Erika Straub International LLC

I felt the energetic pull of your comfort zone
To relinquish my sense of self for your authority
To release the pressure off of you to rise and settle for what was offered
You asked for me to co-sign on patterns that would neglect my needs
My refusal threatened your idealized image

I won’t consent to not disturb your ego
Fear of failure loss abandonment is not what consumes me
I’m discerning who can pe*****te me, but not unavailable to be shown my shadow
I know the energetic expenditure of fighting against someone else’s resistance to
Of not listening to the texture of repellence
To coexisting in a container too small for truth’s expansion

For contrast to create stretching, differences cannot be in pursuit of a superior edge.
It has to be safe to discover if you’re complimentary.
Contrast becomes a tipping point when confrontation has no place to go.
What cannot soften cannot be accepted gets projected.
Regeneration is replaced by the plateau of resentment.

However subtle trying to change someone is a dishonoring of soul.
It’s not for you to say what’s right for you is for them.
It’s one thing to stand in your truth and another to try to convert someone.
When you let go of control everyone is returned to their autonomy and authenticity.
No is the great liberator of the many expressions of love.

Intimacy requires mutual consent to be in relationship with each other’s shadow.
It’s a higher charge somatically to continually integrate and embody, but energy moves through you with less interference when you do.
Stagnation becomes the truth teller. There isn’t enough breath here for reciprocity.

You don’t need to be completed. You need to be met. This is where love grows.

Without a felt sense of safety in your primary attachments, you don’t develop a core Self.

Instead your energy is spent curating protection from the people who were meant to protect you, the deepest betrayal.

This creates an internal conflict, where you crave connection, but also associate it with danger, leading to deep relational anxiety, mistrust, and fragmentation of self.

To bypass the fear of being seen and the deprivation of not being seen you split yourself in halves.

When your system reconnects with the fragmented parts it dislodges terror, helplessness, hunger, and humiliation, forcing exposure of your core wounds.

It is the precise mirror of your unconscious survival patterns held up by a safe relationship that offers an opportunity for integration.

It’s safety that helps you learn to move energy differently in your body.

To dismantle your protective infrastructure and open into vulnerability and discernment and expand your nervous systems capacity to be seen.

Being seen is the foundation of secure attachment.

A missing sense of Self becomes a more empowered one when fully seen.

Start Here.

I’m an integrative relational trauma practitioner.

Classically trained in Jungian Psychology, Somatic IFS, and attachment.

But it was my time in India under a yogi master meditating and the medicine women in Costa Rica that I journeyed and practiced ta**ra with, that taught me about consolidating and recycling energy.

I was initiated into this work when my father passed away at 22 and I had my first panic attack.

The loss of masculine provider and protectorship ripped my sense of safety out from under me.

But it was my resistance to allowing grief to have her way with me that actually fractured me.

Compartmentalization and dissociation replaced the grief process. I learned to perform on top of numbed pain and how to live and love with half of me.

I began unconsciously seeking relief through relationships that were a reenactment of my childhood trauma and attachment wounding.

I moved away from safe emotionally available people who could SEE me, to dark avoidant narcissistic ones who wanted to use me.

Objectification implicitly familiar. With each repetition, there was more remembrance.

My protective infrastructure was crumbling as the betrayals pe*****ted a backlog of unresolved emotions.

I didn’t understand at the time that what felt like utter destruction was the structural split in my psyche, integrating.

The dismantling of naive empathy, perfectionism, and high performance, gave me a chance to slip into the void of my own darkness.

To accept I needed every relational experience to descend into what was unconscious and infuse my felt sense of Self with my own power.

Healing a split experience of love into a full one required, that the man I had placed on a pedestal, had to be taken off. That to let him rest peacefully I had to grieve and rage for who he wasn’t, before the gravity of such a loss could open me.

I had to be willing to give up a reality that my mother wasn’t. To complete the cycle of disembodiment.

My body of work integrates the spiritual and psychoanalytical to offer my clients a safe embodied return to their True Self too.

As I looked around the circle I felt everyone’s eyes on me.
Too many faces to read. Too many to anticipate needs. Too much energy being directed at me.
As the space was held for me to fill I felt my Self slipping away.
Energy leaking from the present moment as I was taken out.
Stripping me from the inside out.
When Self makes an exit, it’s a mass exodus from your body.
What remains are strategies, survival patterns, and personas.
A front row seat to the ways in which you protect your Self when you don’t feel safe.
My protector of “I’m fine” had already resigned from her job.
Leaving a very confused terrified insecure part of me in charge.
The only truth I could touch was to expose how intolerable it felt to be in search of my Self in real time while being witnessed by so many.
The somatic experience of being witnessed in a previously frozen and traumatized part flooded my system.
When a rush of survival energy is released it breaks through locked doors.
What was unconscious becomes conscious.
To dissolve blind spots your hiding spot must be given up.
As the survival response completed and my Self returned more fully, she came back with more truth.
That the ways in which I protected my Self, were the ways in which I was not letting people know me.
That there were void spots within where I didn’t know me.
These spots the most exploitable and the most sacred.
My greatest gift as a healer was also my greatest block to my own healing.
Being the space holder is very different than being the space filler.
Holding others is different than being held.
One to one relating is different than one to many.
It was the eyes of the group on me that created enough energy for me to witness how empathy was making me my worst enemy.
The invisibility wound now visible.
The true path to being fully known.

For nearly twenty years I was a serial monogamous.

One half a decade long relationship bled into the next with very little space between.

Not one of us knowing how to offer regenerative endings.

Strangers to lovers to strangers again happened sharply.

The fertile grounds of heartbreak were not bathed in. Death cycles not completed. More of Self not integrated.

This decade offered deeper medicine.

As I exited a deeply intimate long term partnership that felt destined to last a lifetime, I deeply grieved in his arms for the first and last time.

The person I undressed my whole self in front of was no longer there.

An absence that echoed in our empty home reminding me of how afraid I was to be alone.

As our shared life dismantled, so did I.

Not knowing at the time I was being taken on a descent that would shatter all illusions.

That this was the way home.

Time and space and preferences have no place in the underworld. I succumbed to the solitude I had been resisting.

And as I sit here on my birthday reflecting on this past year, this is the story that comes to mind.

Because it was the true beginning of the return back into my Self.

We walked each other as far as we could and offered each other to the threshold.

The magnitude of our love and its deconstruction gave me the greatest gift of all.

A chance to know intimacy by another name, naked truth. How vulnerable.

To come fully apart until I had the capacity to consolidate all of me into a coherent unified whole not held together by force, but by love herself.

So much more of me to give to love when sharing from my whole Self. And so much more to let go of.

And as I’m writing this, his name pops up on my phone, the first to wish me happy birthday.

Resting in the deep belief of continuity and the repair in how generative our ending was 🎈🧁

As my desire to high perform diminished, I squared off with the fear of feeling more. Of fully being seen.

The perfectionist who’s afraid to be punished.
The intellectual that prefers to think rather than feel.
The pleaser who just wants to belong.
The empath that doesn’t want to cause harm.

My high functioning team resisted visibility because they were committed to protecting me from feeling what was stored beneath.

Separating from what they didn’t want seen and didn’t know how to feel.

I spent a year unraveling the over doing, over giving, over functioning.

Giving up these hiding spots felt threatening.
A deep fear of exposure.
Sensation turning back on.

Dismantling high functioning protectors brings you into direct relationship with fear.

Fear forced into compartments when it wasn’t allowed in the conscious space.

The invitation to stop pretending fearlessness halts the whole performance.

What happens when you stop performing, you slow down from what felt urgent, breath deepens, creating heat. What was previously frozen starts to leak.

What high functioning parts don’t understand, is the further they exiled the sensation of fear, the less equipped they were to actually protect and choose you.

The capacity to differentiate danger from discomfort diminishes, strategies replace instincts, unable to untangle trauma responses from intuition.

Doubt creeps in between perception and reality.

You don’t need to be protected against fear, you need to be able to detect danger.

When you can’t feel fear you cannot discern truth from performance.

To be intimate with fear means you will chose to participate in experiences that active fear, but you will not do things and pretend you’re not afraid anymore.

To give permission for fear to be felt also means you believe in your deservingness to feel safe.

High functioning protectors want to prove they aren’t afraid.

Until they are willing to make room for fear, discernment won’t be fully embodied.

Discernment is the difference between truth and almost true.

If you want more you have to feel more.

It was just about a year ago I ditched a business that felt more like a box than a creation.

Stepping out from behind a brand meant stepping more into Self.

It was no longer about what I did, but revealing who I am.

I’ve never worn a label well.

I resented roles I found myself stuffed into it.

There will always be push back from something inside of me when expected to be more of the same thing or when I’m out of alignment.

But I soon discovered that no box meant no containment and it split me wide open.

All parts of me were in different places, but in agreeance, there would be no more confinement.

In the waiting room of “I don’t know what I’m doing”, there was a small door that said sacred.

I spent a year in the perpetual unknown trusting. Serving my clients in private, but bringing no more forward.

A personal brand is the integration of your own story.

My work is my art is my medicine is my alchemy is my purpose.

It mirrors to me where I’m going. It’s not something that can be served prematurely.

My process looks like an external pause until I have internal clarity. It’s Godspeed from there.

As the year closes out I can feel the labor it required to soft land in a place of consolidation.

It won’t be a reintroduction in 2025, but an even deeper reveal.

To love and be loved is the greatest alchemizer.

And yet, there is no human without a pain body. Or an inner critic. There is no human without safety strategies developed in childhood to defend against the overwhelm of unmet needs.

There is no human without a shadow. Without blindspots.

We all have barriers to intimacy that prevent us from seeing ourselves in the mirror clearly. Or the person standing in front of us.

But it’s at this very intersection of love and trauma that you always have a choice to expose your truth.

That you may be terrified of being deeply loved.
That you harbor hidden self hatred.
That you’ve tried desperately to heal by changing or fixing yourself.

Your healing is in your capacity to reveal. This sets in motion the process of metabolizing trauma, not the denial of it.

When you can love yourself when you’re in your trauma.
When you can stay inside yourself when loving another.

When you can trust that the way your Self wants to express.

Your truth becomes your healing.

Your personal healing is what creates the possibility for relational healing to take you deeper.

It’s the integration of your younger selves that opens the door to your wholeness.

You become the parent you never had by fulfilling your childhood unmet needs.

You breakthrough conditioning when you learn to relate to your Self in a different way than you were shown.

You become your inner child’s keeper.
Deep reparenting asks you to step up as the guardian.

You fill in the gaps of a missing childhood with your own love.

Love is an offering of reparative experiences that were missed in childhood.

Where there are feelings of scarcity and inadequacy, there is childhood trauma asking for completion.

Self actualization is the journey of overcoming a childhood where you were forced to grow up quickly without the opportunity to develop your sense of self.

Self is who you are at your core before childhood trauma.

Love is the energy of Self.