When we are little ones and we experience difficult or traumatic things alone, without warmth and resonance from others, we make agreements to make sure that scary thing will never happen again.
These are called unconscious contracts. They often have a ring of absolutism to them: I will never open my heart again. I will never trust other people. I will only rely on myself.
These agreements are genuine attempts to help ourselves, but as we age we realize that we’ve tied ourselves in knots with unsustainable vows that keep us small, keep us separate, and keep us disconnected from others.
Want to learn to release these contracts? See the resources below.
I haven't found any other process that allows us to so thoroughly disentangle the deeply patterned emotional responses and sabotage we enact on ourselves. Untangling unconscious contracts is deeply powerful work, and is the focus of my new year-long course,...
What needs are you meeting by remaining small? Surprisingly, most often those needs are survival and integrity. How do you then transcend these self-made limitations? I was teaching a multi-day training in Europe two years ago, and one of the participants, a man in...
Joy and the PLAY circuit are the most vulnerable emotional circuitry we have as humans. Our capacity to experience joy is especially vulnerable to the ways in which we have experienced feeling unsafe, unaccompanied, or not having a sense of mattering to those around...
Ronnie, I’d like to talk with you about our sexual experience.” “Okay, Jan,” says Ronnie. Ronnie says this even though, inside, Ronnie is quaking. This is not good news for Ronnie’s nervous system. Conversations about sex are painful and never end well for Ronnie....
When I was walking my dog last night I ran into a rigid place inside myself. For any of you who've worked with me for a while, you know that a felt sense of rigidity is a cue, a way of knowing there's something going on under the surface. This rigidity provides an...
In order to belong, survive or honor our families, we make unconscious and silent agreements with ourselves, our caregivers, or the world, which can keep us feeling stuck, small and constrained. When working with addictions and compulsive behaviors, we can use unconscious contract work to touch on, bring healing to, and release ourselves from agreements that are no longer serving us.