The Challenge
Explaining my approach creates a challenge similar to the one ‘whisperers’ face in this culture. If you’ve seen horse whisperers (such as Pat Parelli) or the dog whisperer (Cesar Millan) on YouTube, it seems that they have magical powers to help animals overcome their issues and problems. This isn’t the case. Instead, their success is grounded in attunement—they’re ability to understand how the animals experience and struggle with life. This understanding allows them to see problems and solutions through the animal’s eyes instead of through the human’s. In so doing, whisperers are able to get to the heart of how things work in ways that pass by most people.
You can think of me as an emotional whisperer whose approach is grounded in collaborating with the organic needs of the emotional system. People spend a lifetime with their emotional systems, but they do so with a general focus on doing what works for them instead of learning to give their systems what they need so they can thrive. This has led us to normalize an approach to our emotional systems that neglects some of its fundamental needs, and this progressively leads us to degrade emotionally as we go through the challenges and difficulties we all experience in life. This degradative process ultimately leads to our systems getting torn up at their deepest levels—a state I call core debilitation.
We’ve normalized a practice of suppressing, ignoring, and covering over our deeper negative emotions in this culture. This approach tends to allow us to ‘get rid of’ our emotional pain in the short term while setting us up to have chronic issues and problems in the long term. You can’t successfully keep torn up core emotion suppressed indefinitely, so it usually finds a way to surface and express itself no matter how much we try to keep it at bay. Different people experience different types of issues and problems as a result of this. This leaves the average person with a challenge—he or she is clearly struggling, but his/her issues and problems seem to come from nowhere—often seeming to be irrational—because he’s/she’s disconnected from the heart of what’s driving them.
(To read more about Why we struggle emotionally, click here.)
Testimonials
‘When I first started working with Doug, I couldn’t access my core, and could barely perceive of its existence. Through the work with Doug, I was able to find an inroad to this core wound and make a place for it to exist so I could start to connect to it and create change. Peeling back the layers was a slow and intense process, but one in which I was never without the tools necessary to succeed. Having arrived on the other side of this challenge, I greet each new day with an intense gratitude for having gone through this process. It changed my life, provided me with a freedom I couldn’t have imagined possible, and gave me access to personal depths that continue to teach me even years after finishing the work with Doug.’—JT
‘Working with Doug gave me the structure, support, and accountability to fundamentally change how I move through the world. Fear and shame used to dominate how I met the outside world, as a shy, oddball gay man who never felt at home anywhere, and I spent too many years hiding myself and trying to convince people I was who I thought they wanted me to be. This was harming all aspects of my life. Doug helped me go deep into the core wounds that drove these hiding behaviors and discover a different way to show up as myself. This journey was often scary and confusing, constantly resisted by my own wounded experience, but Doug’s insights, energy, and defiant commitment to the process held me accountable to my own strengths and helped me discern my path to real change. Now, the differences I used to disguise are what I confidently offer the world and my relationships, art, and life are as daring, adventurous, and open to possibility as I ever hoped. I’m incredibly grateful to Doug and the tradition he works within for insisting on real healing and real wellbeing.’—TM