Transforming Trauma: Episode 146

What is one-word that describes your deepest desire? What might be in your way of actualizing this desire? And, if you were able to actualize this desire, how might that impact your life moving forward? These are questions that people who are exploring personal and spiritual growth ask themselves, and that helping professionals may use to guide their deepening connection to themselves and their clients.

One long-time teacher says that creating more depth in the helping field requires therapists to do the hard internal work of self-healing. She invites us to feel our way through layers of pain and recognize the alchemic potential of being with our deepest emotions. Only then can we hold that same space for our clients.

On this episode of Transforming Trauma, CTTC Director and NARM® Senior Trainer Brad Kammer welcomes Jessica Britt, Training Director of The Diamond Approach, to share wisdom from her decades-long journey of personal healing and professional development. The pair also examine similarities between The Diamond Approach and the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) in working with themes of connection, health and aliveness in healing complex trauma.

Jessica has been a student of Hamid Ali since 1977 and a teacher since 1985. As training director for the Diamond Approach, she leads ongoing groups in Europe, Canada, and the US. In the 1980s, Jessica was on the Gestalt staff of Esalen Institute, creating an integration of Reichian and Gestalt work. While at Esalen, she was a student within the Native American traditions leading wilderness journeys. Additionally, she studied continuum movement with Emily Conrad, A nurse in the seventies, Jessica specialized in the field of childhood sexual and physical abuse. She continues to practice from a view that includes the whole of the miracle of conscious life.

“I come from a very traumatic historical background as a child,” begins Jessica. “It was a lot of abuse in my family of origin.” Those experiences prompted Jessica’s quest for healing. “I started basically needing to deal with myself,” she laughs. “I went from Freud, which helped organize my history, to Jung, which gave me a larger context of holding, to Gestalt, which taught me about feelings.” She then incorporated Reiki, which provided her with a more embodied sense of self.

Still, she felt something was missing. It wasn’t until Jessica met Hamid Ali, her spiritual teacher and founder of The Diamond Method, that she learned to process complicated feelings while remaining thoroughly in her body. “I became somatically present and, over time, I started recognizing what we would call a spiritual strength.” She also realized first-hand and by working with clients that “our aliveness is more fundamental than our biology. Our ‘love nature’ is more fundamental than our organic or psychological heart.”

Jessica believes that it takes a profound level of self-awareness to hold someone’s emotions in a therapeutic relationship. “I don’t know where most people can get the practitioners who will be with them in a really deep way, that gives their clients the confidence to feel what feels like the un-feelable,” she says. NARM, which integrates a nervous system-based and a relational orientation, and also recognizes the spiritual level of human experience, is undoubtedly well-positioned to fill the void.

Jessica suggests about depth-oriented healing work, “It’s a midwifery process. It’s very hands-on in a certain kind of way. So to make oneself a vehicle for holding that does mean that you’ve dealt with some of the deep forces in your own consciousness,” she says, adding, “I think the therapist needs to be kind of fearless, you know, their feet solid on the ground and their butt in the dirt.”

Transforming Trauma is grateful to Jessica for sharing her wisdom with our community. She reminds us how important it is that therapists turn their inquisitive minds inward, exploring the darker chapters of our own stories so that we may better accompany our clients on their journey toward the light.

GUEST CONTACT AND BIO

The Diamond Approach

Email

Jessica Britt has been a student of Hamid Ali since 1977 and a teacher since 1985. As training director for the Diamond Approach, she leads ongoing groups in Europe, Canada, and the US. In the 1980s, Jessica was on the Gestalt staff of Esalen Institute, creating an integration of Reichian and Gestalt work. While at Esalen, she was a student within the Native American traditions leading wilderness journeys. Additionally, she studied continuum movement with Emily Conrad. A nurse in the seventies, Jessica specialized in the field of childhood sexual and physical abuse. She continues to practice from a view that includes the whole of the miracle of conscious life.