Hi, my name is Lesa Spravka and I’m a psychotherapist here at Heartwood Center. I want to tell you a little bit about a therapeutic technique I was recently trained in called The Completion Process. This process was created by Teal Swan (tealswan.com) who developed it to assist herself in recovering from some horrific childhood abuse. One of the reasons I find this process so compelling is that Teal developed it because she has extrasensory abilities and can actually SEE streams of consciousness and how they get broken off due to trauma. The good news is that you don’t have to have these abilities to recovery from trauma.

Let me take a moment here and ask you to consider a wider definition of trauma. What Teal and now I am calling a trauma is any experience in your life where you did not, for various reasons, always understandable, express your felt emotion(s) or feeling(s). I know, that means all of us, right?

Let me take another minute here and ask you to have as much compassion as you can muster for yourself…because it is our society that has taught us to not pay attention to our feelings/emotions and in particular, not to express them. And our parents carry that message to us; because it’s the message they have been given. Mostly we were encouraged not to express negative emotions but sometimes positive emotions were not welcomed either.

It turns out that emotions are our internal guidance system. The Pixar movie, Inside Out, about the importance of emotions is based on science and shows how crucial having access to our feelings is to our overall brain health. Without knowing our emotions we don’t know who we are, we become a stranger to ourselves and we try to navigate the world on what other people think we should do based on their feelings.

The Completion Process is a 20-Step process that starts with the client creating a mental construct of a “Safe Place” that is prompted by a detailed guided meditation created by Teal Swan. This only needs to be done once so after the first time it’s actually a 19-Step process.

I’m particularly amazed how this first step, so thoroughly lets us truly create only what our mind knows is satisfying. I think other “safe places” I’ve heard about by others are created with much less prompts, so the detail in the Completion Processes guided meditation rises to the level of that individuals authentic knowing. This, individualized creation, seems to give the Completion Process its healing foundation. When clients have shared their safe place with me I am amazed how completely different it is than mine. This often alerts me to be a better listener in general.

About half of my clients came to me after hearing about my services through the Teal Tribe Community and they seem drawn to the process, I believe, because Teal, the creator, speaks more truth than they have heard in a long time. So they have ‘hope’ that the process can help them. But they are not used to honoring their negative emotions. So I spend as much time as needed helping them understand their tendency to avoid feelings and to see that avoidance happening. I also interject compassionate responses to their emotions to show them how different it feels to have their emotions validated.

Two key parts of doing the Completion Process I believe is accepting the importance of feelings and emotions and a willingness to understand the existence of an inner child, even if seen as “only” a mental construct. I feel that once we make the leap that this inner child exists, I feel I can see in my clients a physical expression, primarily, facial expression of a ‘knowing’, a recognition of themselves, a relief. It feels like they are saying “I’m home”.

I like to tell my clients what the steps are because I think it gives them a safer structure with which to allow these feelings that have never been safe to express before. Some of my clients dive right into the process and get to feel, possibly for the first time in awhile, an “all-right-ness” once their primary support or adult self is able to mentally construct unconditional loving kindness to their hurt inner-child.

I have to say that the biggest obstacle to clients and myself (Teal encourages people to learn the process and do it on themselves) actually doing the process is our often unconscious fear of our feelings. We have spent years mental-izing our life and to just understand there is another critical part is a significant shift in perspective.

If you are interested in learning more about this process I have some more details about it at my web site: compassioncentral.org or give me a call and I’d be happy to answer any questions.

Thanks for listening and remember to take care of your feelings. They are super important to a complete you.