Leslie Nipps Counseling

Healers want to heal. People in pain or distress want healing. What a perfect fit. Right? Or maybe not…

Last fall, I herniated a disc. I developed very severe sciatica, and for those of you who’ve had this experience, you know the pain is quite extraordinary. I suddenly became willing to spend any amount of money to whoever could take away the pain.

I met a lot of incredibly skilled alternative body workers. But I found myself cycling through all of them. None of them seemed quite right, and they all, to be honest, kind of scared me. I was in a state of near-terror due to my intense and sudden pain, and I couldn’t find anyone who made me feel like things were going to be okay (despite a lot of reassurances that they could indeed fix my pain). I remember talking with one highly recommended practitioner on the phone who began to castigate western medicine, even though I had never brought up the topic, and I wondered what was going on and why I was feeling nervous about meeting this person.

Eventually, I found a practitioner with whom I immediately felt safe and I have been working with him since then. But a client’s experience of safety with us as practitioners doesn’t need to be left to blind luck.

Most healers focus their efforts on a particular healing framework that really feels like it works. They want to offer the healing that works so well to those who need it. People in need of healing are searching for just that healing you have to offer. But they don’t have the framework. What they’ve got is the pain or distress.

When these two people come together—the healer and the sufferer—there’s the potential for terrific engagement, but this potential often has to overcome an initial gulf: The client has the pain, the healer has the answer, but the client doesn’t know or understand the answer. They need, somehow, to be brought on board.

This gulf is usually obvious to the healer. The client doesn’t know anything we know about how energy moves and is blocked; or how posture is causing their pain; or that they need to balance their nutritional intake; or how to engage their core in order to feel healthy again. They know very, very little about these things. We want them as partners in their healing. We don’t want to just do things to them—which isn’t very useful anyway.

But let’s ask for a moment: What does the client want in the beginning? In addition to having their pain taken away, what do they want? What do you want when you become the client? Do you want to be initiated into a new healing framework?

What almost all potential clients want is for their pain and their experience of it to be met, seen, understood, and deeply respected. They also want their health and the rest of the meaning of their lives also to be met and respected. They don’t want feel that all that needs to be shoved aside in order to have the healing they most want. They want to believe that what they already value can be integrated into a healing framework.

It turns out that creating that reassurance is simple and can take place in the first few minutes of an interaction with a potential client. It’s done with something called “rapport.” Have you ever met someone who seems to create safety for almost everyone s/he meets? That person has an instinctive gift for creating rapport. They do it unconsciously in the way they stand, move, speak and engage with those they are with. But it isn’t mysterious. It’s a set of skills that are easily learned.

People relax and feel safe when they feel they are with “of like kind.” Imagine a gazelle on the savanna: anything that looks like a gazelle feels safe; anything that might not be a gazelle (even if it’s just a waving bunch of grass) might be a lion. RUN!

It turns out we are not much different from gazelles, and even though we don’t usually run, we find good excuses not to be with people with whom unconsciously we don’t feel fully “of like kind,” or fully safe. We suddenly realize we don’t have enough money for the service, or feel like it’s just not a “match” for us.

Rapport skills are what make it possible to help almost anybody feel safe with us. We give people the assurance that we are, indeed, “of like kind,” and fundamentally okay. Through learning a few easy, concrete skills, we can increase our ability to create rapport and help others feel really, really good with us no matter how different they may be.

Rapport is not “people skills,” warmth, friendliness, good listening skills, or any other version of sociability. It involves specific cues we give to others’ creature neurology that we are safe for them. It’s a remarkably respectful way to be with others: instead of asking people to get on our map of the world, we kindly move onto theirs, and work with them on their map—and this works so much better.

After establishing rapport, if we’ve done that well, we can start telling our clients about our healing framework and how we are inviting them into a new way to feel better. But let’s start with letting them know they are safe with us, no matter what. We get a whole lot more clients that way.

Mt. Diablo Rapport

“ Raymond” came to me wanting a closer relationship with his father. He knew their estrangement was sapping energy from his life, but there was so much enmity and misunderstanding, he couldn’t see any way through to closeness.

Wouldn’t it be nice to trust that we were born into the very best family for us? The truth is…we did. Even the dangerous, crazy families are the source of our life. Take out even one member of our direct ancestry, and we…are…not…here.

All members of a family have this sense, and it creates spectacular loyalties and confusions.  Every member belongs equally, and can never unbelong. Each member has his or her particular respect and place in the system. These are, as Bert Hellinger puts it, a result of “Orders of Love”: everyone always belongs to their family, and everyone deserves respect.

Another Order of Love is that those born first send life down to the younger ones. Life and “help” never flows the other way. But when the younger ones look backward and see the older ones suffering (or having suffered, if they have died), they often reach back in an effort to help. We do this naturally and lovingly, but it never has good effect. We see this quite explicitly in the lives of the descendents of Holocaust survivors, who in an effort to honor and help those who suffered so much, make their own lives completely unlivable. And we see it many other ways in which we take on others’ problems as our own, structuring our lives around trying to resolve and heal their wounds.

This turns out to be the source of many common issues: financial problems, relationship difficulties, food disorders, depression. We are making our lives miserable in an unworkable effort to say “I love you” to someone upstream. Argh! How do we begin to unentangle this?

What if we could gather the family together? All of them: kids, parents, grandparents, great grandparents. Bring them together so that we could see and honor the suffering, include the lost ones, notice how much bigger the older ones are than the younger ones, and hear the ancestors lovingly say to those pesky younger ones “Cut that out!” What if we could bring them together and unentangle all the inappropriate attempts to help, bring peace to the heartbroken, and put everyone back in their proper and right place in the family?

As it turns out, nothing is ever truly lost, and everyone’s family is still available through the presence of their unique “Family Soul.” Family Constellation work gives us access to this ongoing and real phenomena. We tap into what Rupert Sheldrake called the “Morphogenetic Field” where all information is accessible, and discover the love of our families—the kind that is stuck and the kind that is flowing.

In that safe, contained environment, Raymond was acquainted with his long dismissed Mormon ancestors, his father’s family. The constellation quickly revealed that these people had been both on the end of terrible victimization, and had themselves committed crimes. As a result, they had been rejected, and all but forgotten.

Our family souls will not put up with this. No one may be rejected or forgotten. Apparently, Raymond had offered to be the one who would make sure they would be included by sapping his life of energy and being alienated from his father. By his own suffering, the dishonor done to his ancestors could be addressed. The little ones in a family are almost always willing (if unconsciously) to do this out of love for their family.

But the constellation offered a new and much more effective solution. We made these Mormon ancestors visible. We watched them willingly take responsibility for any wrongs they had committed, and also offered them our respect for their sufferings and losses. The strength of these ancestors became re-accessible to the entire family, which is what the little ones always need to be able to live their lives fully. And Raymond received his ancestor’s blessing to live the life that they had given him. In this context, it became easier for him to respect his father’s limitations and challenges, and once again accept the full blessing that his father is able to give. In this tableau, we could see Raymond’s energy beginning to return, now that he wasn’t cut off from his own family’s life and love.

Love freely flowing. This is what our whole family wants for all of us.

Chandalar River, Alaska, by Leslie Nipps

lkjlkj

Atlantic Light by Leslie Nipps

A beautiful day on the ocean…

An invitation to dive in…

The sheer aliveness of everything…

What do you see?

Every NLP session begins with these four magical words: “What do you want?”

What makes them magical?

After all, I see them lit up in digital form on the screen displays of lots of cash registers. Indeed, they can seem trite, or self-serving, or in an extreme form hopelessly narcissistic and consumer-driven. Why in this world of excess would I encourage people to ask that question?

Well, let’s see. Try it. Take a moment, take a deep breath, and then contemplatively and respectfully ask yourself “What do I want?”

What, for this day, seems most important to what you want to be or to experience today?

This question is immensely powerful, for a few reasons:

• It shifts our attention away from problems, and toward desire, hope, rightness of life.
• It opens our heart to possibility, rather than focused on limitation or already established pattern.
• Most of all, as we begin to answer the question, we already start making the answer true by imagining it, empowering it, and reaching for it.

One alternative to asking this question is not asking it—preventing our heart from wanting at all. Another alternative is appearing to ask the question, without really doing so, and ending up with ready but frustrating answers like “Another piece of cake!” or worse “Nothing much, really…”

I have recently lit upon the daily practice, in my morning meditation, of asking this question. Sometimes the response refers directly to something important happening that day about which I have a special intention or hope: I want to be fearless in my horseback riding today; I want to allow my competency to shine forth as I work with a suffering client tonight.

Other times, the response is more general, addressing large life issues that continue to be part of my life’s journey: I want to experience intimacy today; I want to invite the pain of Haiti’s people into my heart.

In either case, asking the question and allowing a creative, heart-felt response to form is itself the work of bringing into reality these things that I am pretty sure are part of God’s and universe’s desire for me, as well.

What would you like? As you respond, let the power of your heart’s answer begin to re-pattern and re-illuminate your life…

Peace, Leslie

Toward the Stormy Ocean by Leslie Nipps

We teach what we most need to learn.

The day was foggy, cold and windy, and a horse was bucking in circles on his lunge line a few feet away. Everything in me was expecting my normally calm—but not bomb-proof—horse to start prancing, jigging and jumping. He had every right to, given the circumstances. Why had I even tried this? It was my first ride in two months, still healing from my first ever, incredibly painful and frightening, herniated disc. I could not risk being bounced around (much less thrown off). My horse had to walk, and only walk. And here I was, completely tempting fate.

And yet, I took the risk. I dared to trust him, and life. I dared to trust that I was ready, and that I am a good enough rider, truly, to ask my horse to calmly walk when I need him to, and succeed.

And we did.

I learned not simply that I can trust. Okay, that’s a pretty simplistic lesson. It’s that life is regularly, almost daily, offering me experiences that remind me that trust is the most useful and truthful stance toward life. Life reaches back out in trustworthy acts.

We teach what we most need to learn.

I discovered this as I grew as a preacher in my former career as an Episcopal minister. My best sermons were never about the issues about which I had clarity and certainty; indeed, they tended to be boring and a tad strident, or at least pedantic. My best sermons always focused on whatever I was working on, struggling with, confused or curious about. They might sound “convincing” (and I got regular feedback of how inspiring these sermons were), but they resonated because they came from my own searching and desire. I was reaching for God (Spirit, Life, Hope, Meaning, etc.), and so the congregation could reach with me, and find what they were looking for.

Since my counseling tagline is “Trust as a Way of Life,” you can assume that is what I myself am reaching for. Trust is at the heart of the well-lived life. Without it, joy is harder to come by, we have a hard time seeking relationship, we can’t fully express our creativity and work, and we can’t help others. At the least, things feel unstable, and at the worst everything may be “out to get us.” Whatever wound we carry, whatever behavior or experience of life we would prefer not to have, distrust is some substantial contributor.

Take a minute now, and make a picture of a future version of you who trusts in exactly all the ways that you want and which would support the things you most long for in life. Notice how natural trust is to that version of you, and enjoy that one’s experience of life in the midst of such joy…

Peace, Leslie

California Hillside by Leslie Nipps

One Response to “Trust as a Way of Life…”