Dr. Arielle Schwartz: CASAT Podcast Network.

Heather Haslem: Welcome to season six of CASAT Conversations, where we sit down with professionals who have spent decades in their fields like mental health, addiction treatment, business, sociology, and more. In this special season, our guests share valuable wisdom from their careers, reflect on what has kept them grounded and inspired, and offer advice for future generations. Whether you're new to the field, uncertain, about your next steps, or feeling burned out, these conversations provide guidance and reassurance from those who've walked this path. Let's dive into today's episode. Today we welcome Dr. Arielle Schwartz. She is a psychologist and the author of several books, including those focused on somatic therapy. Dr. Schwartz's work in somatic therapy involves integrating traditional psychotherapeutic approaches with body centered technique. Welcome Dr. Schwartz. We're happy to have you here today.

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: Thank you, Heather. It's lovely to be here with you and to have a chance to connect.

Heather Haslem: so as we get started, please share with us a little more about yourself and the work that you do.

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: So I've been in the field of somatics since about the mid-1990s and I was originally drawn to study somatic psychology because of my own life experiences that impacted my own just sense of embodiment, my own sense of comfort in living in a body and the ways that especially early childhood experiences impacted my physical health and my sense of emotional, safety in the world. And so it kind of very early in my life launched me into a curiosity about how can I create more of a sense of safety. So I'll back up into my own personal story again, perhaps. But what I'll say in terms of what my life looks like now and what my work looks like is It's an integration of somatic psychology. But I'm also a yoga teacher, so that informs my approach to working with the body and being present with the body. And I also incorporate what I would call kind of very traditional time tested relational therapy and EMDR therapy and some parts work therapy modalities. And overall a very kind of comprehensive approach to care, specifically for trauma, with a focus on complex PTSD or childhood trauma.

Heather Haslem: And you know, you mentioned that your own experiences impacted your embodiment. Will you share a little bit more that you feel comfortable sharing with that?

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: Sure, sure. So, you know, I, like without going into too much detail, I'll just say that the early m probably m experiences of both my parents, anxiety, their unresolved trauma, if we want to put it like that, and the the discord in my family home, it began Even before I was born. I mean, it goes back generations, but certainly in terms of just informing me, even my mother's pregnancy with me was one that had a certain amount of duress, to it. And my parents were already separating by the time I was 2 and officially divorced by the time I was 4. So if you imagine those first very fundamental and formative years, and in terms of a sense of self, there was a lot of dysregulation in that household, all of which impacted my sense of self. And then, you know, continuing on through my developmental trajectory, I had two households that really became two very different households, very different tones and rhythms and moving between those two different households. I felt very different in myself. One household felt very safe and at home for me and the other felt very, I felt very on guard and vigilant and unsure and insecure. And in a sense I knew what it was like from a very young age to go between those two senses of self in the world and having these experiences of what felt like kind of losing myself and then coming back home to myself. And if I fast forward, into high school or into college, I experienced a lot of that leaving and coming back to myself just within me, qualities of a lot of anxiety or a lot of depression, a lot of confusion. And then certain experiences that felt like this homecoming. Those experiences would be on my yoga mat or out, in nature or in a body mind centering class. That was my first introduction to somatics. And so I got so curious about what is it about these experiences that brings me back to this feeling of safety and okayness and connection. And it just set my whole trajectory into. By the time I was 23, I had finished a yoga teacher training and began a, three year master's program studying somatic psychology. What is this thing? And know, fast forward even a bit further. I, ended up doing my doctoral work after my master's degree in somatics. I did a doctorate in clinical psychology and devoted those studies to the integration of mind body therapies into clinical practice.

Heather Haslem: I am, struck. I, I can identify with parts of your story for sure, and see some of those pieces in myself as well. And you know, I took my first yoga class when I was 19 and I remember feeling, and then I became a yoga teacher about 24. So similar, similar time frame there. And I remember feeling for the first time like this sense of like deep connection with myself. and until you. Actually, I think about safety a lot in the work that I do. Now but until you actually said that, I never thought about that sense of safety that I felt in that moment. So thank you for naming that and sharing your story because I can feel that in my own experience.

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: you know what comes to mind as I hear you say that is that safety has certain elements to it that can also then evoke vulnerability. Right. If we think about like when I think about those early experiences, especially where I first touched safety, what that evoked was actually a lot of grief and tenderness. And it created this space for me to feel. But feeling isn't always easy, right. If we think about the quote unquote kind of safety in self protection, I think I utilized that form of safety. and still do. We're human, right? Still sometimes can go back and try and rely on not feeling as a way to keep myself safe. And that the, you know, the experience of being able to feel safe enough to feel, which then led me to feel vulnerable, which then sometimes felt a little bit on the edge of is this safe or not? Right. And that we talk a lot in the field of somatic psychology about building a tolerance for feeling, feelings or a capacity for feelings that we may initially have. you know, feelings that get brought to the surface and we're like, oh, I don't know what to do with that yet, or that scares me. And then we go back into self protection. It's a little bit like a rubber brand, rubber band of expansion and contraction. but that, what I can say now, after 30 years of being in this field and my own, my own embodiment work for myself and my own therapy is that that tolerance or capacity to be with the vulnerable emotions that might emerge through the gateways of safety has grown tremendously.

Heather Haslem: Yeah, I, my experience has been similar. I started mindfulness based stress reduction right after my son was born and you know, felt like I lost myself as this new mom. And then started taking MBSR and slowly felt like I returned to myself. But what I've learned since then is I actually lived most of my life disembodied, and really through my mindfulness practice and like developing this relationship with my body in a deeper way now feel much more embodied. But I can feel my, you know, I was actually practicing this morning and was like, oh, I am not embodied today. So It's a comeback. Come back. And so it takes, for me it takes a lot of practice and It's probably a practice of a lifetime.

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: I think that's exactly right. And, and I think It's so valuable when we recognize that It's the practice of a lifetime and that we don't reach some state of embodiment and then we forever live there. It just doesn't that way. Right. Because we're human, because life is inherently stressful and carries certain degrees of, of inherent threats that we're perceiving consciously and non consciously that having practices that we can come back to that help us process the impact of those layers of accumulated sensory input. Right. And then be able to also have practices that allow us to kind of let go of the unnecessary or just like for digesting our food. We have to tease out what can I assimilate into self, what's nutrients and what's waste. And that's for me, what the daily practices really help with is that, that assimilation, digestion and elimination.

Heather Haslem: I love that analogy. that's beautiful. so as we talk about embodiment, for anyone who isn't familiar with the term, will you describe embodiment and I'll add a second piece to that question and that is, how does trauma, like specifically childhood trauma, impact embodiment?

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: The irony of all of this is that to some degree we are always already embodied. So It's not like you're in some ways trying to create something that isn't already there. It's also what I love about the yogic philosophy, It's this understanding that we're already whole and that It's about remembering or coming into the awareness of the wholeness the already exists. So when we look at embodiment, the what we're facilitating is a sensory awareness of what is. We are opening up the sensing of the felt sense. And as I mentioned already from my own experiences, right. And, and just what it means to be human. We have ways that we guard ourselves around the felt sense of being. We guard ourselves by staying really active, by doing a lot, by staying busy, by retreating into the upper echelons of the mind and the intellectual defense that we might cultivate there. We might distract ourselves by scrolling social media or binge watching a show or maybe It's through, you know, just excessively working. There are so many ways that we can not feel because we're directing our attention in all of these other directions, all of these other places. And so when we're cultivating an embodied self awareness, an embodied felt sense, what we're doing is we're redirecting our attention and we're guiding the attentional and intentional presence to, toward the felt Sense toward the interoceptive landscape of our interior. And once we bring our attention there, we're more likely to sense or feel what, what we're carrying in our bodies. And once we can sense and feel that we are actually better able to take care of our bodies. Meaning I can sense if I'm thirsty, if I have to go to the bathroom, if I am hungry and I haven't eaten for several hours. I can sense if I've been sitting in a posture that has been, creating, certain, you know, muscular imbalances in my hips or my shoulders or my neck. And I can readjust because now I have that interoceptive, the interior of my body, I have that feeling feedback that helps me recalibrate. How do I take care of myself? One of, you know, one perspective on embodiment goes back to a formative somatic therapist named Alexander Lohan. And he developed bioenergetics. And I like this understanding he offers that what we're doing in an embodiment practices. We're grounding, we're grounding downward into the felt sense of self in the body. And that again, it doesn't mean that we aren't already existing there, but we're grounding the center of our gravity or the center of awareness further down into the chest, the belly, the pelvis, the legs, the feet, right? So we can bring our center of gravity downward. And, and you know, the, the other part of your question is, how do traumatic experiences impact our felt sense of embodiment? Well, they tend to do the opposite. We tend to pull away from gravity. And many of us develop what in the bioenergetics language we refer to as kind of holding patterns in the body where we gather tension in places that restrict breath or restrict, the felt sense. For example, we might grip in our pelvis or we might grip across the abdomen, right? Like pulling the abdominal muscles tight, we might grip across the diaphragm, which would impact that freedom of the breath. We might grip and be braced across the chest or even in our throat center, right? Where we get more restricted. And the more that we grip and contract, the less available sensory awareness of ease we might have in those places. We might, if we sense into those places of tension and contraction, feel more discomfort or pain and then therefore try and avoid feeling them. Ooh, that doesn't feel good to reside in that tightness in my shoulders or my throat or my chest or my belly, right. M. And so it becomes this kind of self perpetuating, cycle where it becomes harder to feel. And you know, when we look at some of those early influences in somatic psychology, this idea that we develop these kind of holding patterns or self protection against sensing and feeling is very related to developmental trauma. It rolls all the way back to the experiences of a baby being held by its parents. And whether or not there's cues of safety through the voice tone and the vocalizations and the facial expressions and the eye, you know, the eye, contact and so forth for those nonverbal signals to be communicating, cues of safe enough for that child to in a sense relax into the arms of the loving caregiver and vice versa. If the child is receiving cues of threat through that loss of vocal prosody or a, ah, furrowing of the brow or the muscular tension held in the body of the caregiver, facial expressions, whether they're conscious or unconscious on the part of the caregiver, the baby is very right brained, right. You can look at the work of Alan Shore and a lot of the, you know, edtronic, those who research early infant parent interactions and the baby's very right brain. So It's going to pick up on all of those nonverbal cues of safety or threat and then begins to inform the embodied experience of self for that child at that very young age. Whether It's safe to breathe deeply, whether It's safe to express how I'm feeling or if I get, you know, if I cry, will my parent get dysregulated? Right. if I'm in distress, if I'm irritable. And so it will shape how much of my authentic self I feel comfortable sharing with another. And the more cues that we get that the other can't handle me, the more that we restrict what we actually shell and over.

Heather Haslem: You know, I'm thinking over the course of a lifetime, like what's the impact of that restriction?

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: Yeah, no, I mean the, the good news, if you, if you go that broad, if you think about the. Over a course of a lifetime, one has many, many opportunities ultimately to heal and integrate. but if we do not have access to resources or a therapist or places where we feel safe enough, then what can begin to happen is that those early learned restrictions of self expression and restrictions of our own felt, you know, comfort in ourselves and authenticity. All of that leads us to in a sense carry forward the patterns that were passed on to us and we can start to see not only does it impact our own life, but even as you vulnerably shared about your journey of feeling like you were losing yourself as a new mom. Right. We can then start to pass these unconscious patterns onto our children. It becomes the foundation of the generational wounds. So hopefully we have opportunities to unwind and heal and reclaim our own sense of safety as you speak about and we've been speaking about thus far. And then we foster that in the next generation.

Heather Haslem: You know, I'm, I'm thinking about like our, our medical system and the medical model and how the mind and the body are often separated. I would say that there we're moving towards more integration or integrative medicine. but It's a slow moving ship in my perspective. And you know, you've been doing this work since 1990s you said. And so how, what shifts have you seen in psychology and medicine and where are we going? I guess big questions, Stan.

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: Really great, great big questions. I mean, so when I started my studies in this, it was 1996 and you know, if we think about when the Body Keeps the Score came out, Bessel Van der Kolk's book that came out in 2014. So this was you know, about my goodness, you know, how many years earlier it was, almost 20 years prior to that. And when I started studying somatic psychology, people looked at me like, Are you talking about semantics? Are you talking about words? What is this thing, right? Bodies and the body and the psychotherapy. Are you kidding me? Like it was risky, edgy, new, Completely. Well I don't want to say completely, but relatively unheard of, you know, especially by any mainstream medical approach and the kind of medicalization of psychotherapy that had already happened in the cognitive boom of psychotherapies. And not that there's anything wrong with cognitive psychotherapies, they're just not the whole picture. So the field has evolved tremendously in the almost 30 years now since I began studying this. And I credit a lot of that to the work of Dr. Van der Kolk, because of his emphasis as a mainstream medical psychiatrist to really step out onto the, to the edge. Like he walked onto that edge. And and the field has largely joined him, has largely followed that lead, has largely accepted. There's still a long ways to go, but I can now walk in most circles and talk about somatic psychology and be invited into the conversation. I've been able to present at Harvard and Cambridge and you know, in major mainstream organizations about somatic psychology and have that be welcomed into the conversation and valued rather than Quickly dismissed. You know, I would say that that research is one of those gateways through which we change the field. And I would say the other is a little bit more grassroots in the sense of you can start to see how many people like ourselves that resonate with this, that go, oh my gosh, someone's finally speaking my language. They get what It's like to be me. they understand that feeling that I had in my body all those years where I just felt so unsafe or uncomfortable or why my life experiences resulted in these health conditions. Like it just makes sense to so many people. And so both from those seeking treatment and also for those of us that are kind of sitting on that divide where I both am seeking this for my own integration and wholeness. And I'm also a provider. Right. So many of us that have chosen to go into studying somatic psychology are because it makes sense, it resonates with our own life experience. And at some point along the way, the road, we've had an experience in ourselves in response to an embodiment practice where we go, oh, I want more of that.

Heather Haslem: That makes sense. I'm thinking about. So I do a lot of work with first responders, hospital professionals, people who really, have secondary traumatic stress. And I'm curious if, see what impacts to the body do you see, with populations that are exposed to trauma?

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: Yeah, you know, I'm like one of the things that comes to mind for me, and especially as you're speaking about the specific populations that you just named, is the ways in which first responders or even I'm thinking about like, let's think of, you know, our pandemic and Covid first line, medical providers that had to go into work every day knowing that they were walking into work to face a virus that, that could potentially kill them. Right. I mean these are really significant events watching the fallout of all of this. And you know, I'm just going to hone in on that population for a moment just to say that when you are trained as a first line responder or or medical professional, you are trained to actually walk toward something that's dangerous. And so now you have to navigate between a survival, built in, biologically based survival response that we all carry within us, which is to basically move away from something that could hurt us. Right. I have a fireplace, behind me. And this, this warmth of this fire, well, at this distance It's pleasant. Right. If I get too close or place my hand in there, it will burn me. So we know we have that instinctual response to not get too close to something that's harmful. But when you're trained as a first responder, you are trained to actually know how to override some of those very built in body based survival pro processes that say, don't go toward that. No, I'm going to go into the burning building, I'm going to go in military combat, I'm going to go into the hospital where the virus lives. And, and so on the one hand, thank goodness we have these people that are there to provide the services that they provide. And the cost of having to learn how to override instinct for the sake of service can be significant because from a body centered perspective, what we're doing is we're actually reclaiming and reorienting towards that instinctual self and saying thank you, you're doing a really tremendous job to try and keep me safe. And I'm sometimes at odds with myself. So I just wanted to name that, that there's a very specific element of this for the population that I hear that you're serving and thank you for that. And that kind of, more broadly speaking I would say that very often the key or core dilemmas that we might face is, has to do with those double binds. I'll use an example here. When I work with developmental trauma, those double binds, often look like I have a need to attach. I have longings for connection. I need to feel cared for and I need to express my care and excitement to see another person. Now in the case of developmental trauma, let's say that caregiver is also the source of cues of threat or danger. Maybe they're hurting me, or maybe my caregivers are hurting each other. And so now I also have within me a biological drive to seek safety. And that may be fleeing from what I perceive as a source of threat. So now I have these two competing biological drives. The one that's leading me to seek proximity and connection and closeness to who's my, you know, the person that I need for my survival. And I have a confidence lifting biological need to flee from that same person. It's a little bit like that burning house. Once again, I need to go towards something that feels unsafe because I need it. Right? I'm dependent on you for my very survival. And so what I often find when unwinding trauma and unwinding that through the therapeutic process is that we bump up against those polarizing experiences within ourselves. The need for closeness and the need for separateness, the need to be able to be my authentic self and express how I feel, but the terror that I'll be rejected again. And so we work gently, delicately, slowly we, we unwind this at a pace that feels safe enough.

Heather Haslem: I have lots of things running through my mind. I'll share with you that one of the things that I think of, you know I, I love studying, teaching about the nervous system and in working with the populations that I do, I've often wondered if populations that go into like first response or military tend towards the fight response more. So right, we know that It's hyperarousal fight or flight, but if they tend more towards that, moving towards And then in training you're training to stay, you know, from a window of tolerance perspective, you're training to stay calm, cool and collected in hyper arousal. So then when you like there is no down regulation of the nervous system or regulating the nervous system unless you have these practices or you have been trained on these practices to be able to at the end of the day. and so that, that is what I tend to do in the work that I, I do with folks is just teaching about the nervous system and teaching ways for people to become familiar and feel what It's like, you know, when your shoulders drop and you can feel, oh, I can take a deep breath. and yet we don't in my opinion talk about the nervous system or teach the nervous system in the context of long term health. So if we think about operating in hyper arousal for a career, the impact of that really on any chronic disease is impactful.

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: what it brings to mind for me is another essential element to the approach of work that the, the approach to my work which is the integration of the polyvagal theory because It's a nervous system informed approach. We actually have these opportunities to just develop shared language with our clients about tracking the state of the nervous system. Whether that's in the sympathetic as you're speaking about here and living in that sympathetic tone for extended periods of time and maybe not knowing how to downregulate into calm, rest, relax, digest, states of the parasympathetic. And of course what the polyvagal theory also teaches us is that the parasympathetic also has a defensive presentation in which when we're not safe, or when we have experienced ongoing chronic traumatization or ongoing experiences, repeated experiences of life threatening events that the parasympathetic has another protective expression which is referred to as a dorsal vagal state or a shutdown a collapse, an extended state of fatigue, helplessness, hopelessness, despair, shame. And, you know, one of the things that, you know, that it comes to mind in the example that you're giving of working with individuals who maybe stay in hyperarousal for extended periods of time is that our nervous systems are not meant to live in that state for extended periods of time. Hence why It's good to know how to take that deep breath and relax your shoulders at the end of the day. But there's also an impact on our health when we do stay in that hypervigilance, which can be, you know, compromising our immune system or our endocrine system or our digestive system, our cardiovascular system. There's significant consequences. And lastly, sometimes we stay in that. On guard, on guard, on guard, until rather than going into collapse, what we go into is. Excuse me, rather than going to relax, we go into collapse.

Heather Haslem: And this is, you know, when I'm teaching this to first responders or military professionals, what we talk about often is at home, right, when you, you know, the divorce rates are very significant in these populations. but, you know, when you're operating at a. In hyper arousal at. At work, and then you come home and you crash, that can be really challenging on a relationship when, you know, the wall goes up or you just zone out, because you. You don't have that capacity to be present with the ones that you love because you've operated at such a high level.

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: Exactly.

Heather Haslem: So It's interesting, right, like how this dysregulation of the nervous system can really impact our relationships. You think about it from parenting, to, you know, intimate partner relationships. It's fascinating to me.

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: Yes, yes. I think It's one of the pieces that stands out for me. Again, if I just speak about applied polyvagal theory, it recognizes that our nervous systems are not so distinct. We are constantly exchanging information, nervous system to nervous system, with each other. And Steve Porges refers to the, upper, more most recently evolved pathway of the vagus nerve as the ventral vagal circuit. Or our social engagement, system in which we are communicating cues to each other as to whether we're available for connection or not available for connection, or whether we're, you know, potentially feeling, angry, threatening, or whether we're feeling, collapsed and ashamed. And we communicate that to each other whether we're consciously aware of it or not. So our nervous systems are not distinct, you know, islands separate from the world that we share. We are constantly exchanging that information. You Know, remotely via you know, via telehealth and in person and actually even in the news. And what we observe in our social media, we're responding to the cues that we observe from the world around us all the time. So we also, to some degree, when we engage in our own healing practices, it allows us to be more mindful and conscious of the impact that we have on others and the kind of quote unquote wake that we leave behind when we walk out of a room.

Heather Haslem: So with that in mind,

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: I'm.

Heather Haslem: Curious if you'll speak to the impact of the ventral vagal circuit, for therapists, and clinicians.

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: Yeah. So as we cultivate, I mean, I'll speak to it for us as therapists and I'll also speak to it, in relationship to our clients and our work. You know, one thing I want to maybe just name here is a. As a foundation of somatic therapies is that it is not the interventions that we do that makes one a somatic therapist. It's the presence that we bring into the work and the embodiment that we offer ourselves. So again, we're looking at the exchange that is happening in the room and we can think of that quality of safe or authentic or relaxed embodiment, whatever word you want to put in there. Connection as synonymous to some degree with that ventral vagal or social engagement system that when I have a coherency of my nervous system and I'm breathing rhythmically and calmly, calmly, and I feel at ease in myself and I can communicate those cues of safety, I feel totally nourished throughout my day when I'm working. So it provides this really stunning backdrop for the work where I'm less likely to end the day with my own vicarious traumatization or or exhaustion or feeling dysregulated by the work itself. Because I'm tracking my own nervous system all throughout the day and I'm engaged, very intentionally with that self care of noticing. Am I breathing, am I leaning forward all day? You know, how have I, you know, kind of lost touch with that fluidity in my own body? Am I feeling, you know, safe enough, relaxed enough, whatever it might be, that I can really offer my best work to another, that I can join someone in states of fear or irritability or whatever it might be without getting stuck with them and in those states so that the nervous system has a flexibility to it, that I can meet another and return back to, you know, a state of Enough ease. So It's of great benefits to us in terms of secondary traumatization. It would be the same, you know, same benefits to, a first responder being able to have these tools or to someone in the healthcare system being able to have these tools, to come back to throughout the day. And then, you know, as we're working with others, it becomes a foundation for the resources that we want to have in place when we do turn towards the impact of trauma, on, on an individual. Right. So if I'm doing a piece of trauma work and I know that someone has that nervous system flexibility, that we can go toward times in which they felt afraid, or we can go toward times in which they felt shut down or collapsed, and they're less likely to get stuck there. I'm less likely to get stuck there. So we have cultivated this bandwidth of going back to our window of tolerance or our window of capacity. We've built this capacity to move across a pretty broad range of states and emotions safely.

Heather Haslem: And will you speak more to the ways in which people can develop nervous system flexibility?

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: Sure. So, you know, I, I think that when we look at the sympathetic nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system is, as we said, It's a fight flight system, but It's really a mobilization system. So it moves us into the world. Right. Or, you know, toward or away, but It's a movement system. And when we've experienced trauma, our sympathetic nervous system can get kind of over, coupled with, with threat. In which case all movement or all activation, all elevated heart rate states feel a little scary or, or threatening to me. I don't know if I can handle that. And that part of building nervous system flexibility is to uncouple the sympathetic nervous system from threat so that we can actually befriend stress, we can befriend activation, we can befriend mobilization, in which case I can feel the elevation of my heart rate and go, is that fear? Wait, I think that's excitement. Right? Oh, that totally changes this. Right. The first time I heard Dr. Porges speak, this was many, many years ago, and he said a phrase which I will never forget, and he said if we didn't have our sympathetic nervous system, we wouldn't have play. And it was like a total light moment for me. Right. yes, we need our sympathetic nervous system. It serves us in great ways. Whether It's climbing a mountain or going to your Zumba class or getting on your yoga mat, whatever your thing is, right. It lets us play and feel Alive, feel energized and empowered. So you can feel it in my voice as I'm, you know, saying this. It's an, It's a state of excitement that we can start to embrace rather than feel like, oh no, every time I feel activation in my body, something bad is happening. So we can change our relationship to that which allows us to have more choice. I can go towards, toward or away from that activation rather than feeling stuck in anxiety and panic and insomnia and rumination and worry and all of those things that can happen. Irritability. So let's look at the other side of that continuum. If we look at the hypoarousal, the more of the shutdown, collapse, fatigue, that too can get over, coupled with stress and trauma. So our parasympathetic nervous system, which is about immobilization, It's about stillness when It's over, coupled with trauma. Every time I go into stillness or I try and go to sleep at night, I start to feel unsafe, I start to feel safe, stuck, trapped or depressed or hopeless. Right. That's the over coupling of the parasympathetic with the trauma state. So to build nervous system flexibility, we want to uncouple those as well. Which means that I can reclaim my ability to sit in stillness and feel safe enough, whether that's through non sleep, deep rest protocols or yoga nidra or meditation. That we want to change really radically transform our relationship to stillness. So that I can embrace that as something that's nourishing for me and potentially, even, potentially even a source of a deep spiritual connection with myself. Right. In meditation or a, deep availability for intimacy. Because I can rest in stillness and not immediately feel like I want to jump and run and you know, or collapse and be unavailable.

Heather Haslem: M. I'd love to hear a little bit about your perspective on the importance of somatic therapy in the context of public health. So we know that trauma, you know, approximately 90% of people have had some traumatic experience. And if you could sort of like wave a magic wand, what would you want, the public to really understand about somatic therapy?

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: Yeah, I think that when we have an understanding of somatic therapy, we, we become more allies for the biological, intelligence that resides inside of each and every one of us. And that rather than being afraid of those moments of trembling or those big waves of emotion, we can actually trust that the body has wisdom and that we don't necessarily have to medicate every symptom. because that to me is perhaps one of the biggest negative consequences of the medicalization of psychotherapy. and also of the intolerance of symptoms of big feelings. Right. Too often grief gets medicated that those early acute traumas get overmedicated. And what we really need are allies that help us trust that we can ride the wave of a big feeling and be like, I gotcha, It's okay, let yourself feel that I'm right here with you and it will pass. Let's trust that actually, you know, most emotions will pass through us within about 30 seconds. Right. It may be at most a few minutes if we really let ourselves feel the bigness of the feeling and have a co regulator by her side that can say, you're okay, we're gonna, we're gonna stay with this person, big feeling and not immediately run into, if I'm having a big feeling, there must be something terribly wrong with me and I have to make it go away. So whether It's And It's we all know the story of, of the individual. Maybe It's you who's listening, maybe It's us who's speaking, right. That have had quote unquote, a panic attack and end up in the ER because we think we're having a heart attack. Right? And gratefully, right. The many emergency room physicians, and nurses and PAs and so forth know the difference, right? And can say ah, ah, this is panic and you're not having a heart attack. And hopefully can go the next level of saying and let me hold your hand through this one or let me just sit by you and breathe with you for five minutes and just see what changes. Right? Just five minutes of sitting and breathing with someone can change a life. I Think what happens so quickly, right. We, we, you know, we get a prescription.

Heather Haslem: I, I really love this term co regulator by your side. that is a beautiful way to describe what you do as a somatic therapist. and I'm curious in the context of like titrating and you know, too much too soon, too fast and sitting with someone, like how do you modulate that within your own practice?

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: I think titration can go in both directions. Sometimes we can pace things too fast and something, sometimes we pace things too slow. So It's very much a conversation that we get to have with the people that we're serving to, you know, to really listen to what is, what is their capacity for that, you know, what is their emotional bandwidth or where might they get stuck and that we're, we get to kind of be those Co pilots. Right. We talk about the co regulator but in a sense when we're working with others, we're also the co pilots together of like, how's the pacing, how's our altitude level? Right. Do we need a little bit more gas? Do we need a little bit more breaks here? And that when we are working with people, perhaps the most important foundation is that they feel safe to tell us what's working for them. for those that aren't familiar with this term of titration, It's this term from chemistry that says, hey, if we take all of the baking soda and the vinegar and we toss it in the mix together, we get that third grade science experiment of the volcano. Right. We don't necessarily want the volcano moments in therapy. Sometimes they're just too overwhelming to be able to digest and process. But we take a dropper full of vinegar, we put it into a spoonful of the baking soda and it fizzles up and it you know, drops back down. So as we're working with pacing in the psychotherapy room, as we bring attention, our vinegar to somatic experience, the baking soda, we're going to feel a bit more, that's the bubbling up and we want to modulate or titrate. How much of that attention towards somatic experience are we ready for? Because we don't want to open up all of the gates too fast.

Heather Haslem: And I appreciate what you're saying too about being in dialogue, conversation with your client so that you're not going too slow too. Like I can, I've seen and witnessed like a slowness that doesn't seem in service of a client before too. because they still seem, that they're still stuck. and, and It's a safety issue mechanism. But sometimes I think if you don't, if you think that you're the expert, but you're not allowing that person to be the expert of their own body, that's when it can be a challenge. And so It's trusting that that person is the expert of their own body, not you as the, the clinician.

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: That's exactly right. Yeah. It's It's And you know that we can both look for the signs of safety in the sense that I want to know that you, know a client that I'm working with can say no to me, can tell me what's not working and also can tell me what is working so that we can navigate that, that path together.

Heather Haslem: And in our, in our world that wants things nice and clean cut. And here's, here's the protocol. you, this work is the. Not that.

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: It's not. And I think that It's actually something I deeply appreciate about somatic psychology is that It's resisted the, the urge and the pressure perhaps within the field of psychology to proto to be protocolized. you know, I'm an EMDR therapist as well and EMDR does work with a protocol. And what I've found over I've been trained in EMDR for 23 years is that, you know, you have to know how to modify the protocol. Sometimes It's helpful to have frameworks. And what I love about being a trainer in somatic psychology is I do give frameworks. I do, you know, talk about how do you set up a session and what's the arc of a, of a good somatic therapy session and so forth. So that we know how to cultivate somatic resource, for example, so that ultimately we can turn towards the felt sense in the body of the impact of traumatic experience. We also can then listen for impulse in the body that allows new experiences to emerge and then we can take the time to integrate those experiences into an overall sense of self. That would be an arc of a, of a somatic therapy session. And you know, we need to know that the healing isn't linear. It's not like we just go through, okay, we're going to build our preparation, we're going to build all our resources. Now we're going to work on the trauma. Now we're going to do integration. Right. It's It's very often a little bit of, you know, a little bit of a cha cha. Right. Like a two step, two step forward, one step back. We build some resources, we go towards the trauma, we go back to resource development and so forth.

Heather Haslem: I love that. So as we wrap up today, is there anything else that you'd like our listeners to know or understand?

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: Yeah, I think that when I'm what I'm witnessing today in the emergence and It's a beautiful thing. I'm so glad somatic psychology is taking center stage and we can start to see somatic practices on TikTok and on YouTube and on, you know, all of these social forums and, and the only caution that I want to give out there is that those aren't always modulated or tailored to really recognize the impact of the somatic experience and process. I'll share a personal example of this. When I started studying somatics and mind you Again, I was 23. I had a lot of my own trauma to unpack. I cried every single day for three years. I wept. I was like, how many layers does this onion have? It was such an unpacking and an unwinding of myself, into ultimately what felt like a very cohesive core of myself that I can now reside in and deep, deeply trust. And it took years. And it doesn't mean now that I still don't sometimes have layers that I, that I work through and heal. But somatic psychology is not a quick fix. And I just caution those that think that It's a single practice or a single, big session that's going to, you know, open up the gates and I'll now finally be this whole embodied person. It just doesn't work that way. It's really the small accumulated practices that create the lasting, meaningful change. Thank you.

Heather Haslem: I'm so glad you named that. if people would like to work with you, learn from you, how can they find out more about your work?

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: Probably the best way to stay in touch with my offerings is through my website to sign up for my newsletter. So if you subscribe to my newsletter at Dr. Ariel schwartz.com you will find out about trainings and retreats that I'm offering, that are both for the clinician and then I have, retreats that are sometimes yoga based. And, I have lots of books out there. I have a YouTube channel that has lots of extended yoga classes and shorter somatic practices that you can follow along with me.

Heather Haslem: M Wonderful. We'll include those in the show Notes, and on our webpage and and just want to A deep bow of gratitude for sharing yourself and all of the wisdom and knowledge you've acquired on your journey.

Dr. Arielle Schwartz: Thank you so much.

Heather Haslem: Thank you for listening to CASAT Conversations, your resource for exploring behavioral health topics. We hope you found today's conversation timely and meaningful. Please share this podcast with your friends and colleagues. If you want to learn more, visit us at our blog at www.casatondemand.org. CASAT Podcast Network This podcast has been brought to you by the CASAT Podcast Network, located. Within the center for the Application of. Substance Abuse Technologies, a part of the. School of Public Health at the University of Nevada, Reno. For more podcast information and resources, visit www.casat.org.