Laquanique Esposito

Laquanique offers a heart healing path approach to therapy, wherein the client is their own healer, and she is their heart healing path guide. This approach affirms that all human beings are Love despite the sum of their behaviors and the consequences of those behaviors; that Love is perfection; that perfection is wholeness; and that all human beings are whole despite experiences of suffering. Heart healing is the practice of choosing to hear one’s heart through the fiercest of the mind’s distracting lies about who one is and what one has to offer. The healing journey or path is, then, not the process of rewriting oneself as whole, but, rather, it is perceiving the wholeness that one already is.

As the heart has a profound and often suppressed consciousness of its own – one that speaks truth to the mind’s distortions of who one is and what their purposes are – Laquanique uses multiple frameworks to help healers hear the heart’s voice more precisely and more frequently within the context of day-to-day living. Developing one’s ability to purposefully discern between the heart’s voice and the mind’s voice (the internal source of self-love talk and the internal source of self-distortion talk; wholeness perception and fragmented perception) is a potent healing tool, for it makes ‘choice’ apparent to the healer in a way that is not only understood but also internally experienced. The healer is made aware of their right to choose heart guidance over mind guidance and the choice to train the mind to be in service to their highest good or life’s purposes.

The heart healing path approach places fundamental, clinical social work theory, practice, ethics, tools, and symptom conceptualization/categorization within the context of heart-centeredness, thereby, revering and making space for ways of perceiving self that extend beyond the mind. It acknowledges the soul’s ability to be expressed through nonverbal mediums such as uninhibited, heart-led art, and it acknowledges the body’s innate wisdom and (often undervalued) ability to share healing truths. It acknowledges the whole lived experience of a person – mind, body, and soul – by practically melding intuition and intellect. This approach is, thus, multifaceted, mobilizing celebration, curiosity, experience, practice, reflection, awareness, imagination, exploration, and soul expression while drawing from the frameworks of dialectical behavior therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, functional family therapy, strengths perspective, client-centered perspective, mindfulness, problem-solving/solution-centered perspective, and soul-expressive art/heart-led art (via movement, lyrical expression, free writing, free-from poetry, wordless vocalization).

There is not one kind of person who can benefit from the heart healing path approach to therapy. All are welcome who desire to see themselves whole and with Love. Here are some kinds of challenges that can be explored through the heart healing path approach: fear of Love, distrust of Love, fear of unknown future events (worry), resentment, disgust with Life, shame of physical appearance, despair and the desire to self-harm, difficulty with finding meaning in life’s experiences, desire to pass on from this life into peace, fear of expressing oneself fully through the use of voice, desire to be in freedom from past pain, difficulty loving self, fear of the experience of freedom, fear of rejection of true self-expression, experience of being constrained by dominating emotions, experience of non-medically explained pain or discomfort, reexperiencing of unresolved past pain.

The healer’s heart healing journey is not confined to the healing space cocreated by client and clinician/healer and guide. Laquanique will, therefore, assist healers in creating their own healing practices, for what is persistently practice will become the healer’s patterned way of living, and the healer’s patterned way of living will continuously create the quality of their lived experiences.

Laquanique L. Lake is formally recognized by the state of New York as a licensed master social worker. She earned a BA Psychology from Fairleigh Dickinson University and an MSW degree from New York University’s Silver School of Social Work.