How to Deal When the Shit Gets Real Podcast · Rietta Boksha

Tatiana Szulc: Trauma Healing and Somatic Experiencing

·33 min·2 clips

Tatiana says her anxiety became stomach aches, dissociation, and suicidal ideation before she found effective help.

1. How to Deal When the Shit Gets Real Podcast focuses on Tatiana Szulc and somatic experiencing as a trauma-healing method. 2. Riera interviews Tatiana Szulc, a first-gen Latina, trauma therapist, somatic experiencing practitioner, and holistic coach, because her own healing story shapes her work. 3. The episode asks what somatic experiencing is for and why Tatiana says it changed her life. 4. Tatiana distinguishes somatic experiencing from general somatic tools and says Peter Levine developed the method. 5. She describes somatic experiencing as a three-year training program that works directly with the nervous system and physiology. 6. The method aims to move people through fight, flight, and freeze without requiring them to talk through or relive trauma. 7. Tatiana says many clients come to her after they are 'all talked out' and feel therapy has not helped. 8. She explains that her job is to track thought, emotion, sensation, behavior, and movement as signs of nervous system state. 9. The client is asked to sense into the body and report sensations, emotions, thoughts, or images without narrative detail. 10. Tatiana says that helps people decode what their nervous system is communicating and move out of survival states. 11. She says she used to read micro-signals in her head, like facial expressions, posture, breathing, and movement, to understand what someone's nervous system was saying. 12. Her earliest memory of dysregulation is around age five or six, when being spoken to could send her into panic and muteness. 13. She describes chronic social anxiety, repeated stomach aches, doctors who found no diagnosis, and parents who thought she was making symptoms up. 14. Tatiana says her symptoms later expanded into depression, dissociation, low self-esteem, and suicidal ideation during a four-and-a-half-year abusive teenage relationship. 15. In college, she studied psychology to understand her own mind, then failed psychology three times before later double majoring in human development and family studies. 16. She says grad school and her first job in community mental health kept her in fight-or-flight, with people-pleasing, hustle, and constant stimulation. 17. The turning point came in 2020, when burnout, shutdown, and dissatisfaction pushed her to google mind-body trainings and sign up for somatic experiencing. 18. Tatiana says the first training changed everything because she realized she did not have to live in survival mode forever. 19. The conversation is conversational and personal, with Riera sharing similar childhood anxiety and Tatiana answering in a teaching style that moves between lived experience and practical explanation. 20. People interested in trauma healing, nervous system regulation, and body-based therapy will likely get the most from this episode, while listeners wanting a purely technical clinical discussion may skip it.

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