What is Fierce Love?
Fierce Love is a relationally bold clinical method that heals the patient’s Wounded Self by championing the Core Self so that the Present-Day Self can flourish.
At the heart of suffering is self-rejection, caused by a reaction to traumatic experience/s in which the patient internalizes self-hatred in the form of Core Erroneous Beliefs and Pathogenic Affects (e.g., “I am unlovable, it’s all my fault, I am bad.”)
The Fierce Love therapist stands in on behalf of the patient’s Core Self, piercing the defenses and the toxic shame states, to guide the patient back home to themselves.
Why Love?
Love is not just another emotion.
Love is the container in which everything is held.
We are born with the birthright of love.
Trauma and its consequent psychopathology involve a failure of love -- its lack or its profound distortion.
Fierce Love reclaims the word love as a powerful and central force in healing the Self.
It’s a love that dares to be wholly present to our patients’. unbearable pain, suffering, shame and the dark hole of existential despair.
It’s a love that reminds our patients of what they didn’t get but always deserved.
It’s a love that holds on to the steadfast belief in our patients’ ability to reclaim their Core Self, no matter how broken our patients believe themselves to be
It’s a love that communicates to our patients in our words, our expressions, our felt presence, that they were and still are worthy of love.
Why Fierce?
As therapists we learn to err on the side of caution, by remaining neutral, by waiting for our patients to reveal themselves at their own pace, but often, in doing so, we end up colluding with the defenses, at the expense of our patients’ suffering. Our patients come to us in deep intrapsychic pain; we see a suffering that is unnecessary, wrong, and unjust and are thereby emboldened to interrupt, to lead, to redirect -- to get to that place of deep healing as quickly as possible.
The fierceness is a belief that you are leading patients in the right direction, while simultaneously being able to shift gears at any given moment based on micro-attuning and micro-tracking.
Many therapies focus on the patient’s defenses with the goal of undoing them. In Fierce Love, however, the therapist pierces through the defenses with a targeted, precise focus on the wounds.
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sueanne@fiercelove.com
raoul@fiercelove.com