Somatic practioner - Tanya Wishlove
Podcast Summary
This is episode number 68 with Tanya Wishlove, a master therapeutic counsellor and somatic experiencing practitioner. In this episode, you are going to learn what somatic experiencing is and what makes it so powerful and useful for people. You are also going learn the importance of having boundaries with our attention and the connection with healing and resilience.
Tanya was born and raised on the west coast of British Columbia and has been counseling in private practice as a somatic therapist for over 10 years. She studied somatic practice for over five years and is currently in the third year of a four-year training program that addresses the power of the body and nervous system to transform patterns of behavior and health.
Tanya's favorite management strategies include movement, music, and humor. I connected with Tanya after reading the incredibly powerful book, The Body Keeps the Score and Learning about Somatic Experiencing, last summer when I was in Greece, and she is full of wisdom. And her practice and what she does is extremely powerful, and I wanted to interview her because many people know about talk therapy, and I want more people to know about this bottom-up approach.
I hope you enjoy the show.
Contact Information for Tanya Wishlove:
Transcript:
Tia Graham: Hi, Tanya.
Tanya Wishlove: Hi, Tia.
Tia Graham: Welcome to the Arrive at Happy Show, I'm so excited that we're able to do this together.
Tanya Wishlove: Thank you for having me. I'm really, I feel really privileged to be here, actually.
Tia Graham: Aw, thank you. So what I wanna start off with is, in your own words, For you to explain and share what somatic experiencing is.
Tanya Wishlove: This is the gazillion dollar question.
Tia Graham: Yes, yes. Just for someone that maybe hasn't really heard of it before, how would you describe what it is?
Tanya Wishlove: I would describe somatic experiencing as a modality of therapeutic work that focuses on mobilizing survival physiology that's been stuck in the body for who knows how long.
And it's a gentle process, or I think it can be a gentle process. It's not about re-traumatizing ourselves. It is a trauma informed way of working with patterns, symptoms, things that people come to therapy for. And it's really about focusing on what we notice within ourselves. And that can look a whole bunch of different ways.
It can come up in imagery, it can come up in sensation, it can be emotion, it can be behavior. There's a lot of different doorways that we can attend to the nervous system through, but this is about working with the nervous system because this is where trauma hangs out, and I use the words trauma and overwhelm interchangeably.
It's really about, too much happened at once, too fast, and we weren't able to process it. So, the body has to get really creative and figure out a way to help us get through, and then we don't get to complete those experiences. They stay kind of almost suspended in time within us. And this is about completing those experiences and coming onto the other side, actually more resilient than before the thing happened.
Tia Graham: Okay, well we could just spend so much time just digesting everything that you just said, and that's such a beautiful explanation. So, you use the words trauma and overwhelm interchangeably, and I love how you do that. There are a lot of perceptions or even definitions of what trauma is, and for many people, overwhelm seems very different than that.
You're like, oh, I was in a traumatic car accident, or I am overwhelmed by how much work and pressure my boss is putting on me. And you know, all of that, but really when you said it's too much to handle, too fast and you're not able to process it. Imediately and my mind went, oh my gosh, living through the pandemic for so many people at the such a beginning like that was too much, too fast.
How do you even process it? So, do you think that everyone on Earth, I know there's 8 billion of us, but everyone on Earth, throughout their life. If you're an adult right now, you have had overwhelm like too much too fast, it seems. I don't know anyone that probably hasn't had something like that.Would you agree?
Tanya Wishlove: Yeah, I would agree. I would say that, if you've been born into this world, then you have overwhelm. I mean, just even the birth experience to a little baby nervous system is, you know, coming outta that environment and into this environment. There's gonna be a lot to process. I think we're actually made to go through these experiences, and then come out the other side. This is how we grow. We develop capacity. This is how our system gets to understand regulation.
So yeah, I think anyone who is living in this world is, is has experienced overwhelm. People talk about big-T trauma and little-T trauma. I don't know that I really wanna get into that.
I don't think about it at that level. But what I, what I believe, and this is part of the learning that I've done from training and somatic experiencing, is that trauma's not, in the event, it's in the experience of the nervous system to the event. Because you and I could both be in a situation, and we're gonna have different experiences of it.
We're gonna have different recall, and that's dependent upon the health and capacity of our individual nervous systems. And everything that involves,
Tia Graham: Right, Right. So, briefly, can you describe, it doesn't have to be the whole session, but for someone that is thinking, oh, interesting.
Like this is, this is the type of therapy and a lot of people, and more and more people are doing talk therapy, whether it be cognitive, behavioral or, even EMDR, like there's different types of talk therapy as well. So, can you share a little bit about, for someone listening to go, oh, I wonder what, like, a session or, what would this look like?
Can you share just a little bit about that?
Tanya Wishlove: Yeah. Most sessions, they're gonna look different depending on what shows up with the people that I work with. But it's generally, do you want me to talk about a first session or just like a, you know, we've had a couple sessions and now we're doing the work?
Tia Graham: Yeah. I think like you've had a couple sessions and what, yeah.
Tanya Wishlove: So, we've had a couple sessions. We're doing the work. We'll show up and invite people to get comfortable, physically comfortable, support their bodies so that they can feel themselves and that most of their structure isn't straining or managing something, if it doesn't have to, that helps us see what patterns kind of show up in the system unconsciously, I'll say.
So, we get you comfortable. We have a conversation about what you're noticing, and that can look a bunch of different ways. Sometimes we'll talk about what's going on in the moment. Sometimes there's physical pain, discomfort, old patterns showing up. Sometimes it's emotional, sort of looping stories that people are, are used to kind of having run through their mind.
Sometimes it's an event that happened in the week. But we'll just sort of check in, depending on what feels important. And then we're going to notice what's happening in the body. And I'm usually going to invite people to notice that. And I'm also going to be tracking for what I see in front of me. Regarding eye movement and, you know, flushing of the skin and movements in the body, and what's the pulse in the neck doing and how's their breathing?
Because this all gives me information on what their physiology is doing, and we can see when the body's going through, states. And I'm just thinking, you asked me to give a short answer, so I'm gonna wrap it up.
Tia Graham: No, this is great Already, this is super valuable that people like, it's, a lot about, it's really about that noticing. And like, yeah, having the person tune in. But then you also are able, you're also noticing with your, with your, I wanna say like your own intuition, your body, your, of course, like the training and everything, but really understanding what, what is happening and tuning into to the nervous system. And now I'm gonna say like, your soul also.
Tanya Wishlove: Yeah. It's multi, it's multi-layered for sure. I'm noticing with my eyes, I'm also, you know, our nervous systems just as humans, they ping off of each other. You know, when you walk in your room and you can feel like something just went down, that information's coming from your nervous system.
But there's information coming from many different layers and levels of us. So, yeah, I'm kind of using all of that and noticing what's happening and then, really Tia, what I've been saying to clients and colleagues and friends lately, and what I'm coming to is like, this work is striking me as really being about boundaries with our attention.
What am I noticing? What am I feeling? The big, loud thing that's screaming at us from the inside. It's so compelling. It's so hard not to go there, but we need to build these boundaries of our attention to not keep feeding those patterns in our body. And in order to do that, I think we need supportive help.
I think doing it from the inside by ourselves is really, really challenging. Yeah, and then we also need to be able to notice what else is true, and that's, I think that's the work we build the, the capacity to notice, okay, so this thing inside of me, this story, or this injury, or this old experience or this sensation, whatever is, it's the only thing I can notice to have someone else go, well, what's happening in your left knee right now?
It looks kind of like it's just hanging out there and then people are like, oh my gosh, I have a left knee. Yeah, it's kind of neutral. And then the nervous system goes, there is something else that's true. And, then we can unfold a different blueprint. Well, maybe blueprint's not the right word. We can shift the tapestry,
Tia Graham: right? Right? I mean, boundaries with our attention is so powerful. Of course, everyone listening is familiar with creating healthy boundaries, whether that be with people in your life, with your time, et cetera. But our, our attention, you know, so valuable and…
Tanya Wishlove: and powerful.
Tia Graham: And Powerful, yes. Absolutely. So, many, in addition to, to saying, okay, who doesn't have, who hasn't had over experience? It's like every single person, right? And I will say most people, unless you are really, really investing, in yourself in so many different ways. Most people have an accumulation of stress in their bodies as well, and then their symptoms of stress.
So, what are some of the, when you hear kind of symptoms of stress, because I get asked about stress from pretty much, everyone wants to know about work-life balance and how do I manage stress? And so can you just kind of talk about, from your experience in your work, sort of that, that symptoms of stress and, and maybe, you know, when people, I think everyone thinks, oh, being alive today, it's like, yeah, it's, you're stressful, you're working, you got kids.
Like, it's just, this is how life is. But, you know, there's some point where it's like, no, maybe your level of chronic stress is something to actually look at. Like, you can just keep, go, go, go, go, go. Um, so yeah, can you talk just a little bit about sort of that accumulation of stress and, and symptoms of stress from your perspective?
Tanya Wishlove: Yeah. Um, sure. I mean, how much time do we have? Feel free to cut me off. Mostly, when people show up, this is what brings them into therapy is experiences of like, what, what they call anxiety and depression.
Tia Graham: Yep.
Tanya Wishlove: Um, so these swings into like higher energy states that feel really uncomfortable and like you can't come outta them.
Or this shutdown of like, everything feels meaningless. I'm numb all the time. That actually feels kind of nice, but I can't feel myself, I can't feel the world. You know, both of those are distressing. Body pain, a pattern of dysfunction in relationships, challenges with children, multiple doctor's visits with no answers.
Lack of sleep, poor digestion, like patterns of like interrupted sleep or inability to have good productive rest. These, these are kind of the things that I see, or like when our heads just won't shut off, or slow down or quiet.
Tia Graham: Oh, that's a good one. So that's a perfect segue, into, in the corporate world, which is where I spend a lot of time giving talks and, working with leaders, meditation has, and it's wonderful. It's become so mainstream, you know, and not that every single person meditates. But, it's well known and companies are investing a lot into it.
You know, people are, even if they're not doing it, they know that the benefits are like just the mainstream media has, you know, dedicated so much time to this. And, before I met you, I actually had worked with a meditation coach and learned a lot about meditation from her. And, it's interesting, when I first met you, you said something like, you know, we're not really gonna be focusing on the breath.
And I was like, oh, wow. This is, this is really interesting that, you know, it's different. So, um, for those listening that, that meditate or maybe know about meditation, Can you explain a little bit, and I know I know you did, but just to go a little bit deeper on, we're not really necessarily working with the breath, we're really tuning into the nervous system. So can you share about that a little bit?
Tanya Wishlove: I will, I will do my best, but I wanna preface what I'm gonna say with the confession that I haven't spent a lot of time digging into or researching, or even practicing meditation myself. So I'm gonna be speaking from this place of that.
One, one other thing I wanna say is that, I did try meditation personally for a while at a certain stage in my life to help me manage this stuff before I knew about working with the body in this particular way that we're talking about. And it actually had a reverse effect for me…
Tia Graham: And it does on many people.
Tanya Wishlove: So this is why when I talk to clients, we talk about this because, people with early developmental trauma, especially, pre-birth, birth up to two to five years old. Those, these pre-cognitive, non-verbal places, when overwhelm happens to the nervous system.
If we dive into meditation, we can support the body and the nervous system to have these lovely, expansive experiences where we feel like this peace and pleasure and like something different than what we're used to. But the body actually doesn't have the capacity to sustain that at that place unless some preliminary work has been done in the nervous system.
So we can have this expansion and then the body has to go into contraction in order to compensate. And this is where, you know, people wind up in emergency and like everything gets destabilized. And I had some pretty close experiences to this personally, so I just wanna put that out there.
It's a part of the assessment when I work with people about what their early life was like, because people are like, and I meditate and like, things just seem worse, and like there's a legitimate physiological reason for that. Instead of people taking on the shame of like, wow, I can't do anything to help myself I must be really broken.
Tia Graham: And there are a lot of people, that's so interesting. A lot of people have shame, like, I can't meditate, I'm not good at it. And it's. Gosh, you shouldn't have shame about if you can meditate or not. But yeah, some feel that way. So that's, I think that's really important that you noted that.
Tanya Wishlove: Yeah. About the breath. The people, you know, especially I hear in like meditation practices and stuff like that, the breath is used as a vehicle to support meditative work and in somatic experiencing, or the way that I work with it, is we allow the breath to show us where the nervous system is at.
So, if the breath starts getting, you know, heightened or if the breath gets really slow and shallow, this lets me know kind of where we are in the physiological process.
Tia Graham: I love that.
Tanya Wishlove: And that's really helpful information for navigating where we’re headed. So, we don't wanna manage the breath in this work cause the breath is like information.
Tia Graham: The breath is information. Oh my gosh, you just gave me goosebumps. And I'm thinking of, my little daughter. For everyone, just write this down. Okay, if you're driving, don't do that. You know, put it in a note after. But just the breath, our breath shows us where the nervous system is at.
That it is, it is powerful information. I love, love, love that. So, everyone wants to be more resilient, and I know, one of the big outcomes of doing this type of work, somatic work. And so, can you share a little bit about how, how does this bottom up approach, right? We're working with the body versus talking, which a lot of people know there's a type of therapy where you go and talk, this is working with your physical body and of course, mind, body or talking every single second. How does working with the body make us more resilient to deal with the, the challenge which is being a human?
Tanya Wishlove: Yeah, okay. We're gonna need a follow up interview. There's so many good questions you're asking, but I'll see if I can do this succinctly.
You may have heard of like the broken bone theory, Tia, I'm not even sure if I'm naming that correctly, but it's this idea that like when you break a bone and you said it properly and it gets to heal properly, that it's actually stronger in the broken place than if the break never happened.
And then the nervous system works the same. If we do good repair at the level of the nervous system with ruptures that happened, or with overwhelm, if we support and allow the conditions for the nervous system to move through these survival states into completion of them, which it never got to do, and that's why we're having all these symptoms.
Then we're actually gonna be more resilient on the other side because the body had the experience of going into activation, then coming back down into regulation and basically surviving the thing. Now anyone who's here, anyone who's listening, we've all survived the things cuz here we are. If we're still in the symptoms of past experiences, if we don't feel like we can feel ourselves and be present in the moment and we're not feeling the fullness of our life, there's likely some stuff that's hanging on that we haven't been able to move through in a way that lets our body go, I did that, and now I'm here and I can feel my life energy and I can engage.
Our life’s energies being used up to kind of hold these experiences in a band, in our tissues, in our, in our bodies. We want to help those energies, for lack of a better word, to move through and complete, and then we kind of come into a new opening, a new expansion, more capacity. That's the convoluted way I would, express that.
Tia Graham: Right. Right. No, no, no. That's, clear. Yeah. Really, really powerful. So there are, there's this, I don't even know what word, massive. Multi, I think it's multi-trillion dollar industry, which is the wellness industry. Right? And there's so many, meditation could fall under that. I mean, there's like a million different things.
And we could even say, you know, helping people relax, and balance out living in this world of technology and work and kids in this age, you know, and everything else, and relationships, et cetera. 24/7 news, all of that. So, there's this, there's all of these different tools and techniques, you know, to help people feel.
Well, hence the, like, mass products. I mean, you, you know, you could go on and on. But, what I know that is so powerful about the type of work that you do and the research I've done about it, is that it's not a, it's not a band aid. It's not like, it's not something that's gonna make you feel, it's into your cellular and it's natural, it's neurological.
I mean, I was looking at, for everyone listening who might not go read all about it, Somatic experiencing includes stress, physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing, medical biophysics, and then there's all the experience and research that the own practitioner brings, like, right.
So, you know, getting a massage or going to, you know, all these things that people do to balance out is great. But if you're not, if you're not going deep to what's, what's truly in your body, it's going to, it's gonna do that kind of, then it's gonna make you feel good that day or that week.
Yep, so my last question is, what's your advice for people that, you know, haven't necessarily invested in themselves in this way? But they are, I mean, and let's come back to this, everyone listening, if you're having body pain or relationship challenges, challenges with your, I mean, this is literally everybody.
Um, maybe doctor's visits, sleep problems, your head, like your thoughts and your heads are just going crazy, because this really is about, truly understanding yourself and healing from the inside out, so, my last question is what advice do you have for people that maybe feel like, oh gosh, I don't know if I have the time.
I do, I really wanna do this. But I guess, what I want you to say is why it's worth it. I guess that's my last point, is why, is it worth it for people to do this type of work?
Tanya Wishlove: I can only, I can only speak from that personally, actually. Because to some people it's not, and I think it's more like to, at the risk of sounding cliche or cheesy, like am I worth it, might be also like a follow up question or maybe a primary question, but there's a couple things I feel are important to say to that.
One is, we need all, all the management strategies we can have. I wanna have a toolkit full of tools, so massages, chiro friends, like everything that I bring into my life that helps me manage that might be meds, that might be regular doctor's visits to follow up with what's going on in my body. Whatever feels helpful and supportive, we really, really need that.
And there's also this dynamic that I notice of looking outside of ourselves to deal with the inside of ourselves. We need that at some level, but what I see over and over and over again when I work with people, it's all inside. All the answers and the truth and the stories of what we've gone through, it all lives inside of us.
We have to go inside in order to repair and heal. So yes, we need the support and the help from outside, but if we become reliant on the outside, then I think we're missing the point. It's all inside. I don't wanna see clients for years and years and years. I mean, sometimes that's the level of the repair work that we're doing.
But when people start to feel like their capacity has increased, they have access to regulation, their resilience is growing. I don't wanna see them for a while or for a long time because they get to live and enjoy this. So I'm a resource, practitioners are resources. But to go for years and years and years and years is kind of giving your power outside of yourself.
It's outsourcing your inherent, you know, the gifts that we've been given inside of our bodies that were actually made to heal.
Tia Graham: Yes, yes and I truly believe that of different stories and people and bodies can heal. Right?
Tanya Wishlove: Yeah. We do have that, it's innate in us. This is why the work works.
Tia Graham: Yes, yes, yes. Oh, we might need to schedule a follow up session in the future, but, well, you've provided so much wisdom and, I'm inspired even though I've, you know, talked to you before, just renewed inspiration, so thank you for, for sharing all of this. For people who want to learn more about you, connect with you, and learn more about somatic experiencing, where can people go to find you?
Tanya Wishlove: To find me, if they Google my name, which is Tanya Wishlove, my bio will come up, um, online and they can find me that way. And if they wanna learn about somatic experiencing, I think they can do the same thing. Um, there's gonna be lots of information that comes up, but the Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute is kind of where maybe wherethe majority of like information that we'll talk directly about this work. And then there's also a practitioner's list on there that people can look up for their area if they wanna work with people.
Tia Graham: Perfect. Perfect. Okay, well thank you so much and hopefully we can talk again soon.
Tanya Wishlove: I'd love that, Tia. Thank you for having me.