Milo Wu
Areas of practice
- Abuse - Emotional, Physical, Sexual
- Anger Management Issues
- Anxiety and/or Panic
- Child Behaviour
- Divorce and/or Separation
- Family Issues
- Life Transitions
- Marriage and/or Relationship Issues
- Parenting Issues
- Personal Growth
- Pre-Marital Counselling
- Self Harming Practices
- Self-Esteem Issues
- Stress Management
- Trauma Counselling
Approaches used
- Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT)
- Emotionally Focused Therapy - Individuals
- Internal Family Systems
- Online / Virtual / Telehealth Counselling
Counselling practice website:
www.treerootscounselling.comPractice information:
INDIVIDUAL THERAPY:
Negative experiences can leave stuck emotions, beliefs, memories, and sensations in us. We develop coping strategies to protect us from re-experiencing these overwhelming unsafe experiences. Once there to protect you, these coping strategies can become stuck habits that no longer help you, impacting your relationship with yourself and others. In Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy, these overwhelming experiences create three ‘burdened parts’:
Burdened Managers:
These are protective parts who bring security by being proactive and controlling. They are responsible for keeping life together. Often focused on the future, they fear that relinquishing control will lead to worse outcomes. They protect against anything that leads to vulnerability, pain, or instability.
Examples: Controlling, analyzing, criticizing, achieving, judging, caretaking, people pleasing, planning, avoiding, blocking, numbing, worrying, denying, rejecting, etc.
Burdened Firefighters:
These are protective parts who are very reactive. They are automatic and jump into action to prevent any hurt and pain in the present. Consequences don’t matter as they only care about immediate safety. Firefighters are powerful in removing any hurt and pain fast!
Examples: Abusing substances, attempting suicide, addictive behaviours like bingeing, overspending, dissociating, distracting, cutting and self-harm, TV/social media bingeing, etc.
Burdened Exiles:
These young parts have experienced trauma and attachment injuries, carrying deep wounds filled with danger, pain, or shame from the past. Extreme in their attempt to be cared for, healed and seen, the other protective parts fear they are too overwhelming, thus, shutting them away.
Examples: Not good enough, too much, dependency, abandonment, and shame, etc.
Path to Healing
The goal of therapy through IFS is to understand the good reasons behind these ‘parts’ and help them unburden their extreme roles and become more Self-led. With the unburdening of these protective roles, one can get out of stuck cycles and live a life with more harmony and balance. The length of therapy is guided by how much burdened parts can let go of their extreme roles and trust the Self to be the source of internal reassurance and guidance. Parts that were once stuck in old roles can now become:
Unburdened Managers:
Take on a balanced approach to daily responsibilities. Are effective and collaborative, encouraging other parts and people. Advocate for growth, becoming more accepting and nurturing.
Unburdened Firefighters:
Signal the Self when stressed. Use effective self-soothing activities and diversions. Advocate for fairness and stand up to injustice. Lend courage and confidence to act bravely in challenging situations. Have the confidence to risk and take on challenges that were once too scary.
Unburdened Exiles:
Can experience vulnerability as strength, advocating for connection and care. Feel secure with Self as primary caretaker, feeling freer to reach out to others. Offer intuitions about others’ feelings. Enjoy being open and trusting.
Discovering the Self:
Inherently embodies the 8Cs of IFS: Clarity, Confidence, Calm, Curiosity, Connectedness, Courage, Compassion and Creativity. There is comfort, balance, harmony, and acceptance within oneself and others. It doesn’t need improvement as it exists in everyone and only needs to be uncovered.
COUPLES THERAPY:
You want connection with your partner. You want to be seen and cared for but somehow you feel misunderstood and lonely. No matter how hard you try, you feel trapped in this pattern of resentment and anger. Or you feel blamed and hurt and the only way to cope is to hide and withdraw. You are exhausted from trying to fix the problem, and you don’t know how to end this pattern. You would like to keep that intimacy and connection that initially brought you together.
When partners are overwhelmed, it becomes difficult to meet each other’s needs. In survival mode, it is hard to understand or be understood. Bids for attention can be misunderstood as cues of danger. Coping mechanisms that once helped can become patterns of fight, flight or freeze in the relationship; this can show up as blame or shutdown.
This conflict in the relational cycle affects the sexual cycle. For different partners, sex can have different meanings:
- Sex leads to connection: “I need sex to feel connected emotionally with you.” Desire is more spontaneous.
- Connection leads to sex: “I need to be emotionally connected before we can have sex.” Desire is more responsive.
When a couple struggles with sexual desire, it’s often not because there’s not enough ‘accelerator’ - the things that turn us on. Instead, it’s because there are too many ‘brakes,’ i.e., stress, trauma, body image and relationship issues.
In the safety of counselling, we will make sense of your relational and sexual cycles. Often it is not the absence of love in a relationship that causes anguish, but the unwitting ruptures between each partner’s protective parts. Healing in couples therapy becomes more effective when both partners can unburden their protective parts from their extreme roles with IFS therapy (see Individual page on this site). This will allow each partner in the relationship to:
- Focus inside and recognize which part is triggered
- Speak for the part rather than from the part
- Recognize that your partner’s behaviour may also be coming from a part in them
- Understand the good reasons behind your partner’s protective parts with curiosity and compassion
When wounded parts are healed, protective parts naturally relax, giving space to find an inner source of harmony and balance. By learning how to share and what to listen for, partners can become more accessible, responsive and engaged.
ABOUT ME:
As my client, your well-being will always be my guiding focus. In the safety of counselling, you will be valued, respected and listened to. Like the roots below affecting the tree above, the inner worlds of your mind and body affect the outer aspects of your lives. Guided by these values, therapy at Tree Roots Counselling provides a safe place to restore balance to your inner and outer worlds.
It is important to me that my clients feel safe. It is in this safety that you can reconnect with your vulnerability as strength and restore your sense of self to live life with more authenticity and intentionality.
My IFS training helps me guide clients to make sense of their inner worlds and the good reasons behind the coping strategies that have become stuck patterns. Similarly, EFT focuses on how couples fall into a negative cycle when partners rely on their individual coping strategies. When the strategies are understood, the meaning of relational distress can be reframed to understand how unmet longings for connection and protection can become danger cues. Empirically proven over decades of research, EFT is the best model for couple therapy, and IFS is described by trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk as the leading therapeutic model for deep healing in individual therapy. These approaches also inform my counselling work with children and families in schools.
I value the trust clients place in me to walk alongside their important journey. I live in Vancouver with my wife and three kids.
Visit my website for further information and resources - www.treerootscounselling.com