This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.com Thanks for joining me for the read-a-long of The Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma. This week we’re exploring the end of chapter 2 (all things disidentification) and Chapter 4 - the power of asking exploratory questions and drilling down into our own experiences! You can join at any time, even if you aren’t currently reading the book - I’m here to recap and break things down for you so you can take this and apply it to your life. Transcript below: Hello Book Club and welcome back! Super excited to be moving through The Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma together. I'd love to hear from some of you what you have been curious about as you've been doing the reading, and you're more than welcome to leave a comment here or just reply to this email- it comes straight to me. I'd love to feel the connection with each of you as we're undertaking this process together because this book is so rich and so deep that it's so important to hold the container together of knowing that we're in this together- we're learning and being curious as we go along. Something for me, as I've been rereading this book that has really stood out, is that process of dis-identification. We talked a little bit about this in our last meeting together, but it really, really stood out to me about how impactful and how big that dis-identification process is and can be. We talked last week about that pillar one model of NARM called clarifying the therapeutic contract. What that pillar really represents is connecting you to your agency and what you want for yourself. An experience that I had in my own therapy when I started NARM long ago was how much I hated doing that. And what I didn't know at the time was that I have a really, really strong part of me that wants to push against autonomy and agency. Part of my predictive adaptive patterns were around protecting me from having wants, having needs, and wanting to be a separate and individual person from those around me. Clarifying what I wanted for myself really hit upon this part of me that was like, oh my gosh, that is a huge thing to let myself figure out what I really want. And that might sound kind of strange because if you knew me, you would know that I'm a very achieving, moving towards goals type of person. But what I didn't realize is that a lot of what I was achieving and moving towards was what I thought other people wanted from me. I didn’t have a deep, genuine sense of connection to that desire of what I really want, what I value, how I want to live in my life. And so whenever I would come up against that therapeutic contract, when I was in training for NARM and doing my own NARM therapy, I would feel a sense of anger of why is this therapist trying to put this back on me? Aren't they here to help? What I was able to realize is underneath of that anger was a strong sense of fear and deep sadness that I had spent a portion of my life trying to make others around me happy. There was also a part of me that was so deeply exhausted from having to juggle everything all of the time to make others around me happy and keep going and keep achieving. I wanted someone to do it for me. I wanted someone to tell me what I should be doing and what I wanted for myself. What I love about this model is that it's so deeply non-pathologizing- that I was never made to feel like there was something wrong with me for not being able to get clear about what I wanted for myself, or what I needed in my life or in relationship, but rather the support to come into my own capacity and to start to dis-identify or un-blend in internal family system terms from that old predictive pattern that said it wasn't safe to have wants and needs and to not take care of everyone around me. But that dis-identifying from that people pleasing, perfectionist, intellectual part of me was a pretty intense process, and it