👉🏽 Subscribe for thoughtful, bite-sized emails — from Liz Zhou, a neurodivergent therapist — on how to take care of your nervous system & understand your brain.
To feel your existence
|
​ This is a story about how animals can help us heal our nervous systems. ​ Recently, my mom got to meet my cat, Tiger. And it was really fun to see them spend some quality time together. You see, my mom had grown up with stray cats in her neighborhood, but never had her own pet in the home. So everything about Tiger — the orange creature that I adopted from the Boulder Humane Society, with a “diagnosis” of “under-socialized & fearful” & the personality of a Sour Patch Kid — was a completely new experience for my mom. “Look, Tiger jumped onto the couch!” she would announce excitedly. “Tiger is rolling on the carpet.” “Tiger is licking her paw and using it to clean her face.” “Tiger is scratching the couch – stop it, Tiger!” And so on and so forth. ​ To feel her existence. “Yes.” I said. “That’s exactly it.” She wants us to feel her existence. I’d never put it that way, and yet those words resonated so deeply. ​ I imagine that when Tiger wants us to feel her existence, she wants to feel seen, heard, and accepted. She wants to feel like she matters. She wants to feel like we’re here with her and she’s not alone. ​ And in that sense... I think we all need someone to feel our existence. I think we owe it to each other to feel each other’s existences. To remind each other that we matter. To remember that we’re not alone, even if it feels really lonely to be here & human sometimes. ​ Being around animals has always reminded me of what really matters in life... Love. Connection. Relationships. Sometimes (or maybe always), it’s really that simple. And just as Tiger wants me to feel her existence each and every day, I hope this message reminds you that, because you are a being in this world, your existence is felt too. And in case no one has told you yet, your existence is a gift to the world. ​ To many more moments of feeling each other’s existences and remembering just how much we matter. ​ Talk soon, P.S. If you need help taking care of your nervous system, I'd love to support you. I offer ​Nervous System Healing Intensives​ — three 90-minute sessions, using brain-body modalities (Brainspotting, IFS, EMDR) that go deeper than talk therapy & help you feel better, sooner. ​
​ Intensives are a type of short-term, accelerated therapy — for folks who are looking for something different than weekly therapy; who need longer than 50-min sessions to go deep & get to the root of the issue. 👉🏽 If you want to get an Intensive on the books, click here to book an intro call. I'm scheduling for August 2025! ​ P.P.S. Know someone who needs to hear this? Forward it along. New readers can subscribe ​HERE​. I help highly sensitive, neurodivergent adults heal their nervous systems & connect with their authentic selves.
|
​Liz's Neurodivergent Letters
👉🏽 Subscribe for thoughtful, bite-sized emails — from Liz Zhou, a neurodivergent therapist — on how to take care of your nervous system & understand your brain.
When people ask me what Brainspotting therapy is and how it works, I have a couple different responses. The first is the clinical answer: “Brainspotting is a trauma-informed modality that uses fixed eye positions to facilitate deep healing and processing in the brain, by bringing unconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories into conscious awareness.” And if you’re thinking, hmm, okay, but what does that actually mean?, then you might find my second response more helpful. Instead of just...
I have a funny relationship with time, and I’ve noticed a lot of other neurodivergent people do too. Here’s what I mean. You might sit down to write an email for five minutes, and then half an hour passes and suddenly you have nine tabs open, you’re baking a cake in the oven, and the email is still incomplete. (No judgment at all here, by the way – sometimes our brains are non-linear like that, and flow in unexpected ways.) Maybe you have a hard time remembering what you ate for dinner...
I’m writing to you from the shores of Lake Superior in Michigan, the place where I grew up & the land of the Ojibwe people. And my time here, this past week, has me really appreciating the element of water. Water is so healing for the nervous system. Not just because we physically need water to survive. But also because, for many of us with highly sensitive systems, water is uniquely calming & soothing. A view of the lake, with a snippet from the book We Are Water Protectors: "Water is the...