Mark Baxter

People have developed, you know, coping strategies to not feel their feelings, to push them down in ways that they needed to do at the time and developing the kind of confidence and bravery really to feel these and feel them all the way through and feel them fully is a really important skill set.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, if people could do that in primary school and high school and families were more into that, like we would have such an easier run as adults, I think.

Yeah, I mean, it's a huge area that we work with.

And depending on people's kind of early experiences, especially their early childhood experiences, they have a huge range of different relationships to the way that emotions show up in them.

For some people, it's a matter of, you know, unexpressed emotions.

And for different reasons, they've had to dissociate, block, numb or move away from difficult feelings.

And, you know, later on that can show up in forms like substance abuse or eating disorders or depression.

And for some people, we're really trying to help them get in touch with, feel into and express what's going on for them.

And for others, they've kind of got this kind of overexpression in a way.

It's almost like whatever shows up in them spills right out into the world.

And for people like that, we're kind of helping them with kind of emotion regulation and distress tolerance and helping them.

understand what's coming up not be so confused about the mix of things that are coming up give name to that internally and then be able to kind of you know use different skills to to kind of be with that in a way where their behavior is not automatically affected and therefore their relationships aren't you know ruptured in that way so we're kind of working with this kind of spectrum I guess of under regulation over regulation under expression kind of over expression and

Yeah, it's a huge aspect of the work we do, how we're programmed when we're young.

So what happens to us and the impact of that and the resources that we have around that time, including the support from others, all play a part in how our belief systems form about who we are, how we trust or distrust other humans in the world.

And also our feelings about the world in general.

Is it a safe place?

Is it an unsafe place?

So there's these belief systems that form from those early experiences.