Hello. I’m Sarah Peyton, writing to you from Vancouver, Washington. When Mary invited me to write this letter for this month’s edition of Growing Roots, I began reflecting on my life’s journey and some of the moments that brought me to where I am today as an NVC Trainer and speaker.

I remember the day I learned that research had been done to show exactly how our difficult childhoods impact our brains. I looked at the different fMRI images (pictures showing what parts of the brain are active) and saw that verbal abuse leaves visible changes in the auditory cortex, impacting our ability to decode speech. I also saw that other abuse changes the cerebellum and our sense of our bodies in space, and that witnessing domestic violence leaves changes in the visual cortex. 

When I saw all this, I wept. 

No one could ever say again that the things done to children didn’t matter. The things that were done to me and to others did not disappear without a trace. We have actual evidence that when we hurt children, it matters throughout their lives.

And then, because I was already deeply involved in learning NVC (I already had a subscription to NVC Academy, as soon as they became available!) and was discovering empathy’s ability to help heal brains from emotional trauma, I enfolded myself in warmth and empathy. I acknowledged the mixture of relief and mourning that knowledge about brains always gives me. 

“Healing?” you might ask. “Can we heal these scars in the brain?” It turns out that even though we can’t change the way the brain has been impacted by abuse, we can change the way the brain responds to life, on an epigenetic level. We can rewire the body’s wired-in response to things being hard, and restore the connections that were missed from a lack of attunement and empathy. In the process, we can make the insides of our brains very sweet places to be, even if what we experienced interrupted our natural growth and qualified as developmental trauma – trauma that interrupted our natural emergence of self.

If you have ever had the sense that you might be more capable and more your true self if you hadn’t lived through some hard family times, or felt very alone when you were little, this new class I’m teaching for NVC Academy is for you. It’s called Healing Your Childhood with NVC, and we’ll lay out the roadmap and learn the skills to begin to transform brains into very good places to be.  

I hope that this letter brings you encouragement, comfort, and perhaps even some empowerment in knowing that healing and internal peace is very much possible. 

Very warmly, 

Sarah Peyton
CNVC Certified Trainer