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Somatic Therapy, Nervous System Regulation, and Expanding Capacity for Rest: An Interview with Linda Thai

Curt and Katie chat with Linda Thai, LMSW, ERYT-200—a trauma therapist and educator specializing in brain- and body-based modalities for complex developmental trauma. We explore practical, culturally aware somatic tools therapists can use right away, how to help clients (and ourselves) expand capacity for rest not just activation, and ways to integrate bottom-up work ethically in treatment for trauma survivors and adult children of refugees and immigrants.

Transcript

Click here to scroll to the podcast transcript.

(Show notes provided in collaboration with Otter.ai and ChatGPT.)

About Our Guest: Linda Thai, LMSW, ERYT-200

Image - headshot of Linda ThaiLinda is a trauma therapist and educator whose work centers brain- and body-based modalities for addressing complex developmental trauma. She teaches mindfulness, grief tending, and somatic practices with a special focus on adult children of refugees and immigrants. Linda has assisted Dr. Bessel van der Kolk in small-group psychotherapy workshops on attachment trauma and holds an MSW emphasizing the neurobiology of attachment and trauma. Her training includes Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing, Brainspotting, Internal Family Systems, Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment, Havening Touch, Flash Technique, and structural dissociation. She offers the Safe and Sound Protocol, yoga, and meditation in her practice in Fairbanks, Alaska (traditional lands of the Tanana Athabascan people), with a passion for interrupting historical and intergenerational trauma across individual and community levels.

In this podcast episode: Somatic therapy basics and culturally aware nervous system care

Why we brought Linda back: Over hundreds of episodes, we’ve alluded to somatic approaches—this conversation dives in. Linda offers accessible regulation practices (rocking, orienting to distance), clarifies how bottom-up processing expands capacity for rest, and situates healing within cultural, ancestral, and ecological contexts.

Key Takeaways for Therapists (somatic therapy, nervous system regulation, decolonizing practice)

“You don’t see the world as the world is. You see the world as you are… our bodies keep the score, and our bodies tell the stories of our lives, and if we can pause for long enough and be curious and have a space of containment, of clarity, of witnessing that we’re then able to start to pause for long enough to catch up with what happened that shouldn’t have happened, with what was given that shouldn’t have been given, with what was taken that shouldn’t have been taken, and in that way, begin to befriend ourselves from the inside out.” – Linda Thai,LMSW, ERYT-200

  • Start with the body, gently. Micro-interventions like side-to-side rocking can bring the vestibular system online, soften vigilance, and increase bilateral integration—creating immediate, felt safety clients can track.
  • Orient to distance. Inviting the gaze to an imagined or real horizon widens peripheral vision, reduces peri-traumatic narrowing, and increases access to options and creativity.
  • From SUDS to SUNS. Pair “subjective units of distress” with subjective units of nourishment—brief sips of rest, pause, and support during sessions to build capacity rather than push to catharsis.
  • Psychoeducation that de-pathologizes. Use memorable metaphors (e.g., “hashtags” that link sensations to survival responses) to normalize future-oriented strategies that live in the present.
  • Bottom-up ≠ only activation. Skillful somatic work includes landing—expanding the nervous system’s capacity for rest/ease after titrated approach to the edges of the window of capacity.
  • Name context. Acknowledge how colonization, hustle culture, and institutional exploitation shape disembodiment and burnout; avoid weaponizing “calm” as compliance in unsafe systems (especially with youth).
  • Right-fit learning. Choose teachers and communities that match your style; sample broad primers before multi-year trainings to align with your caseload and values.

“So the strategies that kept you alive keep you from living, and yet they kept you alive. And in terms of somatic work, somatic work actually allows us to slow things down for long enough to become aware of those strategies. So we’re actually accessing the wisdom of the body from the bottom up.” – Linda Thai,LMSW, ERYT-200

Resources on Somatic Work, Nervous System Care, and Decolonized Practice

We’ve pulled together resources mentioned in this episode. Some links may be affiliate links.

Relevant Episodes of MTSG Podcast

Episodes with Dr. Jamie Marich:

Meet the Hosts: Curt Widhalm & Katie Vernoy

Picture of Curt Widhalm, LMFT, co-host of the Modern Therapist's Survival Guide podcast; a nice young man with a glorious beard.Curt Widhalm, LMFT

Curt Widhalm is in private practice in the Los Angeles area. He is the cofounder of the Therapy Reimagined conference, an Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University and CSUN, a former Subject Matter Expert for the California Board of Behavioral Sciences, former CFO of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, and a loving husband and father. He is 1/2 great person, 1/2 provocateur, and 1/2 geek, in that order. He dabbles in the dark art of making “dad jokes” and usually has a half-empty cup of coffee somewhere nearby. Learn more at: http://www.curtwidhalm.com

Picture of Katie Vernoy, LMFT, co-host of the Modern Therapist's Survival Guide podcastKatie Vernoy, LMFT

Katie Vernoy is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, coach, and consultant supporting leaders, visionaries, executives, and helping professionals to create sustainable careers. Katie, with Curt, has developed workshops and a conference, Therapy Reimagined, to support therapists navigating through the modern challenges of this profession. Katie is also a former President of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. In her spare time, Katie is secretly siphoning off Curt’s youthful energy, so that she can take over the world. Learn more at: http://www.katievernoy.com

A Quick Note:

Our opinions are our own. We are only speaking for ourselves – except when we speak for each other, or over each other. We’re working on it.

Our guests are also only speaking for themselves and have their own opinions. We aren’t trying to take their voice, and no one speaks for us either. Mostly because they don’t want to, but hey.

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Transcript for this episode of the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide podcast (Autogenerated):

Transcripts do not include advertisements just a reference to the advertising break (as such timing does not account for advertisements).

… 0:00
(Opening Advertisement)

Announcer 0:00
You’re listening to the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide, where therapists live, breathe and practice as human beings. To support you as a whole person and a therapist, here are your hosts, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy.

Curt Widhalm 0:15
Welcome back, modern therapists. This is the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide. I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy, and this is the podcast for therapists about the things that go on in our practices, the things that happen with our clients. And we have done several hundred episodes at this point, and in all of them, we have maybe alluded to the field of somatic therapies, but we haven’t really ever dived in and really talked about how somatic work comes up. We post questions in our Facebook group, the Modern Therapist Group, from time to time, where people post comments as far as body is really underutilized and under understood in the healing process. And Katie and I thought, you know, we had such a wonderful time talking with Linda Thai in one of our previous episodes that we would love for her to come back and to be able to talk about ways to incorporate more somatic work. And I’m always just so much at peace when I hear Linda talk, even when she’s talking about the state of the world and what’s going on, but it’s so wonderful to be in your presence again, and thank you for joining us today.

Linda Thai 1:28
Oh, it is such a gift and a pleasure to be back here with you, Curt and Katie and your community.

Katie Vernoy 1:34
We’re so excited to have this conversation with you. And like Curt, I just love spending time with you, because I feel like you bring something that that soothes me and helps me to accept myself in a different way. And so I’m sure we’ll end up talking about those things, and I will, as always, be very effusive about your work. But before we get started, I want to let other folks know, who are you and what are you putting out into the world?

Linda Thai 1:59
I’m a somatic therapist and I’m a trauma therapist and an integrative therapist, so I train in multiple modalities. As a result of having read The Body Keeps the Score, got it on the day that it came out in 2014 and my life has become changed because my somatic architecture has become transformed. You know, we often talk about how you don’t see the world as the world is. You see the world as you are. You know, that’s what I learned in my yoga training. And yet, the additional layer of that is recognizing that yes, our bodies, yes, our bodies keep the score, and our bodies tell the stories of our lives, and if we can pause for long enough and be curious and have a space of of containment, of clarity, of witnessing that we’re then able to start to pause for long enough to catch up with what happened that shouldn’t have happened, with what was given, that shouldn’t have been given, with what was taken that shouldn’t have been taken, and in that way, begin to befriend ourselves from the inside out. And for me, that is the ultimate power of somatic psychotherapies. And my own journey, my own process, has led me to to, has led me to recognize that I’m part of a larger body. I’m a part of a communal body. I’m part of an ancestral body. I’m part of a an ecological body, an ecological system. I’m a part of something so much bigger than myself. And this is what trauma does. It disconnects us from this sense of being a part of a unified field.

Curt Widhalm 3:41
Katie and I have embraced a lot of trauma therapies. One of our frequent podcast guests, Jamie Marich, speaks very highly of you as well. She comes on talks a lot about integrating some of your practices and principles. So Katie and I are very much immersed in not just your teachings, but also some of the very wonderful people who also incorporate bodies and spiritual and cultural practices into things. For the people who haven’t been listening to us for the last eight years, what are they missing out on when it comes to how some of this body work, how some of these cultural practices really end up as part of the healing process?

Linda Thai 4:23
Okay, I’m just gonna throw some words out there, and let’s see what happens. So Thema Bryant, I’m paraphrasing Thema Bryant, who is president of the APA, says that traditional psychology says “What’s wrong with you?” and trauma, informed psychology asks “What happened to you?” Culturally informed psychology asks “What happened to your peoples?” And liberation psychology asks “And what continues to happen to you and to your peoples?” And so when we look at the last 456, 100 years of human history, we actually their need to put front and center the history of colonialism, and what colonialism has done is on purpose, disconnected us from our bodies. Has disconnected us from the cycles and the rhythms and the seasons of the natural world and of the Earth around us, through hustle culture, through trauma, mass collective historical traumatization, genocides, wars, displacement, enslavement and abduction, the tearing apart of families. And so when we are disembodied, we are easier to control, because we have lost a connection to our own innate wisdom, our own body’s wisdom, and the wisdom of the earth that’s holding us.

Katie Vernoy 5:49
In trying to reconnect to that, I know that there are folks who do a lot of different types of their work, going into nature, trying to regulate their nervous systems. It feels like that’s both an actual thing and kind of a phrase that people start saying in Tiktok and those types of things, or reconnecting with their cultural, cultural heritage, or their community. And I think especially now, it can feel absolutely critical to do these things, and much more difficult to do them. How are you approaching the healing work of others? It seems like you’ve been able to really tap yourself in. And I love your newsletter, because I get a sense of how you’re kind of grappling with it on a week to week, month to month basis. But, but it’s clear that you’ve been doing this work for a long time, and so for folks who are not as far on their journey, especially during these very tumultuous times, what are you recommending as far as how to make sure that you’re getting back connected to what those who want us disembodied don’t want us to connect to?

Linda Thai 7:05
I would start by a gentle rocking of the body, whether it’s side to side or back and forth, or little Hemi circles, or perhaps for you, it’s a down and then an up and then a down, yeah. And I see here for Katie, the your body’s natural wisdom just began to take over. And you scrunch the shoulders up, and then in, and then release them down, and then a big deep breath naturally emerged. Yeah?

Katie Vernoy 7:34
Yeah.

Linda Thai 7:35
Yeah. So when we rock from side to side like this, the vestibular system comes online, which is the balance systems, and that means the left and the right side of the brain through the inner ears, left and right are starting to then communicate to each other through the corpus callosum. And when the vestibular system is online, then that limbic brain, the vehement emotions, the the survival brain is offline, and so this right here can be such an incredible resource. And I also noticed that when I invited you to just gently rock your body, that your eye gaze actually naturally oriented to the distance. And I know that we’re on computer screens right now, but your art your eyes is there was this wisdom in the body that said, oh yeah. And now I’m gonna look into the distance.

Katie Vernoy 8:29
Yeah.

Linda Thai 8:30
And that is also your body’s natural wisdom emerging, because perhaps we can offer permission in this moment for our listeners to orient towards the distance. So to the imaginary horizon through your walls or the horizon outside your windows, and notice what subtly emerges for you. It could be a softening or a lengthening. And I see for you, Katie, there was a connection to the back side of your body, just for a second.

Katie Vernoy 9:05
Yeah.

Linda Thai 9:05
Yeah. And when we are in Go, go, go mode, yeah, we’re in the front side of our bodies, and we’re on the edges of our seats, we’re prepared to mobilize ourselves for action, as well as preparing to mobilize ourselves, perhaps for protection, and when there is the persistent possibility of unsafety and threat, it makes sense that our bodies are always mobilized, and when we’re always mobilized, then it doesn’t take as much metabolic energy to then go into action, whereas when we’re in the backside of our bodies, it takes a lot more energy to mobilize, and that could mean life or death. And so this what we’re doing here, is just offering the nervous system and the body little micro moments to pause into rest, to pause into slowing down. Yeah. As trauma therapists, we often talk about SUDs, subjective units of discomfort. You can see how much I don’t use it.

Linda Thai 10:21
…subjective units of distress. Yeah, like pre and post and intervention. And what if we could orient towards SUNs, subjective units of nourishment, little micro moments for a sip, sip of nourishment, of pause…

Katie Vernoy 10:39
Of respite.

Linda Thai 10:40
Of respite. And right here, Katie, your body is receiving the support of the desk in front of you, yeah? So this isn’t a collapse, right? This is your body receiving the support of the desk. Because if your body was in a collapse, your neck would be shortened and like in the turtleneck, yeah? And I see how your eyes are softened, how there’s actually some color in your cheeks, and I actually notice how your breath has just naturally lengthened in terms of the exhale and the inhale. Just from a little moment where we rock the body, and then your body’s wisdom emerged, and I. I caught It just in that moment and asked us to land into the eye gaze in the distance. And the other thing about the eye gaze in the distance is that that can bring us out of the peri trauma response. When we are in a peri trauma response, right? We’re at the we’re in the we’re moving towards the edge of hyper vigilance, yeah. With the peri trauma response, our peripheral vision narrows in and our field of focus also shortens, and then we don’t see we actually don’t see things that are right in front of us. We don’t see possibilities, or possible routes or other creative, resourceful opportunities, possibilities, avenues, and so orienting towards the distance, that brief moment of the connection to the back body, the limbic brain starts to disengage as we’re rocking the body, the vestibular system comes online. Breath naturally emerges. The eyes soften. One, we’re more approachable. Two, we have more brain capacity. We have more creative, collaborative potentiality that emerges that can actually then speak more effectively into what is needed from us. And we also have more capacity to know what’s ours to do and know what is not ours to do. We have more capacity to notice countertransference, and we often think, as therapists, that countertransference is what is happening between me and my client. However, it happens at the collective, at the cultural, at the societal levels, and when we are more embodied, we’re more able to notice that, and then we can attend to that which is ours. And so in this way, individual healing and collective liberation really does go hand in hand, and we have to be able to move towards discomfort. Because as therapists, we know that right, that personal healing isn’t possible without some discomfort, and collective healing, also collective liberation is also not possible without capacity for discomfort, capacity for embodied collective co creative struggle, and that is discernment, and that takes practice and community and encouragement and support and the knowing that oopsies and ouchies will happen along the way. You know, as Bayo Akomolafe says, “The times are urgent, let us slow down.”

… 13:57
(Advertisement Break)

Curt Widhalm 13:59
A lot of people with trauma in their backgrounds, somatic work seems to fit very, very wonderfully in and for a lot of trauma therapists out there, they already understand that. And a lot of times what trauma therapists will run into is clients who that activation in the nervous system can be very triggering and very traumatizing, can be something that that discomfort that you’re referring to is something that our clients are not ready for. They’re not used to. How do you help clients address that?

Linda Thai 14:41
I find that psycho education is ever so helpful, and I often use the metaphor of hashtags so that sensory memories, somatic memories, become hashtagged into a filing cabinet that is outside of our conscious awareness that says the whiff of the sniff of this I am going to mobilize or I am going to immobilize in service of survival. And we also know with trauma survivors that the whiff of the sniff of discomfort is hashtag in with the thing before the thing before the thing before, the thing before, the unsafety threat, danger. Yeah. And so therefore it makes sense that discomfort equals danger, that it’s become hashtaged in so deeply in service of survival, so that the thing that happened that shouldn’t have happened doesn’t happen ever again. And therefore to frame PTSD as a set of future oriented survival strategies that live in the present moment as a result of something in the past that we may not be aware of, that we may not even have the words for. And yet, can we be curious? Can we be curious and slow things down, unpack things, get to know that various hashtags as they arise in real time, so that we can normalize the ways in which your body responds to the whiff of the sniff of discomfort, because there is something so incredibly threatening about it. There is something clearly so in like some there is something something there, because your body is responding in service of survival. And I find psycho education is a great way to to depathologize what is happening, and to help someone to make sense of the ways in which they have so very remarkably sought to to make sense of, to cope with a nervous system that they have at best have minimal control over. A nervous system that seems to hijack them, a nervous system that they may have perhaps decided that they need to exert absolute control over at all times, perhaps even by leaving the body and treating the body as an object, right? Like all you know, it’s that Janina Fisher saying how trauma survivors don’t have memories, we have symptoms, and some of those symptoms are the or many of those symptoms are the management strategies.

Katie Vernoy 17:27
When we look at kind of the broader topic that we’re talking here to bring some folks in who’ve not necessarily explored this, what are some of the basics about somatic work that we, that therapists need to know at this point to really be able to sit with us in this conversation.

Linda Thai 17:45
So the strategies that kept you alive keep you from living, and yet they kept you alive. And in terms of somatic work, somatic work actually allows us to slow things down for long enough to become aware of those strategies. So we’re actually accessing the wisdom of the body from the bottom up, like, as you stay with like, just we pause in on moments, and we pause in and we will ask, you know, what is emerging in this moment, in terms of other sensory information that’s emerging: memories, images, emotions, and we frame those as body echoes or memory echoes that are hashtagged in with this felt sense of it’s life or death, or it’s urgency or a must avoid. Yeah, and we can normalize all of this within what we know about the symptoms of trauma, and yet what we also need to know is, when we slow things down, when we slow things down, what can actually emerge is then the body’s wisdom emerging to move the trauma out of the body, which is the neurogenic tremoring, which is the vehemence of I’m doing it now like the nostrils start to flare and the mouth starts to snarl and the bite response starts to emerge, and my hands are starting to claw and grip right, yeah. And this is the body’s natural wisdom of of moving through that which has learned to be overridden. And this override response is what we have learned to do in order to survive. And so when we start to tap into the body and the body’s wisdom, then stuff will emerge that we actually need to have training around, because otherwise it’s like, whoa. What the [uninteligable] is happening?

Katie Vernoy 19:44
For sure.

Linda Thai 19:46
Yeah, and the client may also feel that way, and they’ve spent their entire lives overriding, overriding, overriding, overriding, overriding, because of that has also been part of the management strategy and the survival strategy, and so now the body is starting to release, and it can butt up against I’m feeling out of control. It can butt up against shame. It can butt up against humiliation, rejection, abandonment. I’m too much. I’m not enough. I’m confused, especially when there’s been terror, right? Because trauma is inescapability, then there is also existential confusion and the preparation work of the psycho education and learning how to take nibbles right, how to move towards and then away. And the body will naturally do this. It’ll say, Oh, that was a lot, and then move back. And us as therapists, we can tend to want to push towards catharsis, and yet it’s about integration, yeah. And so this is the window expanding, and now the body’s saying, Oh, that was a lot, and then he’s automatically shifting back and to then allow the nervous system time to land, because now we’re actually expanding the nervous system’s capacity for rest and for ease. And we often forget this as trauma therapists, we think that it’s about moving towards the distress, right? And, yeah, and expanding that window, and yet it’s also about the landing afterwards, where we’re actually expanding the capacity for rest and for things, and in this process, we’re actually expanding your window of tolerance, or your window of capacity, as I prefer to call it and so this here is working at the nervous system level. I personally have experienced so much benefit from brain spotting and other modalities where we’re getting into the traumatic memory. I’ve experienced a lot of benefit from flash technique and from havening touch, where we’re deactivating the autonomic nervous system activation associated with particular memories, and yet, at the same time for me, somatic experiencing and sensor motor psychotherapy has expanded my window, so I have more capacity for productive struggle. I have more capacity for discernment. I have, because discernment is moving towards discomfort while being tethered. Yeah, and we know that with trauma survivors, that when we get to the edges of the window, that’s where our survival strategies then kick into the high, into high gear, right? And when we’re talking about distress tolerance, it’s actually about being able to stay at the edges of our window without blasting out of the window, yeah, because faster with the whiff of the sniff of that discomfort means that I am going into my survival strategy or my management strategy.

… 22:51
(Advertisement Break)

Katie Vernoy 22:52
It’s so interesting. When you were talking, I just I had such a deep reaction to the comment about expanding the capacity for rest and the and we talk frequently about being able to to manage and weather the top of the window. But I think I am one of those folks who particularly have difficulty weathering the bottom of the window. So it’s, I hadn’t really thought about it in that way, and it’s, it’s really interesting, because I think it’s something that I’m I’m assuming a lot of therapists can miss. How do you address folks who have difficulty with rest?

Linda Thai 23:35
Within a session, I make a lot of time for the nervous system to land. And so part of the preparation work is knowing that when we come back for the session where we’re going to start to play with moving towards the upper edge of the window that we we actually kind of have to get into it, yeah, so that we have enough time at the end of session for the nervous system to land, or we book a 90 minute session, yeah? We, I just, we just do that. Because otherwise it can sound like I’m trying to convince you that rest is necessary.

Katie Vernoy 24:14
Yeah.

Linda Thai 24:15
Yeah, when so many of us struggle with it for a whole variety of reasons that are related to survival, related to culture, related to family systems, related to the fact that for some of us, our peoples have never, ever been allowed to rest, ever, yeah, and so, I mean, there are so many layers of this that are actually worth unpacking and normalizing, including the fact that for many of us living in Go, go, go, go mode is also how we have survived, because that experience of powerlessness, helplessness, hopelessness, I don’t want to experience ever again. And so rest can be hashtagged in very closely to It’s over now. It’s about to be over now. And so many of us, we don’t have the, we don’t have that thing where we have a bedtime routine and we ease towards bed. We just go, go, go, go, and then hit the pillow, pass out.

Katie Vernoy 25:19
Yeah.

Linda Thai 25:20
And that pattern, that rhythm, that cycle, repeats itself in our working lives, where we go, go, go, go, go, and then burnout crash. While simultaneously naming that burnout is also institutional exploitation. It’s also a product of institutional exploitation. And yet for some of us, our nervous systems, like when we start to get towards burnout, we then double down and work even harder, and then work even harder so that we can work our way through the burnout. And that’s that’s where the institutional betrayal and exploitation needs to be named. And yet, when we look at rest, I tend to, you know, I love work, doing work with individuals, and yet, from a more expansive conceptualization, beyond, beyond naming hustle culture and beyond naming that rest is revolutionary and rebellion within hustle culture, we could also name that in nature, nature doesn’t make us earn rest, that rest is a part of the rhythms and cycles of the seasons, of the days, of the animals and plants and everything around us. And we have become disconnected from those cycles of nature.

Curt Widhalm 26:43
How do you help clients expand this beyond the therapy sessions? I work with a lot of teens who maybe don’t have the permission in their family environments to be able to operate outside of that survival mode, and to be able to incorporate some of these practices is something that can feel very dangerous in a way that is ideally kind of a goal, to be able to take it and be able to live in this way more consistently

Linda Thai 27:18
Naming that and framing that, I think, is very important, right? We also need to name the gentrification of calm and the weaponization of calm within families, within school systems, within cultural contexts where calm then becomes weaponized towards compliance and obedience, because without recognizing that within the context of that individual’s life, calm is not accessible and calm may make you a sitting duck, and therefore it makes sense that you’re always on. That your nervous system has become sensitized to, perhaps the cycles of domestic violence. Yeah, that you started to get to know the sound of the keys as someone’s coming home. And that’s the thing before the thing before the thing before the thing. And therefore it makes sense that is that when you hear any keys, right, that your body goes into a survival threat. And this is where it’s important to, you know, I think Dick Schwartz calls it being a being a hope merchant, yeah, where we can take in SUNs, where we can the subjective units of nourishment where we can create for ourselves pockets of respite as well as pockets of collective care, whether that is baseball or dance or hip hop or beatboxing or a walk in the park, yeah, whether it’s being a part of Big Brothers, Big Sisters, being a part of any form of community group, so that someone can experience relative safety and relative connection in ways outside of the family system, so that they can see that, not see, be exposed to that there is a bigger world out there than their family. And we’re building in we’re scaffolding in the social emotional skills, the life skills that will help you to make good decisions for yourself later on. Because how it is now won’t be how it’ll be forever, even though I know it feels like it, and that’s where these self regulation techniques, the regulatory capacity of finding one’s people a place where you can breathe, where you can hope, where you can dream, where you can imagine something different for yourself. And that’s also the space that we provide. And over time, that starts to become somaticized, starts to become embodied. It starts to become real. And we all get loved into becoming, we all get witnessed into becoming.

Katie Vernoy 30:20
For therapists who want to incorporate bottom up processing, or specifically more somatic or culturally aware practices, where do you recommend they start?

Linda Thai 30:30
Start with whatever is accessible and available for you that fits into your busy schedules. Start with whatever it is that piques your interest and your curiosity. Find yourself communities, teachers who resonate with you, because there are a lot of fabulous teachers out there, and it’s all about, you know how we all have books. We’re therapists, we have so many books.

Katie Vernoy 30:55
Stacks.

Linda Thai 30:56
Stacks, and yet so many the books are just, ah, so painful to read, because the writer doesn’t write in a style that that comes alive in our bodies, yeah, and in our minds, yeah. And yet, there are other books that we just devour because yeah, because the manner of teaching really speaks to us, so the communication cycle speaks to us. It’s the same with teachers. And so my invitation and encouragement is to is to connect to the communities, the teachers, the because when you learn how you learn, you can learn how to do anything, yeah, when you learn how you learn, you can learn how to do anything. And when you learn what supports you need, what environment you need in order to learn, you can learn anything. And I say that overtly, knowing that that therapists, we have our own bucket of stuff, that means that we also have really distinct learning styles, that somehow, we somehow made it through graduate school, and we don’t have to do that to ourselves anymore, right? We don’t have to do that to ourselves anymore. And so that would be my, my, my overall encouragement. And if you find yourself in a three year program, and the style of teacher does not or the trainer does not work for you find another trainer. You don’t have to endure that trainer, because that’s what is a like, you don’t have to do that. Yeah, and before you commit to a three year training course, I would highly encourage folks to come over to the somatic certificate that I offer on my website, linda-thai.com it’s a 12 week course that gives you a primer in terms of the very big, very, very, very big field of somatic psychotherapy. And then, based on that, you’ll be able to then have an idea of where you would like to go that matches what it is you’re currently offering right now, right? So there are therapists who just love worksheets, and yeah, and so yeah, like there are areas we can go around, mapping the nervous system and befriending the nervous system in that way. And then there are therapists are like, No, trauma, trauma, trauma, trauma, trauma, trauma. And it’s like, okay, cool, like, you know, there’s a direction you can head in there. And for others, it’s like, no, it’s more sort of developmental wounding rather than trauma, in which case there’s a different direction, yeah, and in that 12 week, course, you’ll be exposed to all three of those, plus some more, and that will then allow you to make a better decision for yourself based on your own needs, your own preferences, how you prefer to operate as a therapist, as well as the client base. Who is your preferred client base?

Katie Vernoy 34:03
That 12 week course is so rich and has so many extra pieces to it. I’m still working, working my way through it, and it’s, it’s just a joy to to learn from you. It matches for me. And so I really have appreciated that course. I also, there was another somatic like a toolbox with different somatic exercises to do that was also very approachable and provided me with some more tools for my little tool belt when I needed to get myself a little bit more regulated, especially now. So there’s so many good things that you have that was why I specifically wanted to reach out to you for this. But it’s, it’s something where learning this stuff pulls together a lot of things I’ve heard before, but I think in the way that you’re, the big, broad way that you talk about it, and also kind of narrowing down and and just, I’m so struck with how you integrate the information that you know into something that makes a lot of sense. I always get very overwhelmed going to all those books and sources, and you’ve made it very, very consumable, bite sized.

Linda Thai 35:12
Thank you. Katie, yeah, thank you. You know, there’s a speaking to the cultural piece. There’s another course I’ve got out there at the moment called ‘The Missing Pieces of Attachment Theory: a decolonized approach.’ And within that, I also take a somatic approach to resourcing our bodies so that we can remember, so that we can remember our a more expansive conceptualization of what it holistically means to be human, and so that that that would also be a resource for folks to consider as well.

Curt Widhalm 35:49
Where can people find out more about you and the work that you’re doing?

Linda Thai 35:54
You can head over to linda-thai.com, l, a, n, d, a dash, t, h, a, i.com. Ah, it’s a website with lots of resources in there. I’ve got lots of stuff out there on YouTube as well, as well as courses that I hope are reasonably accessibly priced, with plenty of scholarships available.

Curt Widhalm 36:17
And we will include links to those in our show notes over at mtsgpodcast.com. Follow us on our social media. Join our Facebook group, the Modern Therapist Group, to continue on with this conversation, and until next time, I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy and Linda Thai.

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