Approach · her own method
Positive Re-Narrative and Repatterning
This is my own method, and it is the through-line of everything else I do. The idea underneath it is simple enough to say in one sentence: an old pattern is a loop that keeps closing on itself, and the work is to find where it can open. Not to break it, not to fight it, not to shame yourself for having it. To find the place in the loop where a different move is available, and to practice that move until it is as familiar as the old one.
Telehealth only, by secure video or audio, for people physically located in California. Laurie, LMFT.
What this work looks like with me
Most people arrive able to describe the loop with real precision. You know the shape of it. Something happens, you have a familiar reaction, the reaction produces a familiar result, and the result confirms the belief that started it. You have probably been told to stop doing it. You may have told yourself, sincerely and often, that this time will be different, and then watched the same sequence run anyway. That is not weakness. A loop that closes on itself is efficient, and efficiency is exactly the problem.
So we slow it down and take it apart. We find the sequence in ordinary detail: what happened, what you thought first, what your body did, what you said, what you did not say, what happened next. I ask a lot of small questions here, because the opening is almost never at the dramatic end of the loop. It is early, in a place that seemed too minor to mention. Often it is a half-second where you decided something about yourself before anyone else had said a word.
Then we look at the narrative that runs alongside it. Every long-standing pattern is glued together by a sentence about who you are: I am too much, I am not enough, if I need something I will be left, if I stop holding this it will fall. The re-narrative is not a slogan to replace that sentence with. It is a more accurate account of the same life, one that includes the evidence the old sentence had to leave out in order to keep being true. We build it with real material out of your history, which is why it holds up under pressure and a slogan does not.
The repatterning is the practical half. A new understanding that never leaves the session is a pleasant hour, not a change. So we choose one specific place in the loop and one specific different move, small enough that you can actually do it in the week ahead. Then we come back and look at what happened, without either of us needing it to have gone well.
A pattern is not a character flaw. It is a route that was worn in early, by someone with fewer options than you have now.
We are not looking for the moment it began. We are looking for the moment it can open.
The parts of the method
Find the loop
In specifics, not in themes. Not 'I self-sabotage' but 'on Thursday, when she said she was busy, I decided within two seconds that she was done with me, and I sent the message I always send.' A pattern that stays general cannot be worked with.
Find where it opens
Every loop has a point of most leverage, and it is usually earlier and smaller than you would guess. We look for the place where one different move changes what comes next, rather than trying to change everything at once.
Write the re-narrative
A truer account of your life than the one written by a much younger you, built from evidence you have been discounting. This is not a more flattering story. It is a more complete one, which is why it holds.
Practice the new route
The old path is worn in and fast. The new one has to be walked repeatedly before it feels like yours. We choose something small and repeatable, and we expect the first attempts to be clumsy.
Include what it was protecting
A pattern almost always has a job. Repatterning that ignores the job produces a rebound. So we make sure the thing the loop was guarding has somewhere else to be held before we ask the loop to stand down.
How we would work
We start with a free 20-minute consult by phone, text or video. You tell me what keeps happening, and I tell you honestly whether this is work I can be useful in. You feel into that for yourself.
If we go ahead, we meet weekly by secure video or audio, and the method sits underneath whatever else the week requires. Some sessions are almost entirely this: mapping, opening, practicing. Others need Internal Family Systems, because the loop turns out to be two parts of you in a standoff. Others need somatic work, because the reaction is faster than thought and lives in the body. Others need EMDR, and I am EMDR certified, because a single memory is still supplying the charge. And when grief is what the loop was built around, which happens often, the grief comes first.
I work with adults, seniors, couples and families, and the method scales to all four. In couples and family work we map the interlocking version, where each person's loop is the other person's trigger.
- The same argument, in a different relationship
- Self-sabotage right at the point where something is going well
- Choosing partners, jobs or friendships that end the same way
- Overfunctioning until you resent everyone you have been carrying
- A reaction that is much bigger than the thing that set it off
- Knowing exactly what you do and being unable to stop doing it
Questions people ask about this method
- Is this just positive thinking?
- No, and I would not blame you for asking. Positive thinking usually means putting a pleasant sentence on top of an unpleasant truth and hoping the sentence wins. That does not hold, because the part of you that knows better is still in the room. A re-narrative is not a nicer story than the true one. It is a truer story than the one you inherited, which was usually written by a much younger version of you under pressure, with very little information. We do not argue with the old story. We look at when it was written, what it was protecting, and what it left out.
- How long before something actually changes?
- Noticing a loop as it starts tends to come first, and for many people that begins within the first several weeks. Interrupting it takes longer, because the old route is faster and better rehearsed than the new one. What I watch for is not a dramatic before-and-after but a shortening: the spiral that used to take four days takes an afternoon, then an hour. I will not put a date on it, because that would be a number I made up.
- Do we have to go back into childhood for this?
- Sometimes, and only as far as is useful. A pattern usually has a beginning, and knowing where it started can take a great deal of shame out of it, because a response that looks irrational now was often intelligent then. But we are not excavating for its own sake. If you have already told the story of your childhood many times without anything shifting, that is a sign the missing piece is not more history. It is the loop as it runs today, in this week, in the specific conversation you had on Tuesday.
- What if the pattern is not mine alone?
- That is often the case, and it is why I work with couples and families as well as individuals. Patterns interlock. One person withdraws and the other pursues, and each is certain the other one started it. Repatterning in that situation is not about assigning the fault. It is about finding the one point in the sequence where either of you could do something different, and making that point visible enough that it becomes a choice instead of a reflex.
The loop can open
If you have watched yourself run the same sequence for years and are tired of promising it will be different, that is a good place to start from rather than a bad one. Text or email and we will find a time to talk. What I am working toward with you is not only a broken habit but more peace, purpose and fulfillment in your relationship to your own life, held in whatever framework is yours. Telehealth only, by secure video or audio, for people physically located in California. Laurie, LMFT.