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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, Shawn 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 Sean.
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, because it can create a very
small environment in which different information becomes available.
I make a choice, 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. Shawn 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. 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, 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 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 Shawn 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 Shawn Dorf, and I want to thank you for being here.
It's an honor to share this space with you.
Until next time.