In Healing Sexual Trauma with Erika Shershun: Episode 113 of the Soles to Soul Care with Eve Menezes Cunningham podcast, I’m delighted to introduce the somatic psychotherapist who specialises in helping trauma survivors reclaim the life they were meant to live
When you think about what YOU’ve survived, how does it feel to imagine, however outlandish it may feel, that you CAN heal?
When you read or hear those words about the life you were meant to live, how does it feel to reconnect with potentially forgotten dreams and goals?
le grá (with love),
Ev3
Erika’s the author of the Healing Sexual Trauma Guided Journal: Writing and Somatic Practices to Help You Process, Heal, and Feel Safe, the Healing Sexual Trauma Workbook: Somatic Skills to Help You Feel Safe in Your Body, Create Boundaries & Live with Resilience, and the PESI Sexual Trauma Clinical Training. The workbook is available in Spanish (Tengo Un Trauma Corporal?), Polish, Russian, and Romanian, and the journal is available in Turkish.
Her approach is trauma informed, rooted in somatic principles, drawing on neuroscience and integrative modalities such as EMDR, Brainspotting, energy psychology, mindfulness, self-compassion and parts work.
Erika values diversity, offers individual online therapy sessions in California, and provides coaching to clients outside of the state. You can contact her at HealingSexualTrauma.com, ErikaShershunTherapy.com, or follow her @erikashershun.
Sexual Trauma Clinical Training: Interventions to Cultivate Safety, Release Shame and Guilt, and Nurture Boundaries is available at PESI.com
@erikashershun
https://www.instagram.com/erikashershun
https://feltsenseresonance.com
Donna Eden’s five-minute energy tune-up
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/0nKWaJBgJ68?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
Bradley Nelson emotion code
https://discoverhealing.com/gb/the-emotion-code
Louise Swartswalter Mind Gems:
If you enjoyed this, check out:
Episode 48: Cattitude: Purr! Hiss! Freeze!
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/atAcj0HtD6U?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
Episode 64: Trauma not “post” traumatic stress but ongoing?
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/nKYWGchOcio?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
Episode 55: EFT Tap Along for Stress Awareness Month
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/l7fOZwiviOg?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
Book your free telephone consultation and access 100s of body-mind practices at https://solestosoul.ie/free-downloads
CHAPTERS
(00:00) Healing, growth and advice for a younger self
(02:22) Erika’s books and journey into trauma work
(07:55) Discovering somatic healing after years of therapy
(13:02) Post-traumatic growth and self-care
(16:36) Grounding practices and toe tapping
(26:06) Self-compassion, spirituality and healing tools
(35:22) Self-agency, choice and nervous system healing
(39:02) Co-regulation, connection and cats
(42:04) Hope, healing and final reflections
FULL TRANSCRIPT
At the point I’m at now, I would tell the younger version of myself that, you know, this is part of the path I’m on, and it’s going to turn out OK, and that you’re going to heal from this and grow and be able to help others through it as a result. So I never would have wished it on myself, and obviously not on anybody else, and it isn’t because someone was so cruel to us that this happens. It’s because of our courage to do the work to heal and to grow in that process.
Hi, you’re listening to Soles to Soul Care for Trauma and AuDHD. Learn to love and care for all your parts, from the soles of your feet to your soul. I’m your host, Eve Menezes Cunningham.
This is Mighty Meadbh. I’m a senior accredited supervisor, senior accredited counsellor, a therapeutic coach where I integrate all my offerings, including psychosynthesis counselling, the trauma-informed therapies, the neurodivergent-affirming therapies, AuDHD coaching, yoga, breathwork, meditation, crystals, EFT. I’m a senior yoga teacher and EFT international advanced EFT practitioner and mentor and an NLP master practitioner.
I’m also the author of 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-Care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing, a columnist for Platinum magazine, where I answer readers’ questions every month using the Feel. Love. Heal. framework that I use in these episodes. So the focus is on self-care, connecting with that highest, wisest, truest part of yourself and community care, collective care, the Feel. Love. Heal. framework. There are new episodes every Tuesday, so you can subscribe wherever you watch or listen, and you can also access older episodes, free resources, more information at soletosoul.ie/podcast.
Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoy this episode.
Welcome, Erika Shershun! Thank you so much for joining me.
Would you like to say a bit about what you’re working on at the moment, your books and also how you got into this work?
Sure, yes. Thank you, Eve.
It’s really wonderful to meet you and to get the opportunity to speak with your audience. I’m currently writing my third book, which is on healing from sexual trauma. This one is for practitioners.
The first one is called the Healing Sexual Trauma Workbook, and it’s somatic skills to help you feel safe in your body, create boundaries, and live with resilience. Then my second book was the Healing Sexual Trauma Guided Journal, which is similar to the workbook. However, it can be used as a companion book.
It’s a little bit more easeful to go through. The workbook, a lot of therapists use it with their clients. So either they can be standalone or they can be combined.
What’s the one you’re working on? The one I’m working on is on the same topic, but for practitioners.
How did you get into this work? I got into this work from my own struggle to heal from sexual traumas. I didn’t realise until I was in my 40s, but my sexual trauma actually started when I was an infant.
Then I had some sexual harassment as a teenager where I was groped in public and things like that. Then I was raped right after my 19th birthday by an acquaintance. Then I had another assault where I was out for a run and I got attacked by a stranger. It wasn’t a successful rape, but it was successful in traumatising me. In that one, I just want to mention, I fought.
And it’s also excellent that you survived the others.
Excellent that I played dead because that’s how I stayed alive.
Any response, it’s an adaptive survival response.
Exactly.
I wanted to point that out because the majority of people I work with did freeze and I froze in the one prior to that. Then I froze in another one I went through from an employer after that. So much shame and guilt is carried by survivors about freezing.
I just wanted to put that out there that just because you froze one time doesn’t mean you’ll freeze every time. Hopefully there won’t be another time, but a lot of people fear that. To learn to trust, as I know you teach, in your nervous system’s capacity to take you into what survival response your nervous system determines is going to keep you alive or most likely to benefit you most.
We don’t choose. It happens. In the case where I fought, that was life and death.
And any assault can turn into that. I think it’s so important for us to trust that our nervous system has a wisdom that happens so immediately. It can even determine what we want to do with our brain.
It’s really important to know that your body is going to do the best thing for you in the moment.
Absolutely. Where can people find your books and you online?
My books are available at all the big publishers, I mean not publishers, I’m sorry, at all the big booksellers.
As well as a lot of smaller boutique bookstores. Online they can find me at two places. One is I have a website for the books called healingsexualtrauma.com. And then my therapy website is erikashershuntherapy.com
Or feltsenseresonance.com will take you to the same place.
But in going through those traumas, I, when I could afford to, I sought healing and I went through 20 years of therapy and didn’t heal. So that’s what led me to write the books because the therapy was talk therapy. It was before internet.
I didn’t know about somatic work until 17 years in. And at that point, I, my symptoms had worsened and I was in a class for body work called a type of body work called trigger point therapy. So it’s just very subtle touch.
And the instructor asked to demonstrate on me because he knew I’d had had a lot of issues with my neck. Yeah. He was a chiropractor.
He worked with me and he knew. So I thought, Oh, you know, this is a great opportunity. But the word no came out of my mouth.
OK, brilliant. And then someone else stepped up. And he, the man who volunteered had also had a life threatening on his neck.
And I went back to practice with my partner and I couldn’t feel anything. Yeah. I went numb.
And I called the instructor over and he said, you know, why don’t you take a break, go to the other room, he understood what was happening, but I didn’t. And I just got flooded, I started to have flashbacks. And, you know, I was dissociating, but I didn’t know about these things.
And, like, you know, the therapist hadn’t told me about these things. They hadn’t given me any tools to work with any of this. That’s when I realised I’ve got to take this healing into my own hands.
And also, when I when I got home that night, I was, again, like just overcome with, you know, the realising how just how much these traumas had impacted every aspect of my life. Yeah, it was just devastating. So much grief came up with that realisation.
But that is when I decided to go to grad school and train in therapy myself. And so then I ended up piecing together things from different modalities that I found that helped me and things I read. And it was through piecing together all of these different things that I finally healed.
And when I say healing, I just want to be clear, what I’m talking about is, like, no longer getting triggered by the trauma, being able to talk about it like I am now, you know, breaking down. Not that there’s anything wrong with breaking down. But if you don’t want to, it’s nice to have choice, right? So, so it, you know, and it reduces all the symptoms, so or eliminates a lot of them.
So there’s also so much to say about symptoms. But anyway, I just want to pause and give you a moment. And I thank you so much, because the podcast is Soles to Soul Care for Trauma and AuDHD.
And thank you for talking specifics. And also that healing isn’t linear. But what you’re saying, it’s so I’m hoping people will find your work really helpful.
And I’m really looking forward to finding out what you do on an ongoing basis. It’s how I built my practice, everything I trained in was to save myself. And I think interpersonal trauma, especially, we find it so hard to trust other people.
So I trained in things rather than put myself in other people’s hands. And eventually, it was like, oh, and then it was like, kind of building a practice that I love building work that I love. But it started out just I remember saying to my crystal therapy training, that was the first thing I trained in.
I was having a lot of I had endometriosis and postmenopausal now, so I don’t have it anymore. But I think that was the last time I was like actively suicidal in my 20s. And I remember being terrified of the idea of reincarnation, that I’d have to go through childhood and teenage and early 20s again.
And she was talking to me about like grounding. This was long before I then did the trauma informed yoga and things like that. And of course, grounding, resourcing, it’s so important.
But looking back, it’s I mean, I was going to ask you at the end, but I’ll ask you before asking about the others. What advice do you wish you could send to a younger version of yourself? So this will be hard for people who have not had the opportunity to heal, probably to hear. But at the point I’m at now, I would tell the younger version of myself that, you know, this is part of the path I’m on, and it’s going to turn out okay.
And that you’re going to heal from this and grow and be able to help others through it as a result. So I never would have wished it on myself and obviously not on anybody. And it isn’t because someone was so cruel to us that this happens.
It’s because of our courage to do the work to heal and to grow in that process. So much growth happens in that process. And so much with, you know, the clients I work with, so much other work comes into it, they decide, you know, they want to work on other things like relational traumas from their childhood or from other times in their life as well.
So then they’re, you know, they get this flow of healing going and it’s just really transformational. I remember feeling kind of at an early point in my trauma recovery, feeling rage at having been raised Catholic and certain other things in my upbringing that it made me feel like I’d been raised to be prey. And like, I think people are more aware now about not having children hug relatives they don’t want to hug or all sorts of things like that.
But I think there’s so much healing and it’s all interconnected. But I want to ask about your ideal and actual self-care in terms of, so I have a framework I developed, Feel. Love. Heal. So the Feel bit is the kind of regulating the things we can do when we have the bandwidth to feel better.
It might be going for a bike ride or something to move out your body, some sort of exercise or cooking something nourishing or whatever it might be. The Love part is that knowing, like you just said, your post-traumatic growth is down to you. It’s not like, oh, thanks to the trauma, it’s you surviving the trauma, but everyone being whole, everyone being part of the divine, part of nature and that inherent wholeness, that connection with the miraculous self.
And then the Heal bit is the turning what hurts your heart into action, that collective care, the co-regulation. Where you find community as well as how you hold space for others. So I realise this is quite wordy, so I’ll go through it like… initially the Feel bit.
If you had all the time in the world, in an ideal world, what would you be doing for yourself on a daily basis or on a regular basis in terms of helping yourself feel better?
It’s kind of a long list, but I would like to, and I do this some days, but in all honesty, I don’t fit it in every day, but there’s a few energy practices. So also I have a practice that’s available on my website. The first chapter of the Healing Sexual Trauma Workbook is available free to download.
There’ll be a link in the show notes.
Yeah. And this exercise is at the end of the chapter, but it explains leading up to it, why you do each piece of it. So that’s called Coming into safety or presence. And a piece of that, that is especially important is called Orienting. If we have time, we’ll talk more about that.
But I would do a grounding practice every day. My favourite one is toe tapping, which is also in that chapter. And there’s also a free download on called the Many Ways to Ground.
So just there’s so many options of how to ground. So then I would do a relatively new to me practice called mind gems. It’s also an energy practice and that I’ll give a link for a therapist or a psychologist whose website you can download the mind gems for free on that you can have in the show notes.
And it’s, well, I’ll show you, it looks like this. There’s 12 of them. So they’re just these little… Is that a butterfly hug at the bottom? It is.
In the middle. It is. Yeah.
So you just hold that butterfly hug, you hold it for 12 seconds, and then you cross over and do it on the other side for 12 seconds. And this one’s for balance, for storing balance. But there’s a few here that are especially good for trauma.
Like there’s one that clears fear, there’s one for anger, there’s one for clearing negative emotions, which actually is you cone your fingers and you put your right in the mid forehead and then cross over. And again, you just hold that one for 12 seconds on each side. So, you know, then you cross over, put the other wrist on top.
And for people who aren’t watching, we’re demonstrating, as in everyone’s demonstrating, I’m attempting to follow along. Yeah, it’s really simple. And there’s 12 of them, and they’re meant to be a daily practice, you can do them really quickly, but then you can also do one in the moment.
There’s one that clears remembrance of what has traumatised you. So that’s why I like these. And then also, there’s Donna Eden’s work, which is the five minute energy tune up.
I would do that every day. It’s about getting the energy flowing body in the way that is most healthy and like life-affirming for you. Yeah.
So, so those I would do, I would do those things, it only takes about 15 minutes to do all of that. And then I would also do some yoga stretching and some running, working out and I would get out in nature for self care. And then I just love learning new things.
So I would want to put some of that in there as well. So time to read or listen to a good podcast or, you know, whatever form.
And if you only have the time for one thing, what would be the most important thing for you to start your day with or include in the day? I would say the toe tapping.
OK. Do you want to say a bit more about that?
The reason I say that is because when I was in grad school, and I was diagnosed with PTSD, and I was having flashbacks and be easily triggered. Yeah, it was the first thing that started to help me.
I found it in a book. It’s from traditional Chinese medicine, but it was a book from a Western doctor who was also trained in Eastern medicine. And it’s the first thing that gave me hope.
I love it. Yeah. Because my symptoms started to gradually lessen in intensity and duration and in frequency.
Within a month, I saw a really positive change happening. So now I don’t need it for that. I haven’t had symptoms in years.
I don’t have PTSD and haven’t had it in years. However, we still need that grounding. It helps maintain our health.
So it’s one of my favourites to do, especially if you feel anxiety, if you feel nervous, worry, you know, when it’s not trauma responses that you’re trying to help with. So if you do it for five minutes, once or twice a day, you can also go 10 minutes if you have the time. And you simply lie down and tap your big toes together.
So your heels are a little bit apart, but you just get this rhythm going where you’re tapping your toes. And it feels good. It tends to take the energy where it needs to go.
So you can do it. If you’re tired, you can do it and still go to sleep. But I also would do it when I had almost no energy, but also no time to go for a run.
And to help motivate me, I would do that. And I would feel energised to run.
I recently rebranded from Feel Better Every Day to Soles to Soul Care for Trauma and AuDHD. The reason I chose soles is because my approach is so grounded. And it’s like a fully embodied approach. But I’m 50 and my entire life, I’ve really struggled with feet.
Throughout my yoga therapy training, all the classes I used to go to when I was younger, now I wear socks. But I hated the idea of my nose being on the mat where my feet had been. And then when other people’s feet, like now I know I have autism as well.
But sensory differences. But it was like, choosing that name, it’s like I’ve started treating my feet much better. I’ve always loved being barefoot in the water in the sea, or walking barefoot on grass or sand or, but actually touching my feet.
I’ve started taking water wipes to yoga. So I accidentally walked in a puddle last week. And it was like, aggghhh, wet socks, or bare feet.
And I did it and they were like, “We’re free!” So if we’d spoken a week and a half ago, I’d have been like, oh, toe tapping. Whereas now it’s like I can almost hear my toes saying, we want to try this.
And I’m just sharing. Strange. But I know a lot of people do have sensory issues.
And also, I think there’s something you were talking about dissociation, I think there’s something around the feet, specifically, like, I mean, you’re working with the base chakra, it’s to do with security, it’s to do, I’m astonished. I thought, well, I have done so much healing over the decades. But this really feels like a deeper, like, loving and caring for all my parts, including my feet. I’m looking forward to trying that.
I think it’ll be really good for healing for your feet. I don’t know if you want to keep this in, but I muscle test and I muscle test, we were talking about that. And I got that it’s an inherited trauma for your feet.
For me, for my feet? OK. OK. Interesting. Thank you. And so that is fantastic.
Thank you very much. And there’ll be links in the show notes. In terms of the Love part of the framework, what helps you what practices help you or what do you do to connect with that highest, wisest, truest part of yourself to remember to love and accept your whole self and just that you’re part of the divine?
Well, there was a time when I made an effort to work on self-compassion. And that is something that is like one of the fundamental exercises I ask clients to do. It’s really important. And a lot of people have what in Bradley Nelson, who came up with the Emotion Code, calls a heart wall.
I had a vivid image of it on myself before I was aware of him and heart wall and saw it as a shield that had cracks in it while I was going through my healing. And light was coming through where some of the pieces had chipped away. Yeah.
But I could feel there’s this shield around my heart. And so it’s very common for people who’ve survived trauma, which is so many of us that when we were infants or young children, we constricted around our heart centre because it was one of the only things we could do to try to protect ourselves, especially an infant. So, you know, we can strip there.
And according to Bradley Nelson, the energy gets trapped there. Emotions, emotions wrap there. And it makes it very hard to take in compassion from others, but also to receive it from yourself.
So it’s a process of practice in working with that. I worked with one person where the first time they tried to give themselves compassion Yeah. With me there, they collapsed on the floor in tears because realised it wasn’t possible.
And to her credit, she tried every day for about three months. And finally, one day she came into my office and had this big smile on her face. And she said she finally took it in.
Yeah. It was this huge turning point in our work. So I used to have to, you know, effort to do that.
And then it just became like natural. Yeah. Have to really think about it anymore, unless I catch myself being really hard on myself.
Yeah. Effort again, you know, I’d say effort, but it’s not hard or anything. It’s quite easy now.
So that just my connection to something greater than our individual selves nourishes my heart. Yeah. What helps you do that? To connect with something greater than myself.
Yeah. I’m trained in Reiki. I’m Reiki attuned and that has helped.
I just connect pretty directly and quickly. Another thing that has helped is Emotion Code. So I trained in that about five years ago. That is an important part of my work still now. I cleared so many on myself. Yeah.
Already gotten past the PTSD, but I realised there’s still emotions. So I use EMDR in my work also, and the EMDR is wonderful at integrating and creating a memory reconsolidation so that the negative beliefs we take in about ourselves at a time of a traumatic experience, which usually amounts to self-blame or self-rejection of some sort. We take in this belief on a deep subconscious level and those are not easy to overcome.
Like you can’t just think your way out of them and EMDR creates the memory reconsolidation. When the integration of the trauma takes place, the new belief emerges organically. And then we install that if we’re doing EMDR in the way it was initially conceived.
So that’s life changing. However, EMDR doesn’t tend to release trapped emotions. Yeah.
So then I also have that component of my work. So I call it just the healing triad, those three elements. And so in doing that, I become a much clearer, like vessel, so to speak in have released so many on myself.
According to Nelson, the average adult has about 300 trapped emotions. Yeah. I have way more than that. Yeah. But, now if I get, like, if something angers me, if I immediately do a motion code on myself, it goes away immediately. Yeah.
Like incredible. The transition is so quick. I think has helped my connection to, you know, spirituality source, however, your audience wants to view it.
And I think part of that, like, I’m thinking, EFT is one of the things I do, and it’s the self-empathy element. It’s like, even telling yourself, you’re going to do some emotion code on yourself. It’s like, you deserve to heal, you deserve to, and that alone, then I think helps it.
There’s so much out there. And I’m really grateful for the complexity of what you’re sharing. I’m remembering that.
I mean, we can say healing isn’t linear. We can say life is messy. We can say all these things, but when we’re going through it, it can feel so hopeless and so terrifying.
And even when we want to heal, like I remember early on in my crystal therapy training, it was over three years, like 2001 was my first experience meditating. I thought I was having a heart attack. And my tutor was like, oh, no, your heart chakra is opening.
And I was like, I don’t want it to open, like, leave it shut. And what you’re saying, it’s like, yeah, it was like, on the surface, I was very open and loving, but it was very, and I had, I hadn’t wanted to disturb the others in the group by saying, I thought I was having a heart attack. But it was like spiritual crisis, healing crisis after healing crisis, and just trying to ground, ground, ground and hope and doing more and more trainings and more and more.
It’s like trying to piece together, how am I going to get through this? How am I going to like, it felt worse in my 20s than it had as a child, because I hadn’t understood it almost. And also, I was from 20, 2001. So it was having to deal with it then without the self-medicating.
But I really appreciate what you’re saying about the complexity, because it’s not, I think it gets presented as like before and after pictures. And it’s not it’s messy, but it’s so worth it. Yes, it is.
It’s so worth it. And everyone I work with feels that way. Yeah, it’s that, that point.
And it doesn’t have to take 20 years. I see people clearing in one year, two years, if it’s a really intense, complex CPTSD with a bit some other, you know, big T traumas, it can be three years, but so many people have really great outcomes within a year. But what you’re talking about, I just want to point out, you’re talking in part about self-agency, like choosing to do EFT, which is greater, or whatever it is, right? And people can train and to do these things, the EFT or the emotion code themselves, that you can buy a book on emotion code, if you can’t afford to take the training and learn it from the book.
So, you know, it’s, it’s well worth investing in. And same with EFT. Yeah.
What I found with EFT is like, it’s helpful for some people and not as helpful for others is what I found is definitely extremely helpful for some people. And so, but what we’re really talking about here is self-agency. Yeah, so when we’ve been through something traumatic, choice was robbed from us.
Yeah, even if it’s a natural disaster or something like that. Yeah, it doesn’t have to be sexual trauma. No, you know, any kind of big trauma choice was taken from us, which is why we were victims, right? But we were victims, we’re not a victim right now, unless we’re still being, you know, unless we’re like, in an abusive relationship or something along those lines.
But most of the people who come to see me are not victims. Yeah, currently. But they might feel like it because their trauma is so present.
And what is so important is to start to introduce choice and to understand that, you know, having that choice brings about self-agency and helps to start to take you out of feeling like a victim. And that’s how we work with Polyvagal Theory, right? Like, all about choice, you have a choice, you don’t get to choose which state your nervous system took you into, but you get to choose what steps to take to come out of it. Yeah, and you have choice about how quickly you’re going to come out of it.
Like, if you don’t want to do anything and you just want to ride it out, you know, that’s a choice. But you can also choose to do these practices and take steps to move out of it, which most people want to do. And your kitty is so pretty.
And she had six teeth removed a couple weeks ago, she was the mammy to the ferals. And I got, I went from one rescue to 11 overnight, a few years ago and kittens on my back doorstep. And I had a mental health crisis.
It’s like, I’m not like, I can’t deal with these kittens. And my partner’s like, your best is good enough. And I learned how to like trap, neuter and release.
And I got the kitten socialised and adopted out, but I then adopted her. But yeah, she was part of the inspiration for my Polyvagal Purrs approach. So I use that Purr! Hiss! Freeze! to help describe the different vagal states and encourage people to find their own names for them.
And like just using the rescue cat stories to help understand adaptive survival responses and things like that. And yeah, that’s great. I think the cats really helped me in terms of the love part, because a beloved rescue cat knows that it’s worthy of all good things.
And humans, we just need to get out of our own way and remember that and move towards what feels good and away from what doesn’t. But I want to, you’ve spoken a bit already about kind of community like trainings you’ve done working with clients. Can you say a bit about what helps you co-regulate? What helps you with the collective care? What like, I mean, the fact that you’ve created your practice to support others like that post-traumatic growth and that kind of Persephone energy around using like you being a guide then for others through their darkness.
Where do you find holding for yourself as well as how you hold others? Would you like to say a bit about ideal and actual collective care? Well, I guess I’m not sure if this is what you’re sort of asking. But for me, personally, my cat, one of my cats especially, but both of them can be very regulating if I, you know, I’m feeling a disconnection. But some of the things that some of the tools for co-regulation that are helpful for people that always depends on the moment, like what’s coming up for you, who you’re with, what you don’t, I mean, it has to be someone you feel trust with, but just eye contact, holding a hand, like touch, touch, contact, full body hugs are self-regulating.
So if you’re with someone you feel close enough to have that kind of contact with, that’s a wonderful way. Even having a picture of someone you love or a pet you love. But if it’s someone you a human, a picture of them smiling, especially on your phone is an excellent way to help you with co-regulation when you don’t have someone else there.
And what helps you most? I honestly, I had to do so much on my own, in my feeling that it’s more like the cat, no, amazing. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And the tools, the tools of self-regulation, but co-regulation is wonderful. I wasn’t in a, I wasn’t partnered up while I was going through that.
So I didn’t have that. Yeah. You know, I have a partner now.
Yeah. Um, and just some of the things I just named help that. Yeah.
I want to say it’s been an absolute delight talking to you and I’m also sorry for all you’ve been through. So like delight sounds bad, but also it is a delight because I’m so grateful for the work you’re doing and there’ll be links in the show notes so people can access that. I think there is so much hope we have access to so much wisdom from around the world and through the ages.
And I know things are dire in so many ways, but like you’ve talked about so many things today, there are so many, I just hope that people watching or listening will think about what resonates for them and how they can reach out, how they can begin the process or restart or just continue. But I just want to thank you. Oh, it’s been my pleasure to talk with you and get to know you a bit and just to be here, to get to connect with your audience a bit.
And I honestly feel like my past is in my past. It doesn’t bother me in any way anymore. So though you said you’re sorry, I appreciate that, but I’m fine.
No, I don’t mean like, no, I, I know what you mean, but it is, it’s the both ends, isn’t it? It’s like no one should go through any, like all children, all babies, all adults should be safe, welcome and loved and able to thrive and protected and cared for and cherished. But at the same time, thank goodness for all the ways in which we can heal and yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. In a perfect world, that would be the case, but we’re, unfortunately, not anywhere near that at this point. Well, thanks again.
And do you want to say again where people can find you? Although the links will be in the show notes. Yeah, I just want to not end on such a glib note, but to say that, but we’re in a better place for our ability to heal than we’ve ever been. And people are making amazing strides and just the growth of so many people is pretty incredible.
It’s an amazing thing to see. So yeah, they can find me again at healingsexualtrauma.com or Erika Shershun, which is S H well, it’s Erika with a K. E R I K A S H E R S H U N therapy.com. Yeah. Thanks a million.
Really appreciate. It’s lovely to meet you and thanks for all you do. You too.
Thank you. Before you get in with something else, I’m going to encourage you to pause for a moment and scan your whole being from the soles of your feet to your soul and the crown of your head and notice what you’re aware of. Notice any physical sensations, pleasant, unpleasant, warmth, tingly, whatever it may be, just being curious about what you’re feeling as you’ve listened to this episode, making a note, asking what those sensations might be trying to help you with, what you might benefit from doing for your body right now.
Being aware of your thoughts, noticing any feelings that feel more prominent as a result of listening to today and any intuitions, any insights, anything that you can actually schedule into ground and improve your life in some way. So let me know how you get on, make a note, doodle, journal, whatever feels good for you. And thank you for listening.
This episode, like all of them was produced by me, your host Eve Menezes Cunningham and I look forward to sharing more next week. You can find out more, access old episodes and free resources and more information at solestosoul.ie/podcast. See you next week.