How It Works

A Simple Orientation

This page begins with the practical shape of the work, then moves into the five phases and the deeper framework for those who want it. A free 15-minute consultation is available if you would like to ask whether individualized work may be a fit.

What Life Telling Processing Looks Like in Practice

Life Telling Processing is a way of staying with the story beneath what is pressing now. It is an individualized, depth-oriented approach developed by Jon Holmes. Rather than asking you to perform a version of your story, the work makes room to notice the patterns, meanings, and protective responses that may be shaping the present.

We begin with the pressure, reaction, relationship, or question that has brought you to this moment. Together, we notice the meanings and protective patterns that may connect the present to earlier chapters. The framework offers orientation while the pace and direction of the work remain responsive to your actual experience.

You do not need to understand the framework before beginning. The framework helps orient the work. Your lived experience is where the work starts.

What a Session May Feel Like

A session often begins with what is most present in your life now. We may slow down a recurring reaction, stay with an emotional or bodily response, or explore the meaning attached to a particular experience.

You do not need to arrive with your full history organized or with the right theory in hand. The work follows the story rather than forcing every person through an identical sequence.

What Is a Neuro-Archetypal Approach?

In-Person Sessions — Old Fair Oaks Village

The Five Phases of Life Telling Processing™

Life Telling Processing™: A Neuro-Archetypal Approach

Life Telling Processing™ is not a technique. It is a journey.

Life Telling Processing™ (LTP) is Jon Holmes's neuro-archetypal, integrative framework. It brings together attention to narrative, memory, learned protective responses, and the deep symbolic language of archetypal patterns. It is not presented as a separately empirically validated treatment protocol.

Stressful or traumatic experiences can affect how people make meaning, remember events, and respond under pressure. At times, threat-related responses may become more prominent and a person may have less access to reflective decision-making. LTP uses narrative and archetypal language to explore these experiences without reducing them to a single brain region or cause.

Life Telling Processing™ is the practice of gently, courageously, bringing those fragments back together, not to erase them, but to integrate them into a story that is whole.

Understanding Your Brain's Story

Your brain is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect you.

When people experience pain, loss, or threat, memories and learned protective responses can influence how they interpret relationships, work, and their own worth. These patterns may be helpful to notice with care, especially when they no longer fit the present.

In our work together, we use compassion-centered inquiry, informed by established clinical traditions, to explore unmet needs and unresolved fears that may be shaping protective patterns. The aim is not to force a reaction away, but to support greater room for reflection, meaning-making, and genuine connection.

We all carry archetypal patterns: deep, universal templates for how we understand ourselves and the world. The Warrior. The Lover. The Sage. The Uninitiated One. These archetypes are not weaknesses; they are the grammar of the soul.

But when these archetypal patterns are wounded through trauma, abandonment, shame, or the relentless pressure of performance, they become sources of pain rather than power. We call these Archetypal Injuries.

Through Life Telling Processing™, we identify the specific archetypal injuries you carry, explore the stories attached to them, and invite those wounded parts of your story into the light. The goal is not to banish the wounded parts, but to integrate them and give them a place in the mosaic.

The clinical hour is, before anything else, a sacred sitting.

I come to it as an audience to a grand narrative. The grand narrative is the life of the person across from me, held in all its fullness, the heartbreak and the endearing warmth, the chapters that have never been told and the ones that have been told so many times they have worn smooth. To be trusted with that story is an honor I do not take lightly.

This is what contemplative means in this practice. Not a technique. Not a posture borrowed from a tradition. It is the quality of being genuinely present to another person's story without rushing it toward a resolution it has not yet found on its own. The story knows where it needs to go. The work is learning to wait with it long enough to find out.

Every framework, every clinical map, every phase of the work exists in service of that sitting. The neuroscience explains why narrative fragments. The archetypal framework names what was wounded. The contemplative presence is the ground in which the gathering actually occurs.

Before any deep work can begin, we establish relational, emotional, and narrative safety. This phase is about building trust and enough steadiness to approach what you are carrying with care. We explore where you are and what your story has taught you about safety, connection, and worth.

In this phase, we begin to map the landscape of your story, not to analyze it clinically, but to listen to it with reverence. We identify the key chapters, the turning points, the wounds, and the survival programs that have shaped your narrative. We introduce the Archetypal Injuries framework, which gives us a shared language for the deeper patterns at work beneath the surface.

With the map in hand, we move into the heart of the work. We move with depth and care into the specific archetypal injuries you carry. We ask the questions that have never been asked: What did you learn about your worth? What survival program formed in response? What part of your story has never been told? This phase is where the fragments begin to speak.

Integration is not the same as resolution. It is not about erasing the difficult chapters or achieving a tidy ending. It is about gathering the fragments, the wounds, the survival programs, the archetypal injuries, and finding their place in a larger, coherent story. In this phase, the Prefrontal Cortex comes back online. The narrative becomes whole. The mosaic begins to emerge.

The final phase is not an ending but a commissioning. We consolidate the work, identify the ongoing practices that will sustain integration, and prepare you to carry the story forward. This is where the couragepath becomes not just a therapeutic journey but a way of living, a daily orientation toward honesty, courage, and the deeper story.

Ready to Discover Your Deeper Story?

The path unfolds as we walk it.

The Uninitiated One wound is the wound to transformation itself: the capacity to cross the threshold into a new season of life. When this archetype is injured, we remain perpetually on the edge of becoming.

A deeper look at what the five-phase arc of LTP actually looks like in practice, from Orientation and Safety through Couragepath Living.

The mosaic is the central image of Life Telling Processing™. Understanding why we gather the fragments rather than discarding them is the key to understanding the work.

What happens in the first therapy session?

The first session is an Orientation session. We spend time mapping the landscape: what you are carrying, what has brought you to this threshold, and what you are hoping the work might open. I am listening not just for the presenting problem but for the shape of your story — the patterns, the wounds, the places where the narrative has fractured. By the end of the first session, you will have a clearer sense of whether this work is the right fit and what the arc of the work might look like.

How often do we meet for therapy sessions?

Most clients meet weekly, particularly in the early phases of the work. As the work deepens and the arc becomes clearer, some clients shift to every other week. Intensive formats — multiple sessions in a concentrated period — are also available for men who need to move through a significant threshold more quickly than weekly sessions allow.

Do you offer a free consultation before starting therapy?

Yes. I offer a free 15-minute consultation for men considering this work. The consultation is not a therapy session; it is a brief conversation to look at where you are, what you are carrying, and whether this work and this therapist might be a good fit. You can schedule a consultation through the contact page.