Lifespan Integration Work at Rooted
LI is an evidence-based, bottom-up therapeutic modality that uses neuroscience to help integrate traumatic memories into your neural network. This helps your mind and body heal while effectively being able to digest your traumatic experiences. Integrating these experiences into your timeline allows your body and mind to fully understand that what you experienced is in the past which will help you feel safe in the present moment.
LI pulls from other well-known, evidence-based therapeutic approaches, including Attachment Theory, Inner Child Work, and Polyvagal Theory. By regulating your nervous system, improving your attachment, and healing wounds or traumas from the past, LI can help you build confidence and regain improved functioning and joy in your daily life.
How Does LI Work?
Through repetitions of your timeline, LI will help create new neural pathways and connections that help you feel more connected, secure, and safe. Trauma and overwhelming emotions can change how memories are encoded into our systems, creating physiological responses in our bodies and disconnects in our brains. This disconnect can isolate and fragment our neurons, which challenges how we experience things. This can make it hard for us to remember what happened in the past, increase feelings of dysregulation, and impair functioning.
One helpful analogy is to think of neural connections like a fishing net. Having isolated and fragmented memories is like having too many holes in a fishing net. The more holes we have, the less likely we are going to catch fish that can help us support ourselves. The more we increase our neural connections, the more secure our net becomes, allowing us to catch more fish to provide for ourselves and others. This neural connection process helps us create new behaviors and self-beliefs to help our system reintegrate the traumas, maintain emotional regulation, and increase feelings of safety.
What can LI Help Treat?
LI can be used to treat trauma, repair attachment styles, support emotional regulation, improve self-esteem and self-love, and provide an overall sense of wholeness. After LI, the goal is that you have an internalized ability to regulate yourself and your emotions, be your authentic self, build a compassionate connection to yourself, and have a secure attachment style. Often, clients who have experienced LI will find that they can reflect on their hard or traumatic experiences from a new perspective and have an improved sense of self.
How does LI compare to other Trauma Modalities?
LI is a very gentle method to address trauma and attachment wounds without re-traumatizing you. Often, you will not even need to disclose or discuss the traumatic memories in detail as LI uses short memory cues for your timeline. Additionally, the process of going through repetitions of your timeline in an LI session is regulating for your system. Many trauma therapies rely on a three-phase sequential model that promotes stabilization, trauma memory processing, and reconnection and integration. LI promotes all three phases at the same time, during each session.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy (EMDR)
LI is often described as a gentler approach than EMDR. While LI integrates memories across the lifespan, EMDR focuses on specific memories. EMDR reprocesses and integrates traumatic experiences by having you briefly focus on a particular traumatic memory while using bilateral stimulation to help reduce the intensity and emotion of the response when addressed with the traumatic memory. EMDR is evidence-based and effective at treating trauma and a wide variety of challenges. Like LI, you do not have to disclose or discuss the trauma in detail during EMDR. For more information on EMDR, you can discuss it with your therapist.
Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART)
LI is a bottom-up approach to treatment, where ART is more of a cognitive-based, top-down treatment. ART is an evidence-based approach to quickly heal traumatic memories by replacing negative images of trauma with more positive images of your choosing while using rapid eye movements to help induce memory reprocessing. This helps reduce the stress caused by traumatic memories.
ART is a quick approach and can be used to treat a variety of trauma and mental health challenges. While ART is typically described as gentler than EMDR when it comes to trauma processing, it’s less gentle than LI due to still needing to visualize a traumatic experience briefly. Like LI, you do not have to disclose or discuss the trauma in detail. For more information on ART, you can discuss it with your therapist.
What Can I Expect During LI Sessions?
Your therapist will help guide you through what protocol will be used, and you will create a timeline. This may be done in session together, or there may be times your therapist will have you do this at home. Once you have your timeline, you will be instructed to use 4-limb-activation to move or squeeze a prop, like a pillow. Your therapist will then begin to read through your timeline cues quickly, from the past to the present moment, allowing your body and mind to start integrating. Between every few repetitions, your therapist will stop and do a quick check-in with you, and then you will move through more repetitions together once again.
While you may expect to feel some activation in your nervous system during your session, the act of moving through memory cues from the past and bringing you back to the present moment is grounding and soothing to your nervous system. You may feel tired but should not expect to leave feeling panicked or dysregulated. If you do feel activated, your therapist will help ground you through more repetitions of your timeline.
After your LI session, you may feel more tired, notice more dreams than usual, and you may have lingering emotions for a day or two. This is completely normal as your body is processing and integrating the memories in your timeline. We emphasize the use of self-care the following few days, which includes eating well, staying hydrated, and allowing yourself to rest and relax.
Where Can I Learn More?
Contact our intake team with questions or to request a consultation or appointment with one of Rooted’s LI-trained therapists. You can also find more information on LI here:
Website for LI:
https://lifespanintegration.com/
List of LI research articles
https://lifespanintegration.com/lifespan-integration-research/
LI Information Handout
../../../Downloads/LI Explanations – new version.pdf
References
EMDR International Association. (2024, December 19). About EMDR therapy – EMDR International Association.
Lifespan Integration LLC. (2025, January). Lifespan Integration Level 1 [Slide show; Powerpoint]. Level 1 Training, Bountiful, Utah, United States of America.
Lifespan Intergration, LLC. (n.d.). Lifespan Integration: The What, Why, How and After Care. [FLYER].
What is ART? – Accelerated Resolution Therapy. (2023, January 20). Accelerated Resolution Therapy.
What is Lifespan Integration? – Lifespan Integration. (2024, July 6). Lifespan Integration.
