My guest this week is Ilene Smith, author of the recent book, Moving Beyond Trauma: The Roadmap to Healing from Your Past and Living with Ease and Vitality (affiliate link). If you’ve been through a trauma—and most of us have—then this is a conversation for you. Ilene shared her expertise on how we can use the body to help us heal from traumatic events. If you’ve read anything by Peter Levine or maybe Bessel van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score (affiliate link), you’ll recognize a lot of what we talk about.

One thing I really appreciated exploring with Ilene was how CBT and body-focused trauma treatment can fit together. Ilene also shared about her own trauma experience, and how her background in the techniques she describes helped her to recover. You’ll definitely want to hear about that. Other topics we explored included:

• Why we don’t process trauma in our heads
• Why we get so disconnected from our bodies, “cutting ourselves off at the neck”
• Peter Levine, author of Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (affiliate link) and developer of Somatic Experiencing
• How we can rediscover a relationship with our bodies
• How trauma often takes us out of the present
• Moving through anxiety, rather than trying to avoid it
• How being the observer of our experience helps to slow things down and provide perspective
• Changing our relationship with our trauma
• How cognitive behavioral therapy and somatic-focused trauma treatment might work together
• What prolonged exposure—a CBT program for PTSD—is like and why it’s effective
• Our need for an empathic witness
• What “true healing” means: Knowing you’ll be okay, regardless of what happens
• Ilene’s personal traumatic loss, and how life prepared her to handle it
• Receiving the friendliness and healing our bodies have to offer
• How we know when we’re drawing closer to our true self
• The role of the vagus nerve in the body, the nervous system, stress, and healing from trauma
• A guided 2-4 breathing exercise for engaging the parasympathetic nervous system
• Craniosacral therapy
• Why we store trauma in the fascia
• Balancing the nervous system as the common denominator of a healing lifestyle

Ilene Smith is a certified professional coach and Somatic Experiencing practitioner. She’s passionate about helping others explore life with curiosity and exuberance.

Ilene’s research into SE has underscored the importance of body-based therapies in recovery from eating disorders. Ilene has also worked extensively with patients suffering from addiction. She has master’s degrees in exercise physiology and mental health counseling.

She blends talking, touch work, and movement to create synergy between a client’s body and mind. In addition to her private practice, Ilene has developed a series of trauma healing workshops and lectures, which she hosts worldwide.

She lives in Arizona, although on the day of our conversation she was actually in Montana.

Find Ilene at her website and on Instagram and Facebook.