<p style="text-align: left;" align="center"><b>In this week’s blog, a Denver therapist shares how the process of owning is impacting clients in her practice . . .</b></p>
<p style="text-align: left;" align="center">Having trained in the Healthy Grieving process and having done quite a bit of owning work myself, I have started using the Owning Process with clients. Because of my own work, I can pick up subtle clues when a client isn’t owning something that is impacting his or her life, such as the language of “Well I know I’m not thus and so (controlling, narcissistic, angry, etc.), but sometimes I . . . . “</p>
That’s when I know, Ah, here is something we need to look at. So I will ask the client, ‘Are you open to exploring this?’ and if they say yes, I start with muscle testing.

Recently I had a client say to me that she wasn’t exactly superficial, and I asked if we could look into that. She guessed herself as a 4 or 5 on scale of 1-10 and we tested she was a 10. Her reaction was a moment of shock and then the moment of seeing it. She saw it and then owned it almost immediately. By the end of the session she was able to see how being superficial played out in her whole life. She was very quickly not even defensive, but eager to see it and even laughing about it and excited to make changes in her life.  A huge shift . . . in an hour and a half.

Another client I’ve been seeing for a long time without her making much progress started really getting somewhere when I introduced this work. She owned that she is a drama queen. It was initially such a shock to her that it actually took her a couple of sessions to fully own it and integrate it but then she got to that place of “Yup, that’s me; I totally see it now and own it as me.”  We later did a full grieving process on letting go of being a drama queen, and she has seen such a great shift in her life.  She’s happier than I’ve ever seen her. More relaxed, less stressed, going with the flow of life which is something she initially wanted from our sessions, and also more vulnerable which was also something she wanted.

Now when a client makes a little comment like “This kind of thing sometimes happen, but it’s not really who I am” a red flag gets raised; and if they’re open to looking at it, the owning process can free them from a pervasive pattern that they could never have let go of because they were denying what was true, denying what they were.

The owning process was the missing link for me in my practice. I didn’t know how to take people deeper and now I have the avenue to take them as deep as they want to go.  And as a result, they experience profound changes.