Islena Faircrest Onboard Wellness

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Islena Faircrest

✨ Upcoming Women Rising Workshop ✨
Resilience & Self-Compassion in Stressful Times

When life feels overwhelming, our nervous systems can shift into survival mode — leaving us feeling disconnected, overextended, or shut down.

Join us for a powerful afternoon of grounding, healing, and connection with Internal Family Systems & somatic practitioner Islena Faircrest. Together, we’ll explore how to gently return to a state of inner safety, compassion, and resilience — even in uncertain times.

🧠💛 Learn to recognize and befriend your nervous system
🧘‍♀️ Practice self-regulation through somatic tools
🌿 Reconnect with yourself and your community

📍 Coquitlam City Centre Library
📅 Saturday, May 10th
🕐 1:00 - 3:30 PM | Room 136/137

When I was 16, I left home and worked at a restaurant called White Spot to support myself. I remember a social worker telling me I was too young to get government support (this was the late 80s) and told me to go back home (which wasn’t an option.)
What I didn’t realize was that the shaping of my inner resilience would have a cost… later in life.
When we're forced to survive difficult situations, we develop protective parts within that help us get through it.
My hyper-independent behavior was a trauma response.... the self-sufficient teen who learned to stand on her own, but hid the panic, terror, and fear of showing up in life dysfunctional, due to a dysfunctional background.
So I overcompensated & over-performed.
Sound familiar?
These younger parts of our psyche have incredible survival mechanisms, but they often stay in our behaviors long after they’re needed (habituation, reenactment, repetition compulsion) showing up (in my case) as hyper-competency, people-pleasing to survive, a distrust of government & family authority, and a limiting belief that I would be forsaken (which was younger me’s lived experience–so it was valid for back then.)
Through IFS (Internal Family Systems), I’ve learned how to acknowledge & appreciate these hard-working parts of our psyche with understanding and empathy, allowing the overperforming parts of me to relax somewhat and feel safe in connection with my chosen family (mostly close friends & my partner)... to be 'just me' without all the extra.
What we needed to survive back then, is often outdated for what contributes to our fulfillment & growth now.
It’s important to validate the dilemma of how our younger parts had to reactively enact survival behaviors for our circumstances back then.
Our opportunity now, is to update those aspects of us, and "bring them along"-- include them lovingly (like a big internal family of children with unmet needs) with our current age adult awareness & loving care. Into the Now.
What parts of you are still working overtime to protect you? And do they know you’ve made it to “the other side”? (Of those adverse circumstances.)
Reflecting on this helps create internal understanding & cohesion for how protective parts in our psyche served us, while also encouraging them to release what no longer serves in the Here & Now. xo

If we aren't able to visualize what we want, it'll be hard to create it.
If we can't describe it, it makes for extreme challenge to manifest it.
We can't live what we can't name.
If we don't have a map, we can find ourselves kinda paddling rudderless--defaulting into rote repetition of the 'known' (safety zone.)
An absence of intentionally authored direction is living in survival mode.
There's nothing wrong or bad about survival patterns; they're highly intelligent & necessary at keeping us alive & going.
But they can feel like hitting a ceiling.
Stuck. Stagnant. Numb.
A simple way to begin to shift from unconscious survival response towards living into what's important for you, is to lean (hard) in the direction of what you find curious...
- what is the nature of articles, posts, shows, or books that magnetize you?
- what do you find yourself daydreaming about if you let your mind wander?
- what do you find yourself talking about often with others?
- what do you dream about?
- what is an internal urge or impulse you notice that feels different from your current life circumstance? xo

Send a message to learn more

You may have had the experience of being a parentified child if you were unable to connect to your own emotions as a child.
You may have experienced a role reversal with adult responsibilities or roles forced prematurely upon you-- or where emotionally, a parent blamed you or made you responsible for their own emotions--or bled into your personal space and boundaries causing you to be totally unaware you had a right to your own existence and experience.
A parentified child learns to ignore their own needs, feelings, experience, and emotions, because their survival becomes enmeshed with being able to determine and mind-read what the parent needs. They discover that if they want any kind of (breadcrumbs) connection to the parent, they have to take over adult roles, jobs, and responsibilities, way beyond their appropriate developmental stage and state. By putting the parent's needs above their own, and shelving their own needs (often for life), the parentified child (now an adult), loses the ability to put their extremely isolating experience into words.
This is why inner child work, and self-advocacy, self-appreciation and self-rescue work is so critical, in the context of a safe and supportive community. Xo

Can we become addicted to certain emotions if we observe ourselves ruminating, catastrophizing, or looping repetitive thoughts in an emotional experience?
The simple answer is yes.
In our developmental years, if we've been exposed to significant negative experience or trauma, there could be such a familiarity with the intensity, that we can find an "unconscious comfort" in seeking and repeating imprinted patterns of familiar experience. We can become addicted to feeling a familiar way. This may contribute to forming key organizing features in our personality, as tools of survival adaptation to our environment.

We may even grow an unconscious addiction to negative experience, as a way to experience the "rush" of dopamine because the brain releases hormones & neurotransmitters in response to certain emotions, similar to the high we can get in addictive substances.
Feeling and processing negative emotions, and experiencing a negative emotional state, actually releases & increases dopamine levels in certain areas of the brain.

So triggering a familiar emotional response cascades the release of powerful neurochemical signalers that get our addiction (ie: familiar "rush") fed and met.
How to help this?
Simple, and not so simple.
Befriend our emotions.
To understand them, versus controlling them, or them controlling us.
This, is a practice. A discipline.
No different from working out regularly at the gym or outdoors to build stamina, physique.
This is the "workout" of emotional sweat equity.
As folks in cyclebreaking communities can attest to. xo

Educational IFS (Internal Family Systems) infographic created by IFS with Ruth Culver.
So appreciative of her work and all my teachers. xo

Over-explaining yourself (among many other behavioral adaptations,) can be a trauma response if you experienced extremes growing up of feeling invisible, misunderstood, or punished for expressing yourself (or feeling not allowed to.)

Traumatization occurs when internal or external resources at the time were insufficient and inadequate for coping and adapting.

As children, if we grow up with volatile, absent, or neglectful caregivers whom we were dependent on for survival in our formative developing years, the resources will be insufficient and inadequate.

An energy of desperation and suppressed rage will linger in our physiology until we are able to address it in adulthood (influenced by a subconscious frustration of our basic needs not being met, and it being unsafe to express them.)

This is one of the many reasons inner child work and gentle bodywork & movement therapies done in the context of supporting a nervous system impacted by trauma but craving to heal, are so critical. xo

If you've experienced physical, verbal, and/or sexual abuse in childhood, the road to healing in adulthood can be intense, AND possible-- requiring learning practices that support soothing, nourishing, and unlearning for your dysregulated (through no fault of your own) nervous system.

Learning how to communicate from a place of receptivity versus fear, learning how to ask for your needs, and how to trust, and uncover ingrained unconscious habits for self-protection like shutting down, avoidance, and resentment, takes arduous, repeated practice.

With the right mix of support through your chosen circle of clinicians, practitioners, healers, and a healing community that has a trauma-informed lens and understanding, healing is possible.

You are worth it. The world needs you. You may have had an unfair rough start to life, but it's doesn't sentence you; it gave you significant challenges that if addressed, can stretch your capacity as a human in ways that others (and you) will CHERISH & benefit from.

Disorganized Attachment Style: Everything You Need to Know A disorganized attachment style (fearful-avoidant) develops when the child’s caregivers – the only source of safety – become a source of fear.

Learning how to fall down and get back up, and fail forward, again and again, rinse, repeat, is at the heart of progress.

Important insight into your physiology if you've experienced neglect, trauma or an emotionally stunted parent growing up. https://youtu.be/QSCXyYuT2rE