Parents Traumatized By Their Child’s Substance Use; Restoring Your Health Through Trauma Release Exercise with Ericka Thomas

SPEAKERS: Ericka Thomas, Brenda Zane

[00:00:00] Ericka: I picked Taekwondo because it was something that I could walk to at the time. It was interesting because my Taekwondo master was from India and he used to tell us that people who practiced martial arts often ended up as yogis. And he explained that the reason that was, was because Martial arts came from yoga. 


I was at the time, not in a place where I was able to hear that because to me, yoga was too easy. 


[00:00:41] Brenda: Welcome to Hopestream, a podcast for parents of kids who are misusing drugs or alcohol, or who are in active addiction treatment or early recovery. I’m your host, Brenda Zane. Fellow mom to a son who struggled with addiction and nearly lost his life to a fentanyl overdose. I created this podcast to be a resource, guide, and source of encouragement and hope as you go through this challenging season in life. 


I’ve been there in the sleepless nights, cried the tears, and know how scary it is. The good news is you don’t have to do this alone. You have found an understanding and supportive place to come when things get tough, and I am so glad you’re here. Now, let’s get into today’s episode. But 


first, this episode is supported by the stream. You might be listening to this podcast and wondering to yourself, who else is dealing with the kinds of things I am? there are thousands of moms just like you who are struggling to help their kids and who want to have a more positive, personal and supportive place to connect with other moms who get it. 


The stream is an online pay what you can membership for moms who Kids struggling with substance use, focus on their own health, wellness, and sanity, with no judgment and no distraction because it’s not On Facebook. We have daily conversations, weekly events, a book club, yoga classes, workshops, and even a laugh here and there. 


Being a member of the stream gives you an even deeper connection beyond the podcast where you get to interact with amazing moms and me every day. So if you’d like to hang out with us after the episodes, you can learn more and join. Hello, welcome back. Welcome to what I know is going to be a really interesting episode. 


It fits in with the last guest show that I did with Laura Richer, who talked among other about trauma and how it impacts our bodies. And for today’s show, I had a great conversation with Ericka Thomas of Elemental Kinetics. Ericka’s work focuses on trauma release exercise or TRE. It’s a sequence of simple, modifiable exercises that work from the ground up to open pathways to your own natural tremor mechanism. 


And this method helps release that stored and repressed tension without having to relive the story in a traditional talk therapy setting. Ericka is a colleague of mine, she’s a friend, she’s also an advisor member in The Stream, which is the online community that I host for moms. And she runs her own wellness business. 


Which includes teaching private yoga classes. She has her own online studio and she has a podcast called the work in. I know that this is going to be really interesting to so many of you, because as parents of very challenging kids, we store up so much tension in our bodies that they actually start to break down on us. 


And TRE offers a way to deal with that in a really gentle and restorative way. And I know until I met Ericka, I’d never heard of this method. And so I wanted to bring you this information because I think it’s so important for us to take good care of ourselves and make sure we are relieving all of the tension that gets built up in our bodies. 


There’ll be resources for you in the show notes as always. And so now listen in to my conversation with Ericka Thomas. 


Welcome Ericka to Hopestream. I’m excited to have you here today. You and I know each other from a couple of different ways that we know each other, but I am really excited to bring this information Both to parents, because I think it’s really helpful for parents to understand this, but also I’m thinking this has got to be something that would be helpful to somebody who’s currently either struggling with substance use or potentially starting out in recovery. 


So welcome to the podcast.  


[00:04:58] Ericka: Thank you, Brenda. I’m so happy and excited to be here to talk to you about TRE and yoga, and  


[00:05:05] Brenda: it’s going to be good. I know, I know. And for members of the stream who are listening, Ericka, because she does a monthly yoga class for us. And this last week we got to actually experience TRE. 


So if you’re, if you’re on the fence about checking out the stream, this is one of the benefits of being in this community is you get to work with people like Ericka who help keep us. As sane and healthy as possible. So, this is, that’s this Ericka, Ericka Thomas.  


[00:05:40] Ericka: I don’t know if I can keep anybody else sane. 


this would be a good time for the disclaimer, like not a doctor, not a therapist, just working with the body. Working with the  


[00:05:54] Brenda: body. Yeah. It’s so important though. I remember and we’ll get into. Everything about Terry, but I do remember times with my son when we were in the middle of the crazy. 


And I would, I mostly remember sitting on the toilet because it was the only place that I could go was in the bathroom closed door. And I would literally be shaking and I didn’t understand what was going on in my body. So I do think it’s important for people to understand their body and be more connected to it, especially in a time of stress like this. 


But maybe you can just give us a background on you and how you became interested in yoga and then how you. You became interested in TRE, and then we’ll, we’ll dive into some other stuff.  


[00:06:35] Ericka: Great. Yes. So I began my career, I guess you could say in the fitness industry through martial arts, actually, that was my first step in. 


And this was like a life, literally a lifetime ago. And I, I picked Taekwondo because it was. Something that I could walk to at the time. My Children were very young. We only had one vehicle. My husband took it with him to work. So if I wanted to do something for myself, it needed to be within walking distance, and it had to have classes during the school day so that I could. 


Attend right and it was interesting because my taekwondo master was from india And he used to tell us that People who practiced martial arts often ended up as yogis And he explained that the reason that was was because Martial arts came from yoga. Really? Yes. And I was at the time, not in a place where I was able to hear that because to me, yoga was too easy. 


It was an exercise for people that just wanted to stretch. And. It didn’t seem like enough of a challenge for me. I was a little bit, I was one of those people that was really addicted to that high intensity exercise. I must have had, and most likely still do a lot of pent up. Tension in the body, martial arts is a great way to like safely yell, right? 


That was my favorite part. You could punch, hit, kick, yell, and just let go of all of that pent up aggression. Maybe  


[00:08:29] Brenda: right  


[00:08:29] Ericka: from 25 years of. just being the good girl and don’t speak your mind or whatever it is. So that was my first introduction to yoga. It was a fascinating little thing, but I wasn’t something that I was like into at all right off the bat. 


And it wasn’t until seven, several years later when I was teaching, I think I was at that point teaching an insane number of classes during the week. It was like 24 hours of exercise classes that I was leading.  


[00:08:59] Brenda: Holy cow.  


[00:09:00] Ericka: Every single week. And looking back, I’m like, what was I thinking? And I was just, it was crazy. 


I do not recommend, do not recommend zero stars. Do not recommend that as an instructor. It’s terrible for your body and your mind and everything else. But during that time, I was working at a studio where. One of the classes that was right after a class that I taught was a yoga class. And it was a really great kind of community of instructors. 


And we often took each other’s classes because gosh, teaching three classes isn’t enough. We should do something for ourself, right? You  


[00:09:36] Brenda: need to do more.  


[00:09:37] Ericka: Yeah. So it happened to be, there’s this yoga class right after mine. And so I was like, why not? I’ve never done this before, but it was a fabulous vinyasa. 


And the instructor ended the class with a short meditation, the final relaxation and aromatherapy and a scalp massage. And I was hooked. Oh my gosh, it is heaven. It is heaven. And I was hooked. And so it took. Several years for me to of practicing, like that was my one thing that I would do for myself. I would say like yoga was the thing that I did to take care of me and make it so that I could do all the other stuff that I did. 


In the fitness world. And then somebody asked if I would be interested in teaching a class a teaching a yoga class and I was not yet certified, but I was like, that’s something that I might think about pursuing and This is, this was a pattern with me as well. Like I will take this class for me and then turn it into a job. 


And so that’s what happened in a nutshell after that first certification. So over time you build on those continuing education credits. for yoga and through Yoga Alliance and things like that. And in part of that training, I was able to do, to move into a trauma informed yoga track. And through that, trauma informed yoga, that is where I first stumbled on trauma release. 


exercise, which is TRE. And it was used in conjunction with yoga. Although trauma release exercise is a standalone type of exercise, but you can easily combine it with yoga. And it really is a great modality to pair with a lot of different kinds of movement. And therapies, other different types of stress relief and trauma release therapies. 


It really goes quite well for reasons that we’ll move into and shortly. But that’s where I was first exposed to it through trauma informed yoga. And then my family has a background in military. We have a lot of military in our family, and I was starting to see some residual effects in real life. With my brothers and then interestingly in myself, in my own body, which is strange because I would never have put myself in a trauma category, but my body was exhibiting some symptoms of trauma. 


Post traumatic stress. And that was related, I believe, to several incidences in my own personal past history. And then also at that time in our family history as some addiction things were coming up, not just in our immediate family, but in extended family. And so you start to realize, or I started to realize at that time, that addiction Is an external regulation of the nervous system. 


What it looks like when I was taking some of my training from trauma informed yoga and trauma release, it looks like using substances, external substances, and it could be anything that is a type of regulation. And as humans, we are really just looking for regulation. We’re looking for ways to balance. 


The body balance, the mind balance, our emotions. It’s part of our homeostasis, right? It’s, it’s part of the body survival response. We’re wired that way. So whatever works, like we’re just looking for something that works in the moment and the faster, the better. And when you stumble upon something, whether that’s a breathing technique or alcohol or a drug or whatever that is, or a meditation, something like that. 


When you stumble upon that. as some way to help you regulate. It’s really enticing. It’s really tempting. We just want to go back to that, whatever works. And then the body adapts to that and uses it as, okay, this is what I need. This is what I need. This is what I need. That’s my progression through that history to bring me to this point. 


[00:14:13] Brenda: Yeah, that’s so interesting. I didn’t, first of all, I didn’t know that martial arts really came out of yoga. They seem so polar opposite to me, right? Like the physicality of it all. But yoga is so physically challenging. I love seeing, and you probably have seen this too, I love seeing it. Yeah. People who’ve never done yoga, like maybe they’re marathon runners or they’re weightlifters or whatever. 


And they try a yoga class and they’re like, they tap out like halfway through because it’s so challenging. So that’s really interesting. And maybe we could talk about trauma for just a minute, because I think people, I know I always heard that word and to me it meant veterans of war. Or people who had been abused as children. 


So in my mind, trauma didn’t apply to me because I was neither of those. And so when I first was going through all of this with my son and I had a couple of therapists say, you probably have PTSD. I thought they were crazy. I was like, what are you talking about? I couldn’t have PTSD. Maybe you can just tell us a little bit about that word trauma and then how we should think about most of the people listening to this are going to have kids. 


adolescents or young adults who are either in active addiction or maybe they’re in treatment right now How should we be thinking about trauma in our bodies?  


[00:15:34] Ericka: it’s an interesting question because the definition of trauma the clinical definition of trauma the clinical definition of ptsd has evolved and when we’re talking about the diagnosis of PTSD, the clinical diagnosis of PTSD as it is described in the DSM five, which is with the psychiatric diagnostic manual. 


That diagnosis has been this fifth version of this manual. The diagnosis for PTSD has been narrowed quite a bit. we need to differentiate between big T trauma and little t trauma. It used to be that, post traumatic stress or trauma definition, that clinical definition was really based mostly on symptoms, like a lot of our psychiatric diagnoses are, but now PTSD is defined, it’s a conditional definition, which means you have to have had an event A particular traumatic event in order to even be considered as, let’s say, a victim of PTSD. 


So what that means is that it requires an exposure to some sort of stressful event as a precondition. So that’s where the confusion is because you may not have, you and I may not have Any memory of or any perception of a particular event, right? And not only, not only a particular event, but a specific kind of event, something that either actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence. 


That is pretty narrow, right?  


[00:17:45] Brenda: Right,  


[00:17:46] Ericka: So if you have not experienced that clinically, you may not rise to that clinical definition of PTSD. You could have every one of the 20 different symptoms. And if they could not be connected to a specific event that falls into that category, you, Technically would not rise to that. 


Now, do clinicians still diagnose people as that? Probably. Especially if you exhibit all of the symptoms that go along with PTSD. and there’s, there’s a lot of them and because we’re all human, they’re going to look different in every person. Now, the thing about that definition, that diagnosis, it’s coming from science and science likes to put everything in a nice, clean little box, a label. 


So that they know what to do about it. Like they have the prescriptions in line, like this is how we treat it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They want it to be a neat little box, but nothing about this comes in a neat little box. People are messy. Life is messy. Life is messy, right? But the thing about trauma, while you may not have experienced an event like what I described, you could have been vicariously exposed to something, right? 


Indirect. witnessing of an event or the repeated extreme exposure to different things through someone you know. So here we come into our relationship with our children, perhaps children with addiction, that is repeated exposure to aversive events through someone we love that we are very, very close to. 


[00:19:29] Brenda: Right.  


[00:19:30] Ericka: In person, up close and personal, and so those kinds of qualifying events will push us over the edge. And all those physical, physiological responses in the body are natural. The body doesn’t read them as bad, or good, or right, or wrong. No attachment to any kind of judgment there. The body is just trying to Help you survive. 


It’s going to do whatever it takes to help you survive the moment in some way So it we may not like it. It doesn’t always feel good doesn’t feel good And it might not really be related to what’s happening right now in this moment But but still the body is reading it that way. It’s really interesting And I don’t want to get into the weeds and geek out on the brain science, but it’s it’s It’s really fascinating how how we make all those adaptations and connections in the mind just to stay Functioning. 


[00:20:32] Brenda: Yeah. Yeah. and so many moms and dads are living that day today and I think that is It’s just a reality when you have a child who’s using specially illicit drugs, because as we know, everything today has fentanyl in it. And so you’re literally living day to day wondering, is today going to be the day that I get that phone call from, The police or from the hospital, there’s been an overdose or, or whatever it is. 


And I have to believe, I experienced the stress and the strain that that puts on your body is huge. it’s, it’s real. And I think a lot of times we don’t give ourselves the credit to say. This is actually physically impacting me. we all know. Oh, I’m worried. I’m stressed like this is really stressful, but I don’t know that we make the connection with what’s going on in our bodies with that. 


Is that what Terry is meant to do is to help with that?  


[00:21:33] Ericka: Let’s talk about what TRE is. So TRE stands for trauma release exercise. It’s a series of exercises, but we’ll talk about that word exercise in just a minute. But so remind me, don’t let me forget. It’s not a bad word. It’s not a bad word. 


It’s not what you’re thinking. It’s just gotta be called something. So a series of exercises that it was developed by a trauma therapist. Named David Berselli, and he basically witnessed and observed in people that he was helping in war torn areas of the world, where they would be under threat. 


And when I say threat, we’re talking about like bombs falling out of the sky. So we have these groups of people who are in the bomb shelters, adults and children, right? The bombs are falling. Every time there’s an explosion, the body kind of contracts. And curls up like fetal position, and it’ll be an instantaneous response, not necessary, not voluntary, not conscious response. 


You hear a loud noise and boom, the body reacts like that. And after the all clear was given and people would come out of the shelters, what he noticed was that the children would be, would shake. And then they would finish, they would just stop and get up and run away and just play. They would just go right back to playing as if nothing happened. 


The adults did not react that way. They would not allow themselves to shake. And they were the ones that started to exhibit signs of what we call Post traumatic stress now. So nightmares and digestive issues and chronic pain, chronic tension, elevated blood pressure, all of those physiological symptoms, and then psychosocial kind of. 


Issues, dissociation and things like that. And so he developed these exercises. Dr. Priscilla developed these exercises as a way to self induce the tremor mechanism that we all have the ability to do. We know how the body knows how to do it. I won’t say we, but the body knows how to do it because. As children, we are capable of doing that. 


We just allow the body to shake. It’s not a pathological kind of tremor. It’s not like Parkinson’s or, something that needs to be locked down. And through that physical discharge, the body that the body can let go of whatever stuck energy response. tension, stress, trauma, whatever it’s been holding onto for since the day you were born, maybe before, it can let that go and work it out. 


So it’s a communication line from the body to the very primitive part of your brain, the brainstem. And so it’s the physical exercises that kind of get you Get the body prepared, charges the muscles a little bit to allow that tremor to happen. And the way we want that to happen is like the easiest possible way. 


We want the least amount of physical effort to bring that tremor on. The easier, the better. So this is, this is what makes it different than other kinds of exercise for stress relief. A lot of people exercise for stress relief, right?  


That was, that’s why I did martial arts was like stress relief. 


I’m going to go. Punch a bag, right? That’s stress relief. It’s also very activating. So the higher intensity we do with the higher intensity exercise that we do or that the movement that we do, it’s very activating. And whenever the nervous system is activated, we are flooding ourself with adrenaline and cortisol, epinephrine, all of these things, which actually numbs the pain response. 


It’s a good thing. It’s the way the nervous system is designed, but we don’t want to live there for very long. We don’t want to stay there all the time. So if you have a baseline state, your baseline state of your nervous system, if that is elevated and then you go and activate it more and then stay there, that’s when the body can get stuck. 


Okay. In that physiological response, totally natural, nothing wrong with it, except it’s not supposed to stay on.  


[00:26:14] Brenda: Let me just make sure i’m i’m grasping this right. So our bodies are under a huge amount of stress already from what’s going on with our children or our aging parents and Divorce ugly divorces and all the all the fun stuff that we’re dealing with menopause You name it. 


So we’re already in this heightened state of stress and then It We, and it’s like you said, it’s a good thing. We go out and we do very active exercise because it feels good and it makes us, it makes us feel good. Helps with weight loss and all that kind of good stuff. Whether that’s a Zumba class or CrossFit or just going running or, Dancing or whatever, but what I’m hearing you say then is we, we then need to bring things back down because even if you’re doing that, and I think this is confusing for people is they’ll say, but I exercise a ton. 


I do all of these things and I’m still having that. Anxiety. And I’m still having some of those physical symptoms. Like you said, digestive issues, I think are so common with folks who are going through this headaches. And so it can be confusing because you’re like, on the one hand, I’m, I’m doing all of the things, but I’m still having these symptoms. 


But it sounds like that’s, that’s exactly why is we still need to let that go. Is it just letting the trauma out? what is, what, what am I trying to get at?  


[00:27:37] Ericka: So it’s a tension in the body. So every time your body senses some kind of challenge, Or a lot of time we talk about as a threat, but it’s, we wouldn’t necessarily perceive a threat. 


It would be a challenge, like anything that’s a challenge to the body will activate the nervous system to do something. We talk about it, I’m sure a lot of people have heard the fight, flight, freeze thing, right? That’s a polyvagal theory. But fight or flight, in my mind, is a threat. has a negative connotation and challenge isn’t always negative. 


It can be good. It can be good stress gets you out of bed in the morning. So unless you just want to lay around all day long, then we need it. We need stress. Okay. We need it. What we need more than that though, is the ability to rise to that challenge and to be able to come back down. And that’s something that is missing from most fitness oriented. 


Exercise because that’s not their purpose. Their purpose is to strengthen the muscles to strengthen the heart and the lungs. You know that they’re doing that. They’re doing that. They’re not training the nervous system to be able to come down safely to your baseline state of calm. Okay, so that’s the piece that comes in when we’re Teaching trauma release exercise. 


The biggest part of that is learning how to stop and rest that discharge of energy. So we invite the tremor to come into the body, wherever it’s going to come in. It can start wherever. If you have, muscle fascia or any kind of tissue everywhere in the body that you have muscle fascia and tissue, you can tremor there everywhere. 


It’s not just in the legs, even though a lot of times people feel that tremor in the legs first, it can go anywhere and everywhere. So once we, we invite that tremor in, once it begins, now we practice stopping. That tremor. So we give you back control over that. It’s called a neurogenic tremor because it’s coming from the brain stem. 


But it is not voluntary. You are not making yourself tremor. Got it. You are extending the legs to stop the tremor. You are changing your body position in some way to stop the tremor. And then you can then practice changing your body position again, to let that tremor come back in in a comfortable way. 


And it’s that down regulation, that safe down regulation that we, we are practicing over time. It reorganizes. That nervous system response in the brain in a way that repeats that when you are not lying on the mat doing trauma release. Okay, so now it makes you more efficient. Your nervous system becomes more efficient whenever there’s some kind of threat or challenge that comes up that you can rise to and then come back down quickly. 


Because we don’t want to stay there. So we practice what we practice in the mat on the mat is something that we can see reflected then over and over again off the mat.  


[00:31:07] Brenda: So we learn it and our body learns it. So we’re able to better respond. Yes. Yes. oh, there’s so many questions that I have. 


The first is, so I want to go back to the exercise word. and then, and then we’ll get into what what Tiare actually looks like from a like how to practice it standpoint. But is this an exercise or is this a therapy? How, how do we think about?  


[00:31:34] Ericka: I think about it as an exercise, but not as a workout. 


Okay. That’s a good distinction. Yeah. It’s an exercise. Technically I think about it like a work in. Okay, so we are working in to the body. We are not working out has nothing to do with what you can see with your eyes. It’s all about finding a sense of presence in the body and reconnecting kind of a friendly relationship with those sensations that come up in the body. 


Because when we practice TRE, you may see. You may discover new things in, in the body that you don’t normally notice because most of the time we cut ourselves off from the sensations in our body, right? And it’s not a bad thing. There’s no judgment there. if you had to feel everything that was going on in your body all the time, you would never get anything done. 


It’s so distracting. that’s why our nervous system is set up the way it is. So you can get stuff done. But when you want to come into that body and notice things, like most of the time, we don’t notice things happening in the body unless it’s very uncomfortable when it, when it starts pushing us into the point of pain, the discomfort is too much. 


Or we feel out of control or that anxiety loop starts to get triggered because that, often comes whenever anything is highly activated in the gut that just taps right into that anxiety loop. So with this exercise versus. Workout thing. We are actually, I have to do a lot of teaching with clients on the learning, this idea of work, what work is, what it feels like in the body. 


And I think the hardest people to work with are the athletes. It’s the ones that, are used to pushing all the way to a 10 all the time. They don’t even understand like a scale of one to 10. It’s either. Nothing or 10 or there’s like nothing in the middle. And I get that because that way I, that’s who I was. 


That’s, that’s where I come from. I, I get it. But once you can find that sense of presence and it does take a lot of time, that’s part of the practice of it to be able to feel like, Oh my gosh, I just, it was only a couple of months ago. I just finally felt my calf muscle contract, like the full contraction. 


I never was able to feel that before. Like it was. Always contracted calves, always contract, like there’s no rest, there’s no release of that tension. It’s only contraction. So that over time, that’s how the body stores stress to as tension. So we been skirting around that, but when things happen that you’re not able to process in the moment, it doesn’t just because you ignore it doesn’t mean it goes away. 


It goes somewhere. It goes somewhere, it goes into your body somewhere, and not necessarily places that make sense. That’s the other thing that comes out in, in when you’re practicing TRE is like you’ll feel the tremor in a place in the body that maybe you have no connection to, no understanding of, maybe you haven’t felt that place in a long time. 


And then all of a sudden, a memory will come up. And And be like, Oh my gosh, that I remember that one time that, that, that is why that’s why that tremor is there. Sometimes you don’t have that. I’m not going to say that memories are always attached. They, they aren’t always, but sometimes they are. And it’s fascinating to stumble across memories that you have. 


Placed no emphasis on that. The body has remembered and this goes back to our definition of what trauma is right? Because the body can remember things as trauma that we don’t  


[00:35:25] Brenda: right.  


[00:35:26] Ericka: Surgery, for example, surgery. When we go in for surgery, it’s typically to save us or help us or, So we don’t think of that as traumatic, but the body has been, cut into, right? 


Yeah. That’s traumatic for the  


[00:35:39] Brenda: body. Yes. So I think that’s really interesting. I just want to make sure that we emphasize that point that you said that. When you’re experiencing all of this stress in your life, when you don’t do anything with it, if you ignore it, or you just say, I don’t have time to deal with this right now. 


I’m going to, I’m going to deal with that. When this current crisis is over, it does go into your body. And I think that’s just a really important point. And like you said, it doesn’t necessarily go where you think it’s going to go. So you might be saying, if I start getting a lot of migraines or if my back starts hurting, then I’ll know something’s wrong. 


But what I’m hearing you say is that that’s not necessarily true. It could be going into other places. And so your body’s just it’s a container and it’s getting filled up with all of this negative. Energy and stuff that really, you’ve got to do something with it. So how does somebody actually practice TRE? 


what does this look like from a practical standpoint? If I said, if I’m, if I’m listening and going, Oh, ding, ding, ding. This is me. This is me. This is what’s going on with me. What does it actually look like? And how would somebody get into trying it?  


[00:36:50] Ericka: I would first say that. you can certainly buy the book. 


You can buy David Berselli’s book and look at the exercises in there and try it personally. I would recommend that to start off, you find a certified trauma release exercise provider to help you and guide you through the process. Because while the exercises are very simple and it’s easy to follow along in the book, Or if you wanted to watch something on YouTube or the traumaprevention. 


com website, which is a great resource, by the way, just FYI. Got it. And great resources there, but it’s a very personal process and we spend a lot of time tailoring those exercises to the individual. And helping the individual. Learn what works for them and giving permission for them to try lots of different things. 


There’s a lot of experimentation that happens in the beginning because while we can induce a tremor, then what? Then what is going to happen, then what, where does it go? What next, what do we do with that? How do we feel? There’s a lot of, there’s a lot more to it than just paying attention to the physical effort that is happening, which we always try to keep that physical effort below a seven and then eventually below a five on a scale of one to 10. 


Explaining that to someone is really, really difficult. And then we have to explain and learn how to apply that same kind of Effort scale to our mental effort and our emotional effort, because those things will start to come up. We are not just a body. We’re not just a mind. We’re not just our emotions. 


Those things are interwoven. And especially when we’re talking about trauma, big T or little t trauma that is stuck in the body. Those things want to be. out. And when they come out, we want to have some kind of safe co regulation. That’s what a provider gives to a practitioner. Someone who’s there who can be what they call a container for the process. 


And a lot of people just will barrel right through, just like every other kind of exercise, right? I got to get this done. Get it done, right? When actually that takes you out of the present moment. If we’re looking for a sense of presence in the body and you’re just trying to get it, get to the seventh exercise and watch the clock and two minutes, two minutes, two minutes, and then, follow the prescription. 


That is not. Practicing a sense of presence in the body. Definitely not  


[00:39:52] Brenda: I could imagine that there, a lot of emotions would come up when you’re doing this. And so having somebody with you in that first, maybe as you’re learning, it could be really important. And then is it something that you learn and can do on your own or do you always need to have somebody? 


With you.  


[00:40:10] Ericka: No, that’s the beautiful thing about it. And everybody is different. So some people feel really comfortable after one session, just continuing to practice on their own. Other people prefer to have someone with them all the time. There’s options to do group sessions. Group is great because now you have more than just one person helping to co regulate the group if you’re comfortable with that. 


And then other people like to have that personal practice and then maybe check in every once in a while, something comes up, something strange, something different. The body did something weird today. TRE trauma release can sometimes move into the fascia. And that is really interesting. I’m sure everyone listening has yawned at least once in their life. 


That’s a good guess. Yeah. That sensation of yawning. is basically a fascial stretch, the fascia, that, that tissue, that connected tissue that covers all of our muscles. And it connects everything to everything else, very structural, but it can stretch and it feels like a yawn. But that fascia is everywhere in the body. 


So imagine feeling a yawn from the bottom of your foot to the back of your neck, or from the left side of your body to the right side of the body, because they can be crossed. So it’s not something that happens right out of the gate to the body, but it can happen. So if you are on your own and you’re not aware of those things, Potentially coming into the body. 


It’s nice to at least have somebody that you can call and be like, Hey, this happened today. And what  


is  


going on with that?  


[00:41:56] Brenda: So would somebody, so if I am doing this, how long does it take for me to recognize the benefits? Like if I, if I do this. Today. Once do I start to feel it? I’m just trying to get an understanding of like with some exercises. 


You’ve got to stick with it for three weeks and then you’re going to see results. How does it work with T. R. E.  


[00:42:17] Ericka: So some people feel after one session, a complete relaxation, what they’ll describe as very relaxed, very calm response. Throughout the body, some people, some people, one session is all it takes right to feel calm. 


It depends on what your intention is with this. If you want a one and done thing, it’s basically very similar to a deep tissue massage from the inside of the body out. That’s very similar to that. Oh, that’s a good visual. So after we get a deep tissue massage, We feel great for that day, but every day. 


Every morning when we wake up, we are basically an entirely new human being made up of all the experiences that got us to that moment and stress is unavoidable, right? All stress can be stored as tension in the body somewhere. So you just continue to layer and layer and layer for 49 years. However old you are, so every day you have new layers of tension coming out one T. 


R. E. Session is not doesn’t fix everything. It’s not like a magic bullet pill. If you practice and the recommendation is 2 to 3 times a week. So we have rest in between because that’s where all of the neurons in the brain starts to change and reorganize. The nervous system reorganizes that way during our rest states or in between the sessions. 


So two to three times a week. What people report is less anxiety. Lower emotional dysregulation that are the overall sense of wellbeing improves. And, and for me, it was like the things that used to send me right through the roof, didn’t bother me as much anymore. That was like, to me, that was huge. 


Like those little irritations that used to push me right over the edge, fly off the handle completely out of control and out of. It just made no sense to anyone around me why I was reacting that badly to that particular thing. That stuff stopped happening.  


[00:44:46] Brenda: That’s very powerful because that is so key to Having everything in your life, start to gel together a little bit better. 


If you can control those responses, especially when you have a kiddo, who is causing chaos in your life to have a bit more ability to really control how you’re responding to them is huge. And there is no pill for that. there’s no, that’s only something that you can do by, like you said, working in, like working within yourself to, to manage that. 


So I think. If it did nothing else, if that was what it did, that would be worth it because we’re all looking for ways to be better at how we interact and how we respond. And, and I know that feeling when you actually feel like you’re out of your body, when you’re having a response. And I remember when the kids were little, something would happen and it just, you almost feel yourself break away whoop. 


That just, I’m now in a different space and I am not in control of what I’m saying. I’m not in control of what I’m doing. And so having a tool, I think like this, that you could work into, maybe you do yoga, maybe do CrossFit, whatever it is you could, it sounds like this is something that you could add into a workout. 


Routine that is not a workout, but it’s just an added piece that will help you with some of that regulation.  


[00:46:18] Ericka: Exactly. Exactly. So it doesn’t have to be something that you only do. Like you takes you out of your day, your routine that here’s one more thing. Here’s one more thing that you have to do today. 


Like it doesn’t have to be that it does pair really well. I feel like with other types of just regular health and fitness. Types of movement, because, those things also add tension to the body, right? And they’re still good for you. That doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t hold on to tension from them, right? 


So giving yourself just a way out of that tension with something like this, that feels very easy and it doesn’t have to take a long time, although in the beginning, as with everything, there’s a learning curve, right? So you want to give yourself. The space and a little bit of grace to learn it. And really what you’re learning is yourself. 


You’re learning your body. You’re learning your responses. You’re getting back in touch with your nervous system in a different way. Hopefully a more friendly way. you’ve got to live with yourself, right? So hopefully, hopefully it’s a nice place. Yeah. We want it to be a nice place to live. We want it to be a user friendly experience. 


User friendly. A little bit of kindness goes a long way when we’re talking about our own, our own, stress response.  


[00:47:43] Brenda: Yeah.  


[00:47:44] Ericka: So yeah. So just tacking it on and that’s where I love doing it at the end of yoga. I love putting the tremor at the end of a yoga class because. Even though yoga is, we think about it as a very calming and relaxing thing and there’s a lot about yoga because of the breath that does downregulate the nervous system. 


It can still be very activating.  


[00:48:10] Brenda: Yes, absolutely.  


[00:48:12] Ericka: Yeah, you can really activate the nervous system with the yoga class. There’s a lot of challenges there. There are not just physical challenges, but mental and emotional challenges too. There’s some scary things in yoga. If you’re going to stand on your head or you’re going to do a back bend and open up the front of the body and things like that. 


And so those are things that it’s not bad to do them, but we do want to give ourself a way out of that too, in a safe way, a really safe, Discharge of that energy so that, so that it doesn’t hang around for later and get in our way.  


[00:48:47] Brenda: Wow. that’s so good to know. I just think any tools that we can have to better manage our bodies, manage what’s going on within them. 


There’s just so much stress and we don’t, I think, give ourselves the grace to recognize, wow, this is really impacting my body. And Maybe you can talk about what are some of the things that we might notice going on in our body if we are storing a lot of trauma and a lot of stress and by trauma again, I like your big T little t because the not knowing where your child is. 


Not knowing where they’re sleeping tonight, not knowing what chemicals are putting in their body, not knowing if they’re getting behind the wheel of a car with chemicals in their body, knowing that they’re hanging out with people who sell drugs or are in gangs. those things are day to day, just commonplace for those of us in, in this world that none of us want to be in. 


That is so traumatizing to the body. And I just don’t know that we give ourselves the grace to say, holy cow, that’s a lot.  


[00:49:59] Ericka: And basically what you’re describing is a elevated, already activated baseline state. So we don’t even get to be down in calm, like you’re never down there. So absolutely living in that space. 


For too long. It can really start to reflect in some pretty well. we call it, I call it like how the body whispers because sometimes some of them are really subtle signals. You don’t really recognize until it’s almost too late to do something about it. So some of those things, some of those things will first number one thing would be how you’re sleeping. 


So your sleep patterns, it’s like a canary in the water. Coal mine for stress in general, right? and this is across the board for all human beings. Everybody, every once in a while has a bad night’s sleep. Like we don’t sleep perfectly all the time. And if you’re saying that right now, I would challenge you on that. 


[00:50:59] Brenda: Yes.  
 
[00:51:00] Ericka: Everybody, every once in a while has a bad night’s sleep when it’s all the time. Then we start this, unfortunately shifting some of our circadian rhythms and a lot of the hormone balance that we would typically depend on for rest and repair, gets thrown off and now we’ve got like a, a terrible catch 22. 


We’re already stressed out so we can’t sleep. And then because we are not sleeping. Sleeping now we’re sleep deprived, which is another cause of stress response in the body. And so now we’ve got this terrible cycle that’s going and feeds on itself. And so what do we do? We caffeinate to stay awake so that we can function. 


And now we’re just pushing ourselves higher and higher with the stimulants up, up, up into that stress. That’s so that’s one way to know, if your sleep patterns are disrupted all the time, whether that means. You can’t get to sleep. You can’t stay asleep, or maybe you are sleeping your eight hours, but you wake up and you’re still exhausted. 


So that tells you that something is off in your sleep pattern during the night, right? So you’re waking up exhausted, and then maybe Maybe on that opposite end of the scale, you have pushed yourself to the point where you’re, you’re moved into that shutdown response. And in humans, it can look like sleeping all the time. 


[00:52:34] Brenda: Yeah. Never being able to get out of bed.  


[00:52:36] Ericka: Yeah. Never being able to, and then you getting into the depression and depressive behavior and things like that. So sleep. That’s one way. The body is going to talk to you about what’s going on in your world, right? Let’s have a little chat. Let’s have a little chat about that. 


Now, couple of things. I just want to give you a couple of actionable tools with that because it’s one thing to, we all know how horrendous it is to sleep deprived, right? But what do you do about it? Fastest way to affect that, to start to affect that is with light in your eyes. So sunlight, when the sun rises and when the sun sets to help reset that. 


It’s not perfect. It takes days. You got to practice. And if you’re living in Seattle, sometimes that’s hard to do, but it’s interesting that that’s how the brain tells, when we’re supposed to be sleeping, Is with sunlight so it’s Just another, I’m going to give you permission to go outside, go outside, just get outside and see the sun. 


So that’s, that’s one little simple, actionable step. And just as consistent as you can be with it. The second thing, the second way the body talks to you is the digestive patterns are eating patterns. And I’m going to lump a couple of things in there, not just how we digest food, but our appetite. So appetite is a, is a clue to that. 


Some people are their appetite completely shuts down. And then I think for some people it’s the opposite of that. So for, for me, I was a stress, not eater. I could go for days with no food if I have to, and that’s not something. Good. No, it’s something you should do. No stars on that recommendation. No, and it does nothing for weight loss either. 


No, it’s terrible. It’s a terrible thing. But along with that, a lot of digestive issues come up with people who are highly stressed and, it might not start off Really, really blaringly bad for you because sometimes just like the sleep thing, every once in a while, your stomach doesn’t feel good. 


So you might not even notice it right away. So that’s one of those things. It’s different for every person, but digestive issues really high on the list for chronic stress disorder. Reactions and it takes a long time. That’s the hard part. It’s not something that you can fix like with one prescription or one Probiotic or something like that. 


There’s so many things that go into that. It is definitely a challenge and the bad part about that is that It can make you really hypervigilant with the sensations, with all the sensations in the body, because our vagus nerve connects so much into the gut. And that’s, the, the major line of communication with the brain about whether or not we’re safe coming from the gut. 


And all of a sudden we’re having these digestive issues and it makes absolute sense in the short term when you’re activated for a stress response or a challenge or something, we shut down digestion. It’s not necessary. We shut down everything that’s unnecessary for your survival, but you’re not supposed to, again, live there. 


So, we need to find a way to calm that response. And that’s one of the benefits of trauma release exercise, actually, because that’s That’s one of the first ways that people start to see some long term benefits when they’re practicing on a regular basis, because we’re tapping into the brainstem, we get into the vagus nerve and we’re communicating a sense of safety that wasn’t there before at a very primal level. 


So that’s the second way digestion. And then a third way to pay attention to in the body is just where you’re holding onto physical tension, physical tension, or muscle pain. And most people. I would say most people I’ve talked to could tell me where they hold tension, neck, shoulders, upper back, some people, hips, low back, things like that, you, where those things are, where those things are, it’s not supposed to, you’re not supposed to feel tight in the body all the time. 


[00:56:48] Brenda: Yeah,  


[00:56:49] Ericka: but that’s coming from this activated state in the nervous system, getting you ready to fight. That always on. Yeah, always on. The shoulders up. And unfortunately, like a lot of our posture in the modern world sort of mimics this fight here, right? This rolled forward, head forward posture. And seated, obviously when we’re sitting all the time, that actually shortens the psoas muscle, which is people call it a stress muscle or whatever. 


It’s very, very powerful. It’s designed to curl you up and protect your organs, but it’s not supposed to be, Activated all the time. 24 seven, 24 seven. No, we don’t want it though. Yeah. We need rest. We need rest and we need to allow the tension to release every once in a while. So those are some ways, some things to look for in the body and they may seem obvious, but sometimes what we consider normal is not supposed to be normal. 


[00:57:50] Brenda: Yeah. and sometimes we’re just so distracted with everything that’s going on that we don’t really pay attention to those things. So I think that’s, that’s really good to be aware of the body. Sometimes it whispers and I think sometimes it shouts. So yes,  


[00:58:04] Ericka: absolutely.  


[00:58:04] Brenda: You got to really be in tune with what’s happening. 


This is just such good information. I’m so thankful to have you on and sharing all of this. I know you just, maybe you can talk a little bit about what you do. You do have a practice and you’re certified in this. Is it something you can teach online? So is this something that you’re teaching virtually since we’re in, still in COVID or how does that work? 


[00:58:27] Ericka: Yeah. So I have my business elemental kinetics is an online studio. It’s an online trauma release studio and a yoga studio. So we teach online all the time. We use zoom. Like it’s the window to the world, which has become the window to the world, which is Is really great because Without COVID, we would just be limited to our own little bubble of locale, right? 


Yeah, it’s great way to be able to reach out to people across the country and spread the word about this particular type of exercise and, and, and let more people learn it and do it and embrace it and benefit from it. So the online thing, very, very doable. And my, my studio, I offer two different products, two different ways to incorporate trauma release. 


And the first is a private session package, which I encourage everybody to start one on one with whoever their certified provider is, because it really is about building a relationship with your own system, your own body again, and that takes time and it takes patience. And The best way I have found is to work one on one with someone. 


And then after that private session package, people have the option to continue on their own. They’re welcome to embrace their own private practice, or they can move into kind of a year long membership program that allows them to work in a small group and live. With the certified provider. So you get to learn from other people through their process. 


And then as well as develop more about your own practice and included in that are ways to integrate TRE with yoga. So they get a lot of opportunities to practice. In real time, and then they get recorded opportunities as well.  


[01:00:32] Brenda: Awesome. And I will put links to that in the show notes, but where can people find you? 


Is it elementalkinetics. com?  


[01:00:39] Ericka: Yes, elementalkinetics. com. And you’ll find all information there on the website. site, including links to the work in, which is my podcast. And we do talk a lot about integrating trauma release into other things, as well as just my geeky love of all things. Brain related. yeah, you just have to forgive me. 


I just that stuff a little bit too much.  


[01:01:10] Brenda: it’s important. It’s really important. So yes, definitely the podcast and your private work with people is so important. So I’ll put that in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming. coming on and sharing this. I think it’s something that people really haven’t heard about. 


I had never heard about it until you told me. So I’m excited to share that with everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to go to the show notes, you can always find those at brendazane. com forward slash podcast. Each episode is listed there with full transcript, all of the resources that we mentioned, as well as a place to leave comments if you would like to do that. 


You might also want to download a free ebook I wrote called hindsight three things I wish I knew and my son was addicted to drugs. It’s full of the information I wish I would have known when my son was struggling with his addiction. You can grab that at Brenda Zane comm Forward slash hindsight. Thanks again for listening and I will meet you right back here next week