STACY SHELTS, LPC

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Do you want to get to know your authentic self?

Do you want to live with integrity and be successful by your own definition?

Do you want to know how parent your inner child differently than you were raised?

Do you want to be skilled at self-regulation without becoming desensitized, numb, and isolated?

Do you value your true feelings more than the people around you seem to?

 

I’m lifelong learner and a work in progress.

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I have been highly sensitive, emotionally dysregulated, and deeply confused about my identity.

My sick* parent was the center of my world.

I did not know how to function without a sick person at the center of my world.

I kept attaching myself to sick people, hoping that if I rescued them, they would rescue me.

I simply could not identify a safe person from an unsafe person.

My body was stuck in a chronic state of fight-or-flight.

It still enters this state when I get triggered, and that's okay.

No amount of empathetic understanding, logic, external validation, or substances worked.

​No amount of self-awareness took my pain away.

I needed to hear from people who had experienced parental enmeshment and were actively reparenting themselves.

With the help of mentors, teachers, fellow travelers, and the God of my understanding, I have learned healthy detachment, self-regulation tools that actually work for me, and am able to be in my body free of addictive, codependent relationship patterns.

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All I want to do now is to share my recovery.

 

I operate by these principles in my practice.

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We are not defined by our symptoms, or by others' opinions of us.

We live within systems of power which seek only to perpetuate themselves. 

We need at least a few safe people and places in our lives to recover from relationship trauma. Insight is not enough.

We can have deep compassion for someone and still choose to distance ourselves.

Of all the important relationships in my life, the relationship I have with myself has to be more important.

You don't have to love & respect yourself to start treating yourself with love & respect.

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*I use the disease model to understand, not to pathologize. Here, I define "sick" behaviors as: mocking, criticizing, belittling, and name-calling. 

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