Welcome,
Everybody.
Today,
My guest is Ariel Schwartz,
And I'm delighted to have her.
She is a very well-known somatic therapist,
Author,
And speaker.
And now,
Of course,
We meet everywhere we go.
So true.
It's so lovely to be with you,
Janina.
Thank you for having me.
Oh,
A pleasure.
Because I remember,
I actually was remembering today that we met as part of an online somatic therapy summit,
Which probably happened in 2020.
When everything went online.
Right,
Right.
And I remember I was the host.
So I got to introduce you.
And then,
As you started to speak,
I thought,
Oh,
My gosh,
We come from the same place.
And I just I loved,
I loved the the way,
The way you talk about what you do,
Not just what you talk about,
But the way you talk about it.
I appreciate that a lot.
I think it is something that I've tried to close the gap on between the intellectual idea of concept and the embodiment of concept and how to be an embodied teacher.
Right,
Right,
Right,
Right,
Right.
So you manifest it,
You don't just talk about it.
Exactly.
You know,
It reminds me just that phrase right there.
I've been a yoga teacher for some 30 years.
And I did my teacher training in 1996.
And I think it was the first time that I felt a teacher manifest an experience,
Because the teacher was guiding us through yoga nidra and a guided body scan.
And I remember that each time he named a part of the body to bring our awareness to that part of my body completely lit up in a way that I had done body scans before.
But this was different.
And I thought to myself,
He's embodying this as he's guiding us through it.
And that's why I'm feeling it so differently.
Yeah,
Yeah.
And that's,
That's kind of that somatic communication.
Yeah.
And so you went from being a yoga teacher to a therapist.
I did,
Although I they,
In some ways kind of co co arose for me,
I did my yoga teacher training in 1996.
In the spring of that year,
And I had just come off of working as a kind of field therapist field staff,
Doing nature based therapies with adjudicated youth youth at risk.
And I decided at that point,
I needed more education,
I was ready,
I had my undergrad in psychology,
And now I needed more.
And that was the year that I also that fall 1996 also started the somatic program at Naropa.
And that kind of launched my official journey of being a therapist.
Right.
So for those who are not familiar with Naropa,
Naropa University is a Buddhist university.
And it has one of I think,
Only two somatic therapy majors in somatic therapy trainings in the entire United States.
That's right.
And especially in 1996,
There was the California Institute of Integral Studies.
And there was Naropa at the time,
And I applied to both,
I got into both.
And I chose Naropa for two reasons.
One is that I liked the grounding in the Buddhist practice.
And I also chose it because I fell in love with Colorado.
Yeah,
Yeah.
Right.
And Boulder,
Colorado is a very beautiful piece of Colorado.
Yes.
And like San Francisco,
Which is where CIIS is located,
Boulder is a real hub for somatics.
And so moving here at the time,
Peter Levine was housing so much of his SE trainings here.
I learned with Christine Caldwell,
Kukuni Minton,
Pat Ogden.
And so all of the early sensory motor and Hikomi was rooted right here in Boulder as well with Ron Kurtz.
Yeah.
So you were kind of in the somatic heartland.
True.
I was going to say in the soup of the somatics,
But yes.
Okay.
So basically you've been doing both for many years.
That's true.
And your work really came in for me pretty early on,
Because as soon as I launched out of my training in somatics,
I started working in community mental health.
It was before I went back for my doctorate.
I did that starting in 2002.
But for the three years in the interim,
I was in community mental health and I had also trained in EMDR at that point.
And so I was the go-to trauma girl and everybody was sending these really complex clients to me.
And I started to learn about complex PTSD and dissociation and feet first landed in that world and scrambled for a while.
And then eventually really got deepened into how do you work with complex PTSD?
And I recommend certainly the Fragmented Selves book to literally everybody that I work with,
Every single training that I teach,
Because it's kind of,
In my words,
The Bible of working with complex PTSD.
Oh,
Thank you.
Thank you.
I thought you wrote the Bible.
That's very complimentary.
I think we all kind of cross influence each other.
It's one of the things that I love about this field.
Yeah,
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
This podcast series is very cool because I get to talk to people who I rarely get to talk to,
Who I've known for a long time and with whom I have so many points of intersection.
That's right.
Yeah.
Including that first job in community mental health,
Where you're thrown into the pond of trauma.
Yes.
Yes.
And that continued for a long time.
I think I started in community mental health in 98,
99,
And I continued in that arena until for at least the next eight,
Nine years.
And then I had kids and I had to find a way to figure out how to pay my bills and pay for childcare and pay for the.
.
.
I think it's one of the real realistic challenges in our field is that I actually couldn't afford to stay in community mental health because it wasn't going to pay my bills.
Right.
Right.
And then I went into private practice and I tried to find ways to kind of make up even for my own guilt of leaving community mental health because I have such a value system of service.
So I took Medicaid and I found ways to do some pro bono work.
But ultimately I've been in the private sector since about 2008.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean,
It's so unfortunate that the community mental health system is where we all start,
But most people can't afford to stay in community mental health.
Yeah.
It's one of the challenges of the larger systems of healthcare today,
Isn't it?
Absolutely.
But as somebody who worked,
I do so much training for Canadian,
Australian and UK therapists who have somewhere between six to 12 sessions a year.
So,
You know,
By comparison,
We're actually doing pretty well by people.
That is very,
Very true.
That is very true.
And I want to say that I,
For the most part,
Got to see people in those services for as long as they needed to be seen and with the frequency that they needed to be seen,
Which is kind of mind blowing.
It is.
It is totally mind blowing.
Yeah.
And you've integrated all of your somatic work with EMDR,
Which,
I mean,
My experience is the somatic piece brings so much value to EMDR.
Yes.
So I was trained in somatics first.
2001,
I did my EMDR training,
And I couldn't not do a somatic EMDR approach because somatics was already my foundation for the previous five years.
And so,
You know,
In some ways that became a very natural and I tried,
And in fact,
I learned a very strong lesson because I tried to do classic EMDR protocol,
And I actually felt like it did damage,
Because what happened was that I was overriding my own somatic signals with a particular client who was dissociative.
And,
You know,
I'm kind of trying to follow the protocol and the EMDR way of working.
And it worked,
You know,
I want to say like with quotation marks for you air quotes for anyone just listening to this,
Like,
It worked in the sense that the client could report to me verbally what she was seeing and how the image was changing and how the belief was changing.
But what was happening is that she had disconnected from her own body.
And so when she went home after session,
She got triggered by an event with her girlfriend,
And she ended up cutting herself that evening pretty severely.
And she had not been cutting for quite a while.
And it was a huge wake up call for me,
Because when I went into my own consultation and supervision afterwards,
My body was giving me all the signals.
And I was observing all the signals in her body that she was dissociated when she was reporting that everything was working fine.
Right,
Right.
And I have consulted to so many of those cases where the dissociativeness wasn't evident to the therapist.
And,
And the,
The client seemed to be benefiting by the standards with which we're taught to evaluate EMDR success.
Right,
And their,
Their suds went down to zero,
Because they dissociate.
Exactly,
Exactly.
And in fact,
Like what I love about working somatically is that we can understand why in some cases,
Especially with with an individual with more dissociation,
That actually,
The embodied awareness,
The suds might go up,
And that that actually can be a sign of good therapy.
And I think that can be confusing for classic EMDR therapists,
If they don't understand that actually,
This person is now sensing and feeling and now the real healing can,
Can occur.
Right,
Right,
Right.
And of course,
The problem for the people I consulted to,
Was that they,
They completely decompensated.
Yeah.
And,
And not only started to self harm,
But in many cases,
Were not able to work,
Were hospitalized for long periods of time.
And it was so it gave me great,
Great respect for how powerful EMDR is,
But how important it is to differentiate who is really a good candidate.
Yeah,
Yeah.
And it also brings to mind something that I'm observing right now.
And I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
But I'm I pay a lot of attention,
Certainly to your work and the evolution of your work,
As well as Ruth Lanius,
And Bethany Brand,
And the Finding Solid Ground work that they're coming out with right now.
And even my work with the Applied Polyvagal Theory in trauma recovery.
And I feel like we've all really shifted our orientation to be so resource heavy,
And to recognize that so much healing can really come from finding solid ground and proprioceptive awareness and feeling safe and oriented in the here and now.
And that the memory focused or the reprocessing of traumatic memories doesn't need to sit as the,
I don't know,
Maybe the gold standard of trauma treatment.
Oh,
I'm so glad you said that.
Because I have actually had a problem with this event focus since the early 90s.
And I didn't say anything.
Because in the early 90s,
I was still,
I was still not licensed.
I was a postdoctoral fellow in Judith Herman's clinic.
And I just thought,
Nobody's really going to be interested in my critique of trauma treatment.
But I thought,
This is not,
Why are we not focusing on the effects?
Why are we focusing on the events?
Yes,
Yes.
And,
And actually,
That's something,
When I became an EMDR consultant,
Was something I really emphasized with my consultees that,
You know,
As in sensory motor,
You just use the event as a way to stimulate what is unprocessed.
And then your focus is the implicit elements,
The image,
The cognition,
The body sensations,
And feelings.
And,
You know,
EMDR did break great barriers by asking about body sensation.
The really the first to outside of the body psychotherapy world,
It was the first method that actually mentioned the B word,
As I call it.
But really,
I feel like in the EMDR training,
What should be emphasized is,
You're processing the implicit elements.
And you're not processing one event at a time.
I mean,
I have had clients who had hundreds of traumatic events by many,
Many,
Many perpetrators,
You know,
Up to 50,
75 perpetrators,
And they wouldn't live long enough to process each event.
Yeah.
You're also really bringing to mind that like,
What we're processing when we're speaking about the implicit experience is kind of like the imprint that it that it carries within our nervous system,
That leads us to be either chronically stuck up here in vigilance,
And in re-experiencing and in our sympathetic nervous system,
Anxiety,
Panic,
Jitteriness,
Restlessness,
Or conversely,
Within the nervous system to be stuck in states of shutdown and powerlessness and despair and,
And nothing I do is going to make a difference.
Shame,
Right?
And now we're working with the nervous system.
And so we can start to experiment with how do we rebalance there?
Right,
Right,
Right.
And,
And if we help people to rebalance their nervous systems and,
And widen their windows of tolerance,
They could actually benefit more from all the other things we do.
Yeah,
Yeah.
And sometimes it reduces the need to spend all of that time focusing on the event.
Right?
Yeah.
Right.
And that's,
That's really what I've been focusing on lately is don't process events.
I haven't processed an event in literally in probably five to 10 years.
Right?
Because I I'm focused on the implicit nonverbal memories that are getting triggered all day long.
Yeah,
Yeah.
You know,
And,
And something else that really strikes me and something that I've gleaned so much from you and your work is around structural dissociation and that particular perspective on parts and how powerful it is when we can help someone access a present orientation or a here now self or why self whatever we want to call that.
But also to look at the way that parts can have very different nervous system states and very different kind of memory systems that are dominant.
Right,
Right,
Right,
Right.
Yes.
And,
And,
And certainly it's very confusing for the client and sometimes for the therapist too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And,
And to know that we can in a sense,
Start to create a depth of understanding or what we'll call a case conceptualization that that is capable of holding that much complexity so that we know,
You know,
At least have some knowing of like where the client might go or where they might get stuck.
And also where we might sometimes get stuck with them.
Right,
Right.
Absolutely.
Yes.
As we often do.
Yeah.
But now if we get stuck,
I assume that that's a structurally dissociated part,
Right.
Or some conflict between parts has led to the stuckness.
Yeah.
And that's just opens up a whole new way of approaching those stuckness,
Those stuck moments.
Yeah.
I love that you brought in the conflict between parts.
I think for me,
Cause my background was in gestalt.
That was really where I came into all of this and working so closely with Betty Cannon who's here in Boulder.
And and so,
You know,
I think that often when we can get in touch with that core polarity as it's living inside,
Like I want to be close,
But I'm also afraid to be close to you because I don't know,
I have all of this implicit memory of times in which closeness brought harm.
Right,
Right,
Right,
Right,
Right.
There's so many of those.
So many,
Right.
I want to be able to feel my feelings.
But every time I get close to my feelings,
I have all of those memories of everybody else who couldn't handle my feelings.
And I can't handle my feelings.
Well,
Or I have the parts with overwhelming feelings,
Trigger parts that have the experience that feelings are not safe to have because you'll be punished for them.
That's right.
So,
So often there's that's the protector parts are trying to,
To stop the vulnerability,
Not because they are afraid of disapproval,
They're afraid of being harmed.
Yeah.
And the same,
The same with being,
Being happy,
Because that's another state that's dangerous in a traumatic environment.
So true.
And it goes back,
You know,
Kind of loops us back to why spending time on the front end of therapy,
Building a capacity to feel safe enough to be okay.
One of the other influences you had on me,
You don't know these stories.
So you get to hear them now.
But years ago,
You presented at a psychotherapy networker conference on the topic of neuroplasticity.
And I had the not only attended,
But the recordings of your talk.
And I listened to that over and over because I was,
It must have been like 2017,
Just to orient you to when that talk was.
Yeah.
And I listened over and over because you were really one of the first people in the field that was linking the topic of neuroplasticity to trauma treatment,
And especially building positive neuroplastic change.
Right,
Right,
Right,
Right.
Yes,
I remember I was,
I really,
I mean,
I still love thinking about neuroplasticity.
Yeah.
There was something that you said at the time,
Which was around that in order to facilitate because we all know neuroplasticity can go in either direction,
Right,
We can reinforce that,
Which we don't want,
Or we can reinforce a new positive shift.
And you use this kind of description of how we have to basically like,
Catch or stop the habitual urge to go down that negative loop and redirect the patterns of our mind and our body and our emotion processing.
Right,
Right,
Right,
Right.
Which is very,
Especially at that time,
Was very,
Very hard for therapists,
Because,
You know,
Most therapists were trained to listen,
To never put words in the client's mouth,
To never say,
Tell the client what they were thinking or feeling.
And certainly to interrupt a client in mid-sentence was like a,
You know,
A violent crime.
And so it really,
You know,
And I,
Obviously,
Dan Siegel was the person who made neuroplasticity a topic,
To think,
Oh,
My gosh,
If we don't interrupt,
We may actually be making the trauma-related patterns worse.
Right.
That's right.
And what I find maybe,
You know,
Kind of like counter to what that training,
The original training was,
Is that when I interrupt or purposefully disrupt a client who's looping in a pattern,
And I say,
Hang on a second,
It seems like there's a part speaking,
Or it seems like that,
You know,
You're looping right here,
You're stuck.
Or,
Hey,
I noticed when you're talking about that you stop breathing,
You know,
Like when I when I interrupt,
Actually,
They're appreciative of it,
Because they feel seen,
They feel recognized in the stuckness,
And it gives us something to work with.
Right.
And you probably have had the same experience I've had.
I have never had a client get upset that I interrupted,
Never had a client say,
You know,
You're not listening,
You're not being respectful.
And so,
I think,
Despite what we were trained to believe,
Clients can handle it and,
And they appreciate a dialogue.
Yeah,
So really want a monologue.
That's right.
Although I will say that there's been a few times over the years,
And I and I'll kind of name this more as a characterological influence.
But there have been a few times where,
You know,
All of the the most well intentioned interventions or offerings that I have around directing,
You know,
Directing us towards positive change,
That I will have clients that get angry,
If I'm urging us in that direction,
And or have interrupted.
Right.
And then,
You know,
If that occurs,
We get to look at that too,
Or learn from those moments.
Yeah,
Yeah.
Well,
I definitely have had clients who couldn't tolerate positive feelings.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Even relational intimacy,
Right?
Like it's,
It's a very relational exchange,
When I said something just happened right there.
And I'd love to invite you to pause and see what that is.
But that is intimate.
Too intimate for some,
For some clients.
I usually find,
If I'm asking them to notice,
It's,
It's not.
It's maybe because I'm talking to the medial prefrontal cortex.
So,
Which is not concerned with intimacy.
Right?
It's very,
Very,
Very interesting.
Yeah.
Um,
Right.
I'm,
You know,
I may actually ask people to notice in a slightly more distant way.
Yeah.
Rather than in a let's us notice.
I love that.
It's reminding me of actually what turned into a really beautiful exchange.
But I was,
There was a moment where I noticed that there was a deeper,
Fuller breath that happened,
Pardon me,
With a client.
And it felt so positive that I brought attention to it.
And because I noticed it,
It was almost like it was a little too much too fast in being witnessed in that positive shift.
And she said to me,
It was brilliant,
Because,
You know,
There was enough safety to say this back.
But she said,
Oh,
I don't know if you if you were supposed to see that yet.
Right.
And it was such a great moment,
Because I said,
I'm going to give you space to notice it for yourself first.
And I'm still right here.
And I literally just took my gaze away and gave her enough space to be with it until she was ready for that to be welcomed into the fold of connection.
Yeah,
Yeah.
I mean,
I've,
I've had clients who told me,
Don't say anything positive.
I can't handle it.
Yes.
I remember I had a client who kept saying,
Every time you say something nice,
I think strings attached.
Because for her being treated warmly,
Meant somebody wants to exploit me,
I'm being I'm being groomed.
So all of those,
You know,
There's so much about psychotherapy that's triggering for people,
Including the word body.
That's why I call it the B word.
Because,
Because I found that I had,
I mean,
Not a huge,
But probably 10% of my clients were so triggered by the word body,
They couldn't engage in somatic work.
Yeah.
So I had to cut the word body from my vocabulary.
Because,
Because they could say,
Head,
Neck,
Chest,
Arms,
Legs,
Anything,
Any body part word was okay.
Physical was okay.
But just not the B word.
So I had to learn how to do somatic work without saying the B word.
I love that.
It's,
And it's such sensitivity,
Right to like,
What is accessible and and relatable and,
And a way in and listening to those ways.
And it also reminds me,
I was going to bring this up before with Ruth Lanius's work,
But it's been so relevant for me as a yoga teacher,
Because there's a way in which turning towards the proprioceptive sensory experience can kind of be I'm almost want to say like,
Like a side gateway in to embodied experience that feels a little safer than interoceptive felt sense of the body.
So proprioceptively,
Like a weighted blanket or some swaying back and forth,
Or even standing up and balancing,
Right,
Like something that helps me feel where my body begins and ends in space.
And especially with trauma and dissociation,
When I can't feel where my body begins and ends in space,
Because I,
That was how I coped was to turn off the sensory knowing,
Right,
Just to start to even feel like my hands pressing into something,
As in feeling the muscular engagement in my arm so that I can feel where I begin and end.
There's,
I don't have to feel all of the inside stuff.
Very stuff.
Yeah,
That's,
That's what I found too,
Is that,
Is that most clients could,
Could tolerate noticing their arms and legs,
Right?
They're kind of the,
But it's the,
The inner body that they had the most trouble with,
Especially dissociative clients.
Right,
Like the,
I can work from the periphery and we'll eventually work our way to the core.
Right,
Right,
Right.
Or not,
Depending.
Or not,
Right.
I think that's such an important piece,
Like just that little bit or not,
Right,
Because it takes the agenda out of the equation.
I don't have a goal that we have to be body centered,
Even though I'm a somatic therapist.
Right,
Right,
Right.
And,
And certainly we don't have to go into the body.
Like,
You know,
There are many methods.
IFS is one where,
You know,
The messages go inside.
Well,
That's a terrifying message for many traumatized clients.
So why would I start by saying something really scary,
Like go inside when I could just say,
Notice that tension in your arm?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Which is usually not hard for people to do.
I already feel myself sensing that like a takeaway for me is that that word notice is going to land itself so centrally in my vocabulary.
Yeah.
I mean,
I feel like that's probably one of the most valuable things I learned from sensory motor psychotherapy was,
Was helping people to notice just even,
Even just the bare bones of what they were feeling.
Yeah.
It's beautiful.
When we work somatically,
I think one of the things that I love about it,
It goes back loops all the way back to where we started,
Which is around an embodied transmission,
If you want to use that word,
But like that,
That so often when I'm teaching about somatics,
I say it's not the set of interventions that we come away with.
It's the embodied presence that we bring as the practitioner or the therapist that forms the foundation for everything else.
Right,
Right,
Right,
Right.
Absolutely.
Yes.
And that's,
I think that's the beautiful thing about somatic training.
Some of my very best sensory motor students were graduate undergraduate somatic therapy students,
Because they were very,
Very good at tracking their own bodies.
And,
And they didn't have any bad habits to overcome.
Exactly.
They didn't need to talk about it.
It's just,
To me,
It's whatever,
Whatever method we're using,
If we can notice moment to moment what's happening,
That method is better.
Yeah.
And,
And,
Oh,
I know where I was going,
Because you were talking about embodiment,
Being able to notice our own bodies.
There's a phrase in sensory motor that I learned from Pat,
And obviously you'll know this well,
But this embedded relational mindfulness,
The experience that in a way psychotherapy is a shared bodyfulness.
I'm going to borrow Christine Caldwell's phrase here,
But I guess it's a shared bodyfulness.
It's a shared beefulness,
Or mindfulness journey together,
Where we're both observing,
I'm observing what's happening with me,
I'm observing what's happening and noticing what's happening with you,
You're noticing what's happening with you,
We notice the space between us.
Right,
Right,
Right,
Right.
Yes.
And,
And even if the client can't do it,
There's a value in the therapist being able to do it.
Absolutely.
That at least one of us is embodied.
Yeah.
Totally.
I'm thinking of someone that I work with who I know I have permission to speak about,
But so often,
Because he'll go up here,
Right,
He's so skilled at doing that,
And has so many protective functions to go up into the intellect.
And to like,
Watch literally that my center of gravity meets him up here.
And the next thing you know,
We're two heads talking in the room.
And then I remember to settle myself back,
And I literally will set further back into my chair.
And I'll let my breath descend into my belly,
And I'll sense my own body in the room.
And even without inviting an invitation for him,
I then see the deeper breath,
I notice that he slows down,
I notice more affect expression in his face,
Just with me remembering to make the shift.
Right,
Right,
Right,
Right.
Yes.
Yeah,
It's amazing.
And,
And that's,
I think,
That's,
That's what I was noticing about how,
How you embody what you do.
I think it,
It,
It actually makes the job of being a therapist easier.
Yeah.
Right?
It's,
I mean,
I remember writing somewhere that sensory motor had added 200,
000 miles to my tread life as a therapist.
Gorgeous.
I didn't have to work as hard as somatically as I did as a talking therapist.
It's so true.
And to me,
I feel like the lessons that I gained the positive lessons,
The upside of being a somatic therapist that I relay in my teachings to others is that when you work in this way,
Because you're paying attention to your body throughout the session,
You're going to notice if you're getting stuck in a funky position,
Or if your posture if you stop breathing,
And like,
As is,
I'm now paying attention to that I'm going to take care of me the whole session while I'm also attending to what's happening in the other end.
And I'm less tired at the end of the day,
I don't feel like you know,
There's as much compassion fatigue.
It's a prevention for burnout.
Right?
Right.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Oh,
My,
It's so good to talk to you.
And,
And good to hear,
To hear how you do what you do.
And I hope our listeners are inspired by it.
Thank you.
And,
And,
Likewise,
It feels like a gift to be able to share with you how much your work has really been a huge influence on how and why I do what I do.
That's great.
That warms my heart.
Thank you so much.
