Gravity Point®Anthology
VOLUME I:
A Method to Resolve Stress Before
It Makes You Sick
What if unresolved stress is what’s making us—and this precious planet—sick?
My Story
I spent most of my life sick.
Chronic digestive issues. Daily headaches. Anxiety and depression that made basic functioning feel impossible.
Despite loving parents, good doctors, and years of trying everything — therapy, yoga, energy work, meditation, medications, and a long list of wellness practices — nothing worked.
By my mid-twenties, I was desperate for solutions.
After taking a year off after getting my bachelor’s degree, I decided to become a therapist — hoping that if I could learn how to heal others, I could also heal myself.
I earned a master’s in Counseling Psychology from Northwestern University, specialized in the neuroscience of stress and traumatic stress, got my first clinical mental health license, and became a university professor and curriculum developer for the program after graduation.
Within six months, I burnt out and was sicker than I’d ever been.
That's when I knew something was wrong. The best training, the latest science, professional expertise - and I was still falling apart. Maybe the problem wasn't me. Maybe the approaches themselves were incomplete.
What I eventually discovered was this: unresolved stress had been making me sick my entire life.
All those persistent problems - the digestive issues, headaches, anxiety, depression - they weren't separate problems requiring separate solutions. They were my body's response to decades of stress that never fully resolved.
And becoming a therapist? That made everything worse.
Here's what I didn't know then: when you sit with someone who's struggling, your body picks up what they're feeling. It's how humans are wired - we're built to sense and mirror each other's states.
For nearly twenty hours a week, I sat with clients who were stuck in unresolved stress. And without realizing it, I was absorbing their stuck patterns into my own system.
A client would talk about the same frustration week after week, never moving forward. I'd leave the session feeling drained, heavy, shut down. I thought I was just tired from listening. But really, I was carrying their unresolved stress in my own body - on top of all the stress I'd been carrying my whole life.
This wasn't just happening at work. In my personal life, I was doing the same thing - picking up everyone else's pain, stress, and overwhelm without knowing how to release any of it.
No wonder I was exhausted all the time.
“In order to change an existing paradigm, you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.”
— R. Buckminster Fuller
The Solution—Moving Far Beyond Fight, Flight, Freeze
Here's what I discovered through years of research and clinical work:
We don't have enough language to describe what's actually happening in our stress system.
Everyone knows about fight, flight, freeze - maybe fawn. But when my clients described their experiences, these categories didn't capture what was really going on.
When someone finally got the promotion they'd worked toward for years, they felt celebratory - but that wasn't fight, flight, or freeze. Where was fulfill?
When a client described their deepest desires, our stress language didn't capture that either. Where was fantasize?
When a client insisted they felt angry but my body kept shutting down as they spoke, I realized they were actually devastatingly disappointed. They just hadn't been able to feel it under all that anger. Where was frown?
Without accurate language to describe stress responses, my clients got stuck. And because I mirrored them— I did too.
So I built a better model for stress and vicarious stress.
The Gravity Point® Model of stress includes twenty stress responses—what I call gravity points because they move energy and information in your life.
Together these twenty points form your gravity point system—the inner GPS that manufactures the feelings, thoughts, and actions that you use to guide your life.
Expanding the language wasn't enough though. I also needed to update how we think about stress itself.
Traditional stress models focus almost entirely on stress that happens TO you - your own direct experiences and trauma. But what about the stress that happens THROUGH you? The stress you absorb from others through mirroring?
If I was going to heal - and help others heal - the model needed to account for both:
Vital stress: What happens to you directly in your own experiences
Vicarious stress: What you pick up from others
Both types of stress can make you sick, and both need to be resolved. My framework treats them as equally important - because they are.
Why A Better Stress Model Matters
Understanding stress this way also changed how I understood trauma.
Past trauma is just a stress response that didn't completely resolve. Your body wanted to fight and flee—or fantasize and fulfill, but couldn't.
The energy got shut down because taking action could have made things worse. That energy doesn't disappear - it lies dormant, vulnerable to being triggered again.
When a present situation is similar to past trauma, it reactivates that old pattern.
Most approaches to trauma ask you to dig into your past—to process old wounds and understand where it all comes from.
But here's what I learned: when you resolve present stress correctly, you resolve past trauma at the same time.
The Method I teach in this book resolves both - without having to rehash your history.
You work with what's triggering you right now. When you resolve the current situation with the right response, the past releases too.
And because the model accounts for vicarious stress, it works whether the stress is yours or absorbed from someone else.
This is what finally healed me after decades of being overly stressed and sick.
The Gravity Point® Book will teach you this Method so you can do the same.
What’s the book about?
Gravity Point®: A Method to Resolve Stress Before It Makes You Sick gives you a practical, 20-step process you can use immediately - in any stressful situation you're facing.
The book is organized in two parts:
-
Before you can use the Method effectively, you need to understand how stress actually works in your system.
You'll learn:
Why fight/flight/freeze isn't enough to describe your complete stress system
The difference between vital stress (happening TO you) and vicarious stress (happening THROUGH you via mirror neurons)
How present situations trigger past trauma - and why resolving the present heals both
The twenty gravity points that make up your inner GPS
Why stress responses that kept you safe as a child might be draining you now
How your nervous system gets stuck - and how neuroplasticity means you can rewire it
This section bridges neuroscience with lived experience, giving you the "why" behind what you'll learn to do.
-
Once you understand the framework, you learn the Method - a systematic process for resolving stress in any specific situation.
It doesn't matter if you're dealing with workplace conflict, relationship dynamics, family stress, health anxiety, financial pressure, or anything else. The Method works the same way every time.
You'll identify one specific stressful situation, then move through twenty steps:
Surrender Phase (Steps 1-10): Release energy and information that doesn't serve you in this situation
Stabilize Phase (Steps 11-20): Pull in energy and information that supports what you want
Each step introduces one gravity point - what it does, how it shows up, and how to use it. You meet each stress response in context, as you actually apply it to resolve your situation.
This isn't theory you have to memorize first. It's integrated learning - understanding and application woven together.
Each step includes clear instructions and reflection prompts so you can work through a real situation as you read.
By the end, you'll have resolved one complete stressful situation - and you'll know exactly how to use the Method again and again for every triggering situation you encounter.
The Gravity Point® Book is for you if…
You're tired of managing physical, mental, and relational problems and are ready to finally resolve them.
You’ve tried everything - therapy, meditation, supplements, exercise - with limited results
You’re wellness-minded and intellectually curious - you want to understand WHY and HOW, not just WHAT to do
You can recognize your patterns but feel stuck in automatic reactions you can’t seem to change
You’re worried about getting sick from ongoing stress and want to prevent problems before they start
You want a science-based approach that respects both research and lived experience
You’re ready to learn a situation-specific method rather than general one-size-all advice
Join us for a virtual launch party.
Saturday, November 15 at 2:30pm CT
Join us for an afternoon of celebration and inspiration as we honor the launch of the book and introduce work that will help us understand how to resolve stress before it makes us sick.
AVAILABLE NOW
$45
Your pre-order support makes independent publication possible, ensuring this work remains accessible without corporate markup or institutional gatekeeping.
All purchases will be personally signed and shipped by Dr. Ashley Anne.