Healing Your Childhood with NVC

Learn How Nonviolent Communication Can Heal Your Childhood Developmental Traumas.

In this 8-session course Sarah Peyton will lead an exploration and a celebration of the power of Nonviolent Communication to transform and heal developmental trauma.

Nonviolent Communication is a practice of empathetic connection. A way of communicating with awareness, compassion and understanding. Not just with others, but with yourself, too. 

Developmental trauma is the trauma that happens when there are repeated experiences of being harmed in early childhood. This results in after-effects for our brains. 

Did you know NVC has the potential to heal your innermost traumas?  — something most of us carry from our childhoods into adulthood — experiences that shape the way we see and interact with the world as adults

Those traumas could be caused by childhood experiences of loss, neglect or abuse. 

They can also be caused by parents/caregivers who were consistently unable to show up for their child in everyday situations. Trauma can occur when a child is:

• Repeatedly not being heard. This can happen when a care-giver is not giving a child their full attention because they are regularly distracted by other things.
• Frequently being overpowered. Many of us are raised in a culture where parents or care-givers are the decision makers — children are told what to do and when to do it. 
• Regularly not being understood. A child sees opportunities to play everywhere. Grown ups often overlook the fun a child is seeking and demand they behave in a different way.

These early experiences can take a hefty impact on young developing minds and contribute to a child’s:

• Reduced ability to connect with others 
• Lack of awareness of their own feelings and needs 
• Reduced ability to trust
• Lack of awareness of their own autonomy 
• Difficulty giving and receiving love
• A general lack of aliveness

The good news is Nonviolent Communication is a beautiful remedy for the significant impact of these experiences from our childhoods.

NVC can help us:

During this 8-class series, Sarah will explore: 

• Attention as nourishment for the soul: Investigate how the attention we pay to others, and the attention we receive ourselves, is the food for our true selves — the person we are truly meant to be.
• Developmental trauma vs. PTSD: Explore the difference between developmental trauma and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). And how understanding these differences can support our healing from repeated early childhood trauma. 
• Time travel empathy: Because our brains do not know that past trauma is actually in the past, giving ourselves empathy (or receiving it from others) as we recall a past experience, has the power to transform difficult past experiences and pain into simple memories and allows the possibility of integration.
• Identify and connect to your childhood felt-sense of self: The way it feels to be yourself as an adult is often different from how it feels to be yourself when remembering your childhood. This topic will help you have affection for all the different ways it has felt to be you during your lifetime.
• Let go of old beliefs: Through our childhoods we unknowingly collect beliefs and thought patterns which affect our ability to trust ourselves and others. This topic will explore letting go of these beliefs which Sarah calls, “unconscious contracts”.
• Reclaiming your individual choice of what we (do not) like: When we are little we know what we do and do not like. As we grow up, we are taught to compromise our choices in favor of the preferences of our families or cultures. This can leave a trauma imprint. In this topic we will start exploring your own preferences. 
• Reawaken your heart to love: Research shows that our hearts respond to emotion more than any other organ in the body. When we are little we have an immense capacity for love that often goes unacknowledged and sometimes gets lost in experiences of aloneness and trauma. During this class, you will begin to heal which allows you to have the safety to reawaken your heart and re-engage with yourself and the world.
• Enjoy your own emergence into who you are supposed to be: Through the journey of discovering and healing your childhood traumas, you will notice and celebrate your true authentic self as it rises to the surface. 

Disclaimer

This work is not therapy and is not a substitute for therapy. If you have a sense that you would be destabilized by yourself or others speaking about difficult events, then this course may not be for you. While we hope that the processes and information that we share can be of use in your journey, we do not have the resources to support extreme psychological difficulties.