Season 2, Episode 31 - Special Guest Dr. Karol Darsa

You're listening to Practical Wellness with bestselling author TEDx speaker and mindbody wellness expert Jaya Jayamyra. Learn how to create good mental, emotional and physical health simply and naturally with practical lifestyle tips for holistic well being. Jayajaya Myra has inspired audiences worldwide and is here to empower you to live a healthy, purpose filled life. And now your host, Jayajaya Myra.

Hey everyone, Jaya Jaya Myra here. Welcome to another episode of the Practical Wellness Podcast. Today I have special guest Dr. Carol Darca with me. She is a licensed trauma psychologist and an author and the founder of Reconnect. It's so great to have you here today.

Thank you for inviting me.

Absolutely. So I love having authors on the platform because books are such a labor of love. What got you motivated to write a book?

Well, I've been a trauma therapist for 22 years and I work with hundreds of people and I found myself saying the same thing a lot. And I thought, well, if I have something written down for clients, wouldn't that save me some time so I can go deeper into it? That's what inspired me to just put together a basic self help book that I thought would be very helpful for clients to read.

Awesome. What is the title of the book and where can people find it?

It's called the Trauma five Steps to Reconnect with Yourself and you can find it on Amazon.com I also have my audiobook that came out about a month ago.

Oh, excellent.

I read it with my own voice.

That's awesome. Have you found that the book is helpful for your clients? Like, do they actually enjoy going and reading or do they just want you to tell them all the answers?

No, I actually think it's been really supplemental. It's saved us some sessions and I said to them, listen, you just spent $15 and you saved me from, you know, save yourself hundreds of dollars that I'm going to do the same thing. And I have good practical tools in the book. So if you don't remember what I was telling you, you can just like do them on your own.

Absolutely. And that is such a valuable resource, especially for people that really want to dig in and take control of their healing journey. I think it's good to have those resources like that we can go back to at our own time, on our own pace, and just like really dive in as deep as we want to. So that is excellent. Can you tell me a little bit about what your experience has been like as a trauma psychologist and exactly what that means? Like how does it differ from just being A traditional psychologist.

Well, my focus is basically going deeper into origins of, of why people feel the way they feel or why they behave the way they behave. So if you're a standard general therapist, you might just go more sort of behaviorally like, okay, this is what's happening. Let's look at now I look at what caused it and what are the emotions connected to it, what are the maybe injuries that came along with that and what you can do so that you're not finding yourself repeating things over and over again. It tends to be more emotion focused and more body focus than just your regular talk therapy.

Since a lot of times people who have experienced trauma end up with a mental block. How do you overcome that when you're working with people?

That's actually a good question. This is the reason why talk therapy falls short when you're just trying to deal with a blockage. So we're not trying to make them think or we're not trying to make them talk. As trauma therapists, I'm going into the body, how feelings feel in the body, what sensations come up, what emotions. And then because I teach a lot of tools about tolerating them, the blockages start going away gradually because their capacity to tolerate emotions increases.

It's very interesting how people think that the stuff gets locked in the mind, but the reality is it gets locked in the body as well. And you can, you can start to uncover things just by really being present and knowing what it is that you're feeling.

It gets locked in the body. It also gets locked in the emotional brain. We have a thinking brain and we have an emotional brain. So the trauma actually gets more stuck in the emotional brain. So when we talk, we're only accessing our thinking brain. And that's where the mismatch happens. That's why people can't access what's really happening for them.

So you are the founder of Reconnect. Tell me about that.

So Reconnect Integrative Trauma Treatment center is Los Angeles based intensive trauma therapy center. So it's outpatient, but clients come in anywhere from three to five hours every day and, and work with a variety of professionals that are specialized in trauma. That includes in addition to psychotherapy, that includes yoga, massage therapy, movement therapy, art therapy, acupuncture, neurofeedback. So they just really get everything under one roof. It's like a bootcamp because you can come for two weeks and really heal unhealed stuff.

That is wonderful, man. I think that would be beneficial for so many people. I know I would have loved to have the opportunity to. To partake in something like that. I think we've all got stuff that we can further deal with. No matter where you're at in your journey.

Exactly. I love my. Actually, a lot of my staff, we sometimes joke and say, we wish we can come here and you can help me, and we want to help each other.

It's like a bootcamp for your staff, right? Like a staff healing weekend. That's excellent. So what is one of your favorite practices that you do on a regular basis to, like, promote mindfulness and just, like, stay clear and stay positive and even keeled?

Grounding. I have a regular daily grounding practice in the morning and in the evening and many times between the clients, so that my mind is much more in the here and now and then I'm not just sort of out of my body, traveling to Spain kind of thing. And it really helps to be present and. And the clients feel really heard and validated.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And while everyone is different, I know people are all coming to you with their own unique experiences. Do you see any common threads, like, with the reasons people are coming to you or the way that you facilitate a treatment plan? Or is it all pretty unique to each individual person?

You know, most clients that come to me have sexual abuse history, so that has been my specialty for 23 years now. And the secondary, I would say, is attachment, meaning relational trauma. So anything that they grew up with a parent who was absent or abusive, alcoholic or mentally ill, then. So they don't have necessarily, like, a typical physical or sexual abuse, but they have an emotional abuse. And those two tend to be the most common diagnosis or issues that we work with.

It's so true. It always amazes me how many people have suffered from sexual abuse or even just like, emotional abuse, like from a family member at an early age. Like, you know, when you're talking with the other woman and really diving in. It's just amazing to me still, yet how prolific these horrible things are.

Yes. And how much people minimize them. People tend to think if I haven't been to a war or again, something like physical abuse or sexual abuse. I'm not. I'm not traumatized, actually. It's not true.

Actually, you are. And actually, you need to deal with it. I mean, and I'm speaking from firsthand experience on everything that you just said, so I know that I had to go through a very long healing journey to be able to deal with all these different things and to heal my body, my mind, and my emotions. So it's definitely nothing to minimize. We all need to deal with anything that has happened in the past if you want to be fully present and successful here and now. So I completely commend you for your work and everything that you're doing.

Thank you.

So if you would like to learn more about Dr. Carol Darca and her work, go check out her website@renectcenter.com and definitely go get her book on Amazon. Repeat the name one more time for the audience so they can make sure to go get your book.

The Trauma Map five Steps to Reconnect.

With Yourself The Trauma Map. Go check out the book. I highly recommend this. We all have things that we need to heal from, no matter what your experience has been, and I bet you're going to pick up some very interesting tools and tricks in the process. So thank you so much for being a guest today. I really appreciate having you here. Definitely have you back to talk more about this because it's a pretty interesting topic to me.

Thank you so much again for inviting me.

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