Unique self recovery
By Lori Galperin
Unique Self is about evolving your identity to be in greatest alignment with the essence of who you truly are. It is about understanding your significance. It is about recognizing the gifts you alone possess in precisely the way that you do, and finding a way to share them that brings deep fulfillment.
Every person has a particular set of capacities and qualities, a unique set of gifts to share with the world. So, never to achieve realization of one’s self deprives not simply the individual, but all. In anyone’s life, there are experiences that aid the unfolding of one’s unique self and likewise, experiences that shift the trajectory in ways that constrain its emergence.
Unique Self Recovery provides a way back. Finding the way back often rests upon discovering where, when, how and why one went off track. It requires looking anew, with compassion, at the previously painful, and at the time, perhaps unassimilable, that created a departure from the course of one’s truest, fullest self-unfolding. It involves looking at events that closed the heart and erected obstacles to intimacy: with self, others and the larger creative context. It is about re-opening.
Re-Selfing is a Seven Step Process
- Realizing where, when, how and why constriction came to reside where curiosity and openness once lived.
- Repair of “damage done”, whether intentional or inescapable: by others or by self.
- Ridding oneself of outmoded belief systems that arose from earlier limited abilities to understand intricacies implicit in the whys and wherefores of that which was overwhelming.
- Re-owning with respect and reverence whatever it felt necessary to shed in order to feel “safe” or to insure seeming “predictability” along the way.
- Resuscitating what was deadened.
- Risking reopening to life and aliveness and renewing that commitment again and again.
- Refraining from self-castigation when things temporarily go away.
About Lori Galperin
Lori Galperin has been a therapist, program founder, clinical director, teacher and writer for 30+ years. She is highly skilled in multiple types of therapeutic treatment. Her current areas of specialization focus on working with individuals and couples around issues of: 1) intimacy, relational and attachment problems, sexual dysfunction, and; 2) trauma, compulsivity, and eating disorder recovery, (from anorexia, bulimia, and binge-eating) and; 3) clinical writing, focused on the process of recovery from addictive behaviors and mental health problems to a state of vital aliveness, meaningfulness, and relatedness.
Lori’s training includes EMDR, Internal Family Systems Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Processing Therapies, and psychodramatic techniques, as well as the original Masters & Johnson model of marital and sexual co-therapy, as taught by its founders. She’s co-authored book chapters and journal articles, lectured and trained professionals both nationally and internationally.