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The Empowering Story – Podcast
Where trauma recovery begins with voice, choice, and the body's own wisdom.
This is not just a podcast about surviving. It's about reclaiming. Rewriting. Returning home to yourself.
Hosted by The Empowering Story, each episode offers trauma-informed insight, embodied guidance, and powerful personal truths for those healing from sexual trauma. Whether through solo reflections or tender conversations with survivors and practitioners, we explore how safety, somatic awareness, and narrative reclamation can reshape your relationship with your story—and yourself.
We don't rush healing. We meet it gently. We ask different questions:
→ What does readiness feel like in your body?
→ How do we write ourselves back together, one breath at a time?
→ What if the truth isn't too much—but just waiting to be heard?
If you're searching for grounded wisdom, language for your inner world, and a community that honors your pace—this is your space.
🔗 Start your journey: https://theempoweringstory.com
Welcome to the Empowering Story Podcast. This is a space
where healing is allowed to take its own shape. Nothing here is rushed.
Nothing is measured. We listen to what's already present
and to what might be ready to move in its own time.
Sometimes understanding what happened is not enough to change what happens next.
You can know the trigger, you can understand where the response came from,
You can recognize the pattern while it is happening. And still your body
reacts before you can reason with it. The heart changes, the muscles
tighten, attention narrows. Something inside you prepares for
what it has learned might happen next. That can be deeply
frustrating, especially for survivors who have spent years trying to
understand themselves. Because if I understand it, shouldn't I be able
to stop it? Not necessarily. In this episode of The
Empowering Story, Jean looks at the difference between understanding a
nervous system response And actually changing the conditions around it.
And he starts somewhere surprisingly ordinary: with a
coloring page. Not because coloring heals trauma, not because a
colored pencil somehow switches the nervous system off, but because a
simple page can contain something important: structure
without coercion, choice without much consequence,
movement without performance. And sometimes, those small
experiences can give the nervous system information that an
explanation alone cannot. Here is Jean.
Imagine sitting in front of a coloring page. The lines already
exist. You do not have to decide what the picture is going to be.
You do not have to create something from nothing. There is already
somewhere to begin. And yet almost every decision that follows
still belongs to you. Where do I start? Which
color? How much pressure? Do I stay inside the lines?
Do I change colors halfway through? Do I finish this part? Do I
finish the page at all? That combination interests me much more
than coloring itself, because the page is doing 2 things at the
same time. It gives you orientation, and it
preserves choice. And I have come to believe that combination
describes something much larger than a page and a pencil. It
describes what makes an experience usable for a nervous system that
has learned to brace, There is a difference between a structure that
holds you and a structure that tests you. From the
outside they can look almost identical— same page, same
pencils, same quiet room— but one functions as a
container. The other becomes a demand. A container says,
you do not have to create everything from nothing; there is somewhere to
begin, there are some boundaries, and your choices still
matter once you are inside them. A demand says something else:
there is a right way to do this. You should be able to relax. You
should finish it. You should stay inside the lines. You should make it
beautiful. You should be getting something from this. And
suddenly the activity that was supposed to create a little ease has become one
more place where you can succeed or fail. That distinction
matters enormously to me. Because I have watched activities
intended to be calming do exactly the opposite. Coloring
pages are a very simple example. Some adult coloring books are
extraordinarily intricate, hundreds of tiny spaces,
dense patterns, very little room to breathe visually.
For one person, that may be enjoyable. For another
person, particularly someone whose nervous system is already
activated, it may recruit exactly what we were hoping to
soften— perfectionism. Hypervigilance,
self-criticism, concern about making a mistake, the
need to finish, the need to do it correctly. So the useful
question is not simply, does coloring regulate the nervous
system? I think that is too broad. The better question is,
what is this activity asking this particular nervous system to do?
Because a good container does not tell you what must happen inside it.
It makes it possible for something to happen safely enough that you can
participate in it. And when I began thinking about coloring
this way, I realized that I had been watching the same principle
for decades, long before coloring entered the picture.
In dance, for example. Give dancers too little
structure and they become uncertain. They do not know where to place
their attention. But give them too much structure and something else
happens. The dancing begins to disappear. They start
executing. Technique matters, structure matters,
but technique is supposed to make expression possible. When
technique becomes the entire point, expression can go
quiet. I see something similar in trauma work.
Without enough of a container, experience can become
overwhelming. But when the process becomes too
prescribed, too interpretive, too goal-driven, the
person can lose agency, inside the very process that
was supposed to help restore it. And that matters
particularly in work with survivors. Because so
much of trauma involves some form of lost agency—
something happened too quickly, something could not be stopped,
a boundary was crossed, a choice was taken away, a voice
did not matter. So if the process of recovery
becomes another place where somebody else tells the person what they should feel,
what they should discover, what their story means, or how quickly they
should change. We have to ask what we are actually
restoring: enough structure to enter, enough freedom to
remain yourself inside it. That principle travels; it
applies to learning, to creativity, to relationships,
to leadership, to recovery. The question remains
remarkably similar: Does this structure give me enough
support to orient myself, without creating so much
demand that I begin to feel trapped inside it. And
this brings us to another distinction, one I think causes
enormous frustration for people who have already done a lot of
work. You can understand what is happening and still be activated.
2 things can be true at the same time: I can know cognitively
that I am safe, and my nervous system can still behave as though I
am not. I can understand the trigger, I can know where it came
from. I can name the trauma response while I am having it,
and still my heart changes, my stomach changes, my
muscles change, my attention narrows, because understanding
and regulation are not the same process. Much of what we call a
trauma response can begin very quickly. The nervous system is
receiving sensory information, signals from inside the body,
Memory, context, similarity. And in
effect it is asking, what does this resemble, and what have
I learned to do when something resembles this? By the time conscious
thought arrives, the body may already have begun preparing,
so I may say to myself, there is nothing dangerous here,
and I may be factually correct. But the nervous system
is not necessarily asking for another fact, It is responding to a
prediction, a prediction shaped by what came before. That does
not make thinking unimportant. Thinking matters.
Language matters. Understanding matters. Being able to
name something can create distance. It can restore context.
It can help me recognize that what I am feeling belongs partly to
then and not entirely to now. But knowing
something and having the nervous system update what it expects are
not identical. Predictions shaped through experience
often need different experiences alongside the understanding.
The body needs information too— movement, sensation, rhythm,
orientation, relationship, choice— experiences in
which something happens differently from what the nervous system learned to
anticipate. And that is where something as ordinary as coloring
becomes interesting to me. Not magical. Interesting.
Because it can create a very small environment in which different
information becomes available. I make a choice, nothing
bad happens. I change my mind, nothing bad happens. I
stop, nothing bad happens. I leave a section unfinished,
nothing bad happens. I choose a completely different color,
nothing bad happens. That is small, but I do not think it is
trivial. There is an
important distinction in what Shawn is saying. The goal is not to produce
a person who looks calm, because quiet and regulated are not always the
same thing. A survivor may have learned very early how to become still,
how to comply, how not to draw attention, how to appear
composed while everything inside remains on alert. So stillness
cannot be the only measure. Shawn uses another word instead:
flexibility. Can I pause? Can I change my mind?
Can I stop? Can I choose differently without feeling that something terrible will
follow? That shifts the question from, do I look calm?
To, do I have more choices available to me? And that distinction
sits very close to the heart of the empowering story. Jean continues.
Yes, regulation is not the same thing as being quiet.
A nervous system can become quieter because it feels safer,
It can also become quieter because it has shut down. From the
outside, those can sometimes look very similar.
Someone can become still, very compliant, very
focused, and there may be no ease in it at all. So I
watch for flexibility rather than stillness. Can the
person pause? Can they change colors? Can they
leave something unfinished? Can they make a different choice
without immediately believing they have done something wrong? Can they
notice what they feel without instantly needing to get rid of it?
When something is helping, there is often a little more room. The
movement becomes less rushed. Breathing may ease.
Attention becomes less rigid. A small decision stops feeling
quite so loaded. When the activity begins becoming another demand,
the opposite can happen. The pencil gets gripped harder. The
person starts correcting. Erasing, rushing, becoming
frustrated, trying to make it perfect, or sometimes
becoming extremely still. And that is why I do not ask
only, did this calm the person down? The question I find more
useful is, does the person have a little more choice after doing this than
they had before? Because choice tells me something. Not
complete freedom, not the absence of activation— a little more
choice. That is enough to matter. And this is
also where I want to be very careful about the claims we make.
Coloring cannot resolve trauma by itself. It cannot
undo what happened. It cannot change unsafe
circumstances somebody is still living in. It cannot replace
therapy when therapy is needed. It cannot replace medical care.
It cannot replace relationship. It cannot replace the
experience of finally being with somebody who believes you, listens
to you, and does not require you to disappear in order for the
relationship to remain intact. A coloring book cannot do
those things. And if somebody picks up a coloring book
believing that if they just use it correctly they are going to heal, then
we have turned another potentially useful experience into another
test, another place to fail. I do not want to do that.
What coloring can sometimes do is much smaller. And I think the
smaller claim is more useful. It can change the conditions of a
moment. It can give attention somewhere to go. It can
give the hand something rhythmic and predictable to do. It can
introduce small choices where the consequences are very low.
It can interrupt, for a while, the demand to explain, to
solve, to anticipate, to perform. And
sometimes, from that slightly different state, something else becomes
possible, Maybe I notice something. Maybe language
becomes available. Maybe I feel something without being completely
swallowed by it. Maybe I simply spend 10 minutes without working
quite so hard. That counts too. And coloring will not do this
for everybody. Somebody may hate it. Somebody may
immediately become perfectionistic. Somebody else may need to move,
walk, dance, work with clay, garden, listen to music,
talk So I would not say coloring
regulates the nervous system. I would say coloring can
create conditions that some nervous systems find regulating.
And then you pay attention— what actually happens? That
question matters more than the label we put on the activity,
and it is also part of what shaped the coloring book I
eventually created, Peaceful Abundance. I
wanted to design around the principle we have been talking about—
enough structure to enter, enough freedom to make it your own—
so the illustrations are deliberately more spacious.
Most of the coloring areas are larger. There is room
around things. Many of the scenes are first person.
You are not coloring another woman who appears to be living the life you are
supposed to want. You are inside the scene, and on
the facing pages there are questions, but they are invitations,
Not assignments. You can answer them, ignore them,
color, change the picture. Leave something empty.
Stop. Because the pencil was never really the point, and
the page was never really the point. The point is the experience.
For a few minutes, perhaps I can experience myself as someone
who can make one choice, see what happens, and then make another.
Not as someone who has to get everything right, Not as someone who has
to understand everything immediately, not even as someone who has
to heal in this moment, just someone who still has
choices. For somebody who has spent years anticipating
danger, criticism, conflict, rejection, punishment,
those moments can carry different information. I can act
without being punished. I can make a choice without having to get
it right. I can engage without becoming trapped. I can
stop without failing. I can change my mind. For many
people, those are ordinary statements. For some
survivors, they are not ordinary at all, and this is where the page
connects to something much larger. The nervous system
learns something from experience. Perhaps over time, it can
also encounter different evidence through experience. Not
evidence that nothing painful will ever happen again. That
would be another false promise. Different evidence.
I can still feel activation and have choices. I can still
be uncertain and remain present. I can still feel something
difficult without losing all agency. I can stop.
I can speak. I can change direction. I can ask for something.
I can say no. I can begin again. Maybe I do not have
to argue with my nervous system. Maybe I can begin giving
it different experiences, small ones, repeated ones,
experiences that are usable, experiences with enough
structure that I can enter them and enough freedom that I do
not disappear inside them. And perhaps, over
time, the evidence begins to change. Not
nothing bad will ever happen, but I have more
choices now than. than I had then. For me, that is the
measure I keep coming back to. The goal was never a person who
looks calmer. The goal is enough room for more choice.
There is a reason this conversation belongs in The Empowering Story, because
reclaiming your story is not only about finding better words for what happened.
It is also about recovering authorship. And authorship requires choice:
the ability to pause, to notice, to respond, to say yes,
To say no, to change direction, to leave something unfinished,
to decide what belongs to you now. If you would like to experience the
kind of coloring environment Jean described in this episode, he has
created a free sample from Peaceful Abundance Volume 1. It
includes 3 selected coloring spreads, so you can experience the
approach without having to commit to anything beyond a few pages.
You can find the free sample at www.
innerconditionpress.com/free/peaceful-abundance-edition-1. And you can learn more about Peaceful Abundance and the work of Inner
Condition Press at www.innerconditionpress.com.
Before you go, perhaps carry one question with you: not, am I
calm yet? But, do I have a little more choice available to me
than I had before? This is The Empowering Story. Thank you
for listening. Thank you for listening to the Empowering
Story Podcast. This space will be here when you return.
I am Jean Dorff, and I want to thank you for being here.
It's an honor to share this space with you.
Until next time.