Daniel Vose MA | Nervous System Healing

Age 14 I was so lost the search party gave up. Addicted, half-feral, and living proof that bad decisions can be made at competitive speed. Age 17 I’d spent over two years in rehab, which is more school than I ever managed 😉. I never actually graduated high school. Folks assumed that meant I hadn’t survived. Somewhere in the chaos I wandered into somatic experiencing and First Nations ceremonies, which, much to everyone’s astonishment, including my own, worked better than anything else I’d tried. Age 18 After meeting enough terrible therapists to last a lifetime, I decided I ought to help people properly. Sponsoring others felt more meaningful than surviving on pure technicality. I soon started noticing most healing models were missing crucial pieces, so I began stitching together what would one day become Trauma Alchemy. Age 20 Went to a Buddhist university. Figured if anyone could explain real sanity, it might be them. Age 25 Earned a master’s in somatic psychology. Worked in treatment centers. Gained eighty pounds of what I like to call “existential padding.” Also started assisting in trainings, limping along like a man twice my age but somehow still showing up. Age 29 Was told I wasn’t the right “box” for a big teaching role, wrong race, wrong gender. I understood the sentiment; the universe was balancing its books and all. Still, the news carried a sting all its own. Age 30 So I started my own brand and started teaching anyway. I reckon some greater intelligence knew what I didn’t, that what I really wanted was to build my own system and create a more complete approach. Turns out independence is the best certification. Age 31 Moved countries. Worked from faraway places. Met my wife, I’d come full circle and made a really good decision. Age 32 We traveled many countries. Got engaged somewhere between passport stamps. Age 33 Married in a tiny Colombian town where even the mountains looked pleased for us. Then moved back to the States to start a family, the sweetest chapter yet, the stability and blessings of family life coupled with the honor of reaching thousands and having hundreds of people go through trauma alchemy each year. #healingjourney

Good somatic practitioners cringe at many of the popular somatic release exercises you see online. If you have to do a release exercise every time you get activated, you aren’t really healing your nervous system. You’re building dependency, and that dependency can actually narrow your capacity over time. A lot of the popular somatic exercises are sold as bottom-up, inside-out healing approaches are actually very top-down. They are control over the body, not collaboration with it. They force an artificial “reset” instead of actual healing. That is a very important distinction. Real nervous system healing isn’t about getting yourself regulated as fast as possible every time you get activated. It’s about teaching your body what to do with that energy, building genuine capacity so you need the exercise less, not more. That said, there are somatic exercises that actually do this. That work toward the deeper layers rather than just resetting the surface. In my free Nervous System Healing Bundle, I explain another one of those tools that specifically helps with fight response and anger. It opens the channels in your body to allow fight energy to move out naturally and gets you ready for the deeper body-led healing work. It’s the difference between managing your nervous system and actually changing it. Over 20k people have already signed up and you can get it for free. You get 5 somatic exercises with in-depth explanations, 2 PDF booklets, and a masterclass. Comment “rewire” below and I’ll send it to you.

One thing I learned from many years of helping train therapists in Peter Levine’s somatic experiencing work is that while big shaking/release can feel amazing, it doesn’t always integrate and can keep people stuck. However when people have a more subtle, a softer and deeper tremble, the integration is smooth. That’s the kind of discharge that happens as the result of a process, not the artificial top down, “you have trauma so shake it out.” The difference between really good trauma work and more superficial work is often just this. Urgency is a sign of an overwhelmed system and when you urgently chase the release instead of being present enough to the process that organically allows the release, you are partly feeding the urgency. You may be unintentionally potentiating the cycles of building up too much activation in the body and then chasing bigger and bigger releases. It may seem like a subtle difference from the outside but it’s actually a really big deal and important thing to understand. A lot of therapists have this sense that they aren’t going deep enough, that they are kind of stuck on repeat using someone else’s system. Those systems can be amazing but they are more like scaffolding so the practitioner can ultimately learn how to rest in themselves enough to facilitate from a place of allowing. Also way less work and burnout. It’s a much smoother way of working but it requires the practitioner to have a different kind of capacity. Comment “become” to learn more about my intro practitioner program.

A lot of therapists got into this work because they were good at reading the room. Not because someone taught them. Because they had to be. Growing up there wasn’t much space to be present with themselves. The attention went outward. Toward a parent who needed managing, or steadying, or quietly rescuing. They got very good at tracking other people’s states and not so practiced at sitting with their own. That’s actually a real gift in this work at fist, until it starts working against you. Because that same pattern shows up in the therapy room. The low hum of tension when a session isn’t moving. The quiet sense of falling short watching someone else’s demo. The need to get it right that lives just underneath the clinical training. That feeling has a history much older than grad school. When you grew up needing to rescue someone and couldn’t, that doesn’t just go away. It follows you into the room. And when you’re unconsciously trying to finish that old job, you can’t really be present with the person in front of you. You’re somewhere else entirely. The deepest shift I’ve watched practitioners make has nothing to do with learning a new technique (though those are important too). It’s developing the capacity to be present with themselves enough that they stop needing the session to go a certain way. When that settles in, the work gets quieter. Deeper. A lot less effortful. And somehow more effective than anything they learned in the training. Comment “become” if this is landing somewhere real for you.

Nashalla helped me through one of the most trying times of my life and I was a teenage H addict so that is really saying something. In this interview we talk some about what she did to help and so much more. If a 2,500 year old system of Tibetan medicine sounds interesting check out the interview! Her medical degree (TMD) was officially conferred by the Qinghai Tibetan Medical College in Tibet, making her one of the few Westerners recognized as a master of this 2,500-year-old healing lineage. She is highly competent and credible.

Send this to your partner to remind yourself or them to try it! I have a somatic relationship exercise library on my site fyi!!

Give this a try! Many people are talking about fascia and the importance of releasing it but not many are yet talking about helping it complete. Completion when done well, takes more bandwidth, more listening to the body and allowing it to unfold. You can still get my Heal trauma intro bundle for free, just comment “Rewire”

No I don't actually iron my sheets, I was just trying to think of an interesting visual to keep attention- little bit of visual sugar to help the medicine go down. I don't think most realize how dibilitating ocd can be.

Somatic release exercises can be good, probably about on level with the mental masterba***n of just figuring out why you are the way you are. Both the releases and the sense of safety you get from insight are most often temporary if you don’t follow them up with deeper process. If every time you get stressed you just do an exercise and release the stress, or just dance it out are you or your body really learning? Does your unconscious nervous system learn how to be with your feelings so they aren’t overwhelming or in the case of trauma are resolved? Level one is important, it’s about feeling you have enough control over your experience, you can change your nervous system state. That level gives you the confidence to learn how to actually be with your experience without needing to manage it, which is where the freedom is. Freedom is not the hamster wheel of constantly trying to put out fires or release your stress. If this type of thing is interesting don’t forget to follow!

This has been my very successful approach to stopping overthinking... Try meditating on the mantra "I am not my thinking mind" - repeat this again and again. If you are not your thinking mind what really are you? Certainly grounding yourself in the phsyical reality of your body and maybe your environment can stop overthinking... The mind intprets and the body percieves.. Resting in your body is resting in perpection and moves you out of your thinking mind. Sorry about the lighting all but let me know what you think about this. I love the intersection between somatic psychology and liberated states of awareness. I actually wrote my masters paper on it when I was at naropa (buddhist inspired university, fyi I'm not really buddhist but like buddhist psychology). My spiritual orientation rarely comes into session, only when requested, because you rarely need to go there in order to help people. For my own process I like to sit and ask myself "what if" ... "What if self was bliss void awareness? What would that be like? How would I experience that?" Then let it go and see what the system does. Need to get the mind settled first though and the best way I know how to do that is clear the traumas.

Many struggle to hold your partner’s discomfort without either rushing in to fix it or just shutting down and going away. It’s not wrong to want those you love most to be happy. The issue comes when your desire is compulsive. When you’re asking them to be happy in order to soothe your own discomfort. When you’re not making space for the whole person in front of you. In that way, it can very much be objectifying. You’re turning your partner into an object that’s just supposed to be one way. Your partner’s pain very much does resonate with your own. When you’re in a close relationship, you essentially share a nervous system. In many ways you become one organism, so when they feel something difficult, you’re also impacted. The desire to help is good. But trying to make them just be happy to soothe you is not, and it will ultimately do more harm. We need to learn a map for our partners so we can help them in ways that don’t encourage them to just repress their feelings. I teach somatic attachment work to therapists, so what I’m saying has a lot of experience behind it. Right now enrollment is still open for my relationship program that talks about the latest findings and practices in working to build a healthier relationship. It’s not just the scripts. It’s a new somatic approach to working with the underlying nervous system dynamics in your relationship. We get into how to actually build a map for how to support your relationship and partner using what’s been tested with many couples and has science behind it. Comment “Secure” to learn more.

What would it mean to actually heal this not just understand it? Most couples don’t fail because they stopped loving each other. They fail because their nervous systems never learned how to be safe together. The fights that go nowhere. The silence that lasts too long. The moments where you both want to reconnect but something won’t let you. That something has a name. It lives in the body. And understanding it isn’t enough. I’ve seen too many people learn their attachment style and still watch their relationship fall apart. What changes things is working directly with the system that holds the pattern.