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 a neuro-archetypal approach to integration, a way of working that weaves together the neuroscience of how our brains process trauma and memory with the deep, symbolic language of the soul. It is grounded in the understanding that our stories are not just psychological events; they are neurological ones. The way we tell our stories, or fail to tell them, shapes the very architecture of our brains.
When we experience trauma, stress, or the slow accumulation of archetypal injuries, our narrative fragments. The Prefrontal Cortex, the part of our brain responsible for coherent storytelling and meaning-making, goes offline. The Amygdala, our survival center, takes over. We stop living from our story and start reacting from our wounds.
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 we experience pain, loss, or threat, the brain's limbic system encodes those experiences as survival memories. Over time, these memories can become the lens through which we interpret everything: relationships, work, our own worth. We begin to live from a survival program that has outlived its usefulness.
In our work together, we use compassion-centered inquiry, shaped by the compassion-based work of Dr. Gabor Maté, to gently explore the unmet needs and unresolved fears that are driving your survival programs. We do not try to force the Amygdala into submission. Instead, we help the Prefrontal Cortex come back online, restoring your capacity for coherent narrative, 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 safety: relational, neurological, and narrative. This phase is about building the trust and the container that will hold the work. We explore where you are, what you are carrying, and what your story has taught you about safety, connection, and worth. The nervous system cannot integrate what it does not feel safe enough to approach.
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.