Arielle Schwartz grew up with developmental trauma and struggled with severe anxiety and depression as a teenager. Yoga and a body-mind centering workshop helped her reconnect to her body. She went on to earn a master's in somatic psychology at Naropa University and a PhD in clinical psychology, focusing on integrating body-centered practices into trauma therapy.
Questions this video answers
Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.
Three years.
Chapters
Fear and anxiety, being great teachers, perhaps, or, you know, kind of reorienting our lives in new directions. So for me, I'll share a little bit of that personal story and then kind of how it shifted my professional work as well. So I grew up with my own developmental trauma, so I'll just kind of locate that from for a moment and name that. For me, my work in complex PTSD was really to help refine my own understanding of what is complex ptsd, when it's the accumulation of ongoing events that we are living in the midst of for so long that they just become kind of normal. And we find ways to make life events that have adversities and confusion and challenging experiences kind of okay enough, because we have to live within it for so long. And that was kind of a definition of elements of my childhood. And kind of flash forward into my late teens, I really started to experience a significant amount of anxiety for myself that was mixed with layers of depression and confusion and what am I doing with my life? Kind of, you know, kind of coming. Coming close to the age of 20 and, wow, what am I. What am I really here doing? And gratefully, I was in college at the time, and I had two pivotal experiences that really significantly shifted how I felt in my own body and mind and emotions. One of those was that a friend of mine started teaching kind of a. An after, you know, an after classes, yoga class. And she started bringing me to class with her. And it was so such a significant shift. Every time I got on the yoga mat, connected to my breath, connected to moving my body, I would end the class feeling better. And I was like, okay, well, I like that. So I went from going once a week to really, within the end of the year, having a daily practice, because it felt like a lifeline to an experience of being grounded and just feeling okay. That was beautiful. And then I had another experience in that same year. I think I was a senior in college at this point, and I junior, senior, all in that phase. And I had another experience where I went into a body mind centering workshop, the work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. And in this workshop, we were doing things like crawling on the floor and rocking our bodies in very rhythmic, intuitive movements. And there was something that, for me, really broke free. Like, I felt myself. I also felt a lot of grief. I felt a lot of underlying fear that had been feeding that feeling of pervasive anxiety. But I was able to touch it and hold it in a new way. And I came out of that workshop and also kind of in conjunction with that year of yoga at that point going what is this, what is this experience of when I get into my body I ultimately even if I temporarily feel more emotional distress or more suffering afterwards, I feel better, I form, I feel more whole, I feel more connected to myself. And so by the time I graduated from undergraduate studies I was like I want to understand this, I want to understand this mind body connection. Where can I go do that? And so within two years I had applied to Naropa University here in Boulder, Colorado and and I entered into a master's program in somatic psychology or body centered psychotherapy to start to open up that inquiry of what is this kind of long story short, I did my master's degree for three years. I went back to school to get a PhD in clinical psychology, deepening my studies of the mind body relationship and how do therapists bring body centered practices into our work and then combining that into the work with trauma.
