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Welcome to "The Activate Change Podcast," where transformation is just a conversation away. Join Gabrielli LaChiara, renowned healer and creator of the LaChiara Method, as she guides individuals through powerful healing sessions. Alongside her, Chloë Faith Urban breaks down the frameworks and tools Gabrielli uses to bring deeper understanding to the profound process of healing. The episodes that are healing sessions offer an intimate front-row seat to authentic, raw, and real personal breakthroughs, spiritual healing, and emotional support, allowing you to see yourself in the journeys of others. Experience the power and magic of the LaChiara Method, learn practical tools for self-growth, and unlock your potential to activate change in your own life.
With the LaChiara Method’s deep commitment to collaboration and perpetual learning, some episodes will highlight conversations with other thought leaders, healers, and activists on the path to bringing healing, liberation and true equality to the world.
Whether you're seeking healing, inspiration, or a deeper understanding of yourself, this podcast is your gateway to a more rooted, resilient and radiant YOU.
To experience or learn more about the method go to: https://lachiaramethod.com
FSTT Fall EarlyBird (00:00)
What if the reason you're overwhelmed isn't because you're broken, but because your system's been doing everything it can to keep up in a world that asks too much? What if your sensitivity, the part of you that feels everything so intensely, isn't a flaw, but your deepest form of wisdom?
And what if the version of you you've been longing to be, the one who trusts yourself, sets boundaries with grace, has gifts to share with the world, and knows your worth, has never been lost, but is right underneath all the noise?
I'm Chloe, your podcast co-host and co-director of the La Chiara Method, and I am so freaking excited to announce that our From Surviving to Thriving Level 1 training is officially open for fall enrollment. This training is everything you need to uplevel your life and your relationships. And right now, there's an early bird bonus you won't want to miss. When you sign up early, you'll get Radically You, our five-week foundational healing course
Normally $297, completely free. That means you can start right away, tending to your own system, clearing old patterns and building real resilience. So when the 10 week training begins, you're already in motion, already shifting, already healing. This training is for big hearted empathic humans who are ready to stop carrying it all and start creating real sustainable change for yourself and
the people around you. Grab your spot at lakiaramethod.com slash level dash one before the bonus disappears. Plus, if you're ready to dive deeper and bundle level one and two to become a full certified radical life coach, you'll get 10 % off.
FSTT Fall EarlyBird (01:48)
We cannot wait to have you on the journey with us.
Chloe (01:57)
In this episode, I, Chloe, am deeply honored to share with you a conversation I had back in 2019 with Dr. Peter Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing. This conversation holds a special place in our archive, not just because of who Dr. Levine is, but because of how foundational his work has been to the field of trauma healing.
Working with somatics and the way trauma is held in the body has deeply informed my own personal healing journey and how we approach healing, coaching, and energy work at the Lakiara Method. Dr. Levine's insights continue to shape how so many of us understand what it really takes to heal, not just cognitively,
but at a physiological cellular level.
In our conversation, we explore his definition of trauma, not as the event itself, but what happens inside us in response. We talk about how symptoms like anxiety or shutdown are actually intelligent survival responses from the body. And we get into chakras, sexual abuse, and much more. Revisiting this interview now, years later, I can feel how much has shifted in me since we recorded it.
I might ask different questions today and have a deeper understanding of his answers, but the wisdom here is timeless. Whether you're new to somatics or steeped in nervous system work, I believe this conversation has something to offer you. Before we go to the conversation, here's just a little bit more about Dr. Peter Levine.
Dr. Peter A. Levine is the developer of somatic experiencing, a naturalistic and neurobiological approach to healing trauma. He holds doctorates in both biophysics and psychology.
He is the founder and president of the Erguss Institute of Somatic Education and the founder and advisor for Somatic Experiencing International. Dr. Levine recently finished his autobiography, An Autobiography of Trauma, A Healing Journey, and is the author of several bestselling books on trauma, including Waking the Tiger, Healing Trauma, published in over 29 languages.
Networker and from the US Association for Body-Oriented Psychotherapy. He continues to teach trauma healing workshops internationally. To learn more, visit somaticexperiencing.com.
Chloë (04:45)
I am so thrilled to welcome Dr. Peter Levine. Thank you so much for being with us today. Gladly.
I'm just so thrilled to be with you today and I've been to one of your workshops and just found it incredibly helpful and amazing. So thank you for that.
I would love to just dive right into what is trauma from your perspective? know, trauma is simply said, it's when we're frightened, terrified, and helpless, feeling helpless. It's a combination of fear and helplessness.
That's the simplest definition. Yeah. After that, it gets a little bit more complicated. happens is when we experience, perceive, experience, threat, our bodies, our brains and our bodies mobilize to prepare for action. That's very strong amount of energy that's mobilized for that. is the so-called fight or flight.
Then there's another aspect of trauma, is deeper actually. By the way, what happens with trauma is when we, for example, get stuck in that fight or flight. So our body is mobilized for that vast expenditure of energy, but there's no target, there's nothing to run away so that continues to replay inside the body.
in a way waiting for that. It's sort of I guess you could say it's all dressed up, but we're not but with nowhere to go Then the other aspect of trauma which is generally even more severe Trauma is when we experience perceive mortal threat Life or death threat and again, this doesn't hack
actually have to be that life or death threat, but we have to in some primitive way perceive it that way. And this is what I call the fight, flight or fold response. Our bodies collapse and we feel paralyzed, like we can't move. And this has actually very profound adaptive values.
for animals in the wild. The so-called playing of possum, but it's not playing of possum, it's this profound physiological state. But what happens is animals go into that state, but then when the predator has left, they perceive the coast as clear, they come out of that paralysis and engage back into life.
many videos you can see where, for example, where a cheetah chases down an impala and the impala is laying there. It looks for all purposes to be starts chewing on it. Then a hyena comes in and because the hyena realizes that the cheetah is spent from its all out
chase. But all of this is going on and then finally the hyena distracts the cheetah and then boom off the gazelle goes to live another day to rejoin the herd. With animals we go animals go into then they move out of it. It's a natural process and my early understanding was in studying animals in the wild
and really wondering what it was that gave the animals a relative immunity from trauma. Because if we experience that kind of threat, or either danger or life threat, we often do not come out. And we remain in that state. So I was going in two directions. What is it that animals do or don't do that we do that's preventing this from happening?
And what is the mechanism of how this gets stuck in the mind and body and the brain and body of humans? when I was developing, very beginning of developing the somatic experiencing trauma model, I wondered, what is it that keeps the animals in? And I discovered some very important research at the time.
in 1977, these experiments were done on rats or guinea pigs. And they would restrain them, and then they would go in this immobility response. But then they would come right out. But if you frightened them while they were going in or when they were coming out, they would stay longer and longer period of time. I actually got to
see these kind of experiments done in a laboratory in Brazil where they were still doing this kind of research. So what happens is the fear then keeps the immobility longer. So what normally would take 17 seconds to come out took 17 hours to come out. And with people, what happens with humans is we are afraid of the very sensations that will take us out of these traumatized states.
⁓ interesting, right. we fight against them. And by doing that, we actually create more fear and more bracing and more immobilization. So people just literally get stuck. And so I discovered that by helping people to touch into these sensations, to touch into them, not to go plunging into the trauma, but to gradually touch in to these sensations once more bit at a time, then the person
was able to come out of the immobility. And that became the basic understanding of how somatic experiencing works, why it works, and then developing specific tools so that people can do what the animals do, which is to touch into it and then to come out. Not all at once, but little by little, because again, we don't want the person to be overwhelmed because there's a lot of energy flowing in the body.
need to touch into that energy with one small amount at a time and not brace him against it. Again, when we brace against it, we get all kinds of physical symptoms over time. Right. Yeah. As you mentioned, a lot of people in your audience are interested in chronic pain and fibromyalgia. those are some of the manifestations that happen when the body gets locked in this fight flight or freeze fold response.
are unable to come out, then often it's the, you know, they get locked in pain and also other kinds of diseases. Right. Yeah, I mean, that is so interesting to me because I was, as you were talking, I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. Animals flush it through and shake it out or do whatever. And why is it that humans haven't evolved to figure that out? But it makes so much sense to me that, we're actually resisting.
the very things that would help us move through. Yeah, that's exactly the key point here. Yeah. learn to gradually touch into them, to learn to befriend them. Right. Then they become our allies. Then they become our way of moving out of trauma and back into flow and into life. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Beautiful. Yeah, and I mean, you mentioned this
piece about how when we repress this energy, then it begins to manifest as disease, pain, depression, anxiety, all these different things start happening. Can you just speak in a little bit more about how that is happening and if we actually go into the trauma, dip in and let it start to unravel a little bit how those symptoms can actually start to heal?
Let me give you, I'll demonstrate a little something on myself here. Perfect. You know, one of the things that happens when we perceive threat is our shoulders go up and our head gets tucked into our, you know, the turtle response into our chest. And it was interesting. I was working in the former Yugoslavia after the
would see these old women and they would be crossing the street and then there'd be an explosion and their shoulders would go up and then they'd go back to the sidewalk and they'd wait a while and then they'd go across again and again there was an explosion and they would go like this. third time that this happened their shoulders went up like this and they stayed there. So that her shoulders were then sending the message to the brain that says that
Danger still exists the threat still exists. So anyhow when we are bracing against the threat and then bracing against the sensations we brace literally with different parts of our bodies. What I'm demonstrating here is the way the shoulders for example get locked up. Well look if your shoulders are gonna be like that and they don't let go after a period of time you're gonna start feeling pain.
After period of time, this pain is going to spread to different parts of the you have more than whatever, this 15 points or something like that where there's pain, then you officially have fibromyalgia. So the trick here in working with those issues, those kind of conditions, is to discover where those bracing patterns are and to learn to release them.
piece by piece, one at a time, to restore the body to its natural state of flow.
read your Healing Trauma Book. In fact, it's one of my favorites because it's so easily consumable, but you also have so many applicable little exercises in it that anyone can do at home. It feels like even just these small things we can do at home really makes such a huge difference. Exactly. Actually, those type of exercises, and different ones.
idea is, you know, I have a belief even about just even about therapy that one of the things that
that is really important as therapists is that we give tools to our clients that they can actually do on their own. They're not just totally dependent on the therapist. I mean, you know, I mean, we are always, mean, if we go to a doctor, the doctor has more knowledge about certain things. So, you know, we go for his or her expertise. Well, the same thing for a therapist, but then you want the tools like the diet, like a physician would say,
Well, you know, if you really want to, you know, change your, you know, their cholesterol levels, you are going to have to make some changes in your diet. But then the, then the patient does that on their So, so actually there's a, there's a, a, a documentary, it's a short documentary, about 25 minute documentary made about the work I did with a, ⁓ with a Marine who was blown up by two of these IEDs.
And after his best friend had died in his arms and he was completely disabled. He was diagnosed with chronic anxiety, depression, PTSD, even Tourette syndrome. anyhow, I worked with him and you could see even after the first session, his symptoms greatly abated. then I, Esalen,
allowed me to give him a scholarship to come for a week workshop that I do there called The Ordinary Miracle of Healing. And so at the end, he was, people were leaving, my assistant had the idea to just film a short interview with him. And he says, you know, when I first saw Dr. Levine in LA, I thought this was the biggest
I that. said, but you know, I realized I could use the tools that he gave me. I could use them on myself. Really begin to direct my own healing. the way, if you want to go, it's open access. It's on YouTube. It's called Ray's Story, R-A-Y, Ray, R-A-Y, Ray's Story.
Somatic Experiencing with Peter Levine. Love it. That sounds amazing. see again how the, yeah, some of the ways that I work with the bracing patterns and trauma. It's amazing. Yeah, and that book has a CD. I have the book right here. It has a CD in it with some amazing tips and different exercises to actually move trauma through. Yeah, because you know, when I wrote, I started writing what wrote
writing Waking the Tiger in like 92, finally got it published in 96. And you know, I really outlied the basis in Waking the Tiger, the basis of the whole idea and how to work with it. But then the book that you just showed, and I thought, no, I really need to add some specific tools. And again, this was back in their mid 90s, I'd say.
So anyhow, again, without tools, trauma rules, trauma and pain rules, but we're with the tools, we're able to tame sensations and emotions and physical manifestations and move through out of trauma. So beautifully said. And there's so many different places we could go here, what I...
What I've been struck with as just listening to you is really the trauma that's stuck in the body. It's stuck energy. And once we begin to move the energy, and I was loving how you speak about this in your books of like, once the energy begins to move, that's really like creative life force. And we actually get to be in flow of who we really are meant to be as these beings.
Can you speak a bit about that and what that phenomenon is when it starts to move? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it really is of accessing this profoundly deep energy of survival. And that is our life energy. And you know,
Some people talk, well, therapy should erase trauma or relive traumas. I say, no, what therapy should do is help the individual access this vitality, this vital energy. In French, they call it El Anvitow. Really, it is life energy. what happens if we would experience this too rapidly, too quickly, the person would be very likely overwhelmed.
and then have to suppress it again. Again, the idea, know, the slinkies where, you know, it's that little spring. And so the trauma is this compression of we don't again want to release that too quickly because then the energy explodes,
So here's the leisurely raising on their repast. They're at the Nucleans meadow. The cheetah springs forth and in a split second they're off, exhibiting all of this energy. Now at the moment when the
captures the gazelle, all of this energy gets locked in. And again, what we don't want to do is release this all at once because the energy can go out But we want to just open one energy level at a time and let it come to rest, to equilibrium, balance, and then again,
And again, until the full energy is restored, but in a way that brings us into our own aliveness. I love that. I love that. And it's almost like channeling it into a different area, almost like giving our primal brains a different job, it seems like. Well said. Well said. You know, another way of looking at this, probably some of your
audience you know knows about the chakras and you know and that kind of thing. Yeah. In that system which is a very very beautiful system a very very intelligent system. Yeah. The first chakra is basically about our survival energy. Right. And in many of the practices the idea is to take that energy and to move the energy up the spine. Into the rest of the body.
in yoga practices, people use breath and different kinds of things to evoke this energy. But when people have been traumatized, that's already happened. Right. They have been initiated. But then the question is, can they then open to it so that it really fills their whole bodily experience? And probably the first person where I really realized what I was doing was a woman named Nancy. I described her first in the
in Waking the Tiger. And she would have been diagnosed as fibromyalgia, irritable bowel, chronic fatigue, as she had anxiety, panic attacks, and chorophobia. so when I worked with her and we released this trauma that had locked in, she says at the end, she said,
It felt like I was being held in warm, tingling waves. And then I literally heard from thousands of people very similar things. I feel like I connected to myself. like I'm alive and I'm real. All of these kinds of things which you think are more poetic, but they're really actually quite literal
physical sensations that occur when we can harness vast energy move our lives forward with this energy. I love that. I mean, as you were speaking about how we move, you know, when trauma happens, the energy goes all the way up. And I was actually moved to tears as you were speaking about that because I was like, wow, you know, for me, and I know a lot of people,
have had severe trauma when they're very, very young. For me, it was four years I hadn't quite made that connection of like, wow, right, when that happens, the energy's like exploding and we're in total intense anxiety or.
or trauma response, but then how do we actually make it feel safe enough for that energy to move? Yeah, exactly. beautifully said. I really, I love that. I, you kind of touch on it in the healing trauma book. And I know I'm so curious because I know so many of our people have dealt with specifically sexual trauma. And I'm curious what, if you find there's a difference with someone who's dealt with
sexual trauma versus other trauma or does it feel like it's, are there different ways that shows up? I'm just curious about that. They're both similarities and differences. You know, they're, and they, they overlap. So this is all other traumas and this is sexual trauma. So they definitely overlap, but there are aspects that are particular to sexual trauma.
You know, because it's a violation of a certain sacred boundary. And that kind of injury...
is special. Yeah. And it really robs us until we're able to really deal with it of pleasure and physical connection. You know, I'm working, it's very typical, but I recently was seeing a couple and the woman
She had been at the age of 13, had been abused by her running coach. And she adored this man, you know, she thought that they were in love with each other, but he was just using her anyhow, this material was starting to come up for her.
pain of this, her sorrow, anger. And so she...
as soon as her husband would approach her to touch her, she would immediately feel revolution. And this really disturbed him, of course, and her. And we did a couple sessions together. And in one session, I...
And you could see he was frustrated. He didn't really understand trauma and what the effect it had on his wife. And so he was impatient or at least saying, you know, well, if you need me to help, you have to tell me how to help, what to do, what not to do. But nothing really worked. So he was sitting in one chair and I asked him, I said, look, this is risky.
but I want to suggest something we can do together and see how it works. And so I had her come and sit on the floor in front of the chair that he was sitting in and he kind of had his knees a little bit around her and I asked him then if he was willing to put his hands on her shoulders.
And then just two them, tears and tears kept they were now able to feel safe touch and safe holding. so that's some of the things that sexual trauma certainly does. But we can also be fooled. was thinking, ⁓ I think this is an example I gave in Waking the Tiger. Not sure where, or maybe it was in an unspoken voice. Anyhow.
This woman had, every time that her husband would have sex, she would And you you'd think, of course, that's sexual trauma. Well, when we worked on the sensations, what it actually was, what the sensations led to was, she was about three four years old, I think. She was climbing the ladder of a sliding pond.
she fell backwards, landed on her back. So when she had an orgasm, it felt like falling. Her surrender felt like falling. she was then avoiding sex because the way of avoiding the sensations of falling because that's what led to the trauma and also the children teased So again, that's what I'm saying.
you have to really keep an open mind. Right. And not, and just see what unfolds through the body, through are called, procedural Sometimes called body memories. Right. Gosh, that's so amazing to think about. right. It could be something completely different than what we actually think it is, even though it's showing up in our
sexuality like that's right. That's right. Hey interesting I am so curious about this part about reenactments and how we actually sometimes find ourselves repeating over and over and over traumas that happen to us and Why that happens and what's going on and what we can actually do? Well, that's certainly one of the mysteries
Yes. One of the great mysteries. Freud, he believed that reenactment was a way, our way of actually goes back to the trauma, work them through. Yeah. There may be some aspect to that, but I think that's really
You know, there's a certain thing like a familiarity we're just drawn into that familiarity. You know, in mathematics, in theory, there are these systems that are called strange attractors. if you have a nervous system, a complicated system, it has its own strange attractor. It will energetically be attracted to a similar energy. Yeah.
And I think it's almost that devoid of any real purpose except that we continue going there because we are drawn to it because our nervous system, our brains, our bodies are drawn to that initial sensation, that initial feeling. It is an opportunity to work on it, to work it through. Because a lot of times people come in with therapy.
is when something like that has already happened. Right, right. Right, it's almost like, okay, how do I trigger myself enough to actually get myself help in almost a way? Well, yeah, but the good news is you don't have to trigger yourself. You can do it in the safe setting of a therapy session. Exactly. And yet some people need that like, my gosh, it's bad. need help. Yeah, I've got to do something about it. myself to the therapist. Right.
It's just, it's a fascinating thing that I've found in my life. it really is. really is. And it, it astonishes us, you know, it really does astonish. And sometimes this comes out like an anniversary. Like a certain day of the year when a trauma happened, then all of sudden we are prone to reenact it.
fascinating how we work, isn't it? It really is. mean, one of the things about studying trauma, has been my life's work, that I quite frankly am always endlessly fascinated by the phenomenon, but also, and also the ability, the capacity for people to heal from even the deepest traumas. And you were talking about people who have had a lot of early trauma, you know,
in their infancies, even around birth and in the womb, and so-called attachment issues, attachment trauma, developmental trauma. And it's more complicated than the simple idea of the energy that we've been talking really, especially when things have happened in an interpersonal
way, when the people who are supposed to care for us, love us, protect us, are harming us, it really puts us in a double bind. Because children, they don't fight or flee, they attach. They attach to the objective of somebody to protect them, somebody to give them safety. But again, if that's the person that's injuring them, that's harming them,
then it becomes so utterly confusing. It's like a double bind, you know, to the end power. And so those things have to be teased out in the therapeutic well as working with the energy that got stuck. That makes a lot of sense and kind of teasing it apart in different angles or modes of looking at. Yeah.
That makes so much sense to me. And I'm curious to just, you speak a bit about this connection between the trauma and how it suppresses the immune system and the endocrine system, the digestive system. Like what's actually happening what's that connection? Can you explain? This is a little bit complicated. Yeah. It's a big question. A very big question. And you know, actually I wrote an article on that.
called Beyond Psychosomatic Medicine. And what it does is it looks at core dysregulation in the nervous system. And this happens not only from like this trauma, the way we're talking about it, but also to accumulative stress, toxic corrosive stress that builds and builds and builds. And it throws the nervous system off its axis.
And literally there is a central axis in the brain and body. It's called a hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. First studied by Hans Selye back in the in the late 30s. And that affects our autonomic system. So it affects our cardiovascular system.
pulmonary system, then it also affects the immune system, the hyperplenic, tuatary, adrenal axis, and it affects our endocrine system because again this axis literally affects every system in the body. But it's one cause, that's the key. It's this core, this autonomic dysregula, I call it
Autonomic dysregulation it really is about really correct that the good news is that it's about correcting one thing, which is our basic sense of homeostasis and resilience. And in somatic experiencing, that's a lot of what somatic experiencing does. What SE does is really helps that core part of the nervous system reset itself.
And then that will affect all the other systems, whether immunological, I mean, a lot of people have gastrointestinal problems, very, very common. Well, there's a nerve that goes from this primitive part of the brain, the brain stem, where the hypothalamus connects. It goes from that part of the brain down into all the...
all the organs below the diaphragm. But actually to all the organs. This vagus nerve. And it's the largest nerve in the body by far. And so when something horrible happens, that we walk out and we see somebody get hit by a car or something like that, our guts go, well, that's that brain stem.
part in the back of the brainstem, sending the signal down the vagus nerve, which then contracts our guts, twists our guts up, and we feel yuck, hard. right. Physical, sensation. What Darwin actually realized back in the 1860s was that
He called this the pneumogastric nerve. was the name he gave to it. It was at the time. Well, he realized that over 80 % of that nerve was actually sensory, afferent. So the motor is efferent. So it's getting the signal from the brainstem down into our guts. 80 % of that nerve is actually signaling back sensations from the guts back up to the brain.
see something horrible, we go, ugh, then that gets sent back up to the brain through all of those sensory afferent fibers and amplifies the distress and sends that amplified signal back into the guts, which makes it even worse. one simple exercise and we can take a few minutes if people may do this with do some exercises. Yes.
call them awareness sizes. Let's do some awareness sizes.
so the idea here again is to get a new signal from the guts back up to the Vegas through the Vegas nerve, back up to the brain that says it's no longer under threat. The horror is no longer existing. And then the nervous system can reset itself. Autonomic regulation. The antidote to autonomic.
dysregulation. So I'll demonstrate the exercise and those people who want to do it, you know, I invite you and if you don't want to do it, of course, just listen to me and just imagine doing it if you want because some people at first something like this can be, you know, little unsettling. So the idea is to take an easy full breath.
and on the exhalation to make the sound voo as though it's coming from here in the belly. So in other words, what you're doing is vibrating those sense receptors in the guts, which are sending a signal now, a new signal up to the brain. the idea is to let the sound and the breath go all the way out and then just wait for the new breath to come in, filling.
the belly and then the chest and then again. So I'll demonstrate. I'm vibrating it down to my belly. And I the sound and the air go all the way out.
you
Maybe one more time.
And just rest and just notice sensations, feelings, images, thoughts. Notice your hands, your feet. Feel any tingling, any vibration. What are you noticing in your belly, in your abdomen? Feeling any sensations of warmth or coolness?
are some of the sensations pleasant, are some maybe not so pleasant. And if they're not pleasant, just noticing them because they will change through a process I call pendulation. So again, just noticing all the different sensations and feelings and thoughts that are evoked by doing this simple exercise.
Beautiful, thank you. I'm curious if you would just speak about, like if something were to happen that's traumatic right here, right now, is that something you could use to reset yourself? Absolutely, absolutely. Actually, one of my books that I did with Maggie Klein, did a couple of books, on trauma through a child's eyes. The other one is called
Trauma-proofing your kids. A parent's guide for instilling confidence, joy, and resilience. Because the idea is when the inevitable mishaps, and they are inevitable, when they happen, when the kid falls off the bike or trips or, God forbid, goes through a plate glass window or door, you know, and has to go to the emergency room or swallows a marble. There are things that parents can do
to help the child come back into balance. And the beauty of this is that when children get these tools, they will carry them through for the rest of their lives. And that was the reason for writing this book. We actually made it red. The idea was, you know, at Mao Tse-Tung's Red Book, the Revolution in China,
This was the book everyone had to have it. Everybody in the kingdom or they would kill them probably. We're not going to kill people about this. This is a book we want in every parent's hands, every parent's hands, anybody who has got children or knows children. just is a very simple tools that you can help children develop this capacity for confidence, joy and resilience.
by using those traumatic events in a way to build stronger. I love that and we definitely have used that book and it's been so helpful for those small little traumas but also the big ones, know, on how to actually hold and what to do, you know, what to do in the moment versus what to do an hour later versus what to do two weeks later. And the first thing we
We give some parents some exercises first to prepare themselves to do it themselves because the most important thing is really initial thing is that you know when the parent sees this they're gonna be scared and very often they will yell at the child you know because but then it's not because they're well it is because they're angry but they're angry because they're scared and feel helpless. So we work to help
the parents when something like this does happen to be able to attend to their own sensations first. Then when they approach the child, they're not fearful. Because what happens is the parent is fearful. The child picks that up from the parent. So the first step is for the parent to deal with their own fear. And then they can be with the child and depending on the age.
to either hold the child or sit by the child's side and maybe put their hand behind their upper back, middle back. And until they go through the shaking and trembling, often tears and deep, spontaneous breaths. And lot of times when you do that with a kid, they'll be sitting there inconsolable, then they settle and then they go off to do what they were doing. They're totally fine. Exactly. They don't think twice.
But again, have those skills to become innate. Right. With really the key. Beautiful. Beautiful. Thank you so much. And I thank you just so much for being here with us. It's been such a pleasure and honor. And I just feel like we have so much here for people to work with and be curious about and move through. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And for
people who are curious, can check you out at somaticexperiencing.com. Your books are amazing, thank you so much for the work that you do in the world and for being with us and sharing. I really enjoyed sharing this time together with you. Yeah, been so lovely. And feeling the energy of our connection.
Thank you. I know I was, it was incredible to just feel, wow, like the tears of recognition, the aha moments kind of like in my brain of like, ⁓ that's how that all works. And it's just so beautiful. I'm to add one more thing in my last remaining time. was going to talk about pendulation. ⁓ yeah. When we have difficult sensations, again, we brace against them.
And when we first start to feel those sensations, it actually feels worse because of the contraction. But then there's an expansion and then another smaller contraction and then another bigger expansion. So again, we move from being locked in to gradually opening to these energies through contraction, expansion, expansion, no valleys without mountains, no mountains without valleys.
Right, right, right. So, yeah, that makes so much sense to me with just you keep emphasizing that gradualness of it. It's not like in one session we can deal with every possible trauma and all that's held in the body, to slowly move it through and. That's right. Yeah, beautiful. Well, thank you so much and thank you all for listening and being with
Outro Podcast (47:40)
Thank you so much for being a part of the Activate Change community. If you want even more amazing content, head over to lachiaramethod.com. And while you're there, be sure to join our email list so you don't miss a thing. You'll get instant access to our ultimate self-care bundle to clear your energy, boost your vitality, and feed your soul, plus exclusive content, special invites to live events, and personal updates we don't share anywhere else.
We're so grateful to be on this journey with you. See you next time.
Aly Halpert Thank You (48:30)
saying a huge thank you to Ali Halpert, the incredible musician and songwriter behind the songs featured in this podcast. To hear more of Ali's music and learn more, alihalpert .com. You can find the link in our show notes.