PT543 – Empathy and Agency: Why Psychedelic Practitioners Need to be Trauma-Informed, with Deanna Rogers
Psychedelics Today
Psychedelics Today, LLC
4.6 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 30 August 2024
⏱️ 78 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, David interviews Deanna Rogers: Registered Clinical Counselor and Vital instructor.
She discusses how trauma grows in our bodies, and the importance of practitioners and facilitators becoming trauma-informed before working with clients. She stresses the need to create the right conditions for clients to be able to work with trauma – to bring compassion to the different parts of their self and build a relationship with the uncomfortable ones, to interrupt negative narratives, and to learn how to exist in a place where they can embrace their window of tolerance and explore discomfort in a safe way. What is the specific container and pace each client needs? How flexible is their nervous system to be able to work with these states? What can be done to bring out the empathetic witness in themselves? And most importantly, how can their sense of agency be improved so that they feel like they're fully in control of how deep things go?
She discusses:
- Her early ayahuasca experiences, and her path toward working with others, including working with Gabor Maté and Peter Levine
- How psychedelics allow us to access our irrational, animal parts, and how this work is often a combination of sacred and messy
- The need for facilitators to have a basic understanding of the nervous system and fight or flight reactions
- Moving away from the idea of: "There's something wrong with me." What do these chronic narratives do to our bodies?
- Working with clients to build out the capacity of their nervous system first, before working with any trauma
and more!
Rogers is one of our Vital instructors, featured in one of Vital 4's new Specializations: Somatics & Trauma. This cohort begins on September 17, and the application deadline is next week, September 3, so apply today before it's too late!
For links, head to the show notes page.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello there. Welcome to Psychedetics today. Thank you very much for tuning in to this episode |
| 0:18.5 | of a vital psychedelic conversation with myself David Drapkin |
| 0:22.3 | in conversation with Deanna Rogers, who is one of our instructors from our vital certificate |
| 0:28.6 | in integrative psychedelic studies. So Diana is, yeah, an old friend of psychedelics today, |
| 0:34.8 | particularly Joe and Kyle, and she hasn't been on our podcast before. So it really |
| 0:39.2 | is a pleasure to have her here. She teaches a lot around somatics and trauma. So obviously that's where |
| 0:46.8 | our conversation tends to go right now. And Deanna brings in her experience as a registered |
| 0:51.9 | clinical counselor and instructor. She lives in British Columbia. |
| 0:56.7 | She talks about her three years at the Temple of the Way of Light in Peru. So it's really nice to |
| 1:01.6 | hear how the kind of Western clinical model around trauma treatment blends with the more |
| 1:08.7 | indigenous traditions that she's had great experience with as well as the |
| 1:12.4 | work she's done with cabour matte compassionate inquiry and peter levin at somatic experiencing |
| 1:17.9 | and some of the questions we're asking around what is trauma why is it really important to be |
| 1:24.1 | trauma informed to know our scope of practice our limits and boundaries and then we also |
| 1:28.7 | speak about this idea of that it's kind of sacred to be messy and broken and you'll find out what we |
| 1:35.8 | mean by that going into that part of us where trauma lives and really going into whatever it feels |
| 1:43.7 | like and whatever kind of transpires when that is opened up |
| 1:47.6 | and it's impossible to know what it's going to be. So that's why preparation is so important to kind of |
| 1:53.0 | develop the resources and supports and to take time to get their foundations laid and then |
| 2:00.7 | to do the integration work afterwards. |
| 2:03.3 | So that integration really looks like life. |
| 2:06.5 | So our life is lived in a certain way so that we are integrating our trauma and simply showing up |
... |
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