The Way Out Is In
Upon meeting her clients for the first time, Grace Dulude often hears a common complaint: “I know what I’m doing. I just don't know why I can’t stop doing it.”
“The reason people can’t seem to change is because there are emotions stored in the body that haven’t been brought into consciousness or awareness that drive the behavior,” she said.
A holistic counselor, with a private practice in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, called Body, Mind and Grace, Dulude graduated from RIC in 1997 with a master’s degree in counseling, with a concentration in agency counseling, then worked at mental health agencies. After seven years of practice, she found it almost impossible to bring about lasting change in a person’s life through cognitive behavioral therapy alone (therapy that focuses on changing patterns of thinking).
“Teaching someone how to think positively or reframe their thoughts and beliefs isn’t enough,” she said. “The entire body must be brought into therapy.”
Yoga is a form of body therapy Dulude offers to bring you back to your body. Yoga increases body awareness, relieves stress, sharpens attention and concentration, and calms and centers the nervous system.
For the past 15 years, Dulude has combined mind therapy (cognitive therapy) with body therapy (mindfulness techniques, yoga and core energetics). Core energetics asks, “What are you feeling or experiencing in your body as you think these thoughts?”
The idea is that the body is the repository of all our experiences – it holds all of our repressed memories and suppressed feelings from early childhood that we didn’t feel we could express.
Core energetics brings feelings to the surface where they can be examined, expressed and released. Only when they are released will an individual have enough self-possession to respond appropriately to challenging situations.
“A client may come in with the defense mechanism of always trying to be perfect, for example,” Dulude said. “As a child, they may have experienced rejection or abandonment whenever they weren’t perfect. They may also carry their bodies in a rigid manner because how we feel about ourselves has a direct impact on the way we hold our bodies.”
“There may also be thoughts of feeling better than others, of feeling jealous of others,” she said. “What’s happening is that their own fearful thoughts – their own not-enough-ness – is being projected into judgements of others. In therapy, we bring their fear of rejection into consciousness.”
Dulude is what Native healers call “good medicine.” Her calming presence generates trust, and with her guidance, her clients learn that it is safe to be in their bodies.
“Being in the body is important because you have to inhabit your body in order to know what you’re feeling and to build confidence that it’s safe to be there,” she said. “When you’re in fear, your energy goes up and out of your body.”
Dulude also teaches that by observing your breath or taking a few slow deep breaths you are able to come back to your body. In observing each inhalation and exhalation, you are forced to stop thinking and to be where your body is.
Our body and mind are very often separated from each other, she said. Our body may be here but our mind may be elsewhere. By breathing mindfully, or even stopping once during the day to take a deep, conscious breath, we recapture what is called oneness of body and mind. Without this, we cannot look deeply enough to see the real causes of our fear and pain.
“I want to live among people who live from a place of love and compassion rather than fear,” she said. “Quite simply, my vision is to create more fearless warriors, to teach people to know and recognize what they fear so they may face it and not be ruled by it. It’s the only way to truly feel fearless and live joyfully.”