The Psychological Container I Built

Weekly insights to turn pain, trauma, and the human experience into opportunities for growth, purpose, and meaning

Sometimes reverent, sometimes raucous. This newsletter is beholden to my whims and ever-changing interests.

Issue 21 - Read Time: 5 Minutes 36 Seconds

Creating a Life to Contain the Fullness of Experience

If you have been reading along for a bit, you have likely heard me mention this concept of creating a container. I write about this a lot because it is a valuable concept to understand. And unfortunately, many people lack this understanding.

Truthfully, until very recently, I did not understand how much work I have done to create my container. I want to share how that came about and how it helps me find purpose and meaning in this current paradigm.

This week you will get:

What do I mean when I say "building a container?"

My story

My current paradigm

What is a Container?

The word container resonates with me. In therapeutic, psychedelic, and other psychologically oriented spaces, practitioners use the phrase container to describe the energetic and physical boundaries put in place to house an experience.

When you go into profoundly personal and spiritual places, you must create a safe environment; otherwise, people's defenses will kick in, and they will have difficulty dropping in. Creating a container means creating that safety.

I think of these energetic containers as porous. It's more like a membrane than a rigid box. These containers can shift and change depending on present needs, and if they solidify and become too rigid, they lose their power.

Another way to think of this is to envision a model or a framework for operating. While these terms are mostly synonymous, I tend to shy away from them because they feel a bit more rigid than I prefer, but I will use them interchangeably throughout this newsletter.

So when I say I create a container for a specific experience or for my life in entirety, I am talking about all of the philosophy, psychology, practices, behavior, and context that make it make sense.

The Story of my Container

I grew up in a high-demand religion that was quite detailed in what it expected from me and how I behaved. This religion had all of the answers and had the exact path I would need to follow to reap the rewards of heaven when I moved on from this plane.

Unfortunately, its primary motivators were shame, guilt, and coercion, and maintaining the status quo within this religion required me to sacrifice so much of myself that it was not tenable.

However, it showed me how powerful it is to have a model for life that gives you answers. Or, if it doesn't provide answers, it at least gives you context. And this is very important when it comes to living a meaningful life.

Something in me was already predisposed to having a model for living. But something inside me also knew that it couldn't be a high-demand religion with its narrowly defined parameters for right and wrong.

So, unbeknownst to me, I went searching.

My world started to expand when I entered the therapy world. I was exposed to new thoughts, people, and ways of being.

I was forced to confront how limited some of my worldview was and how much it held me back. These realizations propelled me into a place of curiosity—a deep yearning to understand something larger than myself.

So I studied, I listened, I observed, and most of all, I did the work to decondition from my previous ways of being. And over the following decade, a new container emerged.

My Current Paradigm

Below is a hierarchy of my current container for living. It is a model I use therapeutically, but more importantly, it is a model I use to guide my life.

You can see, this is a hierarchical model, and the concepts at the lower levels of the pyramid are foundational to the ones above. Moving up the pyramid is possible if the lower levels are in order.

1) Autonomic Nervous System Regulation

Everything starts with nervous system regulation. This has been the hardest for me because my body was so filled with shame that it was nearly impossible for me to be embodied.

Nervous system regulation is not only about regulating for calm, it is about resolving dissociation, working through numbness, and turning back on the bodies sensational experience.

I have worked on my nervous system through meditation, psychedelics, movement, and therapeutic modalities like PSIP.

2) Nurturing the Inner Child

Once we are familiar with the workings of our nervous system, we can start to address our inner child. The inner child can be seen as the literal inner child inside of you or the symbolic representation of the most wounded parts of ourselves.

Regardless of how we relate to this, it is an integral part of this container because it is the avenue to access our woundedness. And the woundedness is usually what gets in the way of our lives.

I have nurtured my inner child through guided imagery, study, journaling, psychodrama, therapy, and having difficult conversations with those who hurt me.

3) Learning from Relationships

Once I understood my nervous system and had closer contact with my inner child, I realized that all of my negative patterns showed up in relationships.

Relationships become the mirror to your inner world, and if you are not aware of what is happening there, all that noise gets projected onto relationships.

So, the opportunity is twofold. First, you can smooth out relationships and form loving and lasting bonds. Second, you now have a barometer to gauge your inner world. You notice when you are projecting, avoiding, and disconnected.

4) The Hero's Journey

Now, we can add a mythic lens to the equation. The Hero's Journey is by far the most helpful narrative framework for understanding life that I have found. It provides context to life's trials and tribulations and normalizes the experience of hardship.

The Hero's Journey is integral in permitting me to struggle and to struggle repeatedly. It helps remind me that this is just the nature of the human experience, and there is nothing wrong with the road of trials.

5) Addressing the Shadow

Finally, we get into the harder parts to look at - the shadow. Once we have done the work on the other levels, my clients and I are ready to entertain and integrate our shadow qualities.

These parts of ourselves are no longer scary because we have plumbed the depths and proven that we can tolerate this stuff.

I have done a lot of shadow work through psychedelics and personal study. I frequently remind myself that I am all things, including the things I do not like.

Closing Thoughts

I may have made this clear earlier, and hopefully, it is, simply by reading the letter, but I am not advocating or suggesting that this paradigm takes the place of religion. Honestly, for me, it is the opposite of religion because it asks more questions than provides answers.

It is not prescriptive, it is not rigid, and it is ever-changing. It is a paradigm and way of conceptualizing life right now. Check-in with me in five years, and I can almost guarantee that my perspective will change.

How to Feel Your Feelings

This framework is defined and laid out because I used it to create my "How to Feel Your Feelings" course. If any of this interests you, I encourage you to watch this video to learn more about the course and enroll if you want to work with me!

At this point, the course is the best way to connect because I am fully booked out for individual therapy.

Let me know if you have any questions on that!

Thank You!

I love that you are interested in exploring yourself in the pursuit of growth and expansion.

And I love that you are diving deeper into the unconscious patterns that limit our capacity as a species to transcend this paradigm.

You are becoming the change you want to see in the world and that is incredibly inspiring!

Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your journey ✨✨

With Love,

Christian