDR], which reaches what her careful articulation hasn’t yet moved.
