Latest / The Trauma Therapist / Abi Blakeslee, Ph.D. The Way of Somatic Experiencing: from the archives
Transcript
- 0:00Or today we even another episode from the archives with one of my incredible guests.
- 0:05Enjoy or welcome back to the Trauma Dipas podcast. My name is Guy
- 0:19mckperson. My mission is to help trauma therapist be their incredible selves, to
- 0:24be human, to be real, not just a clinician. I'm a big
- 0:28believer in who we are is more important than what we know, and this
- 0:31requires cultivating authenticity, genuineness, and vulnerability, and that requires intention. Can
- 0:38learn more about my courses and workshops by going to the Trauma Therapist Project dot
- 0:42com. That's the Trauma Therapist Project dot com. Let's get started, our
- 0:48guys. Welcome back to the Trauma divers podcast. Guy mc ferson here and
- 0:52super excited to have my guest today, doctor Abbie Blakeslee. Abbie welcome,
- 0:57thank you, Thank you so much for inviting me. All right, So,
- 1:00Abbie integrates semantic experiencing with clinical research, the psychobiological principles of attachment,
- 1:06psychodynamic therapy, and semantic body work in her practice and teaching. She conducted
- 1:11original research on the role of implicit memory and semantic experiencing with the committee that
- 1:15included doctor Daniel Siegel, Doctor Blakesley holds and Masters of Arts and Counseling and
- 1:19Depth Psychology and a PhD in Clinical and semantic psychology. She's interested in the
- 1:26intersection between neuroscience, current trauma research, and the psychobiological principles of semantic experiencing.
- 1:33All right, true, got through that awesome Abbie. Welcome, Thanks,
- 1:37thanks again for doing this. Such a pleasure to be here. All
- 1:41right, So before we get going, I know we talked a little bit
- 1:44about this but before we started recording, but share with our listeners where you're
- 1:47from originally and where you're located now. Well, we were just talking about
- 1:53my family lineage here because guys calling from Oakland. My great grandmother grew up
- 1:59in Oakland. Grandmother and my father so the paternal side in California. I
- 2:04grew up right outside of Los Angeles, and now I live in Bozeman,
- 2:07Montana, and I have three young children here and we spend a lot of
- 2:12time in the mountains and fishing and kind of you know, chasing the outdoors
- 2:16as much as possible. What I just want to diverge a little here,
- 2:22but what brought you out to Montana? Quality of life? Peaceful miss m
- 2:30There's a really close knit community here and the great outdoors. You know,
- 2:35we're going to be talking about the nervous system. But for me and my
- 2:39family, we find a lot of expanse and also settling when we're outdoors together.
- 2:46It connects us to a sense of something greater and it's exciting, so
- 2:53there's sort of that, you know, there's a charge to it in a
- 2:54positive way. And then it's also deeply peaceful, which were you know,
- 3:00parasympathetic rest and digest. So it's really just having that kind of the sense
- 3:06of regulation in the environment, which is different. And for me in Los
- 3:09Angeles there's a lot of go go go, so I feel for many that
- 3:14live in cities, you know, there's a real pressure and demand on our
- 3:17nervous systems right to produce, to stay aware, to be an alert.
- 3:23So I think in those kinds of environments we have to be even more conscientious
- 3:29of our evolution and take time to be outside, see long distances, or
- 3:37even just snuggle up, settle and take time for that rest and recuperation phase
- 3:43of life. Wow, I really appreciate sharing that. I mean that resonates
- 3:46with me and we can talk about that later. You know, we're going
- 3:52to talk about sematic experiencing and you're you're interested in and focus on neuroscience and
- 3:57so forth. But before we do, can we kind of really hear your
- 4:01story of how you got here in the first place. What inspired that in
- 4:06you? Well, way back, I discovered that if I gave my parents
- 4:14massages, they would buy me ice cream, yep. And and it was
- 4:20it At bask and Robbins they had the Matterhorn, which was, you know,
- 4:24all different kinds of ice cream with whipped cream and chocolate sauce. And
- 4:28so I learned very early on kind of a love of body work and the
- 4:32body, and it got really good at finding not you know, I'd put
- 4:36dimes into phone books to see if I could feel where it was, and
- 4:45so it was a reward. It was just kind of a you know,
- 4:46basic a little bit of dopamine there early on, and I became really curious
- 4:51about how bodies moved and tension patterns, and after college went into to bodywork
- 5:00school became a body worker. For several years. I was doing polarity and
- 5:05deep tissue work, and I started to become curious about how I might be
- 5:11working on one part of the body and a memory would emerge for someone,
- 5:15maybe something I had a thought about in twenty years, or there would be
- 5:18a large emotional release that would happen when I worked on a muscle. So
- 5:25I started to get curious about this mind body connection piece. And I had
- 5:29a mentor bodywork mentor of mine recommend doctor Peter Levine's Waking the Tiger and ramdas
- 5:35how can I help? And I read both of those and I was struck
- 5:40by doctor Levine's work and how after many years in the autonomic nervous system and
- 5:47in the body, we can have an imprint of things that happened to us
- 5:51long ago, but it's more non conscious, just like in the muscular shirt,
- 5:57right, so it can be held for long periods of time. And
- 6:00that actually led me into my master's program and then into my PhD program,
- 6:04and I let go of body work for a period of time. I'm really
- 6:08focused on psychodynamic work and clinical work, and through se oriented touch work began
- 6:15to integrate the two. Later in my career, it was kind of like
- 6:18coming home again. But I found that somatic experiencing has really been the foundation
- 6:26for the way that I perceive trauma healing. I think it's one of the
- 6:31and I'm biased. I teach somatic experiencing, but the reason why I teach
- 6:36it is that I just stuck with it for a decade and then I became
- 6:43a faculty member. So I've been in the field for close to two decades,
- 6:46and I think it has one of the best sort of progressive learning tools.
- 6:54It's something that we can teach our clients to be able to do themselves.
- 6:58And there are skills and our tools to be able to tend to our
- 7:03responses that are non conscious, right, or some are nonconscious and some are
- 7:10unconscious. Some things it will never really be able to pay attention to,
- 7:15but we can pay attention to internal things that are happening with these survival responses
- 7:21that are right there in the lower brain, right, that are hard to
- 7:26access without these kinds of tools. So that's one of the things that really
- 7:30excites me. You're asking me about my passion, and I just I love
- 7:32this work. I really do. And for many people it's the missing peace.
- 7:36Now, when you found Semitic Experiencing SE and read Peter Levin's work,
- 7:45I mean, for those people who aren't familiar with it, I mean it's
- 7:49about trauma, right, I mean, how did you, how did you
- 7:57move into that whole topic? Right? You talked initially about the body and
- 8:01memories and so forth, but of course now you're moving into this or being
- 8:05introduced to the topic of trauma. How did you move into that and how
- 8:11did that interact with you? Well, at first, it was really just
- 8:16a basic curiosity about human nature and how are we the way we are and
- 8:24wanting to gather more information being a body work or you know really that they
- 8:31called the issues and the tissues, right, having some some openness around looking
- 8:39at kind of these the lower level of responses, and then how we think
- 8:45we are who we are? Right, we have all of these ideas of
- 8:48who we are, but we have these kind of habits and ways of being
- 8:54that we've learned long ago that are part of the continuum of our experience.
- 9:00So I started one of the se trainings as a body worker before I went
- 9:05into my mental health education, and I remember in somatic experiencing beginning one,
- 9:16I started to feel things. I'd been a dancer prior to that, so
- 9:20I had musculoskeletal knowledge and I thought I was very embodied, which I was,
- 9:26but I didn't recognize that there's a whole universe inside of ourselves. It's
- 9:31as if the nervous system is a poem that unfolds right. We can have
- 9:37feelings that are sparkly or undulating, or soft or fluid. We can have
- 9:46feelings of a pillar or a column. Yeah, it can be vaporous.
- 9:56But the learning what we call some named called interroseption, which is a term
- 10:03that was developed by doctor Bud Craig who's a neuroscientist. It's a wonderful book
- 10:09called how Do You Feel? Not for the faint of heart, It is
- 10:13definitely a neuroscience book, but they talk about this ability of a part of
- 10:20your brain called the insula or the insular cortex to consciously become aware of internal
- 10:26sensation. And when you have multiple sensations happening at any time, and your
- 10:35insula will not light up, meaning there's not blood flow metabolic activity on an
- 10:39MRI machine, But when you become conscious of a sensation, this part of
- 10:46the brain lights up, this conscious attention to internal sensation. And this is
- 10:56actually super interesting because they find that long term meditators actually have thicker right anterior
- 11:03insula. The work of Sarah Lazare and then there's another researcher named Critchley who
- 11:09looks at empathy and people who have a better ability to sense their heart rate,
- 11:18so it's higher inter reception, they score higher on empathy tests. And
- 11:24so we can look at this ability to feel yourself helps us to have a
- 11:31better sense of feeling others, feeling connected with others, right, which is
- 11:37something that certainly gets lost in trauma. Our capacity to be able to take
- 11:43in right, or be able to focus on relationship or feel safe in a
- 11:48relationship be poor. Just talks about the neuroseption of safety. Right. But
- 11:54coming back to that full circle here, with that, that sensory experience discovered
- 12:00a whole universe inside of myself. And I noticed where I felt vibrant and
- 12:07alive through I call that resilient. I also noticed where I felt terror,
- 12:13where I felt construction in relationship to certain events or current triggers, where I
- 12:18might go numb or feel spacey. It gave me a whole new reference point
- 12:24for these things that were happening kind of under my conscious radar all of the
- 12:28time, and an ability to process those things from what we call the autonomic
- 12:35level or that lower level. Okay, so that was going on for you
- 12:45when you were as a result of getting into this a s course. Absolutely,
- 12:50Okay, So I had a few different responses. You know, I
- 12:56think you mentioned about trauma. Yeah, we can look at somatic experiencing as
- 13:01a trauma resolution model, but there's another side to it. I really liked
- 13:07the idea of also calling it a resiliency building model, because what's on the
- 13:13other side. When we become less constricted, when we come out of freeze,
- 13:18when we discharge or release or get more organized in our nervous system,
- 13:22become more present to the current moment. This is where we have more resilience,
- 13:28We have more sense of flow, capacity, capability, right right,
- 13:35Yeah, it's funny. As you just said that, it reminded me of
- 13:39discussion I had with these a dental chuck and she just published a bookbook and
- 13:43she was talking about that too. She was saying, yes, there's trauma
- 13:46and attention to that and working on that, but what about kind of the
- 13:52other side of that, you know, she was talking. It reminded me
- 13:54of bringing attention to this other aspect. So I really appreciate that. So
- 14:01what happened in your personal experience as you started what becoming a working with people
- 14:11in this context. Yeah. So through the Sematic Experiencing training, it's a
- 14:20three year training for professionals. I was doing my own personal work, somatic
- 14:26personal work, and then also working in an agency and then also in private
- 14:31practice and really teaching people skills and tools to slow down and to become curious
- 14:43about what their internal state is in the moment. So somatic means body oriented,
- 14:50and experiencing is a verb. So the experience of the body in the
- 14:56present moment and the healing happens in the here and now. We can talk
- 15:01about different events that happened, but as someone is talking, I might be
- 15:07tracking or noticing what's happening in their nervous system or in their body. And
- 15:13then I'll ask, as you talk about the stress that you feel when you're
- 15:18driving to work, stuck in traffic in Oakland, what sensations do you notice
- 15:24in your body right now? Yeah, and so that would be a question
- 15:30that we could explore and to sort of see where a person might be getting
- 15:37stuck, where there might be we call either trauma or less resilience. Kind
- 15:43it's on a spectrum there. But let's say that's something that someone wanted to
- 15:46work on and they're feeling anxiety. Now there are two branches of the nervous
- 15:52system. We have the sympathetic nervous system for excitation, and we have the
- 15:58parasympathetic nervous system relaxation. And in many of these kinds of somatic models,
- 16:04if you have two lines, you can imagine two lines, and then you
- 16:10have a wave that goes in between. We have a soft on, soft
- 16:14off, soft on, soft off. So it's sympathetic. Comparisympathetic are somewhat
- 16:18reciprocal throughout the day, right, and we get a little bit stressed,
- 16:23and then we settle back down again, a little bit stressed, and we
- 16:26settle back down again. Now with trauma, what can happen is we can
- 16:32get into a cycle of dysregulation where we move outside of that window of tolerance
- 16:40into a high sympathetic response. Now, when we are threatened, it could
- 16:47be real or perceived threat, we go into something called the threat response cycle.
- 16:53This is a time limited evolutionary pathway that we move through and then we
- 17:02should, given time, given support, return back to this kind of baseline
- 17:08in a sense, so we move into the high sympathetic charge. Let's say
- 17:15somebody swerves over towards you, you're driving the car, they swerve towards you,
- 17:21and you go into a sense of alert. Then you orient through your
- 17:26five senses towards the threat. Yeah, and then you move into a sympathetic
- 17:33right excitation in order for action. Do I need to swerve? Do I
- 17:36need to hit the brake? Right? What do I do? This is
- 17:41a lower brain reaction. It's happening underneath your conscious ratear. Thank goodness,
- 17:45you're not thinking for every little movement. It's an instinctual response. And then
- 17:52the car, let's say, swerves back. They're texting, right, they
- 17:57get a little angry, Darren, it would be texting, you know,
- 18:00say something and then you start to settle back down again. At this point,
- 18:07your heart is pumping, you're breathing fast, your blood is circulating for
- 18:11action. There's several other things that happen. You're not digesting your food.
- 18:17Yeah, and then you know, you maybe get a little wobbly, You're
- 18:21shaky, little tingly. You track your sensations. When you come down a
- 18:25high sympathetic charge, you start to feel some of these kinds of quakiness,
- 18:29shakiness, trembliness, tingliness, vibration, and it's really as things start to
- 18:36settle back down again and then softening, expansion, warmth, gurgling in the
- 18:41tummy, heaviness in the limbs, Yeah, and kind of coming back to
- 18:47a resting state. So it might be tracking that with somebody, as they're
- 18:52talking about, maybe someone doesn't squove into their lane, but now they're feeling
- 18:56stressed all the time they're driving, and they're consistently in this high autonomic alert
- 19:02state. It's not healthy for their system, right, you want to be
- 19:06able to move into it and then return to some level of a baseline.
- 19:11Now another thing that can happen, And I think this is a great gift
- 19:15of Peter Levine's work and that Dana and other people are talking about in polyvagel
- 19:19theory, which is there's also another parasympathetic response that we and animals move into
- 19:32when there is real or perceived life threat or severe life threat. Is a
- 19:37passive defensive response called a freeze response. And we think about this with the
- 19:42possum. Yeah, and it's everything stopped played dead in the wild. This
- 19:52offers an opportunity for prey. Sometimes the predator will be not so interested in
- 20:00an inert meal. Yeah, so they either the coyotes will sniff the possum
- 20:07and then think it doesn't smell good, it's not moving. It might be
- 20:11it must be old, and they move on, or the predator can actually
- 20:18drag the prey over or sit with the prey, either get distracted or not
- 20:22be interested in it. There's a lot of really interesting videos of impalas being
- 20:29caught by jaguars and other kinds of large cats, and baboons come over and
- 20:37chase the big cats away. I don't know why, but the baboons seemed
- 20:42to be very interested. So you can type in baboons and IMPALA's on YouTube
- 20:47and see this. But so the predator gets distracted, and you'll see this
- 20:53the animal coming out of freeze again through shaking and trembling. If I were
- 21:02to ask, the impala probably be tangling and feeling something coming out of a
- 21:07feeling of being very cold and constricted into high heat, right, and then
- 21:11moving down into warmth sweating. Yeah, and sometimes some water will come out
- 21:18of its eyes. Yeah, it'll start to salivate again after having a very
- 21:22dry mouth, and then they will pop up and run away. So human
- 21:27beings, we have this same ability at the same time when we're in a
- 21:32freeze. It's an analgesic, so it's a numbing response. If we're injured,
- 21:37we won't feel it. Yeah, so when we have times where it
- 21:45freeze again, should be time limited. There are going to be times where
- 21:48we're so overwhelmed our bodies will decide to go in a passive defensive response and
- 21:55we'll go into shutdown, or we'll get so terrified, right, or there's
- 22:00a kind of a more helpless situation where there's inescapable attack and we'll go into
- 22:04a freeze response. Given time, given support, the body comes out of
- 22:10it. But without those conditions, we might remain in a freeze response at
- 22:15a baseline, or be triggered into that freeze response when there's something into the
- 22:21environment that is similar enough or our lower brain assesses is similar enough to the
- 22:26original trauma. And this is what's so frustrating for so many trauma survivors is
- 22:33they're so smart. You know, we're all we're smart. If we decided
- 22:37to just be better, we would be. But why am I feeling afraid?
- 22:41Why am I having social anxiety? Why am I feeling depressed and shut
- 22:45down? Why is it so hard for me to motivate to get out of
- 22:48bed. Why is it I freeze every time that I'm trying to fill out
- 22:53the form for the job application. Why is it I'm having such a hard
- 22:57time connecting with my partner when they're upset with me about a little thing.
- 23:03I go into this deep shot down right and close off so right. We
- 23:08have these patterns that are part of a survival response. Our body was trying
- 23:14to keep us safe. Did keep us safe because we're still here. But
- 23:18it's the repetition of that response which becomes dysregulation in a current situation where we
- 23:26might want some more flexible responses available to us. So tracking the freeze allowing
- 23:33the release cycle to happen with time. Sometimes with doctor Peter Levine's work too.
- 23:40And this is not as it's not as utilized in many other theories.
- 23:48As we call it the completion of defensive responses in procedural memory, which is
- 23:53nonconscious their movement patterns. So the person as they come out of freeze might
- 24:02have this feeling of running or escaping. They might have a feeling of punching
- 24:07or standing up for themselves. So I've worked many times with kids who have
- 24:11been bullied and they've been surrounded by bullies right and physically harmed. So they
- 24:19went into a freeze response. And as we track notice the freeze response,
- 24:25spend some time. They feel my support. They notice they're not in that
- 24:29situation now, they're coming out of numbness. They start to feel cold and
- 24:34a little trembly, and they maybe there's a little shakiness or a little vibration,
- 24:40could be just under the skin, or it could actually become a little
- 24:42bit more to the surface. And as they're coming out the same you know,
- 24:48I just I really wanted to scream. I wanted to say something I
- 24:52wanted. You know, I don't know why anybody helped me. I feel
- 24:56the agency in your body right now. You wanted to say help me,
- 25:00so right here and now, would you be willing just to say that help
- 25:03me? Yeah, And notice what it feels like to use your voice in
- 25:07this moment. And I'm right here with you. You are receiving help now.
- 25:11There wasn't anybody there then, but I'm here now. And notice that,
- 25:17and take some time right in the repair. And then you know,
- 25:22as they're coming on it again, and they start to feel tension in their
- 25:26arms, and I said, just let that tension happen. They go,
- 25:30oh, so weird. My hands are in fists right, or my leg
- 25:33feels like it wants to kick, And I say, we'll let your body
- 25:37feel the power of that and go slowly and notice how that is, and
- 25:42then through the body. A lot of the time the story will come forward
- 25:47and they say, it's so weird. It's as if I wanted to kick
- 25:48them away. That's right. I imagine that there was that right underneath the
- 25:56freeze. There's that feeling of wanting to punch or kick or get a way
- 26:00or stand up for yourself. So let's do that now. So let me
- 26:03just interrupt. So, just for the benefit of our listeners, what are
- 26:07you doing as you're walking that client through that self awareness in that moment.
- 26:17There are two pieces to this, So one is called tracking. Where we
- 26:21are together, we're following their internal sensory experience to notice what the body wants
- 26:30to do. Now. So we're going to be watching and listening and following.
- 26:37So if the body starts to tremble, I'll say, let that happen.
- 26:41If the body starts to starts to tighten, we might follow that tightening
- 26:45to see if there's a movement pattern that comes up right, or if I
- 26:52see the person sitting up more straight, I'll say, right, so I'm
- 26:55attending. Are you noticing how your spine just straightened? How does that feel
- 27:00to you? I feel more here, wonderful. So be in that we're
- 27:07tracking, we're following. Now there is another piece and somatic experiencing. You
- 27:14know, when our students are learning, see, there's this feeling that it
- 27:18can be very intuitive, and yet we're actually quite conscious sometimes of where we
- 27:23might direct a client's attention. And there are a few things about that.
- 27:30One is that if there is an autonomic like a release like a discharge,
- 27:33but somewhere else is tensing or somewhere else's right feeling disconnected, we might direct
- 27:41a person attention to that release cycle. Yeah, or we might direct a
- 27:47person's attention Let's say, if an area is feeling really good and an area
- 27:51is feeling really uncomfortable, depending on the person. For many people, they
- 27:59haven't felt good in twenty years, and they're used to following the discomfort.
- 28:04So we say, you know, let's not pay attention to that lump and
- 28:08solid feeling in your neck. You just said that your chest just opened,
- 28:14or there's a softening in your shoulders before we go to that feeling in your
- 28:18neck, would you be willing to take some time with the softness in your
- 28:21shoulders, So we might actually be very directive in our attention and in the
- 28:26softening of the shoulders. Let's see now that the tension could RaSE in the
- 28:32throat, or it may soften as it softens, maybe an emotion comes,
- 28:37right, maybe some tears the person hasn't been able to feel for a period
- 28:41of time. So that's sort of what one of the things I'm noticing,
- 28:45we're tracking, we're following, and I'm also helping a person to discharge a
- 28:52release, complete incomplete, defensive responses connected to something in the past, and
- 29:00how the nervous system is firing in the present moment, and also making sure
- 29:06that they're not getting trapped in the trauma vortex. And we might be moving
- 29:12trauma vortex meaning negative sensations, uncomfortable feelings, dysregulation, disease, and starting
- 29:22to build a capacity to move towards where they feel better, where they feel
- 29:26more whole. Resources they have, what they think about, resources that make
- 29:33them feel more like themselves, more present, but also embodied resources. Right,
- 29:37yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, I love this. I
- 29:40love that kind of drilling down into almost the minutia and the specifics of how
- 29:48someone is feeling. And I like the way you talked about it is kind
- 29:52of bringing their attention away from that maybe pattern that they're used to paying attention
- 29:59to the at quote unquote negative experience. But well, let's look at the
- 30:03softness in here for once, right, and the power behind that potential hower
- 30:07behind that in the sense absolutely sometimes I call it the parasympathetic domino effect,
- 30:15to where you know, if you feel an attend to place, even if
- 30:18it's three to five percent change. And for many trauma survivors, that's what
- 30:22we're looking for. We're learning to track and attend to the small amounts of
- 30:27betterness in the nervous system in the body, in the overall experience, in
- 30:34the here and now, right and then, and some people can will notice
- 30:40a very much deeper response in the somatic experiencing work. You know, they
- 30:44can get to seventy five percent betterness by just attending to it, you know,
- 30:48just kind of one part starts to settle, in other parts that starts
- 30:52to gurgle, another part that starts to soften, and the brain and the
- 30:56amygdala, which is on this alert what's wrong, what's wrong? What's wrong?
- 31:00Goes Oh, my shoulders are soft. Maybe nothing is wrong right now,
- 31:03Okay, let's kind of dial down that cortisol don't have to do all
- 31:07that stress response. Catecholamines in the brain start to calm down here, you
- 31:11don't need to keep firing. And then we go into more of that,
- 31:17you know, a downshift. We call it down regulation. Now there is
- 31:21an interesting piece here, you do you want to mention sometimes we actually might
- 31:26need to steer someone towards the trauma vortex. This would be somebody who might
- 31:33be a little bit more in the all is good category, you know,
- 31:37everything great, everything's fine. And also sometimes long term meditators, for example,
- 31:45where there could be a way of um there's an embodied kind of pathway
- 31:55and towards towards meditation right and working with altered states or different states of consciousness.
- 32:05There's also some really interesting research to show that there can be almost like
- 32:12a trained dissociation, so it feels really good to disconnect, but dissociation is
- 32:19also a trauma response of disconnecting from the body, kind of floating out there,
- 32:23being away from the corporal experience because it feels like too much. But
- 32:29when somebody lands back in, all of that regulation is still there, so
- 32:32they have to keep sort of going out. It's a more functional way,
- 32:36right, It's not as distressing, but we might have to say no,
- 32:42no, no, don't go into that blissful state of transcendence. Come back.
- 32:47What's the feeling that's underneath when you're here that makes you want to go
- 32:51away to that place? What is the tension, what is the distress?
- 32:55What is the stuckness? Yeah, I mean that's a really good point.
- 33:01And the purpose behind that is what aside from your moving someone away from or
- 33:08kind of inviting them away from this association into the here and now, to
- 33:15be able to kind of open up that kind of door to the feelings behind
- 33:22the trauma a sense, right, right, And we have a lot of
- 33:27different ways to work with that. So sometimes just being with it, your
- 33:31conscious attention, tracking your internal sensation, including negative sensation, your body will
- 33:37start to shift. So a common question we ask is, as you feel
- 33:43I'll use a trauma or tex sensation. As you feel that tension in your
- 33:45chest, how big is it? Does it have a shape beside a color
- 33:51as you feel that. What begins to happen next? Does it increase,
- 33:55does it decrease or stay the same. Some people will decrease, they'll feel
- 34:00better, right, we're moving in a right direction. For other people,
- 34:06maybe it's stuck. So I say, well, what else is there?
- 34:07We'll move the attention somewhere else and help the systems sort of move along.
- 34:14Other times it will increase, get more uncomfortable, get you first. For
- 34:19many people spending time in the body, they leave their bodies for good reasons.
- 34:25And so when we start to come back in to the reassociation process and
- 34:32into some of the sensations of the freeze and the terror and the fight and
- 34:37the flight, it's not easy. So we may also need to take some
- 34:44breaks. Stabilize in the external environment, look around right, find some objects
- 34:50in the room that the person likes, Explore the room through the five senses,
- 34:54chit chat a little bit in the neo cortex, kind of come out
- 34:59of that, and then we're going to tap back in a little bit,
- 35:02touch back in. Are you feeling any different now or what are you aware
- 35:06of? Peter Living calls it titration. It's like a drop by drop model,
- 35:12and so it comes from chemistry chasing changing a base to an ascid.
- 35:15You have to put the drop in and let the solution settle. And they
- 35:21have you know, I think of all of those nineteen eighties videos with the
- 35:25you know, the kids have to wear the goggles, right, or the
- 35:29mad scientists, right, have to wear the goggles because if they put too
- 35:31much in, it explodes. And in those movies they came out with like
- 35:36you know, black blackened hair and stood all over their faces. And so
- 35:42that's that idea, that drop by drop For some people, we're not going
- 35:46to kind of go all at it at once, and then it's a slow
- 35:51process of touching into the nervous system, allowing a little bit of reorganization,
- 35:55moving attention to different aspects, moving the system through time, coming back out
- 36:01into the environment into the present moment, right Yeah, I mean, man,
- 36:08it's I'm just looking at the time here. This could go on forever.
- 36:13I mean, there's so much richness here. We appreciate it. I
- 36:15didn't even get to asking you about the the awareness and you know, and
- 36:21I love talking about this awareness of the person doing this. The therapist that's
- 36:28you know what's required. I mean, you talked a lot about your background
- 36:30as a body worker and a dancer. I mean, but as we close
- 36:36out here, you know the people are listening to this, I know they're
- 36:38getting oh my god, this sounds so intense. If someone is interested in
- 36:46learning more about this and maybe even jumping in, and where would you direct
- 36:52them? Yeah, so I would highly recommend going to our professional website,
- 37:00which is traumahaling dot org. So, if you're a professional and you're interested
- 37:05in learning about sematic experiencing, we have articles, we have wonderful training programs
- 37:13all over the world. If you are interested in receiving sematic experiencing, we
- 37:17have a practitioner directory and you can click on there and you can look for
- 37:22providers in your area. If there's no provider in your area, you can
- 37:27also look for people who do online work. Can you mentioned you know,
- 37:30it's it's intense work, but it's also can be exquisitely gentle, you know,
- 37:38because we are working in this tight trated way. It really helps people
- 37:43begin to have this deeper sense of wholeness, you know, when they can
- 37:47connect to that sense of source and sense of self and allow some of the
- 37:53release or the reorganization. It's a real relief to the nervous system, and
- 38:01like I said, it really can be the missing piece for many people.
- 38:05I really encourage everyone to try it. It's made a huge difference for me
- 38:08in my life, which is why I teach the work. Now, well,
- 38:13that's awesome. So you know you mentioned a few books around us,
- 38:17and how do you feel about was up Bud Craig, Yeah, okay,
- 38:22I'll have those listed up, and of course Peter Levine's work and so forth.
- 38:27But aside from that, and it doesn't have to be trauma related or
- 38:31not. I can see the balentiful of books behind you. What kind of
- 38:37go to book recommendation would you have for listeners? Something that kind of stands
- 38:42out to you? Well, you know, the Peter Levine book that I
- 38:45really love is In an Unspoken Voice, which is the newest book. He
- 38:52also has a great book called Trauma and Memory. If you're a therapist,
- 38:55you might find some real interest in that because it's all about plicit memory and
- 39:00working with that kind of play by play. You know, I read a
- 39:08lot of different things, I mean recently Bud Craig is he's really my hero,
- 39:15and that's all of that work on inter reception which I find so fascinating.
- 39:20Of course, there's Stephen porgeous poly bagel theory. Deb Dana has a
- 39:23great clinical application of poly bagel theory. She has her own modality, but
- 39:30sc has been working with poly bagel theory for I mean, I think we
- 39:36were one of the first therapist that recognized it and started using it as in
- 39:39a clinical model. So I'd say those are my my go to books.
- 39:45There's also Maggie Klein and Peter Levine have wonderful books Trauma through a Child's Eyes,
- 39:52and if you're a parent or a caregiver, they also have Trauma Proofing
- 39:57your Kids, and they're excellent somatic approaches to working with kids. Of course,
- 40:04I have young ones so and I work with kids and families, so
- 40:07it's a great primer to kind of bring this work and embodiment practices because we
- 40:15can do this when we're older, but we can also begin to bring it
- 40:19right from the get go into young people's lives. And that's very exciting to
- 40:22me. Awesome, Well, I mean, it's been a delight having you
- 40:25on here, and you definitely give us like this mini master class and some
- 40:31experience. I want to thank you. I want to thank you so much
- 40:34for coming on board here. You're welcome. It's in such a pleasure appreciate
- 40:38it. Take care. Bye bye