The Freedom Steps

The Freedom Steps offer complete and lasting recovery from any compulsive or addictive cycle you may be experiencing. 
I invite you to embark on this journey to offer structure and direction for your individual sessions with me.  Alternatively, you can take the Freedom Steps as a Self-Study program. 
For more information about this option, please
send your enquiry here

I have bought together three elements that were essential in my own recovery from addictive compulsive behaviours: Internal Family Systems therapy, body-awareness-healing,
and the 12 Step program of recovery. I see this three-fold approach as a stable three-legged stool, enabling lasting freedom from addictive processes at the level of body, thought, and spirit.  

Dr. Richard Schwartz is the founder and creator of Internal Family Systems (IFS), and has been Naomi’s own guide and mentor over her many years developing this program. 

Richard endorses the Freedom Steps and the
Food And Body Freedom Steps Programs in this video.

For more information about IFS, go here:
https://ifs-institute.com

What Are The Freedom Steps?

This process of inner transformation will allow you to finally welcome ALL parts of yourself.  You will get to know your addictive parts as the hard-working inner protectors they are and send them the appreciation that springs naturally from this awareness. 
From here, you will be able to collaborate with these parts of yourself to discover wholesome new ways to discharge and heal negative emotions,
so that you’re no longer harming your health & happiness, creativity, life-purpose, or relationships.

This program is suitable for anyone: those with previous experience seeking and finding freedom from addictive cycles, or with none.  I will facilitate and guide a journey of transformation fuelled only by your simple readiness … readiness to bring curiosity to your own unique experience of compulsivity … and an openness to journey within at your own pace to the site of both burdens and freedom.

What's The Difference Between the Freedom Steps and the 12 Steps?

Although there are 12 Freedom Steps and also 12 Steps in the original fellowships, the Freedom Steps are in no way an attempt to change or improve on the original program of recovery.  The Freedom Steps simply draw on these timeless spiritual principles and combine it with a new way of viewing ourselves, a way which includes the body’s role in healing.  This allows recovery to be accessible for as many people and parts of ourselves as possible. 

As a therapist working in the field of eating disorders and addictions for many years, I have found that sometimes only certain parts of us want to go to meetings, get sponsors or ‘work the Steps’.  It can sometimes be tempting to only align with the proactive and enthusiastic parts of ourselves and others.  However, true recovery can only blossom when we include, understand and appreciate the role of every part of us: the parts that want us to change,
and those that don’t.

The Freedom Steps include and embrace every part of us: the parts that are excited about change, those that fear it, and those that try to sabotage it.  It is a way to journey through the Steps to lasting freedom from addictive cycles where all parts of us can be welcomed, included and supported to relax when they are ready.  This journey is one for our wholeselves.

To include our whole selves in our journey of recovery is the only relaxed path of sustainable positive change.

To discover more about the magic of integrating IFS with 12 Steps go here.

Your Companion Guide

Naomi Nygaard is Founder of FAB Freedom, a Certified Internal Family Systems Therapist and Somatic psychotherapist, and a coach and healer with over twelve years experience helping people individually and in groups to identify and release their inner blocks to achieving freedom from compulsive and addictive cycles, and discover the joy and peace of a freed-up life.

Naomi ceased using alcohol and drugs in her early twenties, after experimenting with MDMA and psychadelics and having mind and heart-expanding experiences which introduced her to her spiritual path. Then in her mid to late twenties, she recovered in the area of food and body-weight obsession, her most entrenched area of numbing inner pain. Naomi has been increasingly thriving from these roots of freedom ever since and has added to her list of recovery successes compulsive cycles in romantic relationships, and those around work and money.  Her programs and offerings are based on the simple principles she applied in her own life. You can find out more about Naomi’s struggles, and how she overcame them, here.

“For me, a key learning on this program has been to slow down by breathing more deeply, and to remember that thirst can be masquerading as hunger. I’ve learned to breathe ever deeper as a practice, and this now ripples out to all areas of my life.

As I reflected today on this journey, I felt that prior to this, it was like I had been trying to knit a complex jumper with odd-sized needles and without a pattern to follow. This programme has been working gently in me; picking up stitches dropped long ago; undoing a purl row where it should have been plain; bringing order to the colours of the Fair Isle design. All this, happening with kindness and gentleness. My jumper may be ready to wear in the Winter…or it may not! Nevertheless, the pattern is emerging, ever more beautifully, with every breath I take. Thank you, Naomi.”

Grace Bird, Adelaide, South Australia