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How can we work DEEP in the body, without ‘blowing up’ someon’s trauma?
Almost all somatic practitioners (including embodiment coaches) I work go through a phase of feeling super worried about activating latent trauma & triggering a client. This is a conversation I have with women, a lot.
Sometimes, this fear manifests as an extreme over-abundance of caution, need to “get it right” & hyper-fixation on strategies.
Resulting in practitioners hold themselves back from deepening into sensation – to everyone’s detriment, especially the clients.
Trauma is trending. Rightly so.
The growing awareness around trauma (whether that’s big T or little t trauma) and it’s somatic component is key for us to unravel our personal and collective hurts. I adore that the conversation around identifying and understanding trauma, and analyzising the collective conditions that are creating so much of it, is widening. Generations of people hurting people doesn’t get fixed by ignoring the dynamics at play.
But backing away from the body because we’re terrified of trauma doesn’t help anyone.
So how can we deepen into the body AND feel confident we’re doing it in safe ways?
Professional training & working with a clear scope of practice helps. But there’s more at the heart of this fear that just ‘getting the right piece of paper’.
Today on the podcast we’re speaking with Somatic Psychotherapist & founder of The School of Integrative Somatic Psychotherapy Monique Pangari about somatic approaches to trauma-centric therapy and what practitioners need to know if they are worried about activating latent trauma (plus so much more).
Moniques training & experience is vast & in this conversation we explore:
- Examples of somatic strategies to support clients in a trauma therapy setting
- Why embodied approach are deceptively simple & some of the core components for practitioners to make them work well
- The difference between trauma therapy, therapy & coaching
- What practitioners need to know if they are worried about activating a client’s trauma
- The importance of rupture & repair for practitioners
- Attachment styles & the work Monique created for counsellors & psychotherapists
About Monique Pangari
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP, is the creator of Somatic Sand Therapy™, Somatic Expressive Therapies and Somatic Attachment Focused Expressive Therapies™ (SAFE-T).
In 2020 she founded ‘The School of Integrative Somatic Psychotherapy’ where she offers post-graduate training and clinical supervision for professional Counsellors and Psychotherapists.
Monique has been practicing Sandplay Therapy and Expressive Therapies with clients of all ages since 2002 and has been training other therapists across Australia since 2008. She began integrating Somatic Experiencing® and Attachment Repatterning into her practice in 2017.
Monique has undergraduate studies in Education and Psychology and holds two Masters Degrees. She is also trained in Family Constellations, Circle of Security, Emotion Focused Therapy for Couples, NeuroAffective Touch®, ISHTA Yoga and is currently undergoing further study in Jungian Sandplay Therapy.
In addition to offering Training, Supervision and Counselling in her private practice, Monique also lectures part-time at the University of the Sunshine Coast (USC) in the Masters of Counselling program and offers Supervision to Counselling Interns at the University Counselling Clinic. Monique is a Level 4 member of the Australian Counselling Association (ACA) and is a member of the ACA College of Supervisors.
Resources from today’s podcast
- Monique Pangari – Website | Instagram
- Diane Poole Heller
- Trauma Aware Embodiment Coaching (Podcast by Jenna)
- Feminine Embodiment Coaching – an emotional embodiment & vulnerability-based professional training for coaches
- Primal Feminine Flow – Embodied At Home Movement Practice
- School of Embodied Arts
- Leave a podcast review on iTunes here
- Thought or reflection to share? Leave a comment on Instagram here
Transcript
(This transcript is generated by AI so might not be perfect)
Hello and welcome to this conversation today around trauma and the embodied arts. Today we’re speaking with Monique Pangari, a somatic psychotherapist about a somatic approach to therapy. Monique is an Australian based founder of the School of Integrative Somatic Psychotherapy, and she offers postgraduate training and clinical supervision for counselors and psychotherapists. Today’s conversation is a really rich one. We speak with Monique about the different spectrums of trauma therapy and coaching work, and our conversation is really suitable for any practitioner who’s working with the body. Monique shares with us some really beautiful examples of some of the somatic strategies that she uses with her clients, and we speak about how embodiment work can be deceptively simple and yet some of the key metrics that we actually need to have dialed in in order to do it well. Monique also generously speaks with those of us who might feel concerned about activating somebody’s latent trauma when we are working with the body in deep ways and some ways that we can reframe and ensure that we are doing good work in those settings. We speak in addition to that around rupture and repair for practitioners and some attachment style work, as well as some of unique monique’s own unique body of work. So it’s a really rich conversation, very relevant for those who are practitioners, coaches, therapists, and working in the realm of working with clients using the Embodied Arts. A warm welcome to our conversation today,
(01:49):
So a very warm welcome, Monique, it is so lovely to have you here with us at the conference today. To get started, I wanted us to begin the fundamental foundation definition piece around looking at trauma healing and trauma work. You approach that work in a more somatic way. And I’d love to begin this conversation by seeing if we can tease apart and if you can share a little with us about how somatic based trauma work and trauma healing might different from some of the more traditional or conventional talk based therapies, which I feel have been predominant over the past decade and more. We’d love just to hear your thoughts on some of the points or approaches that are different between these ends of the spectrum.
Monique Pangari (02:42):
Sure, that’s a great question and thank you so much for having me here to talk at this conference for I feel really touched and very happy to be here. So yeah, I guess in thinking about my own evolution as a counselor and psychotherapist, I have never really been a talk therapist as such, but certainly in my training over the years, particularly my undergraduate training, I was taught the basic modalities of talk therapy. But I guess in my work, I started out teaching in an aboriginal school in central Queensland and then I moved into working for Education Queensland as a behavior management advisory visiting teacher and a welfare officer fed Queensland across the Sunshine Coast. And I guess I was working with kids who were really at risk of suspension and exclusion. And what I was really finding was that teaching kids social skills or teaching kids to count down from 10 and was not really working, these kids had extremely challenging lives and there was just so much more going on in their world.
(04:05):
And so way back then this was, I graduated in, I started working in that role I think around 2000, so over 20 years ago. From there, I guess I was always interested in alternative ways of working and I started studying in my master’s degrees. And on top of that I also started studying outside of the education department, sorry, outside of the tertiary world education world in postgraduate training and expressive therapies. And then I started integrating that into my work with young people in
schools. And then I went on to do a whole lot of other different jobs and expressive therapies has always been the underlying way that I work and it’s somatic in its own way. But more recently, 2017, I started training in somatic experiencing, which is a specifically trauma resolution train program over three years. And I would say that took what was familiar for me around working somatically to a whole nother level.
(05:19):
And so just probably to give an example of how I work differently to maybe how I did in the past or how I know other therapists work that don’t work, somatically pretty much from the moment that clients walk in the door, I’m creating opportunities for them to feel safe in their body. So that would mean I might invite them to see where would you like to sit? So I don’t make a presupposition about where I’m going to sit and where the client’s going to sit because our bodies tell us where we’re safe and where we’re not safe. So for some clients with trauma, they might unconsciously not know, but they might want to be really close to the door. For instance, they might want to have a wall behind them. We don’t know, but our bodies know our bodies are sending us information all the time.
(06:14):
So from the moment the client walks in, I’ll invite them to say, where would you like to sit today? We can be on the floor, we can be on the couch. You could be on this bouncy ball over here, or you can take the single chair, where would you like to go? And they’ll have a think about it and then they’ll pick somewhere. And then usually I’ll say, how do you know? Just take a moment. Let’s just take a moment, just check in with your body and see how do you know this is right? So right from the beginning, we’re inviting the body into the room, we’re just inviting the body to share with us what it’s got to say and that it’s welcome that it’s welcome here, it’s welcome by me. I’m mindful a lot of the time when I’m speaking to the client that I’m talking to the body.
(07:04):
So I’ll sometimes talk in a language that’s talking to the body with my clients. So I might say, what does heart think about that? Or I just noticed that your hand went to your shoulder as you spoke about that. I wonder if we can check in with shoulder and see if the shoulder has some movement or some sound or some an image perhaps might come to mind just as we focus in on shoulder or I might do something else. Just notice how your hand moved to shoulder and just see what is the intention from hand to shoulder. Let’s tune into that and can shoulder feel that intention. So we start dialogue between body parts, between the mind and the body and to invite the body to share with us what’s happening. There’s lots of different things. Those are a couple of different things that I do, but I could keep going.
Jenna Ward (08:06):
Yeah, I know. I love what you’re sharing and you’re so speaking my language, you’re so speaking my language. And to me, it seems like an obvious and necessary language to speak in addressing the resolution, the support around people who have had or hold traumatic experiences in their body. Because while trauma can, I understand while trauma can have a narrative and an understanding and a set of memories that go with it, we see and there’s increasingly literature around the idea that it is the body that really holds the charge of that event, of that series of events,
(08:50):
Of that system that somebody’s living or experiencing within. And so in your experience by for the two beautiful examples that you shared with us, inviting the clients to really access a resource of safety in their body and then involving the body in the conversation, in your experience, what do you notice that this involvement in body awareness, the soma and developing at a greater connectivity and sense of trust in what the sensations and the images and impressions of the body is bringing to the surface as part of these sessions, I’m really curious to hear your thoughts around how this style of addressing the body and the idea that it’s actually the body that is holding the charge or the tension or the residue of that event, how do you see this as this is coupled together? How do you see this unfold for clients in terms of moving forward? What shifts does it create?
Monique Pangari (09:56):
Yeah, this is such a good question. A couple of things are coming to mind, and one is kind of answering your first question too, which is it’s really important for us to, or for me, what I find really important is when clients come in, I’m really mindful that they have a story. They have a story of what’s happened to them that’s held here in the mind that they remember that they’ve probably spent a lot of time going over and over and over trying to make sense of because that’s what the mind does. It wants to make sense of things. The thing with trauma though is that that part of our memory goes offline when trauma happens, the language center, the Broca’s area of the brain, we flip our lid and it goes offline. So when we’re trying to make sense of, we are really grasping at making up stories sometimes that kind of fit with what we vaguely remember happened, whether that’s shock trauma that happened last week or whether that’s preverbal trauma that happened when we were six months of age, the accessing of that trauma is not actually possible from the mind.
(11:17):
So I say when clients come in in those first sessions, I do a bit of psychoeducation around explaining how the brain works and how our mind works to try to make sense of and to create story and what we want to do in therapy. What the aim is is to bring the body online with that story and just to check is that story accurate? Because once the body’s engaged, the story can actually look at things in a different way. The mind can start to see things in a different way informed by the body. And so what I say to clients often is, I really want to hear your story. Your story is so important, it’s really important to me and it’s important for you to have it heard. So my aim is definitely to hear your story and I want to bring your body along with us.
(12:12):
And so that means that at times when you’re sharing your story, I might ask, can we pause here? Can we pause here and just see what’s happening in body for a moment? And that’s where I’ll invite clients to go, what do you notice as happening after just having explained? And I’ll summarize what they’ve said, so mind knows I’m hearing them. And then I’ll say, what do you notice is happening in your body? Just take a moment and see what’s happening. Throat, neck, shoulders, heart rate, breath, belly. And we’ll just take a moment. I’ve had so many clients who just look like they’re just telling a story because they’ve told it so many times before and they say, oh, my heart is pounding so fast and my hands are sweating and my throat is really tight. And it’s like, wow. You can’t really necessarily see that from the outside in because they’re often trying to get through their story really quickly so they don’t have to feel any of this. So by slowing the story down and inviting body and mind to interact in this story and giving space for both of them to interact in the telling of the story. So it’s important at the beginning that I tell mind that we want to hear your story, it’s very important, but we want to slow it down so we can hear it in a really coherent way and a way that body is online and can be a part of the storytelling. Storytelling. So that’s an important part of incorporating the body into talk therapy as such,
Jenna Ward (13:58):
And what you’ve shared, although we work in very different ways. So our conversation today is really centering trauma centric care. I myself am a coach, so my realm of work is to work with clients who are at a level of really well functioning stability in their life and they’re wanting to move to towards their goals and thrive. And yet I also work in really somatic ways. So so much about what you’re sharing around slowing down, inviting resources of safety, coupling the narrative with the sensations, the intuitions, the images and knowings of the deep body so that we can gather more resources so we can gather new awareness. And so that what’s alive inside of us has an opportunity to, whether it is be acknowledged, be metabolized, be shifted, be cared for. All of these things are really, there’s degrees of similarities, although we’re working in different ends of the spectrum. And as you’re speaking, and I’m listening along to just this tiny little snippet of what you’ve shared, and I appreciate this is a tiny little snippet that you’ve shared with us so far. Part of me just feels that this way of working is so deceptively simple in some ways. And I’m just curious if you have thoughts around the deceptive simplicity of this body honoring way of working.
Monique Pangari (15:39):
It is so deceptively simple. I also do sand play therapy. Jung and sand play therapy is another modality, which is again, another very embodied modality using hands in a sand tray with sand in it that can be manipulated. It would be an embodied art I would think would come underneath that definition. And again, I say that to clients all the time or to people that I train.
This is a deceptively simple modality and somatic, I’m just going to talk about somatic experiencing what I’m trained in. But somatic experiencing is similar. The level of training is essential because so many things can happen when we go into the body and having an understanding of what the nervous system is doing, having a good understanding of polyvagal theory, I have found is absolutely essential. And the other piece of this work that is absolutely vital is your own work, like doing your own awareness work your own work personally in your own practices.
(16:50):
I think there’s different levels to embodiment work. I think we need daily practices of embodiment, and I call that embodiment work. And then we need to, from that practice, you usually find places that are, oh, this is a bit stuck, or questions come up. And then, yeah, right. And then from there, I mean if life isn’t already showing you what’s going on, your body will. And then from there, I recommend accessing a somatic psychotherapist that has experience and training that you can do some work with so that you can go a bit deeper. And once you experience your own system changing and your own system unlocking and the tenderness of the conversation between mind and body, it’s at that place where I think we trust the modality in a way that it seems seamless when we’re using it, but when we don’t have that trust because we’ve experienced it ourselves, it can be clunky and it doesn’t seem seamless when we’re doing it or to the client. So that’s why I think deceptively simple is a good one. It’s deceptively simple for somebody who’s done a lot of work.
Jenna Ward (18:16):
I really liked how you pointed out what you just shared around trusting the modality. (18:22):
So again, just reinforcing that our ways of working are really different. I work in trauma aware ways, but not trauma centric ways. So one thing that I notice in the conversation around embodiment and somatic work is that people just really generally
speaking, a lot of people, a lot of practitioners are really, I’m going to use the word scared and sometimes even petrified about blowing up someone’s trauma when they’re entering the body. And I feel that the piece that you just spoke about around really trusting the modality that you are working with and developing a lot of that trust by seeing your own internal shifts and revelations, your own sensitivity and security deepening, I believe that’s a huge part of the conversation. But what I notice as a result of this,
(19:20):
Well-placed fear of blowing up someone’s trauma, and I use these direct quote unquote words, not because they’re my own, but because they’re words that I hear people say. What I notice as a result of that is that people become, sometimes the common response to this is either not wanting to enter the body at all or feeling like we have to be some perfect, always get it right practitioner before we are willing to try. And I’m curious if you just have any thoughts or perspectives, particularly from this piece that we started the conversation from this piece around doing the work in your body first and trusting the modality. Curious if you have any thoughts about that response from a practitioner’s body and how that then impacts the effectiveness of how they do their work. Also appreciating, we’re speaking very generally and quite broadly here, but I’m curious just to hear your thoughts around this common tendency that I certainly notice in the embodiment and somatic space.
Monique Pangari (20:39):
Yes. Yeah, it’s a good one to contemplate. I feel in some ways a little bit paused by this question because we’re all human beings. We’re all walking around with pain, stress, trauma, and to say, oh, I’m nervous. I don’t want to make things worse, is also very human, right? It’s coming from a place of compassion. And I think we need to pause and notice the compassion that that moment of fear is coming from and be reminded of our humanity that we all want to be seen and we all want to be seen at a vulnerable, in our vulnerability in a safe way where we’re not going to be taken advantage of and we’re not going to be harmed. And so it’s, again, I come back to what you were just reiterating too, is the more we’ve done that work, the more we’ve been held ourself in that vulnerable place, the more we’ve felt those attachment adjustments around trust and trusting others and being able to yield into the safety of another, the more confidence we have in taking that goodness in us to somebody else because we are all aching and longing to be held in the goodness of another.
(22:23):
And I just think the more we do this work ourselves, the more that intention comes. The more we live from the heart, the more we see the goodness in people, the safer they feel, the more vulnerable, the more access they have to vulnerability. And I think we can change the world from that place.
(22:48):
So yeah, I guess I would say to somebody that was worried about blowing up someone else’s trauma to just recognize we all are in pain, we’re all suffering. That’s a premise of being human. And to maybe turn that back a little bit and think, okay, has anybody who’s shown deep care and interest in me ever blown up my trauma? Has anybody who’s really shown deep empathy and deep listening and a desire to really listen to my body, has that ever really created a lack of safety? So I think it comes back to your own training, your own practice and trusting the modality and trusting your own goodness, and to give it a go. And when we do mess up, sometimes we do, sometimes we do. I’m trying to think of an instance where I may have done that.
(23:49):
I can’t really think of any right now, but I’m sure I have done that at some point. Then we repair, and that’s one of the biggest pieces of attachment work is that no one’s perfect. None of us are perfect. I’m a parent. I have two children. I’ve been married, I’ve been divorced, I’m now engaged again, I’ve been in and out of relationships. What I know about relationship is that none of us get it right. I’ve been a therapist for 20 years. I upfront, I say to my clients, I’m not going to get everything right, but what I am committed to is repair and that you’re important to me and we can come back and we can repair. So yeah, just knowing that when our intention is to do good and we know how to do a good repair and we know how to come back into our own body, feel what’s there, share from that place, this is how we heal the world.
Jenna Ward (24:54):
I love what you’ve shared, and in part it reminds me that so much healing. We are talking about healing arts and healing modalities today, but so much healing happens outside the therapeutic and practitioner led space. Healing happens in family, in community, in intimacy, in friendship, and we don’t necessarily all have the list of the 25,000 important steps that you have to get right in order to get it right in those settings. So that’s a beautiful lens to bring it with, and I find that it is often individuals who do genuinely desire to do more good and to do less harm, even if it is unintentional harm that are asking these questions, which already is the most positive prognostic factor in my opinion, that you are concerned about. This is already one of the best signs.
(25:52):
I can certainly raise my hand as somebody who hasn’t always gotten it right. And you were looking for an example just before. One example came to mind for me of a time whereby I was working with a client in somatic embodied ways in the scope of practice as a coach, as an embodiment coach. And it was really interesting that when this particular example arose, it wasn’t overt, it wasn’t big, it wasn’t anything blowing up. It was me thinking about our session a day later and realizing actually just in that little moment, I maybe said something or offered something or didn’t say something in a way that could have been done with more care, more compassion, more awareness. I’m curious if something is, feels left incomplete for and with my client. And so very often where there’s opportunities to do better or where I’ve encountered something where it’s not created overt harm, but there was the opportunity to do even to do better work. It arises actually in really subtle ways and requires a lot of self-reflection as a practitioner and repair as you described. So I reached out and we had another conversation about that interaction to see if there was more for us to resolve and to go deeper into, and for me to learn from made me a much better practitioner.
Monique Pangari (27:24):
That just gives me goosebumps hearing that because the world I want to live in. Jenna Ward (27:29):
Yes, yes. I’m so with you, and thus the conference, this Monique Pangari (27:35):
Is the feminine way of being. Jenna Ward (27:38):
Yeah. So you spoke about repair and the importance of repair, and I see that on the spectrum of creating safety, creating vulnerability, creating genuine connection with those that you’re working with. If you were just, we weren’t necessarily planning to speak about this, but because it came up as such a central theme in what you just had shared. I’m curious, when we think about that process of rupture and repair, would you perhaps speak with us a little bit about what that creates in terms of how that supports the body to heal, to grow, to resolve trauma, if that’s okay? Yeah,
Monique Pangari (28:21):
Rupture and repair. We don’t talk enough about rupture and repair, I don’t think. Jenna Ward (28:25):
Yeah, we weren’t planning, but I think you’ve arisen it, and I think it ties in wonderfully with what we’re discussing. Monique Pangari (28:32):
Obviously it ties in wonderfully in parenting, partner relationships, colleague relationships, all the important places in our life. But for me as a therapist, it absolutely applies with my clients as well. So if you’re a practitioner of any kind to know that repair and rupture, rupture and repair is going to happen, it happens in relationships, it happens in life. To understand that rupture is going to happen and not go into any kind of relational position and assume it’s not going to happen here, it’s not going to happen for me. And it’s just setting yourself up to have to be the perfect something, the perfect mother or the perfect practitioner, the perfect coach, the perfect therapist. So I would say expect rupture, because then you know that you are having a relational experience with somebody and think about repair, think about how to do a good repair and what’s required.
(29:39):
And I feel like you just literally went through the steps of what is required, which is to pause. If we’re coming from an embodied place, you’ll feel the disconnect somewhere in your body and it’ll continue to play on your mind. So the body and the mind will be a bit, something’s not right. You’ll feel cranky all of a sudden in, you’ll snap at the wrong person. But if we do embodiment practices in a daily way, then we are used to turning within, I call it the power of the pause where we pause and turn our attention in and we go, what’s happening? Just stay curious for a moment. What’s happening in here? Oh, I’m irritable. What am I irritable about? What happened today? Oh, that’s right. I had that session and that thing happened.
Okay, let me sit with that for a bit. We go through this process of self-reflection and try to nut out what it is that happened that’s not sitting well, that didn’t feel right, and what’s our intention?
(30:46):
Here’s our greatest intention for this relationship. That’s what’s important. It’s never about who’s right or who’s wrong. It’s my intention for this relationship and how can I bring that back into awareness here is this work I just need to do by myself? Is this work that I need to do with the other person? I don’t know anybody who’s not touched by somebody that comes to them and says, Hey, I was thinking about that conversation we had or that session we had, and I felt like I missed you a little bit here. Or when you got really upset, I kind of froze and I didn’t know what to do. And I thought about that later, and I feel a lot of regret that I wasn’t more with you in that moment, but my body froze and I wanted to share with you what happened for me in there.
(31:34):
But now that I’ve unfrozen, this is how I feel. Whatever the content is that we have capacity to share, most people, they soften, they oh, and it just deepens, deepens the connection. And that’s just to come back to your question. And that builds resiliency. It builds resiliency over time. So the more, it doesn’t matter how many ruptures you have in your relationship with somebody, it really doesn’t matter. Some people coming from an attachment lens, some people come into relationship from a pursue perspective, which makes for a very lively relationship with a lot of passion in there and which can look like a lot of arguing, but so long as they know how to repair, it’s all good. It’s all good. You can stay in a relationship that has a lot of energy in it if there’s good repair in there. So all relationships look very different. It doesn’t mean less conflict is better. It means can I repair well? And if you can repair well, you’ll create more safety in the relationship and more trustworthiness. So yeah, that builds more resilience.
Jenna Ward (32:50):
I love seeing the positive and the benefit of the full cycle from rupture through to repair and resiliency when we’re willing to show up for it, which requires us, as you spoke about before, to be doing our work in that. And even though you were just giving these examples of what it might sound like to open the conversation to repair, you weren’t even directing those to me. I was melting in the chair. I was like, yes, let’s lean into intimacy together. If you’re going to say these types of things to me, like I’m here for it, my heart’s feeling it. So although they were literally just examples, not even directed towards me, I can absolutely imagine and feel the opening that that creates to towards deeper intimacy, deeper connection, and thus a platform for deeper vulnerability together, which is where all the magic happens.
Monique Pangari (33:42):
And I just want to say those that kind of came out fairly easily then. And it’s not because I’m a therapist, because I’ve had to work at this. I’ve had to work at this in my personal life big time. So yeah, it’s not because I’m a therapist that I have some miraculous way that I know how to say these words. That’s not the case. It’s been the personal work that I’ve done on myself. And you could ask any number of my ex-partners that would go, oh, yes, no, she does not know how to do this. Well, it’s a practice. It’s a practice and a development for it does come easily now, and it does feel easy now, but it wasn’t that way for a long time. So yeah, just in
Jenna Ward (34:25):
Case
Monique Pangari (34:26):
Sitting there going, oh, you can do that because you got all that training, that’s not the case. That’s Jenna Ward (34:31):
So great to humanize. And it is in our body that we either practice these skills, as you’ve already said, that we either practice the skills and develop the trust and competency in them, or we don’t. They’re actually just a theory unless we are replying them and living them and really seeing the fruits of them.
Monique Pangari (34:50):
That’s it. Yes. I can’t imagine not wanting to practice an embodied way of living. It means so delicious once you get into it. Jenna Ward (34:58):
How I got into it is still mystery and magic to me. My original training was as a clinical hospital pharmacist, but the fact that this spoke to me or awoke or I somehow got towards this path, it has really shifted the values that I hold and how I operate in my life. I feel like I’m a much more well-rounded human as a result.
Monique Pangari (35:24):
Yeah, me too. Jenna Ward (35:26):
So before our time runs out, I wanted to also speak about some of the distinct therapies that you have created as it relates to trauma and expressive therapies. There’s a few of them, but I was particularly interested in somatic attachment focused expressive therapies, which you’ve already mentioned a little bit earlier while we were speaking. I’m wondering if you would be so kind as just to share a little bit around the premise of somatic expressive somatic attachment focused expressive therapy. Sorry, just trying to get it out in the right order. If you could share a little bit about the premise of these so that we can just learn a little bit more about this particular and unique style of work.
Monique Pangari (36:11):
Okay. It’s so somatic attachment focused. Expressive therapies as an acronym is safety. So I call it safety. It’s just less of a mouthful. If I say safety, I’m referring to somatic attachment focused expressive therapies. So yeah, as I said earlier, when I came out of uni, I’d learned all the tertiary things and got my pieces of paper that way and master’s degrees, my undergrad in psych, and I came out and went, I still don’t know what I’m doing here. And so that’s when I started studying expressive therapies. And so expressive therapies has been the foundation for me around everything. And then obviously over the years, life happens and life changes. And so I’m going to do a little bit of self-disclosure here. I was relinquished at birth and adopted at six weeks of age and grew up as an adopted person in a family with two siblings who were adopted. And that has
had, whilst all that seemed normal, we didn’t talk about adoption. By the time I reached my twenties, I was pretty aware that this was a big deal, and I started a search for my biological family. And so from 21, when I met my birth mother till now, adoption has woven its way from birth until now, I should say it’s woven its way through my life in ways that have been very detrimental. And so that’s led me to looking for modalities to work with that can access pre-verbal trauma.
(37:55):
So as I said, I started out with expressive therapies. I moved into training in sand play therapy, which is a fantastic modality that doesn’t require verbal interaction can do, but it doesn’t require that. And then I found somatic experiencing, sorry, before I found somatic experiencing, I went through a divorce and that was one of those life-changing experiences. And I was at a talk listening to Daniel Siegel, and during that talk, just after my divorce, I was a mess. He spoke about adult attachment.
And so I knew a lot about parent-child attachment, but I hadn’t at that stage heard about adult attachment and he spoke about an online quiz, you can do so in the throes of my deep depression and mess, my life had fallen apart. Basically, I went and did this online quiz around attachment, adult attachment, and I didn’t like the result at all, and I put it away and went, okay, I don’t want anything to do with that.
(38:57):
And it took two years later for me to pick it back up again. And then I just ferociously read everything I could read on attachment, and I had started dating again, and the marriage I was in was a very safe, beautiful, safe, secure relationship. What happened for me is I came out, so that meant that the end of my heteronormative relationship and a move into a whole nother way of being, and that meant that I had a lot of dating experiences that were not ideal, that were nothing like this secure experience. So in reading about attachment, I could start to see how these dynamics play out in the dating field in the adult relating field, as well as I’d already done a lot of research about the adult child attachment piece. And so as I was doing all of that research, I was coming across different theorists that I really like, and I ended up flying over here to the states to train with Diane Pool Heller in a program, her program called Dynamic Attachment Re-Patterning Experience, and it’s DARE is the acronym for short.
(40:17):
And I did that training and that led me to doing somatic experiencing training not long after that. And then I started incorporating and creating trainings myself that are differently presented to the way that Paul Heller was presenting them, because I feel like when I just even start to talk about attachment, people’s nervous systems just start to go up. Everybody has a story. It’s very dysregulating once we start looking at our own attachment systems. So I wanted to do it very safely. So I created the safety training where it’s a four three day workshops, and in each workshop we just look at one attachment style. So in the first workshop we talk about secure attachment, what that is, we need to know what that looks like and feels like just so many people don’t have this education. We don’t know what is secure attachment, what does it look like, what does it feel like?
(41:18):
And if you’ve never had it, most people have had it in some way, even if it’s a small way. But if you haven’t generally had it, then it’s really important to know what it is and what it looks like and what it feels like in the body. And then in the next workshop, we go into the, well, in the next three workshops, we look at the three insecure attachment styles. So we’ll do anxious, then avoidant, and then we look at disorganized and we take three whole days on each attachment style so that we can really explore them from an embodied, expressive way. And we look at the ways to work with that in the therapy room and ways to support the natural evolution towards secure functioning that we are all biologically wired for, and how those attachment insecurities, they’re just adaptations. We’ve adapted to ways we didn’t get love, and when we can really press a lot of love into the system, the system can adapt back to its natural biological movement towards love and towards safety and towards security. So that’s what that program is about. I love it. I love teaching it. It’s just kind of like on love, just love. It’s really lovely is what I was trying to love on steroids.
Jenna Ward (42:42):
I can imagine It’s very revealing to see, because we know how our body moves in intimate relationships and in different opportunities for attachment. We already have that somatic data inside of us. So I imagine it’s really illuminating to play that out and also to try other styles on and experience them through the body as this really root up way to experience it, which just sounds so incredibly rich.
Monique Pangari (43:14):
What I find is people will come in and they’ll say, oh, I’m this attachment style. I think that’s what they are. By the end, they’ll go, I don’t know which one I am actually, and I’m like, that’s typical because we actually have very plastic attachment styles. We don’t have one attachment style. We have an attachment style in relation to the person we’re in relationship with. And so that’s why it’s beneficial to actually learn and understand each of the different ones.
Jenna Ward (43:41):
Absolutely. I can imagine this is the whole realm of conversation that we could dive further Monique Pangari (43:46):
Into.
Jenna Ward (43:47):
In the interest of time though, I’d love to ask you one final question. If the future is to be one where there is more embodiment, sprinkled everywhere over everything, what little reminder or suggestion or practice or pearl of wisdom might you leave us all with today?
Monique Pangari (44:10):
Oh, that’s a big question. This feels almost too simple, but I guess what’s coming to mind is practice the pause. Just practice the pause. It sounds simple, yet I know in my own practice I can get carried away. My thoughts get carried away with a story, and it’ll be a few hours, maybe even a couple of days where I’ll go, oh, hold on, pause. Come back. Come back in here.
Come back in here and let the story go and check in with my body. Yeah, that’s one. If I was to add another one, if daily embodiment practice, daily embodiment practice, and that could be for me, sometimes it’s dance, I put on some music and dance. Sometimes it’s, I’ll get out my crayons and I’ll do a body outline on a page. Sometimes it’s yoga, sometimes it’s just sitting and meditating. Sometimes it’s going for a walk in nature in a conscious way, feeling my feet on the ground as I walk. Sometimes it’s breathing in nature, the smell and then feeling it go all through my body. So there’s lots and lots of different embodiment practices that finding something to do every day is important. Beautiful. We’ll
Jenna Ward (45:55):
Take both of those. Thank you so much for your time today and for your expertise. It’s been a joy speaking. Monique Pangari (46:02):
Oh, absolutely. Lovely. And thank you so much for inviting me to come and share with you. It’s been a pleasure.
