Overview
What if trauma healing is less about excavating one awful moment and more about learning how to move through life again with skill, support, and a steadier nervous system? I’m joined by Dr. Rochelle Sharpe Lohrasbe, a clinical counselor, educator, and supervisor with four decades of experience in complex trauma, dissociation, EMDR-informed work, and deeply somatic approaches to resilience. We talk about the philosophy behind her upcoming book, Trauma and Somatic Healing: Wayfinding and the Intelligence of Experience in Therapeutic Practice, and why “wayfinding” can be a kinder, more realistic framework than trying to conquer trauma head-on.
We explore how trauma therapy can become too reductive, focusing on pieces without enough time or space for integration. Rochelle shares why resourcing matters, how “state becomes trait” can turn adaptive survival responses into identity, and why shifting the conditions around a person can be just as important as what happens inside them. We also dig into how language shapes healing, how clients and therapists can get stuck making trauma feel too big, and how building capacity through smaller steps can restore movement and hope.
One of my favorite parts is Rochelle’s use of nature metaphors: the self as a landscape, emotions as weather, and learning to surf internal waves instead of becoming the tsunami that wipes everything out. We end with a grounded conversation about contentment, authenticity, and the kinds of relationships and daily moments that quietly rebuild a life after trauma. If you’re looking for trauma-informed, body-based insights on complex PTSD, dissociation, somatic healing, and resilience, this one is for you.
If you enjoy the show, please subscribe, share it with someone who needs it, and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. What’s one idea from this conversation you want to try this week?
Chapters
0:00 Welcome And Guest Introduction
1:40 From Nursing To Trauma Therapy
6:30 Why EMDR And The Dissociation Path
9:30 Working With Youth And Pushback
13:40 Wayfinding And Seeing The Whole
19:10 Trauma As Learning And Reframing Meaning
22:10 Nature Metaphors And Conditions For Thriving
26:10 Energy As A Missing Layer
32:10 Stop Making Trauma So Big
41:10 The Self As Landscape And Surfing Moods
49:40 Agency And You Are Not Broken
53:20 Home Contentment And Closing Announcements
Full Transcript
Welcome back to the How We Can Heal podcast. Today our guest is Dr. Rochelle Sharpe Lohrasbe, a clinical counselor, educator, and supervisor with four decades of experience working with complex trauma and dissociation.
Dr. Sharpe Lohrasbe specializes in dissociative processes and developmental wounding, and her work integrates deeply somatic approaches to healing and resilience. Her approach centers resourcing and brings wisdom from years of EMDR and sensory motor practices. Known for her warm, client-centered approach, Rochelle brings deep curiosity to the lived experience of the people she works with, exploring how life events shape our nervous systems, our sense of self, and our capacity for connection and healing. Alongside her clinical work, she teaches and presents internationally, helping expand trauma-informed and body-based approaches to care as a sought-after consultant, supervisor, teacher, and trainer. She's just finished crafting the wisdom of four decades of experience into a book, Trauma and Somatic Healing: Wayfinding and the Intelligence of Experience in Therapeutic Practice. It's a guide for people and professionals on the path of healing, and we'll get a taste of what's to come there today. Rochelle is an amazing human with a heart of gold, and I'm honored to call her a friend and colleague. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Rochelle Sharpe Lohrasbe to the show.
Rochelle Sharpe Lohrasbe welcome to the How We Can Heal Podcast. So happy to have you here.
Thank you for having me.
Often start by asking folks how they got into the world of therapy, trauma therapy, somatic therapy. I'm super curious to hear just the evolution of your work as a psychotherapist. Like since you started doing that work, what are some key concepts, things you've learned that have brought you to where you are today? Okay. A little bit of that journey.
Oh my gosh. So just a fun fact last August, I crossed my 40th anniversary of working in psychotherapy in mental health. Nice. It's been a bit of a road.
Yeah. A four-decade journey as a psychotherapist. That's an arc right there. There's a lot of history. Around and about.
So it really started. This is a weird story, but it really started with me wanting to work with Jane Goodall in the jungle with chimpanzees. Yes, I get that. Yep. And that is was really would have been my passion. I love Jane Goodall. I would have loved to do that. But there I was in high school going, how does one get from New Westminster, British Columbia to the African jungle? And what does one need to do in order to make that happen? Well, Clueless Me decided that it wasn't realistic. So I set off to find out what the next best thing to chimpanzee behavior was, and I came up with humans. So I entered psychiatric nursing as a way to be helpful, as a way to be practical. I can hear my mom's voice saying nurses will always have a job. So it seemed like a kind of a win-win. And the bonus was after all that formal education, it was only two and a half years of more schooling. So off I went and I became a psychiatric nurse, which landed me in male maximum security. Okay. Yeah. As a psychiatric nurse, I was in male maximum security on a ward that had people come in by order of the courts for a psychiatric evaluation. And so these are people who have mental health issues that are intersecting with criminal behavior or the law in some way.
Yeah. So that was my training ground. Thrown in there with some of the deepest trauma and behavioral circumstances.
Yes. So I learned there that old saying that hurt people hurt people. Yeah. Right? It was pretty obvious to me that these folks were not really the same as a lot of people walking the street. They look like it in many ways, but there were things going on for them in histories that were coming to bear in their relationships, their life. So I spent about a decade working in forensic psychiatry. And in the meanwhile, I went back to school and became a general nurse. And where did I go for my days off from my regular job? But the emergency department in the local hospital. Nice little rest. Some respite in the ER. And that was in between softball tournaments. Okay. Yeah. So I had some balance. Wasn't all work and no play. Yeah. But it carried on in school, and the easiest path educationally was nursing. So I got a bachelor in nursing, um, bachelor of science in nursing. And then that still didn't quite prepare me for I'd say the level of independent practice. It was works in a system, but stepping out on your own without any kind of supports, I would not suggest that an independent practitioner wants to take on a forensic population.
Yeah.
Right. So I started looking for other ways to be helpful, I guess, with people. And I ended up doing a master's degree in learning and development. And that brought me into developmental psychopathology, which brought me towards risk and resilience.
Yes, that was the title of my master's program, Risk and Resilience.
All right. So you know a lot about this, right? How what helps people be resilient, what gets in their way. And around about the time that I met that moment in education was about the time that trauma therapy started to be taking off, right? Yeah. So I would say my initial exposure
was more of a Rogerian. Yeah. In nursing, human beings are biopsychosocial sexual beings. Yeah. Uh, we approached them with unconditional positive regard. Yeah. But something didn't quite cut it in the trauma department.
Okay.
And I felt like what I was doing in that was simply reinforcing for people, trying to make them feel okay about how things weren't working, not helping them discover different pathways or learn different skills or become more of the person that they wanted to be. I would just keep reflecting the difficulty and yes, and that's hard. And like I wasn't going anywhere with these folks. Yeah. And that took me to EMDR. Okay. That was a more of a protocolized, kind of a scripted thing. It's pretty controversial originally. Yeah. But it's come around to research. So and I was really looking for something that was tangibly helpful. Yes. Right. I didn't want to be a talking head. I didn't want to tell people what to do. Right. I wanted to understand what it was for them that wasn't working in the way that they wanted to. And then try and kind of reverse engineer that so that we could try something different. Yeah. And EMDR, I started to see some successes. So that kind of kept me going in the trauma lane. Which took me further into the trauma lane, which ended up down the dissociation uh back street. Yes. Because that wasn't very welcomed either in the 80s and 90s. It took quite a while, right? For that to get more traction and more respectability.
Awareness, acceptance. Funny thing how dissociation takes time to get awareness, isn't it? Bubble bubble bubble. Yeah. Comes up. Yeah.
So in a sense, that's kind of the journey in a nutshell through backdoors, meanderings, nursing. Education department was learning and development. And then my PhD, I shifted over to a faculty called Child and Youth Care, which was a fledgling department, and became the token cohort for the therapeutic stream about working with children and trauma, which is where I had meandered to in my practice.
Same as me in that stage. And I did a specialization in adolescence in grad school. So I was all in the middle schools and
high schools. And it's a fun population to work with, you know, and either you believe that and feel that or you don't, is what so many people I met, like, wow, how do you work with that population? And so many of the people I worked with were like, yes, we love working with this population.
Yeah.
What attracted you to them to working with kids, adolescents? I think I really appreciated the very developmentally appropriate questioning of things, right? Like wanting to know, well, why do you want me to do that? And if everyone's telling me to go to college, well, why should I go to college? And and what about if I feel something different? How do I resolve that? If someone's telling me this is the best career path for you or this is the best option, and I feel something different. And that's more of a superficial example. But in all these ways, I felt like youth are so intelligent and yet they're in this hopefully positive pipeline, right? Sort of, you know, structure to lead towards employment and function in the world and all of that, be able to take care of yourself and this economic structure. But there's just there can be a lot lost in there. And so I feel like for many youth, not all, there's absolutely the quieter ones, there's absolutely, you know, trauma and dissociation happening. But I feel like there was a sense in the populations I worked with of, and I think this is true with dissociative clients I work with in private practice now too, of if something doesn't feel right or is unjust, they're aware of it and they have feelings about it. And they'll sometimes, oftentimes, push back against it. And that just feels so healthy to me. And so it felt really good for me to support that in a way that hopefully was constructive for their lives, that didn't have them pushing back against a system that then shifted the pipeline they were in, right? Like, and put them in a way that was ended up harming them. But like, let's really this is a skill. Your wisdom, your intelligence, your clarity, um, your lack of taking bullshit is a skill. And how you use that skill is going to determine just how your life evolves and what environments you're in and who's around you, and how people, particularly adults and and people in positions of power in relationship to you, how they respond to you. So I felt like I had this genuine sense of appreciation and celebration of them that they could feel. And then I could be like, all right, let's map that out. If you go tell your teacher they're full of crap, like, how is that gonna, or if you, or if you respond, you're rightfully angry and you respond by punching someone or something worse. Where's that gonna go? And I think when you develop, you know this, when you develop trust with that group and they know you kind of get where they're coming from and you're on their side in terms of like, I value you, I I believe in you, I want to support you, then that can that could just be such a beautiful relationship, right? And then you can also see systems sometimes be responsive and change and and be more supportive than maybe they were structured to be at the outright, right? So lots of layers to it. Lots of layers. What about you? What called you to that population?
A lot of what I picked up probably around and about my master's degree, where I got a real sense of what learning and development was about and and how we're often told, but we're not guided. Yeah. That was a something's not right there. Yeah, it's a myth. Yeah, it doesn't work. So and I really felt like something was being missed in I don't know if I say the general population's understanding of how we learn and how we develop. Yeah. So it's even kind of a funny thing that we're talking about this because this is actually one of the reasons that I I set out to write wayfinding. Yes. Because it
started with what's in the appendix, which is a human growth and development chart across like seven different domains. And that came up because in my consulting work with therapists, I got a sense that they had no idea what to expect from a nine-year-old. And not that age is a good guidance of intelligence. I know lots of six-year-olds that are more intelligent than some 15-year-olds, but these kids that didn't have someone to meet them because the adults were all looking at where they were at and kind of projecting that on a kid. Like, you should know this. And like, what? What do you actually what's your expectation here? Yeah. And so in the consulting, it I figured like, how come people don't actually have this as a through line for the client they're working with? So I started with a chart. Yeah. And that actually factored in quite a bit into wait a minute, now people don't know how people learn. Yeah, this is problematic. We can't just tell you to do something different and expect you just go out and make that happen.
And that differentiation between telling information versus guiding. I think we were both talking about that, right? You have this inner sense, let's work with it, instead of this is the way, allow me to show you. Not even allow me to show you, I'm gonna show you.
Right.
Like this is the way, and you must follow it, you must learn these facts. And I remember even in middle school teachers that were, it was like the new thing to promote critical thinking. And I remember them saying, like, you don't need to remember the dates. I just want you to understand why this is important. It's like, wow, like that was progress in education in 1990, right? And it continues. So talk about what is alive for you today, this wayfinding concept that you've written about and have really dove deeply into.
Gosh, it's kind of challenging sometimes to talk about because, in a way, I think of it as it's a delicious curry, and it has so many different layers and flavors and spices that this is actually what wayfinding is about is sometimes we get lost because we're trying to reduce things so much that we can't hold the whole.
Yeah, we can't just enjoy the curry, right?
Yeah, but when you get the curry and you get all the flavors at once, yeah, even the same curry can be different at different times because you never get it the same. And that's really reflective of human experience. Yes. So I wanted to find something, and I I have to say, in the culture, in the industry that I'm embedded in, there's a real I feel like there's a real desire to reduce things, which in my view is at times leading to fragmentation rather than resolution. And although yes, we need to break things down sometimes into their components and look at how they fit together, when we do that and only do that, we've lost the whole. Yeah. In very important ways. Absolutely. So I get concerned about that. Yeah. Because there sometimes isn't the time, even though you're breaking it down in therapy, but once clients feel good enough, they're gone. And so you don't get to put it back together again in a way that really supports them moving back into their life independently, wholly, and in complex ways, because nothing is simple anymore.
Would you it makes me think of Judith Herman three-stage model, stage three, right? Like I feel like in trauma therapy, and depending on the context you're in, too, it you typically are more focused on resourcing for a long time, building some sort of stability or safety. And then however it shows up, it's never linear, but processing stuff, trying to make sense of it, move through, moving through emotions or grief or things that have the impact of what's happened in the body and the mind and nervous system and brain and relationships and career, all of it. Right? That's like tofu and green beans and tomatoes and onions and spice. And then, like that third stage of integration, of moving forward or being in this regenerative sort of stage of life is like the mixing and tasting of the curry and enjoyment of it. And would you say it that it translates that way? That we're just not in terms of trauma treatment, that we just don't have as much time to be with that wholeness, to support the richness of it, to maybe even be with some of the positive growth and thriving and experience that can happen in that stage, even
after really gnarly trauma. True.
If we think about traumatic experience as a learning experience, there's lots that we can learn from that experience. And not all of it is negative. We learn sometimes a strength that we didn't know we had. We learned that we could look to a person that we had never realized was there before. And maybe it was our own story that pushed that person aside as an option of support. I I learned that in my master's degree because I studied young women who had offended as adolescents, but made a conscious decision not to pursue that as a lifestyle. And the significant difference was mother asking them where they were going and what they were doing before they offended was intrusive, mean, controlling, all those things. And when they looked back afterwards, they just reframed the same behavior as caring, interested. And that was fascinating to me. And it it kind of tracked back to learning.
Yeah.
What do we learn from these experiences? So, in a way, healing could be seen as the product of learning from traumatic experience. Why should that be much different than any other experience? Because it didn't feel very good. I get that part.
Yeah.
But that's not the only thing we're trying to resolve here to make the pain go away, right? Sometimes within that pain, we learn something else.
Yeah.
So I'm hoping that maybe we can shift the narrative a little bit. And let's face it, a lot of people's resources are exactly what gets pathologized into symptoms of nasty stuff. Yeah. And then once you've got that and it becomes turned into your identity, it's very hard to take that. It's like taking your arm off. Right.
Yeah.
My trauma.
I it would be like taking my arm off. Right. Because there are ways that we've responded to it, right? Ways of coping that some can be just helpful and others can end up causing more harm, but they become really integral to who and how we are.
Right.
In the book, I use a lot of nature metaphors. I was just thinking about that. And I love it and I'm here for it. And I celebrate it. Thank you for sharing the book with me as well. It was an honor to write. An endorsement for it and to have a preview into it. You know this. I love being outside, trail running, just like Mount Diablo the other day, sunshine, flowers,
water, earth, a cave that might have had a mountain lion in it. You know, like I love it. So talk about that. How did that become such a central part of the book?
I really wanted to speak to people in plain plain English, plain plain language.
We can all relate, right? No matter what language you speak, we could, I think we can all relate to the planet. We're all stuck to it by gravity.
We all know what a seed is for the most part, right? So let's plant some seeds. So this whole thing, part of what you're talking about, we learned in trauma therapy as state becomes trait. Yeah. You occupy a state often enough, it gets evoked often enough, it becomes a trait, more like a pattern of how you behave under conditions. Yes. So state, in my view, state becomes trait, it becomes identity, it becomes system. And I think about that as a seed to a plant, to a flower. And it there's a whole life cycle that goes with that to a fruit and then a grove of trees. Yeah. And one of the things I think that we're missing in the trauma world is we're not looking at conditions, conditions of thriving. Yes. Conditions, not inside the person, the resources they have, not access to resources outside them, but what's the nutrition like? As a condition for me to be a person having an experience is going to influence the nature, the characteristics of that experience.
Yeah. And there's so many layers to environment and context. And just like if we're looking at a cell in a petri dish, we're looking at how everything in there is impacting that cell, right? We'll put different environments in the same sample of cells and go, okay, which drug is it responding well to? And which one is the mold growing the most in? Or right, like we're looking at how the environment impacts things. And there's so many layers to human environment, right? Sociological, political, economic, environmental. But again, no matter what country you live in, no matter what political system and what's going on there in terms of how people treat other humans, we're all connected to the earth. So that's a system we all share. How are we connected to the earth? What's our relationship to that connection? Because it's there, it's irrefutable. I don't think any human on this planet can be like, well, I don't depend on oxygen or any nutrients from the planet. You know, I know people are manufacturing protein in space these days, but I think we're still pretty connected and dependent on the earth, but it's not something we think or talk about. And in fact, and I know you know this, the whole field of ecopsychology purports that that split, that dissociation, that lack of awareness of that relationship or that intentional disconnection, trying to thrive independently of the earth. We could frame that as an initial trauma. Absolutely. And it's detrimental, an attachment trauma, even, yes.
And it is absolutely yeah, and in a long-term way, it goes nowhere. It leads to more dissatisfaction, more disconnection, more dysregulation,
all those things. But sometimes when I ask what's beneath something, I what I notice is that we've been conditioned in a way to look pretty far up the ladder of what's underneath. So as much as I'm not wanting to deconstruct things, if I did deconstruct them, I would actually argue that energy is what we're missing. The level of energy. Where does energy come from? Where do you get energy from? How do you pull a rabbit out of a hat when you need energy suddenly?
Yeah.
Where do you get it from? How do you sustain it? What happens when it's not available? Yeah. How does it, you know, and it brings in like laws of physics that we in psychotherapy don't seem to really care about, but in fact relevant. Yeah. Okay. Where do you think we get energy from? Where does your core energy of spirit, the essence of who you are, where does that come from?
Oh, my brain goes so many places, right? Because in yoga, prana is energy, life force, and it isn't the breath, it rides on the breath, right? So some people might say, oh, well, it's oxygen, it's the elements within the breath. And yeah, we do get energy from oxygen, we get energy from food, we get energy from the sun, we get energy from all these things, but it also makes me think of in a moment of crisis, right? I have a child around. If she trips on something and I'm within distance, I get immediate energy to go try to catch her, right? I could be so tired. She could have kept me up the entire night last night, but that energy is there. And where does it come from? Instinct, right? It's instant instinct. I'm like, catch the child. And I it's funny because it's happened in public before where she's we're running next to each other and she stumbles and I catch her, and like a stranger will be like, Wow, nice save, mom. Like, thanks. The energy comes from wherever. Same thing with traumatic experiences, the way we respond, that energy, that decision comes from so deep, but it's there.
I'm kind of calling calling that source energy. Okay, yeah. And I I don't actually have some of these answers myself, I don't think. But where does it come from? You mentioned a lot of great ones, it comes from metabolic energy. We food, we get energy from that. It comes from thermal sources, right? Comes from chemical sources. We don't even think about that when we're thinking sometimes about traumatic experience and what's happening.
And then people like think of I'm so excited to be talking to you right now. That gives me energy. Like this podcast and the conversations I have here. I hope people share this listening, but like it gives me joy, it gives me energy. It's there's something about spending physical time with people that you love that can, or even people you don't know. You can, you know, especially folks in the therapeutic world, kind of get a sense of how that other nervous system's going, what the energy's like in that body. You can feel, oh, that person feels really sad. Maybe they're grieving. You can feel, oh, I'm so happy to see this person. We haven't seen each other in so long. And there's an energy to there's an energy to any and every interaction and relationship. And that, just like you said before about the curry, is never the same, right? It's like you might have state to traits of a relationship too. Like I could guess if we're gonna hang out, we're gonna joke a little, we're gonna have fun, we're gonna have some deep conversations. It's on brand, but it's still new, it's different every time. Yeah, I love it.
And really, what's that about is us oscillating, our frequency, the energy is oscillating roughly the same, not the same, because your reality, my reality has to be different, right? Right? Of course, easy to point that out for people today. Do you do you really have a sense of what it would be like to live on Yap Island? No, I know, so that's a different reality, and I can cross over and try and explore that as a different reality because I have a brain and I know how to manipulate energy to do that to some extent. I conjure up an image, right? So I can kind of travel there in a way, I can do a little bit of this. Yeah, and I think we use that sometimes in trauma therapy too, because really what we're saying to this person who's had this experience under certain conditions, is I'd like you to imagine a different scenario, a different way of being. Yeah. That you can take what you know from this, i.e., how to keep yourself safe, who's a trustworthy person, but you can actually be also the person you'd like to be, not completely weighed down by this, but maybe actually buoyed a little bit about some of the things that you learned, and you can have a different reality. From over here, it's hard to see that.
Yeah, from that highly impacted, and we'll just say, I know you and I share this like positive, negative experience is a little too binary, but we can summarize that when something's traumatic, we can call it an undesirable or or not so positive experience. So, from that negative impact or the weight or the residue of the traumatic experience, it can feel challenging too impossible to connect with that energy of what it would feel like to thrive or to
no longer be impacted in those ways. Yeah. Right.
Let's aim for contentment because the world we live in keeps telling us we want these dopamine hits and we need to be up all the time. And that's not realistic either. Right. So let's look for that place where we can have a large portion of our day being in somewhat of a state of contentment. Doesn't mean that there aren't pulls, but we recover quickly, yeah. Or we feel like we have a strategy to work through that. Right. And and people of traumatic experience are amazing, but super intelligent because they've had experience that has challenged them. Yeah. But something can also happen where things pause there. And so that's a four four-dimensional thing. Time, you don't get the sense that time is moving on, they're stuck. And trauma is kind of a 3D challenge, it's limited by its length and width and depth, and only what I can tangibly see and touch. It's much harder to go into some other space and go, oh, this was I'm getting a message that this was actually good for me. That doesn't really feel like that's a trauma piece that most people live with.
And that can feel it makes me think of the saying, everything happens for a reason, right? And how I don't think I've had a single client who loves that phrase. Maybe over time in some limited circumstances. And I've heard variations on it that folks will adapt. Well, I don't believe everything happens for a reason, but I believe that I can take something from everything I've learned, or I believe that I can make something more positive from the things that I've been through that were horrific, or I feel purpose to help prevent this from happening to other people in my direct family and or beyond. So there can be that sense of purpose without it being reduced. And there can be a sense of too part of what I'm hearing you talk about is that source energy that you mentioned, but also the wayfinding, right? The whole concept of wayfinding. How do we find our way when we might feel stuck or we might feel lost, or if there's like a lot of really heavier challenging emotion or experience layering on top? How do we find our way through that?
Right. Gosh, there's so many pieces that that picks up on. The language that we use, for instance, the number of people who describe the work that we do as trauma work. Right. Well, it gets a lot harder when it's trauma work than if it's trauma healing. Yeah. That's got way more opportunity in it to me.
Yeah.
So just the choice of our languaging, how we want to look at our journey, yeah. That can be a big factor in it. The perspective that we're using. I use concepts like valley mind, which is really more like your ego, and mountain mind, which is more like your higher self. So, you know, how do you gain perspective on these things?
I'm wondering for listeners, there's the richness of the curry, there's the elements of the curry. When you think of what you've just written and this concept of wayfinding in trauma recovery that's very connected to the earth and very, I want to say like positive or functional, right? It's not let's do the trauma work and get stuck in there. Let's not let's run at the trauma and see if it runs away. Like there are some approaches that are very trauma focused and that might have a time and a place in this very narrow scope, but don't then take into account the wholeness and richness of being a human, of what it means to heal and connect with or to be in an environment that promotes healing and to be a part of an environment that promotes healing. So I'm wondering in having just finished this book, such an effort, I celebrate it. What are some things that you feel like you already mentioned a few mental health professionals, people who are working with trauma can take away that's like just a tweak or a different direction or a support that helps this also not feel so heavy for providers? Because I think a lot of providers right now, I hear this in consultation and in casual conversation with other therapists, that because of the socio-political climate, because of the trauma work, in quotes, people feel a little bit beat down and challenged. So is there anything you want to share about this approach that brings the sense of life or lightness, even as we are wayfinding through a dark and stormy night, we might call it?
Right. I think in a way, this might sound insensitive, but I think one of the things that we could do is stop making trauma feel so big. As horrific, and I do mean there are horrific experiences that people have gone through. And it's not to negate that, but to get stuck on that one experience that prevents movement. So I I see this happening with therapists is that they're trying to conquer that one big thing that happened.
Yeah.
I don't know that we actually need to do that. I think if we took took chipped away at some of the smaller pieces in adversity, we build skills, we build a way of knowing oneself as being able to move through turbulence and difficulty and move out of survival mode. Yeah. So there's clearly people that we're working with who don't get a chance ever to do that.
Yeah.
So let's try and not make it how it needs to be this one big thing that we have to conquer. But how do we learn a way of walking, a way of moving through the world, perspectives that allow us to adjust according to context, according to energy available, resources available, not available, that how people move as a whole?
I think about the trajectory of even the last 40 years in in trauma therapy of not having words for trauma, to having words and having research and having a clear sense of like even the neurobiology of trauma dissociation and fMRI studies, right? Okay, we can actually see this. We're at that point where you could look at a brain and be like, this person's probably experiencing dissociation, which is amazing and impressive and feels real. Like I feel like with mental health, there's like a broken arm you can see, but you can't see this stuff. But no, no, we can. We have the tools and we can see it. So there's the validation of it and the not what's wrong with you, but what happened to you and what's right with you, and what's the environment that you're in? All of those questions. What's the environment you were in? What's the environment you're in now, right? Not just in your life, but the realities that exist and the layers of that in the world. So there's so much there. And like, how do we, and I think your book does this so well, how do we move into language and frameworks and thought that doesn't continue to dive into the trauma, that doesn't make the trauma overpowering. Because first it's dissociative, we're not aware of it, we don't have language for it. Then we go, oh, here's this thing. We have a word for it, we have a diagnosis for it, we have research studies. Now we're like starting to really understand different layers of it. And then I do feel like, and maybe this is just the effect of social media and the way it responds to the way it interacts with us, but it does feel like then people like dive in the deep end of everything's trauma and everything's a mental health problem, and it's a problem, and I have this, and it's a trait, and it's a character, and it's my life. And and it might really feel that way at time, but I think the way you're describing it is the space around it, right? You're coming back to the context, the environment, and the room for growth and centering not just that that growth is possible, but that it's real and it's a super important. I don't even want to say part, it's like the curry is the point. You made the curry, you're eating the curry, that's the point. You are the curry, right? You in your life are the curry that's super tasty and complex.
And so, like, I I feel like we can get lost in like, but the corner of the pan burnt. That part of the onions burned in the corner and then lose the curry. Exactly. Exactly.
I mean, one of the premises in wayfinding is what if you were a what if you envisioned yourself as a landscape? The self, the self is landscape, and this is open to an individual's preferences. For instance, I had a fight with an editor through this process where they kept wanting to use the desert as a negative landscape. And I'm like, listen, some people thrive in the desert. They like dry heat, they like the vegetation. Why are you making it negative? Because it's negative for you. But let's say that I can have multiple landscapes within me. I can have that desert kind of space where things are dry and arid and a bit dusty, and that that's how I'm feeling in the moment. And the weather can represent things like my moods. Yeah. Right. And what happens if we kind of looked at ourselves that way? We're just walking through. Yeah. Does that offer something? You know, sure. Maybe there's a nasty tsunami over there. Yeah. Right. I I recognize that coming up in me. Boy, this is big. Whatever this wave of something is happening in me, this is big. What do I need to know about waves? Oh, I can surf them.
Yeah.
Okay. So, what happens if I look at my own moods and learn ways to surf them instead of being the tsunami that wipes everything out? Does that offer a different way of looking at yourself, a different way of being in the world, using the conditions that are around you in order to walk the way that you would prefer? So, in a way, like when I use curry, it's almost like it's a metaphor for the self. The landscape is a metaphor for the self. And I think, and what I'm what I hope I tried to do was more or less use everyday stuff. Yes. In order to illustrate these things. We don't need any magical psychological pill here.
No.
It's how you connect with the cashier in the grocery store. The quality of your eye contact, the presence that you bring with that. What does that do? And how does that sit with the adverse experiences, the traumatic experiences?
Yeah.
Also, because they're all in the mix.
Yeah.
And what are we hoping? Hoping for, but some flexibility. You're not rigid, you're not a your yourself is not a self like a cutout, like a paper doll cutout. It's not something we can actually really grab.
Right.
It's like how can you feel more solid in it?
Yeah.
And I'm just tracking like a lot of what you're doing with this book and this concept is zooming out. So, like you said in the beginning, we go in and we get really, and this is serves research, right? Let's get really clear about the constraints of this and the construct and define it and take a piece and look at it and examine it, right? That's science in a lot of ways. Let's control for as many factors as we can and narrow it as narrow as we can to know to the best of our ability the mechanism or what's happening here. Let's try to understand it. So we've done that in the trauma world. Let's break it down and let's find these truths as best we can and these modalities as best we can. And you and I know in the world of complex trauma dissociation, you have to be able to zoom out. Absolutely have to be able to zoom out to development. You absolutely have to be able to take into context the environment and just larger context in so many ways. So what I hear you doing in this is zooming out. And that doesn't negate the pieces, it just invites them into something that has more room to breathe, that factors in more things that we don't know, that centers energy and a little bit of mystery there. And that also encourages what we were talking about with adolescence, guidance, wayfinding. Okay, how do you find your North Star? What are other things that help you orient? Right. You and I know we've presented together and at the same conferences about let's ground, let's connect with the earth, let's orient to where we are. And then what? Then we wayfind. Then we, especially if this is like a dyadic two-person therapeutic relationship, we try to figure out what's next. Like, okay, is that is that a path you want to take? Let's let's explore that. Oh, look, it goes into a field of flowers and you like that or you don't like that. Oh, look, that goes up a hill and it's challenging but really satisfying. Oh, look, now you're at the top of the mountain, you have a wider perspective. Now you're in the bottom of the valley and it's cozy and protective, whatever that is. But in that, like we're doing now, using centering the connection to the earth. So I feel like there's so many sophisticated layers in what you're doing. And I celebrate that there's a little bridge at least to just like super hippie visualization, you know, like how many times I've been in a workshop with like a I don't know, meditation or yoga where someone would be like, What's your inner landscape? Right. And so it gives it a bridge there, right? It's a bridge for anyone who's looked for that, found that to be helpful. Like this feels like this wide context that helps hold some really sophisticated depth in terms of trauma healing, in terms of the science of it. I know you've dove so deeply into so many modalities and worked with countless people and trained so many people. And it's like, let's take all that and let's live. Let's let's not forget about contentment or ease or flow, flow or just quiet moments, or the fact that there are trees around us, even if you're in a city at some point, if you keep going, you'll find a desert, or you'll find some trees, you'll find like we are really connected to this earth. And so I feel like there's a lot of layers and complexity there. But what I love about what you've written is because of that, I think it rings true in a lot of ways. You're not dismissing trauma, you're not discounting it. There's a very rich context and understanding of healing trauma and the pain and the realities of that impact. And there's this beauty around it. We're not getting usurped by it. There's this big cushion of possibility, of hope, of life, of connection, of healing and of the planet. Like it's not left out. And I feel like any modality that's had to be, you know, randomized controlled trial. I don't know. Do you know of any RCTs on ecological principles, right? Like on grounding with your feet on the earth, or like I feel like when we deconstruct to that degree, we lose the the solar system element because it's just too complex. And so I feel like you're bringing that really close awareness, dissection, even into this complex masterpiece of understanding. And it just because of that reads really well. It's like, oh, this makes sense. I feel like I have a guide with me. I feel like I have a friend, a wise mentor who's like you could go down that super rocky path without any ropes, but hey, why not just put the ropes in your backpack and take them with you? They're not too heavy. A little bit of wisdom.
Just in case. Just in case you need to why not just, you know, wear the sticky shoes while you're rock climbing? Because you know, today.
I know you don't have sticky shoes out there, but in your mind, yeah, when you're exploring, you just create sticky shoes. It's great.
So, how do you want people to feel while they're reading this book or after?
I think that's the biggest part. I really was hoping to be because I don't really feel like I'm a great academic writer. In my own brain reading academic works, the citations, everything breaks it all up, and I'm like, what did I just read again? Yeah, I've lost the plot already. And I have to read like literally line by line. I wanted to create something that evoked a visceral experience in the reader. Yeah. So that they have the felt experience. And in fact, by reading, they are getting a wayfinding experience for themselves. Yeah. So there's a lot of you recognize this, you do this all the time, but we take it for granted. And to bring that back, maybe to front of mind, foregrounded awareness rather than it just sits back here and we just forget about it. I wanted to convey or tap into people's agency. I think people are stronger than they realize. They've been convinced for various and sundry reasons by various and certain perspectives in the world that they can't do something. And I call bullshit. Sorry. Yep. I think we can do more than we are, but what we get hung up on is we miscalculate the effort that might be required to sustain that. That might be part of it. I wanted people to hear the message that in therapy, I really do believe that we have to kick into high gear with the you're not broken.
Yeah.
There this pathologizing, slotting people in even to take the analogy of the seed to the grove of trees. If you continue to get that message, they're planting the seed, you're finding evidence that it's true, you're buying into it, your worldview is now shifting into believing and aligning with that. And no wonder you can't get where you want to get to because you've bought this hook line and sinker when maybe that's not true. Or at least maybe it's not true for you. Yeah. How could we explore that? So, in that sense, I wanted people, it sounds really cliche, but remember who you are.
There's a lot of truth seeking in what you're describing, right? And again, back to when we were talking about working with adolescents, it's like, well, this is your life, right? People are gonna have their perspectives. You're born into the conditions you're born into that shapes how you see things, it shapes the language you use, and you have agency and you have choice and you have the capacity to self-reference that might get more complex with the ID in the midst of working with it as well, but still you have selves reference, like you have so much knowledge, material awareness that might come and go, but also is there again, going to well, what's true? What's actually true in this moment and what's true for you as you learn and grow and develop as a dynamic self or selfhood? Exactly.
Yeah. And I really think what you're saying
about what's true for you is the key point because you know, some people, what's true for them is God. For some people, what's true for them is there is no God. Okay, it doesn't matter to me which one you want to align with, it's your beliefs, you get to have your truth. But now, how do you want to walk with that? How does that allow you to move in the world? How does that sit with your home? So, home is one of these concepts that I really love in the in this exploration because it's kind of like home has two parts. It's where you dwell, where I go inside when I don't want to be out, right? It's my safe place, it's my very private and protected place, but it is from home that dwelling. From home is where how I move. Yeah. That's gonna have a big impact about in how I engage with the world and with others, yeah. And with myself in the outside world, right? So there's lots of it's kind of funny in this. I made the book almost like it is we're packing for a for a trip. Yeah. The first bit is about gathering our flashlights and our gear, which is our philosophy and our key concepts. Then we need to know some maps about where we're going, which you know, or we're gonna look at energy, dimension, relationship, or even the metaphysical, yeah, and then more practical guides for making that journey. Yeah. Yeah. The last chapter is for the therapist.
Yeah.
Nice proper.
There you go. So I know people are gonna be interested in your book, and it's gone to the publishers, is not available yet. We will put a link in um later this year when it's published. We'll put a link in the show notes so people can access it later. And I want to close by asking you, you talked about contentment. So, what brings you a sense of contentment in your in your life?
I think I am fortunate enough that I have arrived at a place in my life that I can find contentment just about anywhere. Because contentment is more about the relationship that I have with myself than what is happening in the outside world to me anyway. And so as long as I can be close to where I want to be, close to my authentic self, not having to contort in order to get along or to stay in connection, then that's that's pretty good, I think. Yeah. The best place though, I don't know that it's so contentment, but I now have grandchildren.
Yes, that's a different kind of energy.
That's joy in seeing that uh I don't have to carry the load forever now. Yeah. There's new hope on the horizon.
Yeah, you don't have to carry the load of the parenting, you don't have to carry the load of all the work that you've been doing, all this, all the healing you've been doing can be passed down, right? There's the intergenerational elements of that too, and the investment in these people you love so much. And I was thinking as you're talking about contentment, I mean, one thing that's really strong for me is gratitude. So I could have my feisty daughter and you know, telling me, Mama, wear this dress, or and I don't want to wear it, or needing something, or crying, and I'm grateful for her, and I'm grateful that she's expressing herself, even if it's not what I want, or even if it's making my life more complex. So now she wants to do this, and we really have to go. And like, I'm still really grateful for her for her ability to express herself. I'm great, like any situation I'm in, there's always something I can find that I'm grateful for, and that can be so healing, soothing, helpful. Like it's just a positive experience to kind of sustaining, yeah, sustaining. Yeah, it helps. Yeah. So we'll miss you at the conference this year. Maybe something will happen between now and then. Yeah, maybe, maybe in the next week. We'll see you in Portland. Come on down. Can you come by boat? Actually, probably have a better chance of that. Right. Yeah. Portland's not that far from the coast. That would be amazing. Yeah, no, I wish. Yeah. Another year. Another year. Yeah. All right. So we'll keep folks posted on the book. And anything else you'd like to say as we close?
No, I I really appreciate this opportunity. It it reminds me that there are just so many different directions that that we could go in. And wayfinding is kind of about welcoming them all. So I really appreciate your taking the time and offering the invitation to come and talk with you. Wayfinding together.
Thank you, Rochelle.
You've made it to the end of the episode. Thanks for listening all the way through. Now that you've been listening for a while, I'd love to hear back from you. What's an idea or a story from this episode that sticks with you as we wrap up? Or what's one small thing you can do today to choose a step in the direction of healing or growth? Share your answers and what's good healing for you in the comments below on YouTube, on Instagram at how we can heal, or send me a message at info at howwecanheal.com. Also check out howwecanheal.com for free resources, trainings, and the full transcript of each show. If you're listening and loving the show, please leave us a review on Apple, Spotify, Audible, or wherever you're listening right now. If you're watching on YouTube, click the buttons to like and subscribe, and keep sharing the show with anyone it can benefit. Before we wrap today, I want to be clear that this podcast isn't offering prescriptions, it's not advice, nor is it any kind of mental health treatment or diagnosis. Your decisions are in your hands, and I encourage you to consult with any healthcare professionals you may need to support you through your unique path of healing. In addition, everyone's opinion here is their own. Guests share their thoughts, not that of the host or sponsors. I'd like to thank our guests today again, and everyone who helped support this podcast directly and indirectly. Alex, thanks for taking care of the babe and the fur babes while I record. Last and never least, I'd like to send some love to my big brother Matt, who passed away in 2002. He wrote this music and it makes my heart so very happy to share it with you here. Till next time!
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