So hello and welcome to the somatic uh approaches in therapy summit. My name is Raymon Rodriguez and I am a clinical social worker uh with interests in the areas of immigration, diversity, LGBTQ AI plus empowerment, spirituality and working with marginalized communities and I'll be your host for this session and I am truly truly delighted to be in conversation with Stacy Hines. Stacy is the author of the politics of trauma. somatics, healing and social justice, and healing sex, a mindbody approach to healing sexual trauma. Stacy also co-founded uh uh generative somatics, a multi-racial organization dedicated to building social justice capacity. She serves as a senior teacher as at the Strosi Institute and plays a central role in shaping its methodology. In 1999, Stacy founded Generative uh sorry, Generation Five, a transformative justice nonprofit committed to ending child sexual abuse within five generations. And today we're here to discuss the ways that generative somatics are applied to therapy. So thank you Stacy for being with us here today. I'm happy to be with you. Thank you for having me. It is truly a pleasure. So, so then Stacy um to to uh to get started, you know, sort of uh a question that that occurs to me is why is it important uh to think about individual and collective trauma? Would love to hear your your take on that. Yeah. Um personally, I think they're inseparable. Um, you know, part of being interested in personal as well as social change, which is kind of seems to be my passion, is it has me ask the question of what are the root causes of violence? What are the root causes of oppression? What are the root causes of trauma? And when we ask that question, trauma becomes collective very quickly. So even if we look at something like the impacts of sexism or patriarchy or the impacts of racism or white supremacy, very quickly we're like, "Wow, those get embodied. They get internalized and they're kept in place by numerous kinds of violence." So when I look at something like child abuse or neglect, child sexual abuse, sexual assault, hate crimes, I really see those as obviously those are traumatizing experiences for the people who experience them. They might also be for the people who perpetrate them, which is part of the conversation. Um, but when I look at those, I'm like, wait, why is this happening at the level it's happening or at the scale it's happening? And when we kind of dig into that question, what we I think come to is we're operating inside of a power over system, right? And to keep a power over instead of a power with system intact, it takes violence. It takes norms that are degrading to certain people, genders, and groups of people. So even when I'm working with something as intimate as childhood neglect or child sexual abuse or intimate partner violence, when we start looking at the numbers, it tells a different story about the social norms and systems we live inside of. So that's kind of why I go personal transformation and social transformation or personal and collective trauma. So linked. Yeah. So it's truly like weaving the individual and the collective together. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One one cannot exist without the without the other. Yeah. That's that's a beautiful framing Stacey and also one that I personally feel that is somewhat missing in our in our field in some corners of our field. Yeah. So then Stacey to to kind of bring in the body in into this can you tell us you know why is somatic awareness somatic opening somatic practices how they're all at the core of of healing as you were talking individual and also collective trauma. Yeah thanks for the question. Um, you know, it's funny. So, you know, we were talking about the social conditions. Um, to me it's very much about somatic awareness, somatic practices, sematic opening, which I'll talk about inside of social conditions because it we don't even know that we embody the social conditions in which we are living in which we're raised. So you know you and I drawn to healing work, drawn to social work, drawn to therapeutic work. What we were handed is a paradigm that was about individual change. But that isn't the paradigm everywhere. For much of human history, the paradigm was an individual changes when the collective changes. like we gather in ceremony or we um do drumming and dancing to mend and to re-harmonize ourselves. And I I think especially for those of us in the west or in the north depending on how you think about it, really re-engaging that the collective I'm going to call it the collective body has a very big impact on how the individual body transforms. So why I say body or better yet I would say soma right somatics which is the living organism in its wholeness that's what soma means right although most people think we're saying sematics although you know semantics but but mostly you know we're getting caught up yeah um but the soma means it's our thinking self it's our emotional self it's our sensing self but it's also our relational self Right. And somatics really understands that we have these core needs of safety, belonging and connection and a sense of worth, worthiness or dignity. And then what's amazing to me about the body and about sematics is we have these very predictable and automatic ways that we adapt when any of those things are threatened. And obviously trauma threatens most of them, right? So one I think the body or somatics is such an efficient and effective way of transforming um because all those memories live in our muscles. Those survival strategies, those adaptations to safety and belonging and dignity are literally they're not just thoughts or identities. They literally live in our tissues. And when we unpack those, you know, transformation can happen in a very effective way. So why I say all three of those sematic awareness, sematic practices and opening is because I think that western psychotherapy is much more comfortable with sematic awareness. Notice what's happening in your body. What are the sensations in your body? Now let's talk about it. Which really brings us back to the frontal cortex. Right. Right. Which is good. It's okay. But that's what fits most comfortably inside of a western psychotherrapeutic paradigm. Why we push that a little bit is we really become what we practice and we're always practicing something but most of the things we practice are inherited through mainstream culture. So let's just say we're sitting at school, we're thinking, we're memorizing things. We're talking and then finally we get recess and we go run around. But it's it's it's the break. Right. Right. But if we look at it more from a martial arts perspective, a meditation perspective, a going to the Olympics perspective, a musician perspective, we get good at things through practice, through embodying. So we would say in sematics even loving and being loved is a practice and we can through practice get better and better and better at it which is one of my goals between now and when I die I want to keep practicing that. That's that's really beautiful Stacy. So it's really like helping us move from upstairs right from our thinking brain into what you're saying the soma and how to inhabit our our soma in a different way. That's right. Yeah. Your work always feels somewhat revolutionary to me in our in in corners of our field. Yeah. Yeah. It's all good. Yeah. And so then Stacy, you know, for some of the of the people listening and and viewing this that may not be so familiar Yeah. with this work, right? So how do we support therapists and also clients in developing more of that again somatic awareness somatic openings moving us to some practices uh and you know around things like habitual tension posture movements that's you know reflect those survival strategies and and adapt tendencies that you were talking about. Yeah. No, I appreciate it. You know, in some ways, once we see humans in a more holistic perspective, like that our thinking mind, our conscious mind is a is a small part of us. And we could even think of it like our unconscious mind is what's embodied. But as therapists, as social workers, as healers, we can learn to actually perceive what's embodied. And you know, it's funny. I was just running a program and one of the questions we asked is what are the practices, the embodied ways of being that trauma teaches us, right? Or that in some ways mainstream culture teaches us, right? So, one thing we talked about is trauma teaches us to not have boundaries because one of the things it does is really break boundaries, right? Often trauma teaches us to either overrust or not trust at all but not have good discernment around trust because it's so shattering of trust so often. Right? Trauma can often teach us a quality of anxiety or hypervigilance because that was a really smart response. Right? So one thing we're doing in sematics is we're going that is all so intelligent so wise that our mind bodies and relationships um brought survival strategies that were about helping us live through what happened to us or live in conditions that keep hurting us. Like you said in the beginning, you're you're really committed to migrants, right? When we think about migration, humans have been migrating forever, right? But right now, immigrants are demonized, right? They're made bad. That's just about political power, right? I mean, we know in the United States, our economy cannot run without migrants. We have no food. Right? But it's an easy enemy just like queer and trans people are an easy enemy. But then you think about all the trauma that causes by making a whole group of people bad or evil or wrong. All of that gets embodied in us. So as healers, we're going okay, what's been embodied? What are our survival strategies to that? And then the thing that's complicated about our somas is those survival strategies generalize and they don't take in new information. So I keep being Exactly. I keep being hyper vigilant even though maybe in this moment I don't need to be or in these relationships I don't need to be but like all the switches get turned on and the way to turn them off is through sematic opening sematic practice is really through the body not necessarily through a conscious understanding of it. M ah that is that is so beautiful Stacy and I'm wondering it if this might be a good place to bring in some specific practice and how do we therapists right begin to do that with our clients particularly for some people listening that may be unfamiliar with this way of thinking with this way with with this different okay I can think of two things let's first do a process of contracting and relaxing. Um, and maybe we can do it together. You can tell me how it is for you. Um, another practice maybe we could do later on is about not just talking about boundaries, but relearning how to do boundaries, right? So often for trauma survivors, whether it's from personal trauma or systemic trauma, dropping into our bodies is not that fun. Because the more we drop into our bodies and sense and feel, the more it kind of wakes up the healing process and we might feel a lot more uncomfortable before we're comfortable. So, one of the things that can help is on our way into the body contracting, which is almost like telling those survival strategies, good job. Good job for holding on and then relaxing. So, let's try it together. And anyone watching, if you're willing to do it with us, let's do it together. So, first of all, drop let's drop our attention into sensations. Right. So we have our thinking self, we have our emotional self and then our sensing self is like temperatures, pressures and movement. Yeah. So dropping into our bodies to sense and feel. And then starting with our hands and our arms and our shoulders, let's tense for 3 seconds. So tensing, holding exactly three, two, one. And then soften and just feel the shoulders are softening, arms, hands, but draw more into the body and temperatures and pressures and movement. And then again let's go hands, arms, and now let's add the front and back of the chest to tense. So let's tense arms, shoulders, front and back of the chest. Holding 3, two, one. soften and drop a little bit deeper into the body into sensing and feeling. Let's go a little bit deeper. We're going to add the belly and the mid and low back. Hands, arms, shoulders, chest, belly, and low back. tensing, holding, holding, and letting go. Softening, feeling. And if you were a therapist or a practitioner, you could keep going. You could do the hips, the legs, the feet, and at the end, you can add the face and the head. And this is a way to both respect the contraction that is trying to protect us from what happened or what's happening and then helping the body learn this contrast between contraction and relaxation. Um so are you open to sharing what what did you notice in you? Yeah. So I mean uh first when you invited me to kind of notice I was not aware that there was already some tension in my upper body right so just bringing attention to it I oh yeah there's some tension already there and by increasing it right I could feel it more pronounced and then with the release there was more breath uh that immediately happened and and a kind of like a settling that that also follow. Yeah. Nice. Nice. I noticed something very similar. It's like um more space, more breath, and also more awareness of where I was tense or where I was holding in a habitual way. And again, for folks who are unfamiliar with sematics, part of what we're curious about is where is there either tension or slackness almost like resignation in a habitual way in the psychobiology in the soma in the body because that literally guides us to where survival strategies ies fight, flight, freeze, appease, dissociate, right? Or history is stored in the body. And by allowing that to come to attention and then soften and move from a somatic point of view, that's the deepest part of the healing. Wow. Ah, it's does that seem weird? No, not at all. I I am a a big believer in how the body participates in in in healing. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So, so Stacy, continuing with this conversation, you know, again, thinking about therapists, right, who are who are viewing this, listening in that want to just cultivate more safety, calm, resilience in their work for themselves and also for their for their clients. Like, how do you how do how would you suggest approaching that? Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Um, those are three very big words. Safety, calm, and resilience. So, I'm going to start with resilience, but those are very big things. If we could all feel safe, the world would be very different. Um, so let's start with resilience. So, one way that seatics looks at resilience is that we are inherently resilient. It isn't like there's trauma, therefore we're resilient. Resilient. Resilience is first. And resilience for people can feel like awe or joy or delight or hope. Like people really describe it in a different way. But one of the things I do very early on when I'm working with people or when I'm working with groups is I talk about resilience as our as inherent and as something we can cultivate on purpose. like we don't have to wait around for those experiences of like you know of awe. We can purposefully cultivate them so our nervous system, our tissues, our mind body gets more and more acclimated to resilience and can like pull it up on purpose which I don't know about you but I need a lot of resilience these days given what's happening in our world. What the heck? Right. So often what I'll invite and I'll invite this to the listeners is what are experiences you already had where you felt really alive, awake, joyful, where you felt resilience already. And then what I'll do is ask my client or the group like imagine you're there and tell me about it. What are the smells? What are the sights? What are the sensations in your body? What's it like? Cuz the body can go right back there. Yeah. So there's a colleague of mine. and we teach a lot together and she has this amazing story about being in the Pacific Ocean on a paddle board. She's slowly paddling the sun, the sound of the water, and then a dolphin comes right up next to her. You can feel it, right? Yeah. And she just, you know, awe, joy, connection, interdependence, right? And then we just unpack. How does it feel in your chest? How does it feel in your body? What happens to your lower body and your hips? And help people reconnect with resilience experience they already had, but make sure it's embodied. And then we turn that into a daily practice. So let's say we center every day or we do a five-minute meditation every day. And at the end of that, we go back to one of our resilience experiences and we let it really imbue our bodies. It generates access to calm, access to integration, access to aliveness, remembering the richness of life. Yeah. Wow. That I am I I am staying with that with that image of your colleague. Isn't that amazing? [Music] Then Stacy, you you really what you what what you just shared with us is about tapping into a somatic memory, right? From an Exactly. perspective, not just from a cognitive place. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And and deepening it, right? Yeah. And deepening it. Exactly. Because as you know, so often with trauma, it's like the contraction is so often a contraction of fear, distrust, getting small or like acting out and getting big, but it isn't an experience of resilience. So finding that and those experiences that aren't connected to trauma because I know some of us have trauma and then we popped someplace else, right? But really those experiences and then helping our nervous system get used to a very different state. Yeah. You know, the other thing on resilience practice is I'll also invite my clients or the groups I work with to once a month go do something again that's resilience giving. Oh wow. Maybe it's like putting their hands in soil. Maybe it's music that they love. But keep adding to our experiences of resilience. And while we do them, let's say it's going out to hear live music, feel your body as you're with the live music. So it's not just a mental processing, we're opening our sas to to in some ways being nourished, right? Mhm. And and Stacy, as you're talking about resiliency, right, that and again thinking about listeners, um would would it be similar if we want to bring in more safety and calm into the room for our clients, ourselves? Yeah, I don't think calm is all it's scoped up to be. I'm going to talk about calm for a minute because I want to challenge calm and like I love calm but it is not necessarily the resolution of trauma. [Music] Sometimes on the way to accessing an embodied present let's call it centered state things get much more activated before they get calm. And I worry sometimes, you know, we have a very, how do I want to say it? I feel like in US general mainstream culture, it is like let's pump the adrenaline, let's pump the fear, let's if we look at the number of horror movies, if we look at how fast you're supposed to buy stuff, it is all an upper basically. So I I understand why people are looking for calm. But if we look at trauma like let's say in a traumatic experience the inherent somatic physiological impulse was to run but I couldn't run. So all that energy got trapped inside my soma. Right? When we start dealing with this block the first place that energy is going to go is going to go here. before it then goes there. And so sometimes I'm worried that with focusing on calm, we're actually missing allowing the protective impulse to express itself through the body. Fight, flight, impulse to fight is an is an excitation impulse. Impulse to run is an excitation impulse. And so sometimes I think of course in a safe environment which I'll talk about safety next we have to allow the excitation which is like you know when little kids they get all upset right they're like crying crying crying you give them a safe container and then they're like and then they're done. Our somas know how to do that with that excitation of fight flight as well. And I think sometimes our our roles as therapists are to allow that so it can naturally naturally exhale. Yeah. So almost like a wave, right? To support the body into moving through that wave. A wave of activation, right? To then come into naturally into a sense of calm. Am I getting that right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So, safety to me is a really beautiful and big question. Um, how we talk about it is there's three parts to regenerating safety from the inside out. so that I really know how to access and generate safety inside of my soma, my psychobiology and I'm not always tracking for safety on the outside because as you know the outside is imperfect. Yeah. And even let's say in a safe friendship or a safe partnership, that person is imperfect. And we might from a more traumatized state interpret those imperfections as unsafety when it's not really unsafe. Our safety mechanisms get really messed up through trauma and oppression. They get super confused. So the three ways we talk about regenerating safety is the first one is building embodied skills of different kinds of boundaries and also how to make direct requests based on our needs. Huh? Because so often that gets just demolish with trauma. So, one kind of boundary we call it like it's an it's a we call it an intimate decline. It's a no inside of Go ahead. Can Can you say that again? What what what do you call it? Sorry. We call it an intimate decline. I got it. Okay. So, it's saying no inside of a relationship that you want to continue and build more closeness with. Another kind of no or boundary is we call it a redirect decline which is kind of like someone or something is coming with a request, a demand, an offer and we know how to turn that around and send it back where it came from. Right? Another boundary we talk about is a much stronger boundary. It's called a pushaway boundary. Like and many of us in experiences of trauma, we never got to push away even though that was the impulse because we didn't have the power to do it. So it's like letting the body come back to the experience of like no now I have the power to protect myself. But so many of these things need to be reintroduced to the nervous system. So that we rebuild confidence and knowhow to say no instead of saying no through different survival strategies of avoidance or hypervigilance. Those are their own versions, but they don't serve that well anymore. Yeah. Or asking for what you need. It's a big deal to say, "Hey, would you remind me why you love me? M it's a request because I need reminding or comfort. I asked my partner that. Can you remind me why you love me again? [Music] You know, but how beautiful to know how to make a request based on what's happening inside of us. And so many of us get that knocked out of us in some way. Yeah. So that's kind of part one of what we call regenerating safety is like let's have the skills skills so that we know how to actually navigate for safety and discern for safety. Yeah. What do you think about that? I I am loving it on this piece about boundaries and how to almost like reinstate those in the nervous system in the soma. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And so Stacy, so I so I know that you want to talk about two other pieces, but I'm also wondering if this would be a good place to to to demonstrate some something around or safety. For sure. For sure. I love that. Um maybe the simplest one to do is that intimate decline because it's really something we all need in navigating our relationships, right? And and creating more closeness in our relationships. So a lot of our practices we do standing, but you can also do them seated. Um, so maybe I'll back my chair up a little bit and just show you what it would look like. Does that work? Yeah, sure. Okay. All right. So, in this practice, you could do it on Zoom because so many of us see people on Zoom or if you're in person, it's really beautiful to do as a partner practice. So the no, we first kind of teach a centering practice about how to be centered in ourselves and connected to what we care about. So we would do that first. And then we just take take a take an arm. I'm starting with my right arm. And the move is this. I move it around and I say no. Okay. So that's the move. No. And then what my partner is doing is my partner is walking toward me with their arm extended as if they were making a request or right making a request. We'll just say that they're coming toward us making a request. What we do is we catch their arm, we move their arm, and we say no, but we stay connected here. Yeah. So, can we try it together? Sure. I I am curious how how to do that. Um, yeah. So, if you would take your left hand and just move it across your body to the outside and say no. So, take it around and no. Yeah, exactly. But cross it across your center line first and then nose on the outside and then the no. Okay. Exactly. But the other direction in the other direction. This direction. Perfect. Like that. It's hard to tell on Zoom. Okay. So, let's say I was coming toward you and basically asking something of you or even saying, "Hey, I have this opinion about you." And then you move your arm. Exactly. Keep going. You move me to the outside and you say no. No. And then we stay connected down here. You said no. You're taking care of your needs and what matters to you, but we're still connected. Oh, wow. Yeah. So part of the orientation is it's understanding is not enough. We have to get it back into the body as an option and as a choice. Wonderful. I I uh that was that was really beautiful uh Stacy. And also even though we did something very short and online, I I I could feel the no and the connection and I could also sense the request also. Yeah, I really appreciate how sensitive you are. I do. If we were doing this in a real session, I would say, and you don't have to answer this, but I would say given what you care about in your life, in your healing, who or what do you need to say no to and still stay connected? So we would take it live in your life and you might even give me a line to say as I come in. And then because we're bilateral, our brains are bilateral, our bodies are bilateral, we always practice twice on one side, twice on the other side. talk about it, debrief it, and we might then practice it two or three more times. Yeah. It's like our bodies, our psychobiologies build new skills through repetition just like riding a bike. Yeah. But then we bring in the heart content, the psychological content so that it also is really really relevant to people's lives. Yeah. I think one of the pieces that I love the most about what you just h taught us here Stacy is that capacity to hold the duality of the no but staying connected. Yeah. Like like very profound which I know so many uh traumatized people don't have that capacity or didn't get to experience that in a healthy way. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. I mean in so many ways the you know I think often of trauma it like um it breaks it breaks that connection because that connection becomes so hurtful and so violating and then it's either just like stay connected and give up safety or stay safe and give up connection. But really what we need is both, right? And I'm also Stacy thinking about it collectively, right? Because so much of what's happening in our world is this polarization, right? Where we Yeah. It is it's is a no with a great deal of of separation, right? Or making the other wrong. So there's something quite beautiful about what you just shared with us about able to hold a no from an embodied place and stay connected. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Like I don't have to give up myself to be connected to you, but I also don't need to make you bad or wrong to stay connected to myself. We could do both, right? Yeah. Wow. I mean, that that could really be just that could transformative and huge applications there. Sty going back to this piece around safety, right? because you talked about that one dimension and there were two other dimensions that I also want to want to hear those. Yeah. Yeah. Thank thank you for that. Thank you for coming back to it because really these three things go together. So the one is new practices embodying new choices through practice. The second one is blending which I'll talk about. And the third one is a practice of being allied with and allying with others. So blending is one way we think about sematic opening. And it's different than what internal family systems calls blending. Right? I would call that merging. Blending for us comes from it. What we mean by it is supporting something in the soma in the direction it's already going. So let's say this. Let's say I have a collapsed chest and a contraction inside of my chest that has been protecting my heart for a long time. Let's say that instead of trying to be like you should open your heart, your relationships will be better if you write blah blah blah. What we do, the first thing we do is we take that contraction and we support that contraction in the direction it's going. That's what we call blending. And if folks want to do this with me for a minute, it's kind of fun. If if you imagine that inside your fist is something that's really worth protecting. Yeah. And just feel your body is trying to protect that. And then on the first round like try to pry it open like it's doing something wrong, right? Like why are you doing that still? Just try to pry it open. This is wrong. You shouldn't be so right trying to pry it open. And then what do you notice happen in your body when we try to pry open that fist? Yeah. I notice some tension. Yeah. Tension. Exactly. And like my two hands start not getting along. I start holding my breath. Right. So same fist. Imagine it's protecting something for you like protecting a vulnerability or a hurt or a right. Our soul. Sometimes people say that who experienced trauma like I had to hide my soul away, right? And then take this other hand and with a kind of presence just support that contraction in the direction it's going. Maybe it wants a lot of support, a firm support or a soft support. But it's kind of like we're saying good job, right? And then what do you notice in your body? Ah, that's an immediate softening, Stacy. Yeah. Isn't that wild? Yeah. And and so subtle but so pronounced. Yeah, exactly. I notic the same thing too. I took a breath, my spine relaxed, my hand relaxed. So blending to sematics is going those contractions have wisdom and even those behaviors that seem maladaptive have wisdom when it comes to surviving trauma. So the first thing we want to say is good job. How long have you been doing that? Good job. What did that save you from? Good job. We want to blend in order to help the system just gently start to soften and allow some of the experiences that it's been storing to start to surface with that softening. Right. Right. So, it's it's a little bit of like becoming curious about Exactly. Right. like about the tension. Right. And Stacey, would this be something similar to like going with the resistance if you may? Is that would would that be? It's the Yeah, it's the same idea. We don't use the word resistance because we really see contractions whether it's in behavior, emotions, or the or the tissues. They're completely wise. They may not have worked for 30 years but initially they're very wise and kept the person intact. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's really about inviting that curiosity as how this strategy has supported the person or it has like a good intention toward towards the person. Yeah. Exactly. What what we might very pragmatically do is ask a person where in their body that tension resides or that the source of that behavior resides, right? And then we might just ask the person, great, just increase the tension 7%. And then literally ask the question like you just said, that's great. What has that been taken care of for you? How long has it been taking care of that for you? If we could really acknowledge it, what does it want to hear? But keeping it very located in the body, we're not thinking about it. We're literally going, "Oh, the back of my heart has contracted and here's what that took care of for me." Right? or I mean you get the idea right but we just want to keep landing it in the body emotions and mind but root it in the body in the soul mind yeah exactly exactly yeah beautiful so I know there was a third dimension that you were going to talk around safety I don't I just don't want to lose sight of the of the original you're so great you're very good at tracking I'm sure you're a very good therapist and social worker so the third One is what we call sematic allyship. And what we mean by that is, you know, because we are social animals. Humans are social animals. We need each other for better or for worse, right? We need each other. We're not isolatory animals. That trauma usually breaks apart safety, belonging, and dignity, but we need to weave them back together. And we usually tell the story about the geese, right? There's a flock of geese. If one goose gets sick or hurt, two other geese fly down with it and land. And they feed the hurt goose or the sick goose. They protect it until that goose either heals or dies. And then they fly back up and join the next flock. Isn't that beautiful? I I don't think I know that. I just learned something. Yeah. So, that's what we need, too. And so often what happens in trauma is people say, "Shh, don't tell anyone or they deny it happened to us or they say it wasn't that bad." Right? So, we don't have allyship. It's like the second trauma is how people respond to your trauma. Yes. Right. And very often that part is worse than the original. Yeah. Terrible. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, it's how really I think about, you know, this is last time our president was president, the first time. But when you think about all the cages on the border with Mexico, right? One, highly traumatizing for people. Children being split from their families, highly traumatizing. What was so important is so many people ran to the border to say, "We're here with you. We can't totally help, but we're here with you." That was a move of solidarity and allyship. if no one did that, right? So, we can think about that at a large scale or we can think about it at a a scale of intimate partner violence, right? So allyship is we have the client or we can do this in big groups really feel themselves and then we stand beside them or we stand in front of them or we have their back and we say what has you feel allied with? Where can I stand with you or sit with you that your body is like, "Oh, finally there's someone with me." And sometimes for people it's standing in front of them and finally someone's blocking the way and protecting them. Sometimes it's at their sides and people are like, "Oh, finally someone's with me and I'm not alone." So we put our bodies in place first and then what we ask is what could I say to have you feel allied with? And I got to do this process recently with a Palestinian woman. So intense, right? What's happening in Gaza and the West Bank and then Palestinians in diaspora. And there were two of us doing this with her. And she really wanted us right at her sides, very close in and basically saying, "We're with you. We see it, too. We're witnessing too. We see it." And just let her s experience allyship because so often trauma and aloneeness go together. So that's really the the third part of like safety is a very complex experience, but regenerating it. There's a lot of pieces we need to tend to and heal to really go, "Oh, I know how to access safety from the inside out instead of waiting for it from the outside in." Right. Ah, it sounds like a profound experience of joining Stacy. Yeah. Exactly. Wow. Exactly. But joining in a way that works for that person's soma or that ride because different people's somas needs different things. Some people need two people standing in front where they can finally just hide and be protected. It can look so different. But if we track the person's soma, they'll tell us what they need. What they need. Yeah. It's so so evocative. Yeah. What you just shared. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, wonderful. So then C says I I I I I I have some other curiosities that that I want to ask you. There's so many things that I would love to ask you. Um but here's another uh uh question. So how do we allow for withheld emotions and impulses for protection, right? Because so much of trauma, right? It's about the inability to protect oneself um to move through the through the soma in ways support transformation of course for both therapists and also clients. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [Music] As we all know, as therapists or social workers or healers, we have to do our own work in a way that our our clients grief doesn't freak us out that that we can actually be relaxed. It's like, oh, grief, I know grief, right? Or anger, I know anger. Or fear, I know fear. Because bodies talk to each other in a very unconscious way. And if the person who's holding my healing is afraid of anger, my body will have a hard time accessing it. Right? So that that's our part is like knowing that our soma is communicating. Right? So, how I like to think about it is first as just like what you said before, a wave of aliveness. Any wave, go to the beach and watch it. It builds, it peaks, it crusts, it dissipates, and then it gets integrated back in. We can even think of like If we want to go slower, we can think of the seasons, right? It's like, oh, here comes spring, right? Blossom, bush, summer, fall, winter, right? This is very a very organic cycle inside of us. And our bodies are organic, right? So, in some ways, what we want to allow for, and I'll back up in a minute because there's something I want to say to, but what we want to allow for is that wave of sadness or that wave of anger. And when we notice our clients contracting or going really mental or disengaging, we just want to say, "Hey, hey, it's just it's the wave. Can you drop back into your sensations? And can you let just like 5% more of that wave happen so we can let it out of you? Just bring them back to sensation, right? Sensation is always part of emotion. Yeah. Um, and also just to be comfortable with, you know, if someone needs to cry for 15 minutes, is that just fine with you? That you're like, I'm right here. It's fine. You keep crying. That we don't have to tidy things up. Yeah. Yeah. That we can be with pain. And that's really our in some ways part of our job, right? Part of our calling. Yeah. The other piece is that the emotion is happening through the body because sometimes there can be dissociative catharsis. M um we can call it a lot of things disembodied emotions but it's like when someone is like there was a client I worked with almost always within moments she would just start crying in the beginning I was just with her with the tears I was watching is this is a wave happening but the wave didn't happen the wave would go here and it would stay right and I was like Okay, let's slow this down. One, let's get you in your body. And that can take time for people, right? What we did in the beginning about contracting and relaxing, but helping people like can they settle into gravity? Can they feel their lower bodies? Right? It's not just our breath. Like we got a whole body, right? And then how are they with other kinds of excitation? Like could they feel a wave of happiness? Can that go through them? Or a wave of like we just want to go where's a wave that they know how to let through them so we can get familiar with it. And then what I eventually did with this client which seems so weird is she started the cycling of crying and I said, "Hey, um, can you stop for a minute? I want to talk to you for a minute." And I interrupted her crying because I saw it was only cycling. And then I said, "Can you feel your back? Can you feel your back?" I'm wondering if under the sadness, what's under the sadness? Cuz she was actually using sadness to avoid her anger, right? But we had to get her in her body enough to unpack that. So we need to watch for the wave because the wave is organic and sometimes the trauma interrupts that. Yeah. Do you resonate with that at all? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It's it's like a a habitual response, right? That that that doesn't to have any resolution, right? The person is just sort of spinning in that, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So is it almost like interrupting the automaticity of that of of that response? Yeah. To to the body. Yeah. Yeah. And almost always people won't be feeling their bodies when that's happening. That's why coming back to sensation starts to root them in current in in an embodied experience which is where the wave happens. Right. Right. And and Stacy to that example that that beautiful example that you just offered us like how did you sense to go to the to the back like it like was that like I'm just sort of curious of your process in that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I appreciate that question. So what I notice when I ask people what they sense in their bodies, sometimes we have to introduce people it's temperatures. Where do you feel warmer? Where do you feel cooler? Where do you feel more tense? Where do you feel more relaxed? Where do you feel more movement? Where do you feel more stillness? Those are the structures of sensation, right? And sometimes we have to reintroduce people to that. But when I would ask her, what do you notice in your body? She would always talk about the front of her body. And so as as practitioners, we want to go what's noticed and what's disappeared. So she would talk about the front of her heart, but she wouldn't talk about her back. She wouldn't talk about her hips. She wouldn't talk about her feet. So then I'm noticing what's disappeared. Let me ask her about that and bring access to places in the body that aren't her habit. So Stacy, because we have room for one more question, I I just wanted uh uh to to ask if you could offer, you know, some nuggets of your wisdom uh about therapists. You know, how do we develop our own somatic awareness, our own capacity uh for uh uh co-regulation with our with our clients, relational attunement, right? like like how do we begin to work and also in in thinking uh you know some therapists that again for whom this might be new and different than how they have practiced. Yeah, that's awesome. Um I mean I think one of the first questions I would have us all reflect on is what what practice am I in? And what I mean by that is like [Music] um like do I have a daily practice where I'm actually attending to my own embodiment? And again that might be like for a lot of people I'll start with like if they exercise I invite people to start feeling their bodies while they're exercising instead of watching TV or just tuning out to music. Like what does it feel like to feel your breath in the front and back of your lungs if you're breathing hard or if you're lifting weights? What's it like to actually feel the quality of your muscles and your skeleton? So, in some ways, I would go what are practices that you're already in that you can actually deepen your embodiment through that practice? Again, that could be music, it could be dance, it could be sitting meditation, but embodiment instead of practicing checking out or practicing distraction, right? I mean, I love me some Netflix also, you know. Um, and then I would say, are there next question I go, how are you doing on your own healing path? I mean, I I really hold that we're on a we're on a healing and cultivation path until we until we go and it looks different at different times. You know, sometimes I have a therapist, sometimes I have a coach, sometimes I have a dance instructor, right? But who's supporting you on your path? And can that person also support you in in some ways bringing more conscious practice into your into your life and into your work. And then I don't at all hold that as therapists or healers or social workers we need to be perfect. I don't hold that at all. We are humans learning as as much as everyone else. But I think the third question I'd ask is how are you cultivating more intimacy in your life? And that could be with friends, that could be with your children, that could be with a partner, or that could be with the earth or spirit. There's lots of places for us to be intimate. But I really am convinced that getting better at interdependence and connection is a very big part of being human. And if we're helping to hold other people's healing, it feels very important that we are actively on that path as well. Yeah. How are those? Oh, I I absolutely love those and I'm going to make a note of those. I you know to to your first point of people and how they engage with things that are already in their lives. I see it also in my practice you know a lot of people you know go to yoga let's say but they're not really in the yoga class right they're somewhere else or they're just it as an activity and so it's a beautiful reminder to for us the therapists right to get curious about these activities with our clients and also for for ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. It's kind of like the body is not a thing. We exist because we are bodies, right? Like as long as we're alive, the body and the self are inseparable. So, how are we cultivating the self connects to like being present in yoga class or being present when we're running or like how do we just live more deeply into our sas through practice? Right. And I love that other uh point you made about, you know, how are we engaged with healing with our own healing, right? And to be very intentional about that. Yeah. That that is so necessary. And so then the last point you make was about intimacy, which to me is about connection, Stacy. And I cannot find of a better uh place to to to end our conversation today uh about the importance of of connection and intimacy with ourselves and with everyone around us. So yeah. Yeah. With life, huh? Yeah. Yeah. So it's been an absolute gift uh for me and I'm sure for the viewers and listeners to spend this time with you. you have shared so many beautiful nuggets of wisdom that I hope uh it it it helps us all to become better people and also for the transformation and healing of our of our planet. So any parting words if just it's just been delightful to be with you like thanks for your presence, thanks for your warmth, thanks for your capacity to connect. It really um you know it's a mutual piece these these these processes. So so thank you very much. It's been delightful to be with you. Thank you Stacy. Thank you. Be well.