Latest / The Trauma Therapist / Healing Sexual Trauma with Erika Shershun

Transcript

Healing Sexual Trauma with Erika Shershun · The Trauma Therapist

• 0:00
  Trauma Thepist podcast Plus listeners can listen to episodes early and ad free right now.
• 0:05
  Become a Plus listener by going to Apple Podcasts searching for the Trauma Theverist
• 0:10
  podcast and signing up today. Welcome to the Trauma Nevers Podcast, a show
• 0:18
  about the incredible people dedicated to helping those who experienced trauma. My name is
• 0:23
  Got macpherson, and my mission is to raise awareness of trauma and to inspire
• 0:27
  each of us to help those around us. All right, Eric, here
• 0:37
  we go, so five or three, two and one, our folks,
• 0:42
  welcome back to the podcast. Very excited to have as MICUs today. Erica
• 0:46
  Shearson, Erica welcome, Thank you guys. It's nice to be here.
• 0:51
  Awesome. So. Erica is a somatic psychotherapist who specializes in helping sexual trauma
• 0:56
  survivors reclaim the life they were meant to live. She's the author of the
• 1:00
  Healing Sexual Trauma Workbook, the Healing Sexual Trauma Guided Journal, and the facilitator
• 1:07
  of the Peessy Sexual Trauma Clinical Training as well as the upcoming Sexual Trauma Healing
• 1:12
  Journey. Her approach is trauma informed, rooted in somatic principles, draws on
• 1:18
  neuroscience and intricative modalities like MDR and energy psychology. Erica, welcome, thank
• 1:25
  you. I just want to add that the journal is out next year,
• 1:30
  early next year, Okay, the Guided Journal October. Okay, okay,
• 1:38
  awesome, Erica. Before we get going to your share with our listeners,
• 1:42
  where you're from originally and where you are currently. So where I'm from originally
• 1:49
  is I grew up in a military family, and we moved a lot,
• 1:53
  and I spent my young adulthood trying to escape the underlying pain of trauma.
• 2:00
  Once I turned eighteen, continued to move around, and I also moved from
• 2:08
  one job and relationship and along with each city, and it was really a
• 2:16
  sense of feeling unable to gain grounding or stability with all that sort of I
• 2:23
  didn't know it at the time, but trying to escape trauma, including sexual
• 2:29
  trauma. We'll get to that. But where are you living now now?
• 2:35
  I'm living in San Francisco, California? Okay, all right, cool,
• 2:38
  all right, Well let's let's start. I mean, so, how did
• 2:40
  all this start for you? You touched upon it a little bit. Yeah,
• 2:46
  So it started in that way, Like I mentioned, just traumas in
• 2:53
  my childhood and also as a young adult, and I would read a lot
• 3:01
  of books psychology books, self help books, spiritual books to try to heal.
• 3:08
  Are we talking into personal trauma sexual trauma? Yes, you said traumas?
• 3:14
  Okay, well, yeah, there was sexual traumas and also the trauma
• 3:20
  of losing my father to suicide, so he was a veteran and had undiagnosed
• 3:29
  PTSD, and you know, we just knew so much less about trauma at
• 3:34
  that time, and there were other traumas as well, But in any case,
• 3:40
  they all impacted me in ways I didn't understand at the time and left
• 3:47
  me searching for something really again, like trying to escape, trying to escape
• 3:53
  my inner world. So what age are we talking about now when in my
• 4:01
  late teens and twenties, okay, And during that time did you were you
• 4:11
  aware that you had been impacted by these particular traumas. I was. However,
• 4:20
  in terms of the sexual traumas, I really pushed them away. I
• 4:26
  didn't think about them a lot because I didn't want to feel like a victim
• 4:31
  and thinking about them made me feel that way. So also the shame associated
• 4:44
  with sexual trauma that every survivor I've ever worked with feels or has felt I've
• 4:53
  only come across one survivor who's told me they did not, or they posted
• 5:00
  it to social media that they haven't felt shame. And it's the only time
• 5:04
  I've seen that, and it's possible they just haven't acknowledged that to themselves.
• 5:11
  So there was that as well. It really makes it hard to look at
• 5:16
  it. There wasn't me too. Then there wasn't a place to talk about
• 5:23
  it. So at this point, you're what eighteen nineteen, Yes, where
• 5:29
  you go? What are you doing? Where are you going? Well,
• 5:32
  that's what I was trying to figure out, right, So eventually I finally
• 5:39
  stopped running and settled in San Francisco, and then I was overcome with depression,
• 5:46
  in part because it felt like, well, I'm finally living where I
• 5:50
  really want to live, and something still isn't right. And so, you
• 5:59
  know, I saw it out healing and the sexual traumas that threw it in.
• 6:06
  My symptoms and much of my pain were brushed over or not addressed at
• 6:12
  all by the series of therapists I saw for nearly two decades. Oh wow,
• 6:16
  okay, so let me puse you for a second there, So you're
• 6:20
  in San Francisco. Are you alone at this time? Well? I was
• 6:28
  off and on in relationships okay, okay, and you were alone in terms
• 6:32
  of family. I didn't have any when I moved here. I didn't know
• 6:35
  anyone here. So you get to San Francisco, you realize, you said
• 6:41
  you experienced depression, but you realize something needs to happen. I need to
• 6:46
  get some help. You start seeing therapists for twenty years. Now. Did
• 6:56
  you realize that there had been sexual trauma during this time or was it that
• 7:01
  these therapists. I just did not, and I did No. I had
• 7:09
  not fully repressed the traumas other than something that happened when I was an infant,
• 7:16
  So otherwise I was very much aware of them. But again they weren't
• 7:25
  like at the forefront. I shared them with each therapist I saw, and
• 7:30
  they would just be dropped. No, they wouldn't get into doing healing work
• 7:36
  around those. So, you know, I did feel grateful for some of
• 7:42
  the healing work I received in that time in terms of helping process the loss
• 7:49
  of my father, and and there was some there was another big family loss
• 7:58
  that that played into all of that. And you know, so there was
• 8:07
  something I was getting out of it and you know, processing other relational things
• 8:15
  that came up, but a lot of it still it wasn't integrative work.
• 8:20
  So I would still get triggered by some of these things. At what point
• 8:26
  did things shift for you? But what point did maybe you encounter a therapist
• 8:31
  who was like, okay, yeah. So at one point I was attending
• 8:41
  a trigger point therapy training. I had become a massage therapist and a reiki
• 8:48
  practitioner and will attending that training, the instructor asked if I wanted to volunteer
• 8:54
  for a neck demo, and I thought, like, this is such a
• 8:58
  great opportunity to receive. His name is Eric Rubin, and he's an expert
• 9:03
  chiropractor and body worker and reiki master. And and I was stunned when the
• 9:09
  words no flew from my lips, and I just had this feeling of repulsion
• 9:16
  come over me. Wait, so you were get he was touching your neck?
• 9:22
  No, I said no. He he asked to demonstrate on my neck.
• 9:26
  And so a male student eagerly stepped up to volunteer, and he shared
• 9:35
  of a trauma, a net trauma that had been life threatening, and that
• 9:41
  really brought up one of my assaults, and when I went back to the
• 9:52
  table to practice with my partner, my hands went numb and I couldn't you
• 10:03
  know, just just moments earlier, I could feel the most gentle, little
• 10:07
  grain size piece of constriction, and now I could feel nothing. And so
• 10:13
  that was kind of terrifying, and confusion and panics set in, and the
• 10:22
  instructor suggested I take a break in an adjoining room and alone in that cold,
• 10:28
  dark room, my body just began to tremble, and I was flooded
• 10:31
  with emotion as I felt pulled back in time to that traumatic experience from at
• 10:37
  this point, it was twenty five years earlier or around that, and then
• 10:41
  other traumas with similar themes emerged, and you know, I just didn't understand
• 10:48
  why my body was suddenly reacting this way. It was I had no self
• 10:52
  agency, no control. I didn't realize it at the time, but this
• 10:58
  time I was experiencing dissociation and flashbacks, but I didn't know that I was.
• 11:07
  I was in my forties, okay time, Yeah, I don't remember
• 11:11
  exactly, but I think around forty seven. Okay, So when he saw
• 11:18
  my distress, he recommended I read Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine. And
• 11:26
  you know, at home that evening, I just I laid back on my
• 11:31
  couch and I was instantly flooded with memories of sexual trauma and overcome with shame
• 11:35
  and grief. And in that moment, I realized just how much I'd been
• 11:41
  impacted by unintegrated trauma. Wow, how those wounds had shaped every aspect of
• 11:46
  my life. So you're in your own ways. I would have chosen you
• 11:50
  mentilate forties at this point. Yeah, are you a therapist at this time?
• 11:56
  No? Okay, what kind of work were you doing? I was
• 12:00
  doing the massage, therapy and reiki work. Okay, wow, so you
• 12:07
  have this very intense kind of paradigm shifting experience. Where does that lead you?
• 12:15
  What do you do? Well? As soon as I got my hands
• 12:20
  on Waking the Tiger, I read it and it answered a lot of questions
• 12:24
  I hadn't known to ask. And you know, it was a groundbreaking book,
• 12:31
  and yet it didn't give me the practical tools I needed and the insight
• 12:35
  I needed to heal from the sexual traumas. So it took me several more
• 12:41
  years to piece together what work. But what happened is it inspired me to
• 12:46
  go to grad school to become a somatic therapist. So the rest of my
• 12:52
  healing, really, the majority of my healing from sexual trauma took place while
• 12:58
  I was going to GRASP and soon after that, And it was really by
• 13:05
  piecing together a lot of what I was reading, courses I was taking outside
• 13:13
  of the grad school and just applying and practicing everything that worked for me until
• 13:24
  I was symptom free. So this book, Peter Levine's book, was very
• 13:30
  inspiring to you. And I mean, aside from that, what was the
• 13:35
  what was the impetus for you to become a therapist where you like, I
• 13:41
  want to work on myself and this will help me, or and or look,
• 13:48
  I want to help others who have gone through what I've gone through,
• 13:50
  you know? Was it a combination of those things. It was an interest
• 13:54
  in human behavior that I'd had for years and years kind of gone in a
• 14:00
  different track and gotten involved in the arts for a lot of that time leading
• 14:05
  up to then, and just I realized either I was going to go way
• 14:13
  deeper, excuse me into body work or go into psychology at that time to
• 14:20
  help people heal from trauma. And I felt more drawn to go into the
• 14:26
  direction of psychology but including the body. And I honestly thought I was further
• 14:35
  along in my healing than I was when I started grad school, because you
• 14:39
  know, it's a process to apply and get into school. So I did
• 14:46
  I was working to heal in that time in between, and did think I
• 14:52
  was further along. Had I known how hard it would be to go through
• 15:00
  grad school while suffering from PTSD, I don't know if I would have done
• 15:07
  it at that time, said, you know, within like two decades,
• 15:13
  therapists you had seen just did not kind of drop the ball. What do
• 15:22
  you wish one of those therapists had said to you had done had said Yeah,
• 15:30
  I wish they had said that they didn't specialize in treating trauma and referred
• 15:37
  me to someone who did. Yeah. That would have been the ethical thing
• 15:46
  to do, Yeah, and the smart thing to do. Yeah. And
• 15:50
  excuse me. I see it in my practice all the time. People come
• 15:54
  to me with similar stories. You know, it's not always. In my
• 15:58
  case, it was seventy years, and then there were several more years while
• 16:03
  I was in grad school. So I see people that come in. Sometimes
• 16:15
  it's twenty years or more, sometimes it's five. But there's there's quite a
• 16:21
  bit of that of people that find their way to me who who have been
• 16:26
  really struggling, and often they're they're lacking hope at that point where they're very
• 16:33
  angry or a combination of both. And it's understandable. The the average lifetime
• 16:44
  cost of being a survivor is one and twenty two thousand and let me see,
• 16:56
  I have it somewhere. It's one hundred and twenty two four hundred and
• 17:03
  sixty one dollars. And so that's the impact of sexual assault across the monetary
• 17:11
  impact obviously, yes, yeah, exactly the monetary effect, so you know,
• 17:18
  from doing all of that therapy and also a lot of like missed work.
• 17:26
  So this was the CDC estimate per victim lifetime from twenty seventeen. Psychological
• 17:33
  impact is probably far greater than that now, absolutely absolutely. It impacts relationships,
• 17:41
  It impacts every aspect of a survivor's life, depending on you know,
• 17:48
  how how much how many resources they have available to them internally and externally.
• 17:56
  So yeah, it's it's understandable when people come in angry. Yeah, what
• 18:07
  it's just gears here and talk about your book The Healing Sexual Trauma Work book.
• 18:11
  Now, you had mentioned that one of your books got was banned.
• 18:15
  Is that the one that was banned? Yes, that's it. So,
• 18:18
  first of all, before we get there, was what was the inspiration for
• 18:23
  writing the book and who's it for? The book is for survivors and also
• 18:29
  a lot of therapists to use it with clients that are survivors, So it's
• 18:37
  it was to help make healing possible for those who didn't have access to it,
• 18:45
  or for those who are working with a therapist who didn't have training and
• 18:48
  how to work with sexual trauma or trauma in general, which is you know,
• 18:55
  quite a lot because you were well aware there's a lot of therapists who
• 19:02
  don't have adequate training and trauma. So so there are a lot there are
• 19:08
  obviously a lot of books out there. What give our listeners indication of what
• 19:18
  they might get out of this book? I mean, can you give us
• 19:21
  an idea of the outline of the book? Sure? So the outline of
• 19:32
  the book is it starts out with I think what trauma work always needs to
• 19:41
  start out with, which is just maintaining a felt sense of safety. So
• 19:49
  it starts out there and it goes into a foundational practice that I use for
• 19:56
  that. And then it goes into helping survivors understand what's happening in their nervous
• 20:06
  system, what's going on, why they responded the way they did during the
• 20:11
  sexual assault, because a lot of shame is wrapped up in that and unfortunately,
• 20:21
  and also so that they understand as their symptoms come up, how to
• 20:29
  work with them. So it teaches them how to regulate their nervous system and
• 20:33
  how to know what to do when they get triggered, depending on which state
• 20:41
  they're in in their nervous system, So what they do if they're in sympathetic
• 20:48
  is going to be different than what they do if they're in a dorsal veagel
• 20:52
  state. And then it goes into working with the body. Why that's important,
• 21:02
  and a lot of exercises to help become comfortable tapping into the body and
• 21:12
  feeling safe enough to do so, because that is so important. In the
• 21:17
  work, it covers trauma and memory and you know what happened when what happens
• 21:26
  when anyone's in a an overwhelming traumatizing experience to memory and again tying that into
• 21:37
  the body. Since we remember procedurally and emotionally, memory is implicit with trauma.
• 21:47
  So you know, so many survivors also come in with early childhood trauma
• 21:52
  and they don't know they struggle because they don't have a clear memory of what
• 21:57
  happened. There's so much confusion related to that, on top of the confusion
• 22:04
  of what was happening to them at the time when they weren't familiar with sex
• 22:11
  and what was being done to them. And so it again, it helps
• 22:18
  so much to educate on these things that play into what happened in their body
• 22:26
  and why their body responded to the way it did to help diffuse the shame
• 22:33
  and also to help empower. So the practices throughout the book really help empower
• 22:41
  them. And there's a chapter dedicated to boundaries, which is so important since
• 22:52
  their boundaries were violated and shattered, and many of them went into this strategy
• 23:03
  of fawn. So the pleas in a piece and they haven't learned necessarily how
• 23:11
  to to really make healthy boundaries. Often they haven't had the permission to do
• 23:19
  so so, and it's not only for people who've responded in a fond response.
• 23:26
  I find most anyone I work with can benefit from some boundary work.
• 23:33
  And then we go into emotions and some resilience exercise. Okay, and again
• 23:44
  that is that the Healing Check Will Trauma workbook. Now why was it banned
• 23:48
  and where was it banned? They don't, you know, no one gave
• 23:52
  me a reason why it was banned, and no one notified me outside of
• 23:56
  a newscaster from that town. So I don't know where it was in Davis,
• 24:03
  Michigan. And it was the school district in that area that banned it,
• 24:10
  high school library. So what I learned after that from the Velshie book
• 24:22
  Club Ari Belshie. He's an MSNBC newscaster and he does a banned book club,
• 24:30
  and he said that the books that are most frequently targeted they found like
• 24:37
  an alarming trend and that they share the same three topics sexual identity, racism
• 24:45
  in America. So I was well aware of both of those, but this
• 24:48
  last one, I didn't know women's bodily autonomy, including sexual assault and rape.
• 24:56
  So why why that being banned? Why do people want to prevent survivors
• 25:04
  from healing? It's a pretty pretty traumatic. Yeah, it's pretty terrifying to
• 25:15
  realize what's going on in this country, honestly, and this is a big
• 25:19
  part of it. So you also have something coming up called the Sexual Trauma
• 25:26
  Healing Journey. What is that? It's that is a course for so it
• 25:33
  will be a live weekly teaching and Q and A. Okay, and it's
• 25:41
  a six month course to help survivors heal for survivors or therapists or no,
• 25:51
  it's just for survivors. Okay, all right, we'll have that linked up
• 25:55
  again the show notes Patriot the Trauma tapis podcast dot com. So let me
• 26:03
  as we kind of wind down here, Erica again, I know people listening
• 26:07
  are therapists of varying kind, survivors. Also, you know you touched upon
• 26:14
  the fact that and I can't kind of can't get this out of my head
• 26:18
  that for twenty years, you know, you were going through healing and seeing
• 26:23
  therapists, but people just weren't getting They weren't they weren't people weren't educated.
• 26:32
  I guess is what it comes down to, what do you what do you
• 26:36
  say? What would you say? What do you want to say to those
• 26:38
  therapists out there who want to start learning about getting educated as in trauma in
• 26:45
  this field. I think it would be great if they did. I think
• 26:51
  it's I think it's a rare therapist who doesn't have a client who's at some
• 26:56
  point or many who've had sexual trauma, given the high numbers of it,
• 27:02
  and if they don't want to go in that direction, which is okay.
• 27:08
  No one wants to specialize in everything or even work with it. I do
• 27:14
  think it's better that clients who are sexual trauma survivors see a specialist, but
• 27:22
  you know, I do also think it's great that therapists are working with the
• 27:29
  book in their sessions. And what I would recommend though, for those who
• 27:36
  do want to treat it, is that they train in one of the extensive
• 27:42
  trauma modalities like sensory, motor, or somatic experiencing, and also become familiar
• 27:55
  specifically with the literature on sexual trauma and how to work with survivors. Yeah,
• 28:03
  I mean, I appreciate what you said. I mean, not everyone
• 28:07
  wants to specialize in trauma, and that's fine, but my feeling is that
• 28:14
  as a therapist one has an obligation to at least be somewhat informed about trauma
• 28:22
  and what it is and how do identify it, and like you said,
• 28:25
  become somewhat familiar with the literature. I agree, Yeah, again, like,
• 28:33
  how do you not see clients who don't have trauma? Right? I
• 28:38
  think it's a huge disservice that grad schools don't offer more training and trauma.
• 28:45
  Yeah, we had one class. Yeah, all right, Erica. As
• 28:52
  we kind of close out here, what's the best way for people to contact
• 28:55
  you? So, in terms of therapy, it's at my therapist website,
• 29:04
  Eric Construction Therapy dot com. And then for I have a the first chapter
• 29:14
  of the Healing Sexual Trauma Workbook available if you go to Healing Sexual Trauma dot
• 29:19
  com. And I also have a blog there and newsletter. So okay,
• 29:27
  thank Sexual Trauma dot com. We'll have that link up here again, it's
• 29:32
  the show notes page and the Trauma Theprist podcast dot com. Uh, Erica,
• 29:36
  thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate you sharing your story
• 29:41
  and sharing your journey. It's inspiring. I mean what I think the courage
• 29:48
  it takes to come on this podcast and do that and then to what you
• 29:52
  know to now do what you're doing and helping others is so inspiring. I
• 29:57
  really appreciate you coming here. Well, thank you so much, guy,
• 30:00
  And it's a real honor to be here and have the opportunity to speak with
• 30:06
  your listeners. Thank you, you're welcome. All right, we'll be in
• 30:10
  touch to take care. Thanks take care,