attachment

Complex Trauma & Difficult Early Attachment.

This is an old website page here from 2012, now it’s a blog post.

Trauma can be big T or little t, it may also be known or unknown trauma, none is less significant.

Trauma comes under many guises and often goes alongside growing up with a difficult or disrupted early attachment to the parent/caregiver, meaning there were significant times in childhood when you were not seen, heard or acknowledged and you had difficult later life experiences too.

I like the term unmothered/parented children to describe this early disruption. Together they result in complex trauma that comes from a variety of sources.

Unfinished Business

I believe coming to therapy is about exploring our unfinished business. All our unresolved life experiences and our early attachment patterns are deeply etched in the neuroplasticity of our brains, it’s hard wired if you like.

These patterns repeat physiologically, as neurons that fire together wire together, resulting in how we are in present moment time and in the replaying of flashbacks, or unresolved issues or trauma as current somatic symptoms.

If our symptoms and these old patterns or ways of relating to others and the world are triggered, this is usually what drives us to seek help as life or part of our lives is out of balance and perhaps unmanageable. The good news is we can change the plasticity of the brain, by working together with what is currently presenting.

unfinished business, working with trauma, online.

Trauma – As well as being individual, it is now understood as generational and collective.

Short or Long Term Work
I understand that seeking professional help and sharing at this level is a powerful and courageous step to take. I very much respect the counselling/psychotherapeutic process and I will manage it in a calm and mindful manner. The work will unfold at its own pace and can either be short or long term to suit your needs.

Creative 
I enjoy being creative in my approach and I use a variety of creative means, if appropriate, to enable clients to have better understanding of their current situation all of which helps get beneath the surface of the problem and allows meaning that is beyond words or from an early place in your history.

Insurance
I have professional indemnity insurance which allows me to work online in private practice from my base here in Fife. I belong to National Counselling Society NCS as my professional member body and work to their code of ethics and practice. I attend regular CPD and have monthly supervision to support all of my work.

Attuned vibrational healing, tuning into love….

Its not so much that we cant feel those primal emotions, its that we run from them. Or our fear does. We fear feeling them again as the situation that originally set them up, was fearful and in beginning to re-member or get in touch with that, It re=lights up in our brain circuitry and causes alarm all over again.
We can re wire though! we can meet THAT PART, THE FEAR, mindfully, with compassion and through grace and love… and then small step by small step, that very old defence will allow its dissolving..and new neuroplasticity will form and grow and rewiring will have been successful. ❤. and repeat.
Tuning into love.
maggie costella 2016

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all of my work is based on working from my heart centre

Early relational experiences can be rewired

Via his F/B page by  Matt Licata.

Early relational experiences are encoded in our neural circuitry in the first 18 months of life. They are stored as implicit memory, inaccessible by means of conscious awareness, and form the templates through which we engage the relational world. As we have come to see, these organizing principles come surging in our intimate relationships – with lovers, friends, our children – as well as with the alchemical ‘other’ inside us, by way of previously disavowed emotions, feelings, and somatic information of all kinds.

Our expectations in relationship – the reliability of others, our worthiness of being loved, what we can count on, our fears around being vulnerable – are structured in a fragile little nervous system that is longing for safety and connection. The neural pathways are tender, open, and responsive, as we seek attuned, right brain-to-right brain resonance with those around us. We want to feel felt, to have our subjective experience held and mirrored, and for the space in which we can explore unstructured states of being.

While this encoding is deeply embedded, it can be rewired. While it may feel so entrenched, it is not as solid as it appears. Even if your early environment was one of consistent empathic failure, developmental trauma, and insecure attachment, it is never too late. The wild realities of neuroplasticity and the courage of the human heart is unstoppable and an erupting force of creativity and reorganization.

Through new relational experiences – with a therapist, a lover, a friend, a baby; or with a star, a deer, a tree, a sunset, or with the moon, it will be revealed that love is the basis of all neural circuitry. It is the substance which forms the neurons and their synapses, and lights up the cells in your heart in a fresh moment of warmth, presence, and kindness. Each time you meet and attune to another, receive their love, return it with your presence, and stay close with the ‘other’ within you, a new world is born.

As long as there is breath moving in and out, you can update the narrative. You can make new meaning of your life, make a new commitment to the miracle of the here and now, and learn to flood your immediate experience with presence, warmth, and acceptance. Slowly, over time, you can embed your neural circuitry with the new pathway of holding awareness.

No matter what is happening in your life, you can start right now. In this moment. There is only ever this moment. The opportunity for reorganization is always here and wired within you. Don’t give up. Love will never give up on you.