Our Practices

The Values Factor — direction that holds

Regulation settles the nervous system. But a settled nervous system still needs somewhere to go. The Values Factor is how our participants find direction that does not collapse the first time life pushes back.

What it is

The Values Factor is a structured method for identifying what a person's life is actually organized around — not what they think they should value, and not what family, culture, or survival taught them to say. Drawn from the work of Dr. John Demartini, with whom our founder trained, the method examines the concrete evidence of a life: where attention goes, what fills a space, what a person can be relied upon to do without being asked. From that evidence, a person's true hierarchy of values emerges.

The discovery is often startling. Many of the women we serve have spent years measuring themselves against values that were never theirs — and concluding that they are unmotivated, undisciplined, or broken because they could not sustain a life built on them.

Why it matters after trauma

Survival narrows a life down to getting through the day. When the nervous system finally settles, a quieter and sometimes frightening question surfaces: now what? Goals borrowed from other people require constant force to pursue, and force is exactly what a healing nervous system cannot sustain. But when people can name their own highest values, motivation stops requiring force. Direction becomes something they move toward naturally, because it is already an expression of who they are.

That is why we place this work late in a crossing — after safety, after regulation — as the bridge between healing and living.

What a session looks like

Values Factor work happens through guided written reflection and facilitated conversation, in groups or one-to-one. Participants work through a sequence of grounded questions about their actual, observable life, then distill the pattern those answers reveal. Each woman leaves with her own values hierarchy in her own words — and a way of setting intentions that align with it, so that what she builds after the program ends is hers, and holds.

Where you will find it

The Values Factor is the direction-setting arc of The Women's Crossing and appears in our facilitator training through Community Light Work. It works alongside Somatic Experiencing®, Somatic Breath Integration, and Integrative Healing Practices.