Somatic Therapy & Sexuality - Navigating Trauma, Intimacy & Embodiment with Ariel Giarretto

What does it mean to heal through the body? In this compassionate conversation, Ariel Giarretto, LMFT, SEP, CMT, CSB—internationally known somatic therapist, sex educator, and long-time faculty member with Somatic Experiencing—explores how embodiment restores safety, intimacy, and aliveness after trauma.

From her early work as a birth doula to her years at the Esalen Institute and collaboration with Peter Levine, Ariel has dedicated her career to helping people reconnect with their body’s wisdom and re-establish trust in pleasure and relationship. She shares how curiosity and presence become gateways to healing, and how missing experiences can create new neural pathways for resilience.

Highlights include:
• How somatic awareness restores safety and vitality
• Navigating intimacy after sexual or relational trauma
• The body’s wisdom in processing and completing trauma
• Attachment styles, boundaries, and embodied communication
• The Full Embodiment Model—integrating pleasure, presence, and trust

fullembodiment.org

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:04

Welcome to the Future of Wellness, exploring self-transformation and holistic healing to unlock your inner potential. Hosted by Christabel Armston and Keith Parker.

Speaker 2 0:19

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Future of Wellness. Today we're joined by Arielle Gioretto. Arielle is an internationally known body-oriented psychotherapist, trauma specialist and somatic sex educator. Her passion is to support people of all cultures and ages in how to find ease and pleasure in their bodies, increase intimacy and find freedom from the grip of trauma. She's the co-developer of the Full Embodiment Model, which offers gentle, transformative workshops for people wanting to heal from the effects of sexuality and gender trauma, sexual abuse and disembodiment. Trained in a wide variety of somatic therapies, she is primarily informed by Peter Levine's somatic experiencing for treating the physiological effects of the trauma. For 17 years she has been a full-time somatic experiencing teaching faculty member training and mentoring practitioners all over the globe. Throughout the 1990s she was on staff at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur and she has extensive training in prenatal and birth therapy with Ray Castellino. Arielle, it's a pleasure to have you on with us here today.

Speaker 3 1:17

Thank you. Thanks for the invitation. I look forward to this.

Speaker 3 1:21

Maybe you could give us a little bit of a general background how you came to work in the field of trauma healing and somatic therapy. Sure, it's kind of a long road, but my initial training was actually very interesting. I was very, very interested in the body more than the psyche, and while I was an undergraduate, working on my degree in psychology, I was volunteering at a birth center and I was a doula and I assisted I don't know maybe 50 births and I just got really, really fascinated by how the body functioned, especially a body like a woman's body, when you're able to remind it that it's designed to birth a baby. And so much of that had to do with removing the fear. So I got very, very interested in the natural physiology of people and animals, actually, I might add. And when I finished my master's in psychology I was very, very unhappy, Didn't feel like I learned much of anything. So I actually went on a lawn sabbatical. I lived in Guatemala for a while and had a small private practice working with ex-pats, Came back to the US and I was invited by a friend of mine to come to the Esalen Institute and I had heard about it. I was interested in it. Those of you out there that don't know it it's a human potential center that is primarily body centered, somatically oriented, has one of the best massage schools ever, and so I went for a month to Esalen and ended up staying 11 years, was very involved in offering sessions to the staff, and I became a body worker, massage therapist, and realized, oh my goodness, how much more I could do with my hands in connection with people, and it completely transformed. What I started to think about is what healing is.

Speaker 3 3:31

In 1999, Peter Levine came to Esalen and I took a few days of his work and that was it. I was completely overwhelmed and in awe by his gorgeous combination of being somatically oriented with a very strong therapeutic orientation. It was just the perfect combination and I felt like I had found home. I was so excited and this was very, very early in the days of somatic experiencing there was only a couple of faculty. The institute at that time consisted of an answering machine. There wasn't even much of a staff there, and so I was really very much early in the development of it, which is such an incredible honor. So I pretty much followed Peter Levine around the planet, and that brought me into Europe, where I started to do all sorts of somatic experiencing sessions with second generation of war survivors and again this focus on trauma and how it's passed down intergenerationally. And so I was working in Germany, and I was working in Switzerland and Denmark and doing a lot of SE sessions and realizing, oh my goodness, how different each culture is in terms of its reactions to trauma, its reactions to trauma, as well as how beautifully Essie worked as a model that blended and moved depending on who the client was and depending on what their history was. So it was an incredible experience for me, and I did that for many, many years Around the same time I met Ray Castellino.

Speaker 3 5:25

He's a friend of Peter's and he has developed a very somatically oriented program to work with from conception into the first couple of weeks of life, and so I got heavily involved in his program. I did his training and then, similarly to what I did with Essie, I started assisting him, and so for the longest time I was kind of back to my doula roots, but instead of working with pregnant people, I was working with people who had survived their own birth trauma, and that was really, really fascinating, and so that's kind of what my foundation was. And then so I had a private practice. I'm originally from California.

Speaker 3 6:16

I was in the Bay Area after I left Esalen and had a private practice and for some reason I got a whole surge of women primarily queer women coming in struggling with infertility, and so I started to like scratch my beard, you know, and try to figure out like what's going on here. I'm acting like Freud now. What's going on here that all of these women are coming in and what's the thing? What's the one thing? That seems to be some of the issues, and I realized it had a lot to do with being disconnected from the pelvis and it got me back to realizing that how many bodies shut down when there's fear, and that's what happens in a hospital setting, even under some of the best conditions. But when you start to bring in IVF and everything that's involved in a hospital environment with infertility, there's a similar level of I just need to disconnect from my body here in order to survive it. So I realized I needed to do some more training, which is kind of my way of doing things, and at the time I was also very involved in a big sex positive community, which is probably one of the greatest things that I've ever experienced.

Speaker 3 7:41

For six years, during the time I was in the Bay area I was doing a lot of workshops on sexuality. I was exploring my own sexuality. The community I was in practiced just absolutely beautiful consensual, non-monogamy practice and I just learned so much about communication. I learned a lot about sexuality, sensuality, how to be honest in multiple different kinds of relationships. So I was doing this, my own sort of exploration on sexuality and pleasure, while at the same time working with a variety of women that were really struggling with that. So I decided to do some education on that and I went.

Speaker 3 8:31

At the time there was this university it's not there anymore, but it was called the Institute for the Advanced Studies of Human Sexuality in San Francisco. They offered a PhD in sexology and they also offered a very intensive three-month course to become a somatic sex educator. So that's what I did with this very intensive program and it was completely life-changing and I learned everything there was to know about working with men's bodies, with women's bodies. I learned to do pelvic floor work, internal work. I learned to work with orgasms, lack of orgasms or orgasms that happen too quickly, a lot of sexual dysfunction, vaginismus, and it was just exactly what I wanted in order to take the work that I was doing one step farther. So since then I've sort of stopped doing other than when I teach SE, which covers all different kinds of trauma.

Speaker 3 9:36

I've really focused on what I call sexuality trauma, which is not necessarily sexual assault or, you know, even incest or sexual abuse. It's what I think everybody has, which is multiple, multiple generations of shame having to do with just having a body, particularly towards women, and just the whole way that people frame sex. That has made a profound effect. I mean, you really see it in the US, with the big religious overlay and the disconnection that people have and the shame that people have about having a body and about being sexual, having a body and about being sexual and I thought this was a huge issue and I wanted to tackle it. So my mission now is again primarily because of the SE community. I do.

Speaker 3 10:35

I teach many, many, many trainings for the SE community in very, very different countries and we don't at all touch on sexuality. We don't really touch on sexual trauma very much. It's kind of glossed over because it is so triggering for people. And I realized a lot of the practitioners that I was training and sending out into the world to deal with trauma, they had no idea about how to ask people well, what are you noticing in your pelvic floor right now? You know this whole area was completely ignored, even though we spend a lot of time going inside and tracking sensation. The pelvis was sort of you know the red zone. You know no way stay away. And I wanted to change that. I want my you know my graduates to have a sense of comfort in their own body, but primarily I want them to be able to work with people who have had sexual trauma or who have sexual dysfunction or relationships issues and have a comfort and ease in that. So 10 years ago I formed this full embodiment with a very good friend of mine.

Speaker 3 11:52

You know there's not a lot of choices in terms of somatic sex education. There's, you know, ASECT in the US, which is very traditional and very disembodied, which I find hilarious. There's Tantra, which doesn't normally inform traumatized people for traumatized people, and when I was at Esalen I took dozens of Tantra workshops and so many people were profoundly triggered and so many people were profoundly triggered by the tantra workshops. It was too much, too fast and it kind of belched out a lot of people that were deeply affected by it not being trauma-informed enough. So I'm trying to fill that gap, you know, between you, know beautiful, soft, consensual interest in being embodied without there being the pressure.

Speaker 3 12:54

While you need to do this exercise, to get better and recognize that everybody needs to be approached in a much gentler, invitational way, Like the interest to be sexual, to be in their bodies, to explore their bodies through sensation or touch, absolutely needs to come from the inside, their own interests. Otherwise, I'm just one more person that's doing things to them, and many times things were done to them that they didn't want to do. There was no choice. So, you know, I've spent a very, very long time and I would say, if I was to summarize what my particular program is, it's not really focused on trauma, although we obviously deal with it, but it's really focused on recognizing what is destroyed, what is harmed, um, by generations of of sexual shame, and particularly what is harmed, uh, and destroyed by having early sexual, non-consensual sexual experiences in the form of incest or sexual assault, and so I'm rebuilding those pieces. That's the focus, and the focus is, like what is primarily destroyed, which is the relationship to the body, right, the other thing that's destroyed is choice.

Speaker 1 14:26

The other thing that is destroyed is pleasure without shame, and how to really help people learn to stay present with sensations before they either dissociate, check out or collapse into shame Kind of what it's all about, really appreciate the rich tapestry and the picture you're painting here, which is so important because Keith and I have explored and looked into this area in multiple different ways and it's a complex area in which to work and it's a complex area in which to work responsibly and effectively. So really appreciate you establishing that framework at the outset here as your intentions and the rich background you're holding. We do want to keep the attention with the work you're doing with sexuality, but just to help seed for people who aren't familiar what exactly is somatic experiencing, just the sort of premise of it, because I think that's going to give an opportunity for people to understand where you're sort of coming from and how it's different from other therapeutic models.

Exploring Somatic Experiencing and Trauma

Speaker 3 15:26

Absolutely yeah, and I love to talk about it because I'm very proud of the model. Somatic experiencing was developed about 50 years ago by Peter Levine. His background he was a medical biophysicist, but he was also really, really interested in animal behavior, holding this question why is it that animals wild, animals in the wild, why don't they develop post-traumatic stress like humans do? Of the stress response? And he realized that animals know exactly how to return their nervous system, their body, to the pre-threat state, right? So you know, a lion chases a gazelle and the gazelle gets away and the gazelle knows how again to return its body and there's a variety of things that it does it shakes, it kicks it and it resets the nervous system.

Speaker 3 16:32

And people don't do that. You know, primarily we are not that connected to our bodies and when something bad happens to us we tend to just carry on. You know it's like, oh yeah, my arm's broken, who cares? I need to finish building the shed. So people are notoriously bad at taking the time to check into their physiology.

Speaker 3 16:56

So SCE is all about how to include an awareness of the physiological responses that happen when we're talking about intense things, but also about pleasure. Yeah. So the SE therapist, someone comes in and they say I want to talk about my mother and the SE therapist will say well, what happens inside when you think about your mother? Yeah, so we're working with memory, we're working with cognition, we're working with emotion, but we're also bringing in this other layer of awareness that when I talk about intense things, that my body is having a huge reaction. That could be holding the breath, it could be dissociating, shutting down, it could be fighting it, it could be getting hysterically emotional. So we just are always adding this other layer of awareness and it ends up really going deeply into what the problems are, because we really can't think our way out of our problems and we can't really emote our way.

Speaker 3 18:08

I learned that in Esalen, where Gestalt was all about emoting and catharting and Essie is a very quiet, internal slowing down and really starting to understand and give people tools that when they find that they're getting activated, we call it or triggered by something. We provide tools for them that helps them notice it, recognize it and be with it and in some way, like animals, do relax it in some way. That's the simplest way of doing it. And when someone has a specific event or a big trauma, we take little, tiny, small pieces of that, because when we are exposed to intense situations, things are happening too quickly that we actually don't notice a large number of the things that are occurring, and so, by slowing everything down, we are able to start embodying and noticing these details, and sometimes the details are incredibly positive. Yeah, incredibly, what we call resourcing. Yeah, incredibly, what we call resourcing. And so we rework events and we also help people to regulate we call it themselves in their daily life, and that's all done through the physiology.

Speaker 2 19:37

Thank you for that overview of somatic experiencing, and Peter Levine's work in that model has really become the paradigm for trauma healing. Today. It seems like it's ubiquitous, so I'm curious, as we step forward into the domain of sexuality and sexual healing, what differentiates that? Would you say that, for instance, there are fundamentals of sexual healing or sexual trauma healing, like fundamentals of having healthy sexuality or intimacy with others? That help us differentiate it from other things?

Speaker 3 20:07

Yeah, Well, I think there's a couple of things in the first one. Number one is the hardest and the simplest, but interestingly enough, it has to do with presence. When we have trauma around something, like somebody touches someone inappropriately as a child, the adult is always going to remember to some degree that touch is dangerous. And so there's this, this, these imprints that happen with sexuality, and so when you're working with people in their sexuality, sensuality, it's almost impossible for them not to go into the history, because that's what they learned about touch, intimacy and sexuality, or they're jumping into the future. Well, you know this good, safe touch that my partner is giving me now, which is different than the touch that I got as a child. It's OK now, but what happens if it changes as a child? It's okay now, but what happens if it changes? So people are either caught in the past or they're worried about the future and that they're not going to be able to handle it. And so the hardest thing of working with sexuality and sensuality and people who have had harm done to their bodies is to keep them in the present moment, and so so much of what SE is about is how to stay here, right here, right now, how to work with the sensations that come up, and what's interesting about sexuality is that sexual arousal, otherwise known as just being horny, is just blood flow. Basically it's a collection of sensations and a lot of people feel huge amounts of shame about those particular sensations. If they have warmth in their chest, they might go, ah. They have warmth in their genitals, going to go ah, yeah. And so a lot of the work also is separating out that the sensations that happen in the genital area should not necessarily have any more charge than the other kinds of sensations, and how to help people just stay present with oh, it's warm, it's tingling, it's pulsing, and to allow in the deliciousness of that when it shows up in the genital area. But there's just so much that is piled on top of that that it's very, very difficult. So that's one practice.

Speaker 3 22:53

The second one that is important is bringing people back again to the awareness that moving towards others for affection, connection and sexuality I mean sexuality comes later, but it's our first and deepest impulse to move towards others for that loving connection and being held. But when that is damaged as a child, then obviously intimacy and affection also becomes deeply charged, and so part of the work that I'm doing is helping people get back to those original impulses, right, like who were they before they were traumatized? Who were they? Who we were before we are traumatized by our sexuality is deeply sensual creatures, you know. I mean babies are fascinated with their hands and they want to suck them, they want to play with them. They have no shame until somebody comes in and says, you know, don't do that.

Speaker 3 24:01

So a lot of what I'm trying to do, which is what I did with birthing women, is to try to return people back again to these very deep, natural and essential impulses to move towards intimacy. Yeah, and then noticing everything that gets in the way of that, which is complex. So I mean, it's again. It's a lot more complicated than that, but that's a lot of the two things that I am primarily focusing on, and what I'm trying to do with people is to help them reclaim their body on their terms, at their pace, in the way that makes sense to them, and so that means that I start doing a lot of self-touch exercises. We might just start with fingertips and helping people get fascinated by all the different qualities of the sensations in one finger, you know, and then we might move on to the top of the head and the hair and very, very slowly have people explore every centimeter of their body, hopefully from a place of curiosity and awe, and so we just keep building that, depending on how much people can tolerate, then we will eventually work into the genital area and again see if they can. Again, we're not necessarily going for orgasm or anything, we are just going to invite all parts of the body to be acceptable.

Speaker 3 25:44

Nipples, you know, like how do you embody and celebrate the sensitivity in nipples without doing the US thing, which you know it's disgusting. We don't feel this way in Europe. I love being like being here in Europe where people take their clothes off without even thinking about it, you know. But God forbid that you show a nipple in the US. You're going to get arrested. It's so stupid. So you know again, it's challenging those social constructs of what's allowed and help people again find their own experience, their own pleasure, their own interest. So that to me is really a core piece of rebuilding someone. And for some people that might take a couple of days of exploring the body in a workshop, or people who have profound trauma it could take a year, two years. It's all self-paced by how much they can tolerate and how much interest they have A brief pause to thank you for listening to this episode.

Speaker 2 26:55

If you're looking to take the next step in your transformation, find out how we can support you with our popular energy healing training, one-to-one private sessions, free resources and more.

Speaker 1 27:06

Visit energyfielddynamicscom to learn more learn more when sexual healing, or, sorry, sexual trauma isn't necessarily originating with the individual. You spoke there at the beginning of this idea of the buildup of the multiple generations of trauma, the shame that somebody might feel towards their body, which is often, as we found working with people, it's often, often at least to some extent, unconscious, subconscious. Let's say, an individual's listening to this male, female, they've been fortunate enough in their life not to necessarily experience what we might call direct sexual trauma. Right, you know childhood abuse or rape or incest, but there's, there's a starting seed of acknowledging discomfort, something's not right. You know things, things are not in flow. How is it that you're approaching this level of sexual healing from that intergenerational or ancestral perspective? Because we're familiar, say, with modalities, shamanic healing, which looks at generational healing, family constellations, which is working very directly with family fields. How is this done in your work? Or via the sort of SE practices where somatic methods being used to address inherited trauma or this ancestral patterning you're referring to regarding shame and sexuality?

Multigenerational Trauma and Healing

Speaker 3 28:23

Well, sometimes it's a simple question, right, it's like I'll invite someone to feel a part of their body. Again, they may or may not have necessarily sexual trauma, but they look at me and they go well, I'm a little embarrassed to do that and I'll say, okay, that's fine, that's fine. And who else in your family may have been embarrassed? In your family may have been embarrassed, right, like ask the question? Or who else may have given you a message that it wasn't okay to feel yourself in the presence of another. And so you start to differentiate, that most shame is learned. I mean, there is it, obviously we. It is a part of us. But when it comes to sex and sexuality, a lot of our experiences with our bodies and our bodies not just sex comes from messages from other generations, usually our parents, it could be our peers, it could be anywhere. And so first I want to ask the question, you know, is this your belief, or is this somebody else's? Who may have told you that that wasn't okay? Yeah, and then who may have told and it's often mother or father. Well, who may have told your mother that that sex was sinful? Yeah, where do you think that originated? And so, as we start to realize how far back it goes. Then there is that the question that I always ask people is like, okay, well, let's just magically for a moment move away those influences and how do you want to be in you, like what's? How do you want to be in your own sexuality and sensuality, even though you've been getting these messages for multiple generations? So so I mean, I guess I answered your question. It's mostly just identification of is this really true for me, or is this something that somebody told me, and what do I want to do with that? Do I want to believe that or do I want to have my own experience?

Speaker 3 30:43

One of the things that I think we all have to realize and this is kind of trigger alert, you know is that almost all of us, you know, is that almost all of us, especially in the US and a lot of, you know, europeans is that we all come from war.

Speaker 3 31:04

You know there has been war for multiple, multiple, multiple generations, and one of the and I think this came out in the Ukraine one of the ways that people win wars is by raping, you know, and so we all have a history in our bodies, we have a felt sense of rape and we also have a felt sense of being rapists and we can't really separate ourselves from that reality because it goes back. I mean, that's what the Romans did. It probably went on even before the Romans. So there's also we have to ask. We also have to ask sometimes, when there is a lot of fear about having sex, how much of that is also because our ancestors were so brutalized sexually. So it's not just the messages that we are given, it's also how our you know how our bodies remember to some degree being either brutalized or brutalizing, and I think that's a very important thing to think about, although it's pretty activating.

Speaker 2 32:09

Yeah, so specific to that body memory piece. You know, we're really focused here on the soma and we can't imagine in ourselves consciously what 10, 20, 50 generations ago physically happened as a memory, so to speak. Deconditioning and then reconditioning ourselves seems like a very complex process. So I'm wondering if you could speak to that a little bit, and particularly in circumstances where the signals seem to be confused within ourselves from one stimulus Like, for instance, there are circumstances in which somebody might be raped or be raping and enjoy that, and you know, not because they consciously want to enjoy that, because the body memory on some level is enjoying that, ethics in a sense, or our moral orientation to what we think it should feel like versus how it might be experienced somatically in certain cases, and then go into the healing in which we have to kind of neutralize it and recalibrate ourselves to those sensations.

Speaker 3 33:23

Yeah, thanks for the question. Well, I mean, you know, the whole study of epigenetics is fascinating and there, there, some people say that we have a clear sort of cellular connection to as many Some people say, seven generations back, and I've heard as many as 14. So I think it depends on what you read. But the way that I look at it is it's more like this Right, I come from, on my mother's side, a very, very, very religious family, right, and what I know about my great-grandmother, even though she had lots of children, is that she was a devout Mormon and they absolutely detest sex.

Speaker 3 34:09

So I imagine my great grandmother lying still while her husband is impregnating her and the little one that is formed of that union of probably dissociation and stiffness and really a negative experience. The whole generation gets those messages. Yeah, you either get it on the inside of the womb, right, that sex is dirty, or, you know, whenever grandpa approaches grandma, great grandma, she goes into some kind of stiffness. The one on the inside embodies that. I mean, there is a direct experience of that. And even if it's not the one in the womb, like I said, the family picks up the energy of the negative sexuality. And then those children. It's almost impossible for them not to pass on that same kind of rigidity or stiffness or something. Yeah, and I'm just really aware of that because I know my great grandmother was very religious and she passed it on to my grandmother, who was actually a crazy woman, you know, and very sexual, actually a crazy woman, you know, and very sexual, and then, but my grandmother passed on to my mother sort of the morals of the great grandmother and my mother was totally petrified of sex, you know, and that came from her grandmother who came, who got that from the religious leaders far back. So, you see, it gets passed down.

Speaker 3 35:56

I think it's somatically, I think it's energetically, I think it's cellularly, I think it's in the field, you know, and we have to fight really hard not to allow that to happen, you know not, and to have a lot of conscious awareness and work on ourselves. And you know not, and and to have a lot of conscious awareness and work on ourselves. And you know, I mean I do a lot of work with people. Even you know my generation and some of them are still absolutely petrified of sex because especially of the religious upbringing in the US and it's hard to break through that. Yeah, and you know my goal is to help people not pass that on to their children. You know, I want all of that negativity to somehow stop here so that the next generation doesn't have to be burdened by all this shame and disembodiment. So I don't know if I answered your question, because I mean, I think there are just so many ways that this does get passed down and some of it's just gathering information from the ancestors, you know.

Speaker 1 37:10

Yeah, it's wonderful to hear you sharing about those, uh, collective fields, as it were, of information, of contact and and so much of the work we do here at field dynamics.

Speaker 1 37:18

And we have the modality of energy healing in terms of working with people, but just bringing presence to, to the fields, right, the fields of information, what's held in the body, um, and the, and the energy field from our perspective too, and it's it's an area that's only just really starting to be considered more seriously and there's so much potent work to be done there.

Speaker 1 37:38

I'm intrigued by something you shared, ariel, at the beginning, just briefly about. You said that you experienced a transformation of what your idea of healing was at a certain stage in your career, and it's a question that I like to ask in terms of we have this healing that's sort of, you know, banded about and used, but what is healing from your perspective? Is healing ever complete? You know, especially in this world, that we're talking about where we're dealing not just with our own linear process, right, our own personalized process, but we're extending it beyond, you know, into these collective fields. You know family, culture, society you mentioned how different societies deal with trauma and then you know, maybe most broadly at this level of humanity, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Healing Through Replacing Missing Experiences

Speaker 3 38:23

Well, I think it's all of those things that you just said. I think one is that I know that when I was trained as a psychologist, I was really taught that healing was about letting someone talk about their issues and we're going to be a wise authority around helping them heal. And a lot of that has to do, I mentioned earlier, with sort of emotional completion, of emotional completion. And one of the things that I absolutely love about SE is that we look at the trauma, right, we look at a bad thing that happened. So you have a child that was abandoned and they grow up and they have deep, deep fears of being left. They don't know how to do intimacy and they're really struggling. And traditionally it would be just, you know, kind of talking about that and reflecting and, you know, being a good listener. But what Essie does is and I love this question to me, healing is the question of, well, what didn't get to happen back then? We know what did happen. Well, what didn't get to happen back then. We know what did happen, but what was missing that made it so challenging for that person. So, SC and the work that I do with my sexuality stuff is I, like I said, what is harmed by sexual trauma? Is we bring in that which was missing? Is we bring in that which was missing? So healing comes from the experience of something new and different, not what we experienced. We look at what we experienced, we feel what we experienced, we recognize. You know the impact of that. But then we sit with now wait a second, what did that little one really need at that moment that he or she wasn't getting?

Speaker 3 40:15

And if we go back to what I said about our deepest wiring, which is to move towards others, a lot of times people are hurt by trauma. They have a hesitancy to move towards others. So we want to do everything we can to help them have a felt sense, experience of what they didn't get right. So that would be the presence of a regulated, loving, welcoming other. What that does is that sets down a new neuron, a new neural pathway of ah, this is what I was missing. So instead of always orienting towards the trauma, now they go oh, now wait, I want to be in a relationship where I feel this, where I feel safe, where I feel seen, where I feel welcomed. I didn't know that before, because all I had ever done is talk about that in therapy, but now I have a totally new experience in my body and that is healing to me, it's adding what was missing.

Speaker 3 41:26

Now, not everybody is capable of this.

Speaker 3 41:28

This is a little bit frustrating, but if we can help people recognize what they most needed at a time when it was most challenging to them and we support them in having a full you know body experience of that maybe not even a full body as much as they can tolerate, but do it on all different layers, look at it like, see it, you know, through the imagination, feel it, feeling the contact that was missing, you know, noticing what it's like to move towards another and to get held in just the right way.

Speaker 3 42:08

I just feel that healing is about new experiences that were lacking and missing, and what that does is that starts to clear up, you know, and often what I say is you know, your little one didn't get this. I'm really holding that. Your little one was totally alone. But notice what difference it makes now when you imagine this right, and then you build on that by encouraging them to find friends, that they can be in that kind of connection with lovers, you know, ultimately, and then we start to set that new learning in, yeah, and then that becomes a lot more options, and so that's what it is. For me is the replacement. You know, it's like what I said when I first started whatever was harmed by sexual trauma or any trauma, let's rebuild that now so that there's the felt sense of getting your needs met and being able to recognize that.

Speaker 2 43:18

You mentioned earlier about a lot of exposure to tantra traditions and, of course, maybe a way of describing tantras in terms of how it applies to sexual practice would approach something like that. You know, we, for instance, have spoken to Diane Richardson on this podcast, who's a proponent of, like the slow, conscious sex model. Do you have, do you advocate for, a particular approach to this at all? Do you have any perspectives you'd like to share?

Speaker 3 44:00

Well, I would say that everything I do is done through the filter of Essie. I mean, that's the approach that I put on everything right. That is all about keeping people kind of like Diane does, like keeping people within what Dan Siegel calls a window of tolerance. Like you know a lot of those spiritual practices which are fabulous for a lot of people. As I said earlier, sometimes they push them past a point. But what I want to do in SE is I always want to work within their range of tolerance, or what I call the range of resilience, so that they are able to stay 100% present. I call the range of resilience so that they are able to stay 100% present. And so it's slow, it's very embodied, it's very intentional and we only do as much as somebody wants to do. Yeah. So I am definitely informed in everything I do by the SE model. Whether I'm taking a Tantra class or whatever I'm doing, I am doing it in an SE way. It doesn't matter what it is, I'm working with people in an SE way.

Speaker 3 45:17

I can't even separate myself. I am the practice. I don't even separate myself. It's, it's, it's I. I'm such, I am in, I am the practice. I don't even do the practice. It's been 26 years, you know so. It's just really ingrained in me. But I add other things too. But that that's my primary orientation. You know I add a lot of attachment material. I'm really informed by attachment, particularly Stan Tatkin and Diane Poole Heller. You know so. I'm in Ray Castellino, you know so. I have a lot of mentors that that add to what I do. And I mean I really like going to sort of wild sexuality parties, but that's just me. You know, I loved tantra workshops but, as I said, they weren't for everybody, and that's. I want to be able to separate, like who benefits and who gets more traumatized.

Speaker 1 46:15

You mentioned there the role of early attachment wounds and how that might shape. Sexual trauma is processed and stored in the body. I'd love to hear you speak a little bit about that sort of primary attachment dynamics and how they might influence our relationship to body and sexuality.

Speaker 3 46:32

Well, I mean there's definitely a huge, huge difference when someone has healthy attachment, secure attachment, I think from my experience I mean I don't see a lot of those people in my practice. I know they're out there somewhere, I hear about them, I notice them, I have friends that have secure attachment. But it seems like when there is secure attachment there is a capacity to make a lot better choices in terms of partnerships, to have more of a filter of recognizing what's toxic, what's safe and what's not safe. When you get into a lot of the other attachment styles, you know, like the insecure ambivalent, you know like the insecure ambivalent, they have a very challenging time with relationships and sexuality because they play that. It's not a play, it's there in that approach avoidance thing. I want it, I don't want it. And I think that's one of the hardest attachment styles because they're constantly moving towards and moving away and moving towards. And not only is it hard for them, because there's a felt sense of there's not just a felt sense, there's an experience of never really deeply getting the satisfaction that they want in connection because they're so quick to pull out of it. They want in connection because they're so quick to pull out of it. Just as they start to get close they pull out of it and there's a lot of sabotage. That happens with the ambivalent attachment style and what I'm often working in with that is slowing them down enough where they can start to take in just the smallest amount of something that feels good.

Speaker 3 48:24

Yeah, and they have a very difficult time with sexuality Sometimes. They they're often like the partner never does it right and you know it's frustrating to be a partner of an ambivalent. And then the avoidance you know they they just have such a. They just don't believe that it's out there. You know the ambivalence, know it's out there and are after it and they're actually a bit entitled about it. But often the avoidant they're kind of like I don't know if you know Winnie the Pooh, but they're kind of like Eeyore. You know I'm just going to sit here and you know maybe something will come my way and maybe it won't. They want it but they don't really believe that it's that they're. You know that it's out there and that anyone's ever really, you know, going to want to be with them. So they tend to be more of the isolators. They play with their own toys and when somebody does come in, they don't trust it.

Speaker 3 49:28

And what's interesting that I really learned and maybe this is because I'm from California but a lot of people can be very easily sexual Like I was one of those people. I can be, I was really sexual at a very early age but a lot of people don't know how to be intimate. You know, they can have joy with sex, they can feel mastery, and this often happens with sexual abuse survivors is they don't know anything about intimacy, but they know about sex and they will often be very, very sexual because they have a sense of confidence around that I can do that. But what's often missing is this really deep need for closeness and the closeness can be terrifying. The sex could be fine, but the closeness can be terrifying.

Speaker 3 50:32

And then you have people that all they want is closeness and they're terrified of sex. So it can go so many ways and I've been really doing a deep dive around intimacy and what that is and who we can be sexually intimate with and who we can be heart sexual with. I mean, I can go off on that topic for another three hours, but it's very, very, very interesting this whole attachment, intimacy and where it ties into who we want to be sexual with and who we want to make a life with, and those are sometimes very different experiences. Sometimes, and hopefully they're all the same, but not necessarily.

Speaker 3 51:34

Well, maybe it does make sense to touch in on that, because I was going to ask you about what are you currently kind of working on or interested in? What do you see as kind of future work? It's been, you know, the deep thought of the week, but I'm realizing there's so much more that people want that people need around this, especially around like diving into their own. Where are they in their sexual journey right now? Can people really like reflect on that? This is where I am, this is what I like, this is what I don't like, this is what I what more, I want, you know, like like really examining that and and and really helping people be more comfortable and at ease with their bodies and at ease with saying what they want and how to help people feel braver to experiment. So the problem is is that, you know, I learned all this and I wanted to go out in the world and talk about it, but all these trauma survivors showed up and not only did they not want to hear about how they could have expansive orgasm, they were like terrified to even, you know, admit that they had genitals. So I had to go way, way, way back and slow down. But so my, I think what I'd like to do is do a series of very slow, titrated things, which I'm doing now, but then also work more in the you know how to have really really, uh, pleasurable sex. I mean, a lot of people are doing that um, which I love and admire, but I think if I bring in a lot of the you know the SE parts to it, that it could also, uh, even be different than um, a lot of the you know the SE parts to it, that it could also even be different than a lot of the. I mean there's a lot of sex therapists I really admire that are doing fantastic things and I refer you know a lot to those folks. But anyway, so those are the things I'm thinking of.

Speaker 3 53:37

But the intimacy thing is something more that I really was really, really fascinated with when I was in the sex positive community, because we would have I learned so much about intimacy, being in an open relationship and it was just like the best thing that could happen to me.

Speaker 3 54:01

Everybody says, oh, you're avoiding, you're avoiding intimacy.

Speaker 3 54:06

It's like, no, it was a place where many of us blossom, and so I'm curious about that, and I was curious about how it's like dropping people into their hearts, because I know that there are people we want to give our hearts to right and that's really important and that's, you know, maybe the people we want to make a life with, uh, we want to have babies with, or whatever but there's also, um, just really wanting to have fun and um, and and and and exploring sex with a lot of different people in a very consensual way, and this community that I was in was just brilliant at that.

Speaker 3 54:48

I mean, we had meetings all the time and safe sex talks and communication talks, and I wish that there were more situations like that, Because I would meet people that were die hard, you know, either identify as queer or die hard heterosexuals, and they were starting to explore with all different kinds of people in different ways. And I think getting out of our binary way of of thinking and feeling is also very important, but doing it in a conscious way. That's kind of what I've been reflecting on is how do I help people you know like discover who they love and how they want to love and what that love would look like, and and how might they explore their bodies and find different potential with that?

Speaker 1 55:38

Sounds like a wonderful intention, ariel, and ties in very much with the title of the podcast, where we often ask towards the end of an interview you know what would be your hopes, your desires, you know your intentions for the future of your field. So really appreciate you sharing that. If people are interested in working with you or connecting with some of your content, where shall we direct them?

Speaker 3 55:57

Well, first of all, I want to say I don't have a private practice. I'm not seeing people individually. I actually don't want anybody to contact me because I'm overwhelmed but my website is full embodiment, with an I fullembodimentorg, and people are certainly welcome to look. I also do have a wonderful long, extensive referral list of people that have either been trained by me or who I trust, and so if there are people out there listening to this that want to go deeper into their own therapeutic work, there's a good referral list on the website and everybody has a little bio and talks about what they do. And if there's professionals out there that want to do any kind of supervision or consultation with me, that is a possibility and that's also on the website. I run constant groups three times a month in different time zones and have professionals call in and ask questions about their cases, and I love doing that. So that's on my website.

Speaker 2 57:08

Thank you so much for your time today and sharing your wisdom. You've had such an amazing journey through this space and that first question and you describing how you came to be doing what you're doing was really wonderful to hear. It seems like there's been like an organic unfolding to really put together a really unique and broad skill set that helps in this specific way that you're describing. So thank you so much for sharing with us and with our audience, and we really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 57:39

Thank you so much.

Speaker 3 57:41

So it was fun. Thank you for the questions.

Speaker 1 57:48

Thanks for being a part of the future of wellness. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review. It helps us reach more people and to make great episodes like this one. Learn more about field dynamics and why we think the future of wellness matters. Check us out at energyfielddynamicscom. See you next time.