My Self-Perception Has Undergone a Revolutionary Shift
Published about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Recently, I shared Courtney's email—the story of how her and Carter's Signature Threesome Journey eventually opened their marriage of 30 years. What I didn't share about is the solo work Carter did with me in the process.
After our work together, I asked Carter if he'd be willing to write a few words. He wrote me an essay!
Reading it, I cried. Paragraph after paragraph.
In His Own Words
This is aspecting: giving voice to the parts of ourselves we rarely let speak.
After a year of standard psychotherapy I had begun to appreciate how defended and disembodied I've been throughout my life. While my therapist had helped me reach this conclusion, the psychotherapeutic setting was not amenable to moving beyond that state. I recognized that I needed to find another path towards embodiment and expressiveness. I reached out to Elaine—one of the most embodied and expressed people I have ever met—for help with getting started on this path, and on the journey to earned secure attachment.
With open expressiveness and deep perception, Elaine routinely guided me into emotional spaces that I had not known I could visit. At some point during each of our five sessions I was moved to tears, and each session resulted in the emergence of a new locus of discovery. Her work with me increased the effectiveness of my normal therapy ten-fold, and the interaction between these therapeutic modalities led to much more rapid progress than I could have expected.
The technique she applied most was that of "aspecting", in which she guided a conversation with some feature of my personality or person in my life. It was through these sessions that I discovered a deeply hidden, lingering grief from a childhood trauma that I had known about but had dismissed as irrelevant. This insight became the focus of my therapy, and has led to a deepening of my relationships with my parents and sibling. The fact that we can now speak openly about the event and acknowledge the grief that it caused has heightened my feelings of compassion for my family and opened new channels of communication among us.
More personally, I feel as if I've entered a new world, in which I am much more connected to the signals my body is sending me. My therapist has explicitly commented on the changes he's seen in me: he's stated that I am more relaxed, at ease and open. I'm more conscious of my feelings, and in fact am feeling more intensely than ever in my life.
I'm starting to question my lifelong belief that I was strongly introverted, and am now seeking out more social connections. I would not have believed that temperament could change significantly over the course of a life, but I have changed my view on this completely as my self-perception has undergone a revolutionary shift.
I've done a lot of work to get to this point, and my success has depended on my own motivation and openness. But Elaine's guidance has been the most significant factor in my ability to maintain that attitude, and to see the path that I needed to follow.
She is a gifted healer and practitioner, and I am grateful to have benefited from her wisdom, compassion and experience.
— Carter
At some point during each of our five sessions I was moved to tears, and each session resulted in the emergence of a new locus of discovery. — Carter
Express & Release: sometimes the way through grief or rage is straight through it—fully, physically, with nowhere left to hide.
The Work Behind This
What Carter is describing is something I call Express & Release—sessions where the goal isn't to talk about your feelings. It's to actually feel them, fully, because that's what can allow you to release them and to shift your lived experience.
This approach comes out of my training with ISTA, the International School of Temple Arts, where I learned to work with embodiment, emotional release, and the parts of ourselves we've learned to keep quiet.
The technique Carter mentions, aspecting, is a form of parts work. I guide a conversation with a specific part of you—a feeling, a younger version of yourself, even a person who isn't in the room. It sounds strange until you're in it. Then it makes a kind of sense that talk therapy alone rarely reaches. His therapist noticed it. So did his family.
My therapist has explicitly commented on the changes he's seen in me: he's stated that I am more relaxed, at ease and open. — Carter
Why This Matters for Every Threesome Journey
The tools I used with Carter aren't separate from the tools I bring into Threesome Journeys. They're the same toolkit. I just reach for different parts of it depending on what's needed.
In a Threesome journey, pleasure and ease are always the compass—we go only as far as feels good, one consensual step at a time. But when you feel safe enough, you naturally start to stretch. Sometimes all the way to the edges of your comfort zone. Andsometimes, at that edge, something bigger than the moment shows up:
Jealousy that feels disproportionate to what's actually happening—because it's reaching back to a childhood fear of being second-best.
Grief for a love long lost, surfacing out of nowhere in the middle of pleasure.
Anger that was never about the person in front of you.
Shame about your own desire, as old as the first time you felt attraction and learned it wasn't welcome.
Fear of voicing a need, because somewhere along the way you learned that speaking up gets you rejected.
When we touch on an attachment wound like that, you have a chance to create a new lived experience and re-write your story. That's why I don't smooth it over or rush us past it. I can take you into a deep process, right there, in the moment—because that's usually exactly where the biggest breakthroughs happen. That's where we find the gold.
I discovered a deeply hidden, lingering grief from a childhood trauma that I had known about but had dismissed as irrelevant. This insight [...] has led to a deepening of my relationships with my parents and sibling. — Carter
Curious to Explore?
If you hit an edge, I've got you. Whether that's in a Threesome Journey, Express & Release sessions, or any other way we work together—I'm here to hold you through it.
If this is speaking to you, I'd love to hear from you. Book your discovery call today, or simply reply to this email.
