An Empowering Life-Changing Self-Paced Course

Here I am again, every morning I am literally forcing myself to attend another day of grad school. 

My heart is racing. I’m constantly on edge. Nervous.  Anxious. My muscles are always tense like armor in an effort to control my desire to just run and hide.

On good days I can hold it together and come home exhausted. On bad days, my body is filled with a burning heat that pulses outward once every second. IT. JUST. NEVER. STOPS.

Oh, that burning, sticky, yucky, pulsating heat!

I feel trapped. Depressed. I just want to quit – but I can’t.

I have NO choice. I am a husband, a father to a little girl.  That responsibility weighs heavily on my chronically knotted shoulders.

Heading into Dr. B’s class is the WORST, because he KNOWS!

Dr. B is sharp! He can somehow sense the enormously paralyzing social anxiety and shame that I feel. I can hide it from all my other professors and fellow grad students, but not from him. My act doesn't fool him. Being in his class makes it all the more intolerable. 

Social Anxiety. Chronic Shame. I didn't even know this stuff had names until I got to grad school. I had suffered from social anxiety and depression for as long as I could remember. 

As early as kindergarten I had to be perfect, to please everyone. Memories of first grade come crashing back like a horrible wave drowning me. A different teacher than my own blames me for something that I didn’t do. The shame I feel is gut-wrenching. My persona of being a “good boy” is now covered with oozing shame as I am being publicly humiliated. Why was I like this?  

My mind is back in Dr. B’s class.

I ask myself, “What the heck am I doing? How can I ever be a legitimate PSYCHOLOGIST?” 

The realization is difficult to live with – I am just a hack, a fake…Pretending to be confident, but terrified inside, and even more terrified that people will know. 

Some call me Dr. Rosengren, but you can call me Kent.

I decided to become a psychologist because I knew that there had to be SOMETHING that could help me. If I could just figure out what was wrong with me in the first place!

I admit I was selfishly motivated. I wanted to be HEALED. I wanted to LIVE. I wanted to STOP being afraid.

Personal Opinion: After my many years of practice I have found that talk therapy is crap!  Sure, it can help for a little while to dump your troubles once a week, but I've never really seen it FIX anything.

Ever been there?  Talking in circles about the same stuff?  Trying so many different things to heal, to change your mindset, to let go of anger or fear, and you just can't get to the bottom? Or worse, don't even know where to start?

I kept searching. I found therapies that did help. They helped my clients, too. 

I turned to alternative therapies, they worked better than the conventional ones.. I learned EMDR and EFT (otherwise known as tapping). I loved the Emotion Code and then the Body Code.  Each approach helped, getting me closer and closer to the core of ME. But through it all, the anxiety, panic, muscle tension, headaches, pulsing heat, and racing heart, feeling judged and alienated from others - these were still my constant companions.

Then… I found the missing piece. During my endless searching I came across body centered therapies.  I discovered how the body and its sensations are at the core of most "mental" illnesses.  I was drawn to Somatic Experiencing, and spent 3 years attending trainings. I learned about the nervous system and the body. I had never known there were approaches that integrated the body into emotional healing. 

For my first 40 years of life,  I lived in my head. I was like Spock. I hated my emotions, wanted nothing to do with them. I basically ignored myself from the neck down. My tense, anxious, fearful body was my worst enemy!  I hated it!

How ironic! You see, I had lived my whole life trying to heal myself, to rid myself from intolerable emotions and limiting beliefs. I had done affirmations, cognitive therapy. I had read hundreds of books.

I mean I know A LOT (in theory) about emotional healing!

I had to make peace with my body. Stop fighting it. As long as I didn’t live IN my body (my body I hated with a passion), I would never feel ALIVE. 

I had to learn to tolerate what my body FELT like. I had to learn to sit with all of it; the tension, the fear, even that pulsating heat that was HORRIBLE! 

But I did it a little bit every day... just allowing the sensations to be there and not SUPPRESSING them. I had to learn to stop doing what I had done my entire life. I had to stop IGNORING my body and what it was telling me. 

But guess what?

Each day, I got BETTER. 

My nervous system started to reregulate itself and calm down. I learned to tolerate my sensations. I started to enjoy talking to people instead of constantly feeling the pressure to earn their approval, or fearing I might do something to displease them. The muscle tightness gradually became more relaxed, my heart stopped racing. And that pulsing heat? I hardly ever feel it now. Even my beliefs have shifted. 

I have finally started to LIVE.

• Can you imagine feeling your emotions, but not being overwhelmed by them?
• Can you imagine how good life would be if you understood your body and knew how to work with it?
• Can you imagine knowing what to do when you get triggered? How to be able to calm it down?

10 years ago, My answer to these questions would have been, "NO!".  I could not even imagine being where I am now. 

I KNOW this method works! I can spout off all the big scientific terms and principles about how and why this all works. But does that really MATTER?