Root Cause Therapy: Healing at the Root
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[00:00:00] I want to start with a question. Have you ever worked really hard on yourself, or maybe your clients have doing all the talk therapy, journaling, self-help books, videos, mindset work, and perhaps it still felt like something wasn't shifting like you were trying to get a big weed out of your garden, but it felt like you were just trimming the leaves of the weed and some of the branches and not fully pulling out the roots and getting rid of it.
This episode is all about my new book release, so root cause therapy, a method for true lasting change. And this book has [00:01:00] been in the making, I would say, for 12 years in terms of the methodology. And then I have been writing the book for the last two years, and finally it's here. I'm so excited. I just wanna let you know before I continue that it's not available.
On Amazon and those places. Maybe it is, but they made it really expensive. I don't know why, but the best place to get it, the most affordable place to get it is on our website. And I'll drop that link in the show notes below or come to the center for healing.com/rct book. And I actually don't make any money on the book.
I've just been sending it out because I want people to get their hands on it. So that's the best place to get it. So yeah. I am Melissa, the co-founder of the Center for Healing and obviously [00:02:00] author of this book. I've also authored a previous book called The Natural Hire, how to Overcome Instant Gratification and Find Inner Peace.
And that really came from when we had our eight outpatient clinic in Melbourne, helping people with mental health and addictions, using our alternative therapies there. So I think that this method and this book really came from my own personal journey of really finding that. Just doing talk therapy or coaching didn't seem deep enough.
Or, trying to get advice from people and reading things, it can only take you so far. And personally, I grew up in two different households where there was narcissistic abuse substance abuse, domestic [00:03:00] violence. And I was somewhat neglected physically, but definitely emotionally and even at school, I was alone.
I was bullied, so I didn't really have any safety. Wherever I was, I didn't feel safe. And so as I got into teenagehood. I was looking for ways to cope with all of my uncomfortable feelings that will inevitably come up when you have a big hormonal shift, just like when you're a toddler, teenager, and then menopause.
You have a lot of chemicals changing, a lot of hormones changing, and you can't suppress what you're feeling anymore. It all starts to bubble up. And I didn't know how else to cope with that. I didn't have anyone to guide me on how to process my emotions. I didn't feel safe in my relationships to be able to have that safe, [00:04:00] relational connection with someone on a deep enough level where I could actually.
Just, work through how I was feeling. No one asked me, really, how are you? Or if they did, I didn't really feel safe to express it, so I was very surface level with people. But that was my own coping mechanism, and it wasn't until I felt like my life shattered to the ground yet again. I was in my mid twenties and I was like.
I had this moment. I had this moment. I had just failed another relationship, had to sell my house. I hated my job. I felt very uncomfortable Inside. There was substance abuse. And I just thought I need to go and talk to someone. I had tried again in the past, I'd seen school counselors and things like that, and that is all helpful.
I don't put down any other methods. I think every [00:05:00] method has its place and time, but at that time I had this realization, which is funny, and I was like, maybe I'm the problem. Maybe I stop need, I need to stop blaming everyone else. For all of my issues, I really was me against the world and I was a victim to everyone and my baseline or my main driver was to try and look like I was happy, but I wasn't happy and it was easier to blame everyone else because I didn't know about self responsibility.
I didn't know anything like that, so I asked for help. From someone, a mutual friend. I went and had a session, and the session actually went to some root causes and it wasn't a normal therapy session. There was some regression in there, there was some psychoeducation [00:06:00] in there, and I really walked out a different person and my whole life felt like it opened up my whole world, and even my vision became clearer.
Colors were brighter. Sounds are clearer. I felt like I was in some kind of flow, and I guess some people would call it a spiritual awakening. That's definitely what I called it. But yeah it really was a defining moment for me where everything started to feel like it was flowing. I realized I was in charge of my life.
I realized that yes, I was, recreating traumas, I was creating patterns that. I thought was just happening to me and I had no control over. So it was an amazing moment. And at that time I was really trying to find my purpose. I was really trying to find my thing, and I always wanted to start a business.
I I was inspired by my dad and other people around having your own business and the freedom of that. And I had studied [00:07:00] business when I finished school. I can't believe that I finished school. I basically failed two years of high school and all of that because of my trauma. But I, something in me knew that I had to continue for some bigger purpose than my own.
So I really want you to know that, in this book I'm not an expert looking down on you. I've been in the depths, and that's really the core of the center for healing as well. Is that it's all about lived experience and then how to deliver that in a professional way so you can do what you love and your life wasn't in vain and you can hold incredible, empathetic space for people because of it.
So that led me on this whole journey of studying. I changed my friends immediately and he talks to relationships. We let go of. All of a sudden I loved reading. All of a sudden I loved researching. I had found my thing. And I went on to [00:08:00] study and even then, again I knew this is my purpose. And so then I begin, I began to find out about somatic work and emotions and in the inner child, and I went on a whole journey till eventually I ended up opening a small clinic in a health building where doctors were.
And yeah we started the Center for Healing in 2016. We actually just celebrated our 10 year anniversary, and we had. Thousands of messages from people that we helped change their lives. Even those who were looking to become practitioners, just going through the trainings had changed their lives. So we were in tears reading those.
It was absolutely beautiful, especially because of where we came from. Literally in the negative, like someone had to give us furniture. We had to borrow our first month of rent to start it. Now obviously we're online, it's a little bit different, but. Yeah, it's absolutely [00:09:00] amazing. In terms of the way that I created these sessions, a when I first studied, I walked out and I was like, that's great.
I have a set of tools, but how do I actually run a session? How do I frame it properly so the client gets the best thing out of it? What do I do? Step by step in a session. There's a space for intuitiveness, which I always allow in these sessions. There's space for our own inner wisdom and guidance to come through.
There's especially space for the client to connect with themselves, and ultimately that's what you want them to connect with their true selves. Their higher selves. Because how I see it is that. As we, we go through life and we grow up, and from in the womb going through childhood things happen.
Traumas happen where we don't feel safe, and we create these perceptions and [00:10:00] survival mechanisms where really it creates rubber bands around our soul. This is the analogy I love to use, aside from the tree and the roots. I love this one because it really. Represents what each belief that we take from, obviously our caregivers or people that were around us growing up, these limiting beliefs, these restrictive beliefs, these generalizations that we have of not good enough.
I'm not worthy. I'm scared to fail. I don't trust people. Each of them restricts us more and more, and we become trapped in all these rubber bands around us and we contract into a ball. And this obviously shuts us down, our nervous system down because like we have all of these intrusive thoughts all day long.
And all of us do. We wanna [00:11:00] create, we wanna be free, we want to be authentic, but. When things happen and we don't know how to process how we're feeling, all this information traps us. And the difference that our clinic had and that we still believe in is that we, yes, sometimes it's okay to just have a painkiller and treat the symptoms right, but if you actually treat the root.
Of the cause, the root of the symptoms, then there's no need for coping mechanisms anymore for those adaptations anymore. So it's really important that we are looking at the healthcare system at psychology as a, like that whole body approach. Where there's a lot more happening in the body than in the mind, and we can't just talk about it or CBT it.
Sometimes on the conscious level, I believe we have to work on all levels of the mind. So the conscious [00:12:00] mind, the unconscious mind, the nervous system, the body. And when you address all of those, and connect all of those and they're in alignment and in synchronicity, then that is healing. That is wholeness.
That is wellness, right? And I know that if you're a practitioner, you've probably even, had clients where you've given them advice or said something to connect a dot for them, or seen a pattern and raised their awareness to it, and they agreed and they saw it, but a part of them shut down and it didn't shift.
And they're still bringing the same issue in over and over. It's not that they don't want to change it. It's just that their body isn't ready to process it yet. Or it, it hasn't processed it yet, so it's not really mind over body. It's really body over mind is what we're learning. So [00:13:00] I love this quote.
You cannot think your way out of something that didn't think its way in, right? So most trauma is created. Through the perception of safety or not safety through survival or not survival, right? So we have a perception that we're safe or not safe and emotion arises, and with that emotion, then thoughts and pop up in our mind.
And then there's some kind of behavior, whether it's attack shut down, people please. There's a behavior that comes with it. And so what root cause therapy does is it address it addresses it at the perception. We go all the way back to the perception by releasing the emotion, which releases the energetic information of the thoughts, which reduces either the behavior that [00:14:00] came from that or the mechanisms because of it.
And something that I brought into the healing space that I noticed, and because of my background, in the industry that I was in before in kind of corporate, was making the intangible tangible. So making it more so that some, if someone comes in for a session, they generally have an idea of what they wanna work on.
We're honoring that, but then we're also tracking all the elements. We're tracking what's shifting. We're tracking what's still a trigger and what's not. We're prioritizing what we need to do from session to session, and we are not going around in circles with the client, making sure you know that we're being present with them, holding a really safe space for them, but we're also being professional and.
[00:15:00] Allowing them to feel seen and taken care of. So that's why I created, and you read it in the book, is a testing sheet. And a part of that, a part of going through that process is we actually do get the clients to check in their body what is real in their body as opposed to their mind. So many people are disconnected from their mind.
So if you were to ask them, do you think that you have this trauma or this root cause, sometimes. Their mind has suppressed it or repressed it for their protection, and so it's not going to tell their brain to tell you and very key, significant things that they need to work on might get missed. So the way that I train practitioners is I make sure that they have the structure, I make sure that they pick up on things like that through getting the clients to muscle test, like using Applied Kinesiology as a way of [00:16:00] tracking.
And finding out actually what is actually the root. And so the method is structured and repeatable practitioners going to, working with clients, knowing what to do at what point, right? So imagine someone comes in and they're like, I need, I have been feeling really anxious. I've, I feel anxious all the time.
I feel really activated. I feel really hypervigilant. I'm having these physical issues at the moment. I'm having these relationship issues. We are getting all that information, we're getting all that data on the client to look at them holistically, and then we are really going through and connecting dots for them.
And then we are asking their body, what are the root causes of this? And that's when we can get information on, they have fear of being alone or fear of being punished because of, say, [00:17:00] physical abuse growing up. Because the reason why people come into healing is because they are not feeling safe and peaceful in the present moment.
Their body. Even if they are peaceful and safe in the present, mon in the present moment, their body is not feeling that their body is time traveling all the time to the past and the future, to the past scenarios that haven't been digested and processed, and then to the worst case scenarios in the future because our body is wired to protect us and have the emergency alarm bells going for just the smallest triggers sometimes.
And also our nervous system is wided in certain ways, so that even if it's uncomfortable, it's known, even if it's uncomfortable, it's something that we've been modeled. So if we grow up with, say someone like one of our parents was [00:18:00] abusive, a part of us is oh, this is what love is abuse. And so we'll get into a relationship.
And there's red flags and everything, but we notice it or we may or may not notice it. We'll feel very magnetized. There'll be chemistry with this person and we won't know why, and we ignore the red flags and we, go through this trauma reenactment, same person, different face. And the reason why we do that is our bodies are always trying to heal.
So our unconscious mind will be like, great, let's recreate it. So finally they'll say Sorry, and it will heal all the times that happened to you growing up and all the past relationships. So what we do in root cause therapy is we take clients back to those original moments where that imprinting happened, and we allow them to process it so they don't have to reenact it in their outside life.
So they don't have [00:19:00] to recreate it externally to heal it. They can, they have the power within and we are the copilot that can help them to actually process that within, so they don't have to create, recreate painful circumstances in their external world. And patterns. Same with money, trauma. We have trauma with money growing up, or there's certain ways that we would.
Shown to deal with money or not deal with money. Maybe money was a stressful subject in our household growing up. So now we completely shut down and don't even wanna talk about money. We don't wanna have money because our unconscious mind, our child self, our inner children associate money with relationship stress.
So we try to get rid of it as soon as we get it. And often people don't know why they do that, and they can read all the books and they can know that they should be saving. But their behaviors take over. Their 4-year-old, takes over and says, no. Money causes stress in relationships, so [00:20:00] I've gotta get rid of it straight away.
So we're not asking the client to remember something differently. We are going to back into the body, into the unconscious where it's stored and completing what couldn't have been completed at the time. So the way that I've set up the book is that it's in two parts. So part one is the why, the neuroscience, consciousness trauma, all of that is explained in depth.
And then part two is about the method, the tools that we use and the practitioner framework. So I've. Made the book though. So it's for practitioners, but it's also for people on the healing journey. It's also for root cause therapy practitioners that we have all over the world. And I'll put the link to our directory in the show notes below.
It's really it can be really helpful for people to understand root cause therapy before [00:21:00] experiencing sessions as well, so you can send these to your clients as well. But yeah, you'll get the most from it. If you notice you're in stuck patterns or your clients are, that can't be explained. They say, I don't know why I'm doing this.
I don't know why. And I, they can't shift it. It's for practitioners who are looking for a deeper modality, something that gets to the actual root. And understand the why they are the way they are and shift things that aren't true and aligned with them. At the end of each chapter, there's reflective questions as well.
So it's a book you can really work with and not just read. And I just want you guys to have a think about as you're listening. Is there a pattern in maybe your life that you've tried to change many times, but you can't change it and it keeps coming back? That's important. That's our unconscious mind and body.
[00:22:00] Expressing to you, to your mind, we need to fix this. We need to fix this. And it does that with flashbacks. It does that with repeating patterns. It's calling out for help. And I know whenever I've had clients, it's like their mind and their body is so excited yes, we get to finally resolve this. 'cause our body always wanted it to be resolved.
It always wanted balance. It just didn't know how to do it at the time, and it still stored in our tissues and our cells and our fascia and our nervous system. And it really limits and hinders our lives. From me, going from nearly failing school, told that I was dumb through my beliefs, believing that I wasn't good enough, believing that I wasn't worthy.
To just shifting those beliefs and having. Run a company with my incredibly safe and amazing partner to creating methodologies like this one and the trauma informed [00:23:00] manifestation course to now two times author. I've also made a parenting course. I've even noticed it with my son at school, like he's the youngest in his class and he's pretty much at the top of his class.
And I really believe because it's the beliefs that we've instilled in him, I believe that every child and every adult has a genius inside them. But we pick up things along the way that stop us from tapping into that. I. Again, if you would like to order the book or recommend it to someone, you can go to the center for healing.com/rct book, or I'll pop the link down below in the show notes.
I invite practitioners to have a look at the root cause therapy training, if you'd like to dive into that. I'm planning on when you do enroll to actually send a book out to you. So I've gotta do that. If you have signed up and you what is [00:24:00] the date? So it'll be from April, 2026 onwards. If you've signed up from April.
Then and we have increased the price by the way. Be because of everything that we've added and upgraded in the course. And you do get lifetime access to the course, by the way, and support from me and monthly live calls. So we've actually had practitioners that still come on the live calls.
They've been with us for four or five years. And they still jump on and support the community and ask questions and I can give supervision for clients. And there's no ongoing fees. We've made sure the doors always open for people, even if they start studying and then they go study something else and come back.
Our doors are always open and I hope that you like this episode. And please leave a review wherever you're listening on Spotify or Apple. We really appreciate it and if you do get the book, I hope that you enjoy it and that it changes your life as [00:25:00] well.
