Liberation Is Possible: Recent Episodes
Anthony Twig Wheeler
Internationally recognized Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner and Consultant Anthony Twig Wheeler shares his insight and approach to SE. Expressly not a substitute for official training by the Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute this podcast series is meant to share humor, hope, guidance and support to somatically and psychobiologically based therapists worldwide. Learn more about Twig's work and be in contact at www.liberationispossible.org.
Caution: This episode is heavy. Proceed with caution.
Creative thinking combined with an attraction to – or fear of – Danger in a world full of Existential Threats can quicken the pulse and take people right out of their ability to respond spontaneously to the moment.
SE practitioners, as with everyone else, cannot "solve" the challenges that threaten people. However, we can appreciate the pain of those caught in runaway worry. We can also offer unique assistance in helping people renegotiate past stressors and more successfully ride current ones so they can feel less concerned about and respond more appropriately to scary stuff in the future.
That's worth some consideration about the nature of catastrophic thinking, the truth of the existential threats humans face and what we as trauma therapists can help the best we can.
Before the "silence goes on too long" let me share a little New Year update from Twig's SE Reflections podcast project. This will probably be most interesting to regular listeners: it's mostly a progress report and a bit of cheerleading. A few final content heavy episodes before reaching 100 are still to come.
The holiday season impacts different people in different ways, from the option of taking it all in to wanting to be narcatized through it with a request to be reawoken on the other side.
One of our opportunities with things like SE is helping people make more appropriate and successful levels of participation with the holidays, including helping them manage or even transform their associated stress response.
In the season ahead, it's a good idea to consider the various possibilities in the Holiday Session and what good you might be able to help your clients find in them - even if that is them discovering that they want to tell the holidays to take a hike.
At long last I'm finally able to share this episode on helping clients prepare for surgery.
I'll be adding Show Notes eventually. For now, I hope some of you will enjoy the audio recording which is available here.
I'm still looking for the opportunity to complete Episode 98 on Preparing for Surgery. On the way there I wanted to say hello, cheer folks who are headed to Adv. II and completion of the SEP training and share some thoughts on getting more comfortable through failing and looking forward to the next opportunity to do better.
With a cup of tea and a microphone, I'm waving and wishing you well on my way out to the forest where I'll be teaching bushcraft for the next little while.
I'll return to the studio toward later September.
We must make mistakes. It's part of the process of learning this craft. Exploratory SEP's can be enthusiastic about their mistakes because mistakes make us think long and hard about "what went wrong" and how we can do things differently.
Ultimately our "library of experience" develops over time, through countless twists and turns. Some of these are clearly real mistakes. Things we simply will not do once we know better. The list of real mistakes is long and each of us has our own unique way of making them.
This episode covers several key mistakes that I believe are extremely common in SE Students and Practitioners everywhere. Cheers for that, we're in good company.
I'm in Chicago doing something "different" than what I normally do. (A 5 week comedy improv theater intensive.) It's helping refresh my attention for my SE work. It's also a good opportunity for me to offer up this SE Reflection episode on advocating that we remember to engage "other things", not just Therapist related stuff.
I'd bet we all want to be a well rounded, interesting people; for ourselves, our families and our clients. I'd bet.
"Try something new everyday." -Maude
Here is a very long episode that boarders on exhaustive, though hopefully not too exhausting. The subject? Considerations and a pattern of thought for how we attend to people soon after they've been in an accident. At those times SE Practitioners have a special and often unique offer of support and guidance for aiding the completion of the autonomic stress response.
This episode is a review, encouragement and cheerleading for that opportunity. It's going to take you several hours to listen to.
This does not cover every last thought I have on Orientation and what is required to ensure smooth meaningful participation when you're asking people to "allow their eyes to go where they want to go." But this 2-hour episode is probably the last thing I'll say about Orientation on this podcast project.
You may need to approach this in rounds and I've left a few things out that would have been helpful to say...but this is what we've got. Please make use of it as you like. I think you'll see that I put some effort into this for you.