Trauma-Informed Care Across the Lifespan with Amy Chavez-Burkett
Birth and death are the two most universal human experiences and somehow, two of the least trauma-informed spaces we've created.
In this episode of A Trauma-Informed Future Podcast, host Katie Kurtz is in conversation with Amy Chavez-Burkett about why that matters and what we can do about it. Amy digs into what it actually looks like to move trauma-informed care from principles into practice in the moments that count: when someone is at their most vulnerable, their most open, and their most in need of feeling safe.
At the center of this conversation is the nervous system. Because safety isn't just a value or a policy, it's a felt experience. And whether someone is bringing life into the world or leaving it, the conditions we create around them shape not just the moment, but what they carry forward from it.
Learn more about Amy:
Amy Rebekah is a visionary leader, facilitator and healer with over 20 years in practice as a licensed massage therapist, craniosacral therapist, doula, childbirth educator and doula trainer, a community herbalist, circle keeper, a story steward and story-teller, a speaker and author, a researcher and trainer of Trauma-Informed and Healing-Centered leadership.
Amy is currently enjoying the experience of weaving her practical lived experiences with the theories and scholarship inside of a doctoral program in leadership and change through Antioch University. This academic journey increased Amy's capacity from supporting individuals and couples going through intense change or healing, to supporting groups and organizations working for change by supporting them in their capacity to practice a more authentic, responsible, embodied, and collaborative leadership culture through engaging a trauma-informed approach.
In 2020 Amy founded ReStoryative Somatics, LLC to share her services and train other professionals in trauma-informed and healing-centered leadership. She is passionate about supporting leaders and those who support others in learning the practice of self-regulation of their nervous systems in service to co-regulation as a leadership practice. She especially enjoys working with organizational systems to implement trauma -informed care as organizational culture change.
In 2022 Amy shared her vision of a new way of operationalizing trauma - informed and healing - centered care in service to uplifting perinatal professionals working to transform the current maternal and infant mortality crisis, a pilot project known as T.R.I.B.E.; Trauma & Resilience - Informed Birth Education Perinatal and Parenting Co-operative. With the support of a community initiative grant through the Northwest Dayton Partnership, and a Community Initiative for Racial Equity Grant through Kellogg foundation, Amy had the opportunity to train18 interdisciplinary perinatal and parenting support professionals in trauma - informed care and somatic oriented healing centered practices, while the members of the pilot in return co-created parenting peer support circles and interdisciplinary wrap-around care to pregnant women and families in Northwest Dayton. Although the pilot did not result in the birth of an co-operative organization as first imagined, the results of the training and the pilot project were incredibly positive, the harvested wisdom of which is seeding new projects of different kinds inspired by the transformational work of the women who courageously co-created the first pilot .
In 2023, Amy and her daughters also joined forces to create a collaborative company called CommuniTEA Love, a company dedicated to facilitating connection within the community through access to delicious herbal tea blends and they are having a wonderful time building this legacy of love together.
Connect with Amy:
Website: www.lovesomatics.org
Website: Www.communitealove.org
Email: amy@lovesomatics.org
Show Transcript:
Katie Kurtz (she/her): Hi everyone and welcome back to a Trauma-Informed Future podcast. I'm delighted to be joined here today by Amy Chavez. How are you today? I'm so excited. This conversation, we already started the conversation and so we're gonna continue it so you can hear it. But something we decided before we get into who Amy is and all the incredible work she does and just somatics and birth work and death work and all the things is just to start with a little bit of nervous system care.
We're in highly dysregulated times and with Amy's work being so healing centered and nervous system centered, I thought maybe we could all just start that way. So, Amy's gonna lead us in a brief nervous system care practice, and if you're listening to this while walking or driving.
Please be safe. Keep your eyes open. Come back to it when you need to, but you can still breathe with us.
So go ahead Amy.
Amy Chavez (she/her): Beautiful. Thank [00:01:00] you. Good morning, Katie, and good day wherever you are, whenever you're listening to this. So I'll just invite us to take a moment and find your body and find where your body is making contact with support.
So if you're sitting to feel where the seat is making contact with support, if your feet are on the ground, just letting your self wiggle your toes, move your feet a little bit, and then just inviting you to notice what that feels like. So having the thought of wiggling your toes, and I like to think about how that activates our motor neurons.
And then as I feel the sensations of my feet making contact with the ground or with my shoes, the sensation, the [00:02:00] information that my feet send back up to the brain
lets me know where my body is making that contact with support. So just taking a moment to explore that. And if you have a support at your back, I'm sitting on a rocking chair. I see you're sitting on a chair. So just to let yourself also bring a sense of curiosity and noticing where the place of contact at your back.
So support beneath my seat and beneath my feet and at my back. And in this way, we just can come into a felt sense of the body as a container and the body as a container in relationship with an internal environment. So we've got all the cells [00:03:00] and all the systems in relationship with each other inside this body container.
And as a whole, this organism, this body relates to the environment. The natural environment and to one another. And particularly in this conversation, we're gonna be talking about how our nervous systems are in relationship with one another and how understanding the language of our nervous systems can give us so much information about how we are in relationship to one another.
So just inviting us to take a deep breath or take a breath at all, just to see what sensations let you know your body is breathing. And as you feel the exhale, just being open-hearted, open-minded, and ready to engage in this conversation. [00:04:00]
Katie Kurtz (she/her): Thanks, Amy. That felt really good. I needed that this morning, and I hope in whatever timeline people are listening, that's just a really great way as why I always say practice that pause, just coming back and meeting yourself where you're at in the moment.
So thank you so much for getting us started. Do you wanna just introduce yourself in your own words to everyone? Who you are, what you do, what you're all about?
Amy Chavez (she/her): Gosh, yes. It's so I'm always a pause there, right? Because we jump right into our roles and the ways we're in relationship with the world.
So I am a mother, that was probably my most closest identifying relationship role. I'm a mother of two daughters who are now a beautiful adult, women, and I am a wife and partner. I have been a birth doula, a death doula, somatic experiencing practitioner, a massage therapist, a craniosacral therapist let's see, a [00:05:00] lactation consultant.
So for about 20 years, my practice was very much around the maternal health period and the ma and supporting people becoming parents through the birth process, supporting people in times of loss and difficulty. And yes, and I think I forgot to say a community herbalist is also the plants.
Were actually my first teacher. And so at this point in my work, my one of my daughters and I have started a small herbal tea company and I'm helping her with that. So that's a place where my love for the. Gets to live on. And then my practice now is actually, I've stepped out of private practice and I've been inside of a doctoral program through the Antioch graduate School of Leadership and Change, where I've been exploring how do we bring in trauma-informed care as a systems change model, [00:06:00] as a leadership model.
Because my practice, because I came to this work one-on-one as a practitioner, the last decade has really been about growing in this new field of organizations and leadership and how we take, well, how I have taken what I learned in the one-on-one work with people's nervous systems and understood how that translates into family systems and organizational systems and religious systems and all the other systems we're in.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): Thanks, Amy. I love the breadth and depth of work you do and especially the how it integrates across the lifespan. And I think that's so important because. In our human brains and also especially in western culture and this American capitalist culture, we think of things so dichotomized, right?
And it's birth is over here, death. Oh, we don't really talk about that. And [00:07:00] then we keep them so separate when really everything is so integrated and it's, so there's that. And my, I just needed to name that, but I think, you know, something, there's so much I wanna talk about today because I think there's so many people who listen to this podcast and are in our community, and people who are really seeking out applying trauma-informed care to their work.
The healing arts, which you have such a deep and rich experience in so many different areas. And somatics, which I wanna unpack that word a little bit. And and then also just this. How you're taking it to this next level with your PhD program. Like I'm so, I love that so much, and I know we've talked about it a lot online and I wanna talk about it more, but I think, again, it's such a great example of integration and that's something you and I know both really believe in, of taking things out of this concept or intention and putting it into integration, which when we [00:08:00] think about healing, it's how are we resting and digesting and integrating it's all connected.
And I'm a big believer that trauma informed care is healing and healing informed care. And so I'm wondering if you can just start a little bit about your own journey with trauma-informed care and how it led you to become a PhD candidate for, you know, looking at trauma-informed change in leadership.
Amy Chavez (she/her): Isn't that something? Yes.
Yes. So, goodness, it was 20 years ago now, isn't it? I just have to time flies. So I was 30, it was 2006 and a woman named Sharon Porter was teaching some something she called Somatic Trauma Resolution which came from the lineage of somatic experiencing. She had been a student of and teacher with Peter Levine inside of the Somatic Experiencing Institute, whose work I didn't know at that point, but a series of synchronicities [00:09:00] actually brought her to my small town.
And a friend who's an Ayurvedic practitioner had met her at a meditation conference, I think in Sweden or something, and they met in the airport and. Next thing you know, she's doing somatic trauma resolution here in town. And at that point I was a birth doula and I was a massage therapist. And I had just, I was doing, I have been doing craniosacral therapy for a little while, but I had just more recently trained in doing craniosacral therapy with the babies and with the newborns.
And it was one of those things that when I heard about the training, like I read it on the email that she was coming. In my mind, I thought about the babies and I made this connection that somehow this work was about working with babies, which it's not, other than it, it can be, but I, it was one of [00:10:00] those just intuitive things that I knew I needed to be there.
So I signed up and I showed up and, of course, she smiled at me the first day and said, well, there's a lot to learn, but eventually you can work with the babies, you know? And inside of that workshop was just probably one of the biggest shifts of my life, which was it was day four of the training, right?
So we'd been there for four days and at that point I was 30 years old. I had given birth twice. I was a prenatal yoga instructor, I was a licensed massage therapist. I'm saying all these things because they're all related to a physical body. I grew up dancing in dance classes and things like that. And on day four of this training she, I was chosen, invited to be a demo, and the conversation was about coupling something called coupling dynamics, [00:11:00] which is.
When? When there's been a trauma adaptation, an adaptation in the nervous system, which we would call like a trauma response, right? An adaptation in the nervous system that happened to, from an event, we can sometimes over associate eight aspects that were present during that event with a felt sense of danger that on their own may not be dangerous.
For example, if I was driving a red car and got into a car accident, I might have this strange response when I see red cars and my rational brain doesn't understand why, but my body might have a somatic reaction. That's just a very simple example and, so anyway, we were learning about coupling dynamics and I was being the demo.
And [00:12:00] inside of that experience, I became aware of how absolutely dissociated I was. I, and again, that's where I say I was a yoga teacher, a prenatal, a doula. I was a mother. I all these very physical oriented trainings and practices, and yet my awareness, I wasn't aware until that moment that I had been navigating from just outside of myself, which is hard.
The language of that almost doesn't make sense, right? But that's why the work is called somatic Experiencing because it is about ex the experience of your body. And so that was my introduction, I will say. And as a, as a. First a human in a body. It shifted how I experienced everything from that moment on my relationship with my partner, my relationship with intimacy, my relationship [00:13:00] to conflict, my relationship to saying no or having boundaries when I was because I was so immersed in emotional labor as my work.
So everything began to shift, and probably one of the most profound things that began to shift is when I was in the birth room, the thing, the dynamics that I was perceiving be, I began to have a more complex capacity to see the dynamics in the room and also the dynamics that were happening for the birthing person.
So I suddenly could notice when somebody was dissociated or shut down or felt overwhelmed and. Wasn't present. And so the way that I practiced birth work began to shift dramatically. And at that point I was working on my bachelor's degree through Goddard College, which unfortunately just got closed [00:14:00] down this past year.
But had an absolutely revolutionary program at the time called integrated Health Arts and Sciences. And they had a dozen faculty that, acupuncture, midwifery, psychiatry, just the whole span. And so inside of that, I really got to unpack and understand. The deeper dynamics of what would be happening, what was happening to the nervous system for the birthing person and for the newborn.
So understanding attachment theory, that brought me to the polyvagal theory, which of course is the core of somatics. And I wanna go ahead and unpack that word, if that's okay. 'cause I know that was a question. Let's do it. So, you know, it's one of those things where when we bring a spotlight to something that needs attention, like wellness and people start talking about wellness, but then it can get murky or dissipated 'cause people can use the word different ways that's happened with [00:15:00] trauma.
And certainly now somatics as you were saying, like things can become a buzzword and we wanna help people understand I love words and language. I think it's really important to understand how we are using them. So my favorite. Sort of definition or explanation of somatics actually comes from generative somatics, which was one of the organizations that now teaches somatics and has a little bit more of a collective social justice lens.
I'm gonna say. And I believe that this definition I think that I'm remembering that it came from them, which is really the understanding of us as whole. Meaning, understanding that we are biological beings, physiological beings, psychological beings, emotional beings, spiritual beings, and also beings that are informed by.
Enculturation and entrainment. And [00:16:00] whether that's through familial systems or religious systems or lineage systems and our very DNA, our the epigenetics, we understand that we are also informed by the events that our ancestors experienced and the adaptations and maladaptations that their nervous systems experienced from their own journeys and how that informs the generations of both biology and parenting.
And so really the thing I love about somatics is it includes all the parts of us, whereas so many conversations in the past have been so siloed. Are we are we physical or mental? Are we physical or spiritual? As if. We're not everything. Right. And so one of my favorite teachers in that field is really Daniel Siegel with the interpersonal neurobiology [00:17:00] model and the hand model of the brain and how I just a real sense of integration of how it's the both.
And part of what I love about what he teaches is that in his development of that as a model, my understanding is that he brought in scientists and contemplatives and philosophers and psychologists and it was like 40 people from these different disciplines helping integrate the language of how we understand the human experience.
So I think that's really what Somatics is about, is helping us understand and re and remember who we really are.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): I love that so much. And I'm, so, happy and grateful that you gave that explanation. I just wanna name and acknowledge that I think so many people interpret somatic work, somatic experiencing that, that's a very specific program.
I just wanna name like that when we say somatic, experiencing that as like a [00:18:00] certification model. But somatics is being used and kind of put in front of a lot of things, and I think a lot of people think it's new. This is a new thing, this is new age wellness. And I am always like, okay. And that's why I like to always create shared language and understanding and why I wanted you to start there because you're not new at this and I, you know, don't wanna like age you or anything.
I'm 50 and a half and I think that a lot of times we. There, this is, you've done this work for a long time. This isn't something that just came on the market in 2020 when we were all glued to our screens. No, ma'am. And realized we were all having a collective trauma response. This was happening.
This was happening before trauma informed care was formalized. Yes, exactly. You know, 2006 like that, you know, it wasn't till almost four to seven years later that trauma-informed care we saw as a [00:19:00] published form. Obviously it was being used before then, but like the formalization of it, so, and am I think the piece I always see missing is the social justice of somatics and the not, and again, only compartmentalizing it to our individual body and not seeing the intersectionality and the integration of.
Bodies that we exist in systems and the role that systemic oppression and ancestral violence has because somatics, when we dig down, I keep looking at this tree behind you, like when we dig down to the roots is rooted in indigenous practices, right? And bodies of culture. And so I'm always discerning and encouraging others to [00:20:00] discern when we think about people using that term or identifying similarly to trauma-informed, it needs to include a social justice perspective and a liberation perspective.
And so that's why I point to people like Resmaa, Mechem Prentice, Hemphill these folks who are looking at that through that intersectional and social justice lens. So I just always like to name that. And I'm sure you can speak more to that too, because our bodies are political and the violence that occurs within and to our bodies, not just from people but climate and what we're doing in the climate and the earth and the environment is also violent and impacting our bodies too.
Amy Chavez (she/her): A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. And the thing that I love about that conversation is that I think that for me it has been a source of [00:21:00] liberation and a real liberatory practice, whereas in a lot of spaces in the social justice space and social, like in a lot of spaces that I had been in doing, you know, diversity, equity, inclusion kinds of trainings. It was such, sometimes it came from such a, I'm gonna say top down or heady like conversation. And because it didn't include the bodies that didn't include the trauma lens, the lens of ancestral continuations of how we got here and how we know what we know and the violence of entitlement and being the equal and opposite of the violence of, not enough of deprivation, you know? And I Resmaa, oh [00:22:00] my gosh. Like when his, when my grandmother's hands came out, it was like the world changed, the paradigm shifted. We had language he brought us the language to things that we could experience, but didn't have the framework to talk about i, as a Jewish woman, that was my experience.
You know, I was in my thirties before I realized that I was white. And that's like a whole conversation. And there's probably people listening, rolling their eyes and, you know, but that's a whole love to have a whole podcast on that for real. 'cause. But the reality of the inside of my nervous system coming from my own ancestry and mixed with some of my own personal history was not.
Matched to the external world of the privilege that my whiteness had. So again, [00:23:00] that's like a whole nother conversation. But the reality is that to me where it becomes liberating is the realization that all these practices, all this, the understanding of trauma-informed care as principles, the practices, the of inside of Somatics that sort of embody those healing practices the healing principles is about coming into right relationship with ourselves and with our environment and with one another, with the past, with who we wanna be in the future.
It's all about becoming in right relationship. And so, to me, that's why it's a liberatory practice of and the reality of it is like it all comes so that, that's all, that all can sound very esoteric too. And so it really is about safety, like in order for humans to [00:24:00] change or, which healing is to change something.
There has to be enough felt sense of safety on board. And that's where the polyvagal theory came in and gives us, well, what is safety? You know, is safety just white? Privilege is safety, just male privilege is safety. Just whatever the proximity to power is. And to me that's where the trauma-informed care principle of understanding historical trauma was so exciting.
And liberatory was the words and the understanding of the principle that if we do not understand our historical trauma, we really don't have access to our gold, our present gold, the historical, gold that we get from our ancestors, our tenacity, our resilience, our loyalty, our passion. And we are here to, I believe, and this is I guess a belief or a framework, is that we are here to evolve.
We are here to evolve our souls our [00:25:00] species, however you know, wanna frame that. And so the practice of exploring how I'm in relationship with my felt sense of safety is what creates the capacity for change, whether that's in one person's nervous system or a family system or an organizational system.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): Yes, I love that you name that. It's something I always help really hone in on to help people as they're building trauma awareness is that trauma when we look at it as a response, not the event. So we expand our lens a little bit there, first and foremost, but trauma thrives in isolation, right? It disconnects us from our bodies ourself our family systems, our communities, it confidence, self-esteem, worth all of it.
It thrives when we're isolated. Absolutely. And the opposite [00:26:00] of trauma is not healing and resilience because we can't get to healing and resilience without safety. And we need to understand safety, even if somebody gets their basic needs met of food, water, shelter, you know, in a safe environment. That's physical safety is a part of it, but it needs to be a felt sense and we need to do that through.
Safe, healthy, nurturing connection and relational. That relational work and coming back to ourselves so that we can get healing. And it's not linear, it's all squiggly and whatever. But I think that's such an important thing because as we start to see more people have language, which I'm all for, like I talk at length on this podcast.
I started this podcast by saying let's talk about it. Let's name a thing, and let's have shared language understanding, because that gives us meaning and meaning gives us power, not it power to [00:27:00] create change. But we are seeing so many people use nervous system work. Somatics, trauma, trauma, you know.
Resolution, whatever terminology, right? And integrating it into healing arts, meaning not just in a clinical medical model of therapy, psychotherapy, et cetera, but we're seeing it woven into, which again, it has been, it just hasn't always been quote unquote legitimized in western culture of body work birth work, death work herbal work, plant work, all of those things.
So it's, but this is where we have to be discerning is, yes, it's great. I love more people. It's becoming a common vernacular, like in our common language and zeitgeist of communications of understanding somatics as body and nervous system. But we have to be discerning of how, what that means and how it's being used and the depth of it, right?
Because [00:28:00] if it's. And this is kind of where I ask you like, and this I talk about too, is just because someone says something as somatic doesn't mean it's trauma-informed. And also I've seen so many things, and I personally, and I'm sure you have too, have been in trainings on trauma, trauma, responsiveness, healing, and it not be delivered or provided in a trauma-informed way.
And so can you talk a little bit about that to us?
Amy Chavez (she/her): Yeah. Absolutely. So the thing that comes to my mind is birth work. Let's, so that, that's a place to to you know, where this conversation comes, it developed for me inside of the birth room. And so, you know, the thing about, the principles are that there are principles until they're [00:29:00] practiced and integrated, which is that word that you and I both love and it really is a literal, like integration is something like when you're first learning how to ride a bike, you have to think about it very much and really utilize that front brain to remember all the things that you were supposed to do to balance and pedal and steer at the same time.
But the more you practice it, the neurons that fire together, wire together and sew. Those systems are built until you can ride the bike and actually be singing a song or thinking about something else. Or noticing the birds and the trees and the plants that you're passing on your bike because you no longer have to be consciously thinking about it.
And that is a series of integration of how that information becomes a pattern, a habit. Unconscious, subconscious, we know how to do it. So it comes from the top down.
So when we're talking [00:30:00] about trauma-informed care, bringing it from pri, from principles into practice, it is about slowing down and practicing doing something different. And when we do something different, often our deep nervous system will give us signs of warning that this feels possibly wrong because it feels different or unfamiliar.
And again, if we're not conscious and slow about it, then we can just distract ourselves or, you know, override that. But there's something about the slowness of listening and paying attention and bringing our consciousness on board. And the reason I'm saying that so slowly is then we think about what it is on a 12 hour shift for a labor and delivery nurse or an OB who might be on a, god forbid, 72 hour shift or, you know, when I went into the birth [00:31:00] work as a doula, I had both my babies at home in states where home birth was legalized and I was supported and it was just so wonderful.
And then I come back to Ohio and I'm like, I'm a doula. And they're like, we don't do home birth here, or it's illegal and we don't, you know, I had to go through the training. I had to go through training all over again because although I had given birth twice and I had been trained on birth, I did not, I was not trained on birth in the hospital.
So think about how different. You might ask yourself, well, how different can birth be based on location? Well, it's actually physiologically kind of polar opposites, and so I had to relearn birth to be inside of this environment. So the way that we think [00:32:00] about bringing these principles into practice is, you know, again, just using birth as an example, if we were to talk about safety in birth, we might talk about things like external fetal monitoring, which would be considered by some, an instrument of safety.
Well, when we really slow it down and break it down, the external fetal monitor was created. For intermittent use, and my understanding is that the scientist that created it actually went in front of Congress to ask that it not be used the way that it's being used now with continuous fetal monitoring.
Because in that way, it was being misinterpreted and there was more emergency C-sections than maybe there needed to be because it was not intended to be used for continual use. [00:33:00] However, it is used for continual use. So the focus on what is happening and what as far as safety goes is now off of the birthing person and onto the computer screen, which is reading the external fetal monitor.
Well, guess what? Every so often. Every time the mother gets into a position, which her body tells her is how the baby needs to move, it's a very precarious down there and positioning is everything. And if the mother is in a position that she needs to be in to help the baby move into an optimal position, but the external fetal monitor can no longer pick up the heart tones, they will move the mother most often prioritizing the need to keep fetal heart tones.
So we've now taken the [00:34:00] locus of control, and I'm gonna say like authority as in the authoring of what's happening away from the center of information, which is the birthing person's body. And we've taken it to the information coming from. The external fetal monitor all in the name of safety. Okay. So that's, if we're looking at safety as an external view, like for example, if my role is the legal counsel of the hospital, I'm looking at safety as how do I keep my hospital running and away from litigation?
Well, what is really safe in a courtroom is to have a strip that says we tracked the baby every moment. [00:35:00] We did everything that we could do. That makes sense in that lens. Right? Oh my gosh. That I can see the lens of safety of where that's coming from. Okay. Well, however, when that's juxtaposed to like the lens of safety of the birthing person.
What happens to the birthing person's nervous system when they are not allowed to move their body in the way that feels natural? When they're doing the most difficult work of their entire life and of the planet to use their body to give birth? What happens to them, to their nervous system, to their sense of safety?
Well, often it becomes overridden. Well. The nervous system is literally what drives the birth process. And this is because we're [00:36:00] brilliant. This is because nature is brilliant and always orienting to survival. So again, if we look at, well, where would've this? Where, why would that be the case? We look to our ancestors and see if our ancestors were in the labor process and a saber tooth tiger came into the camp, labor would stop.
Oxytocin stops at the presence of adrenaline. That's our physiological selves, that's our chemical selves, our biological selves.
So the saber tooth tiger comes into camp, the oxytocin shuts down. The birthing person gets into the fight or flight response runs away, and. If the, they outrun the saber-tooth tiger, they will fall to the ground. They will relax, they will discharge, they will when they discharge that [00:37:00] trauma energy, and they come back to a sense of them knowing that they are safe, their system will come back to that parasympathetic information and oxytocin will return and the label labor will return.
Maybe they'll make out with their partner because they're so happy about escaping the saber teeth tiger. That increases the oxytocin, and there it goes. So that's the biological story of birth. Well, in this day and age, what happens when the saber tooth tiger is the doctor coming in or the nurse overriding the patient's, the woman, the birthing, excuse me, the birthing person's needs for movement.
Service to keeping the heart tones. So that is a very specific example of how, you know, I was jumping for joy when I found the trauma-informed care principles because it was [00:38:00] from the government and they were saying, this is real. I'm no longer just the WOOWOO doula running around saying it matters.
You know? So that's a very specific example when it comes to safety, you know, we can take each principle trust as a neurobiological experience, trust. It's not something we can force. It comes from transparency. That's the other half of that principle. Well, transparency is about truth telling.
Transparency is about acknowledging the power dynamics in the room. So in the birth room, there's only one naked person in pain. There's only one person bringing life forward. And when that person is not the real center of attention and authority, what happens? How does that influence trust, you know, empowering voice and choice?
My gosh that's the creation of doulas and birth plans and all the ways of people trying [00:39:00] to engage that power of voice and choice. I have a story about that one, if it's okay, that comes to mind, which is, it was with a woman and there's very few true emergencies, what we call true emergencies in birth.
There's a couple. There's a few and there's usually signs for them. And so I was with a woman and it was, the cord prolapsed, which means the cord came out before the baby, and that's one of those true emergencies. It's like a seven minutes to the C-section, right? So the doctor is on the bed with his hand still connected to the cord, like so helping her, and the nurse is running down the hallway, pushing the bed, and I am running down the hallway saying, do you want to ask them for a C-section?
Now let me be clear. We all knew she was having a C-section. [00:40:00] It was lifesaving. However, in those moments. Because everything was happening so fast I got to say, this is what's happening. This is why. This is the what. This is what we will be looking for. This is what you might expect after. Is are you okay with this?
Are you present? Can you consent? And she said, yes, I want them to do it. And then, you know, afterwards, being able to integrate how fast, because when we talk about trauma, you know, the two the way, and I know again people are gonna have different, the way I like to teach it is, and really my understanding is somatic experiencing.
You know, the early work really evolved around understanding shock trauma. That is too much, too soon, too fast. And then as the field continued to develop and oh my gosh, SMAs work brought so much [00:41:00] richness to this, we then began to understand pervasive trauma, collective trauma, systemic trauma. Well, what happens when it's not just a car?
You, you know, you have a car accident, you shake it off, and then you go back to regulation. Well, the reality that we all live in this world with, we're in imbalance in our world. We're in hundreds, if not thousands of years of generational imbalance. And so that affects everything.
I feel like I spun out for a minute. No, you're okay. Bringing it back to the birth piece, then a co, just to go through those principles and how they really landed for me. So then we get the principle of mutuality and collaboration. Well, anywhere in healthcare, in medicine, anybody that is holding any kind of space for healing, I believe [00:42:00] must be connected in some way.
At least have a mustard seed of faith in the belief that nature is brilliant. The cosmos are, is brilliant. Sacred geometry is all around. There's so many messages and information inside of our bodies and in nature that continues to remind us the truth of that. And I believe that our job, whatever kind of healing, holding space medicine we practice is to step in with that belief and that understanding that the person that is.
That we are working with, we are in mutuality and collaboration with that. We are not, nobody is here to fix anybody because nobody's really broken. We're all just here to help, remind each other and reflect each other. And what is so powerful, you [00:43:00] know, is to me again, integration and embody this work is like I bring forward from my own journey.
You know, so I can sit in the depths with somebody with integrity and authenticity and say yes. You know, and that's the birth journey. And that's the death journey is the understanding of the in-betweens and the seen and the unseen and, so that piece of mutuality and collaboration feels really important to me.
And it's really challenging right now because in order to practice almost any kind of medicine or healing you there, you almost have to be an inside of an institution that is inherently not set up necessarily that way. And some are even set up to keep people sick and dependent upon the institutions.
And so that's a real call for integrity I think, for each, per each of us inside of this work in these times. Which brings me to my [00:44:00] next favorite principle of peer support and why we need each other. And you know, it's like when I got into this work, through the birth work, I came in. Super much the, I was a dual, I was advocate for the mom and the babies, which sometimes gave me a perspective that the nurses and or doctors and or hospitals might be the other, might be that, which I need to protect them from.
And then gosh, it was like in 2005 I went to a conference that was called Coalition for Improving Maternity Services. And it was like a ground, it was a grassroots huge international group and. There was a physician there, I think he was from Brazil, and at the time the C-section rate there was super high.
And he was sharing a story. I was in a workshop with Penny Simpkin who has passed away, but she was actually my first doula [00:45:00] trainer in Seattle. And she was the first one that wrote a book called When Survivors Give Birth. And so really the first one of bringing that under, like bringing it into the conversation, and that was not until 1999, I believe, maybe even 2000.
And so she was leading this conversation and this male physician broke down crying. And shared a story about a woman that he was caring for and he didn't, you know, he did at that point. They were called the mother friendly initiatives. And it was like these 10 things of what to do, sort of like the trauma informed care principles, like these 10 things to do to be mother friendly.
So he did all the things and during her birth she had a recurrence of polio from childhood, from the stress of the birth. And she came back afterwards and just was so angry with him and [00:46:00] blamed him and said, you should have induced me. You should have taken the baby early. You should have done all the things that he didn't do because he was trying to follow the mother and he was crying and he was so heartfelt.
And he said, how am I to trust? You know, and then I have to go to the next room and trust this next that the mother can do, you know, all of these things. And all of a sudden. That was a moment of maturity. You know, that you have those moments where your perspective just blows up and you're like, oh my gosh.
I had been looking through a telescope and missing the complexity of every nervous system that enters that room and their relationship to the hospital system to birth itself to one another in the room if somebody looks like somebody that hurt me or you know, gender dynamics and race dynamics and class dynamics and ability dynamics and all the things that were unspoken that were playing in the [00:47:00] room.
That's what really blew up my curiosity and sent me back to school to sort of start unpacking this more and more. And then of course, I can't move forward without saying the last. Trauma-informed care principle, which is the understanding of historical trauma. And again, especially in the birth world in, we're in the United States, where the field of obstetrics was quite literally built upon information obtained from enslaved black women's bodies that were tortured.
And if we do not, when we do not address that, if healthcare providers in that space don't do their work around that to understand what ancestors, what epigenetics, what information of safety that they are in relationship with, then they're really missing an opportunity. To do that whole healing.
So [00:48:00] that's the, that's how the six principles fit into birth work as far as I can see. And that was really my journey of it. And then, you know, as you mentioned the in 2017, my just the shift in my own community and my practice and my children were individuating and heading towards college.
And all of those pieces shifting, sort of brought me to the leadership and change program at Antioch, which I did not necessarily consider myself an academic. And I certainly didn't consider myself in leadership. And, but, and yet the way that I navigate, I felt very spiritually led. There. There was no question to me that I needed to be there, but I was in some internal doubt about.
I was in this PhD program with people that were leaders of international organizations and churches, and you know, I have, I've never even worked inside of an organization as an [00:49:00] employee. I've always been a self-employed practitioner who had quite a view of the organizations because after working there for so long, the nurses became my clients, some of the physicians became my clients.
And I really got to see the depth of the complexity of all these different parts, which I think gave me an interesting view. So then I was like, oh my goodness. The organizations are like the macro of the disorganized, dysregulated. My, you know, individual nervous systems and then I meet you who says, yes, I'm out here working on the organizations and it's just such a beautiful fit.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): I love the full circle moment we just had, and the breakdown of showing from principles to practice the trauma-informed care [00:50:00] principles and how just very briefly, obviously there's so much depth to this, but just showing how it can be practiced. It's not complicated, but like you illustrated, we have to be in a mindset to choose it.
And that's why we have to move away from just saying, here's this checklist of principles. How do we practice them in birth work, in whatever work we're doing? Again, work being professional and personal. 'cause we can't. Always compartmentalize them. So, you know, I, as I was listening to you share, my experience with birth work is minimal other than being born myself, which I don't remember.
My experience with life work is really in death work informally, you know, and as I was hearing you share the integration of principles into birth work, I'm thinking, oh, all of this is so mirrored in death work too.
As I [00:51:00] walked my dad to his final moments last year ago when he passed, and I'm in, you know, walking my mom through this end of life care now I'm constantly as their, I'm essentially, my mom's guardian is constantly asked DNR status. What is the status?
What do we do if her heart begins to stop? And there's this liability, constant liability, and what you were sharing earlier of the fetal heart monitor. There, there's nuance here regarding liability and safety. And when we talk about safety from a trauma-informed perspective, and we think about the adaptation of safety, I teach from Sandra Bloom's model physical, psychological, social, moral, financial, and cultural safety.
You'll notice that legal, safety and organizational, you know, bottom lines aren't on that list. Because if we're putting the safety of an organization, an entity, the business entity [00:52:00] before the safety of the people, then what are we doing that's not safety, that's liability, that's fear litigation. And so I just want people to understand, 'cause I do a lot of work in healthcare.
I know a lot of people in healthcare and this may be a conversation of maybe different views, but li liability is not the same thing as safety. It's not a felt sense of safety.
Amy Chavez (she/her): A hundred percent. And it, I think it's an important conversation. And I think in order, like if in order for healthcare organizations to truly engage in trauma-informed culture change, that conversation has got to be unpacked, you know?
Absolutely. And it's not that it doesn't exist because. This is the world we live in and institutions and liability. But it's a such a slippery slope.[00:53:00]
Anytime we over, we choose to override the human soul, the human experience, the and that's where I love the polyvagal theory and the attachment understanding is it gave language super scientific. Physiological language to why love matters, you know? So 20 years ago, they would call me the woo girl.
Like they had all the names for me at the hospital. I was so weird, whatever. So what did I have to do? I have to go learn all the neurobiology so I could come back and have the different conversation with them in the language that they understand, which is fine because guess what? It's still about love.
And we can talk about it in poetry and we can talk about it in psychology or philosophy or physiology. And that's what safety is. And when it comes to humans and when it comes to [00:54:00] humans giving birth or healing their body, it is a physiological reality that only happens in a parasympathetic state of safety.
And so once we realize that, what do we then, as facilitators, practitioners, helpers, whatever word you wanna name. Help facilitate a sense of safety so that their nervous system can quite literally go from fight, flight, freeze to a parasympathetic state where, which is literally the only way regeneration, which is healing or birth can happen.
So, I love having that conversation because there it is. Yeah. Can't really unpack that.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): Right. And I think that's why I am, so, I love working in healthcare and I'm just so adamant about holding anyone in healthcare's hands when I say this has to be [00:55:00] the standard of care because you are doing life work.
From birth to death and everything in between. The reason why we are so honed in on liability and fear that permeates the systems. And even as a social worker who's most of my social worker career has been in a hospital setting, the fear is, you know, CYA, yeah. Cover your ass. You gotta do it. Right? That's what you, that's what was ingrained in me.
Yeah. Out of fear of losing your license being and like again, and both ethics laws important. Absolutely. But if you're doing life work and you're leading this healthcare from a fear standpoint and a liability standpoint, it will always block care. Oh, and we, that's why trauma-informed care is so essential, because we're able [00:56:00] to then, instead of.
Just being fear and liability with care getting constantly put down, and that's why we have an influx of moral injury burnout and vicarious trauma within healthcare providers. Yeah. Trauma-informed care creates what you said, that balance because it holds the end. Both that Yes, we do have, we have laws in place, we have policies in place.
We have to maintain liability, safety, quote unquote for reasons that we can all think of. And we can always take a human first approach, which is what trauma informed care is. Because when we can, when we take a human first approach, that's when the actual healthcare can occur. Right? We're putting, you know, running down the hall an emergency way with that person who needed seven minutes to have a C-section to save their life and the baby.
Simply saying, you're running behind saying you're going to have a C sign and do you want this? [00:57:00] And the ability to say, yes, I do. Yep. Took what, three seconds. Yep. And I know it helped me. You probably had to fill out a form anyways. Yeah. So had, and she had
Amy Chavez (she/her): no, she had no signs of PTSD afterwards. There was no physiological anything other than gratitude.
It was like, and again, I've seen that, you know, I, as a doula, of course, I sort of came what you came up in the natural birth world. And again, even that's a sort of separation. The idea of the medical model of care versus the midwifery model of care. And as a doula in doing a lot of, I've done tons of, lots of home birth and lots of hospital birth and inside of the hospital
that, the amount of celebratory sacred un- traumatizing C-sections that I have been a part of is [00:58:00] phenomenal because again, it's about that birthing person's sense of safety will inform how they come through the experience Yeah. Of whether it was traumatic or not. Which actually, if I can, I'm something you said I kind of wanted to circle back around.
Sure. To this idea of self-regulation and co-regulation and when we're talking about helpers and healers and you know, that concept as again, in the birth world, co-regulation is what happens as soon as the baby is born, which the baby inside the womb. The baby's nervous system is being directly informed by the state of the birthing person's the pregnant person's nervous system. And then once the baby is born, the baby's nervous system will co-regulate with what is hopefully an adult organized [00:59:00] nervous system.
So when a birthing person is supported and not interfered with when the dyad really, so the baby is born and placed on the chest, on the belly of the parent.
The parent the mother's nervous system is flooded with more oxytocin than any other time in that body. More than orgasm, more than labor. The most oxytocin that ever happens is right after birth. And that is the love hormone. That is the hormone that makes us feel love and help attachment happen. And when supported, the nervous system, w will go through its period of recovery from all that it took to push, which does take adrenaline.[01:00:00]
But if the person doesn't feel safe, the adrenaline will kick a feeling of fight or flight. If the person feels safe, that adrenaline will help them feel powerful in birthing their child. Same hormone, different nervous system state. And so if then that birthing person and the baby are being supported, then that nervous system will go through its recovery while being flooded with love hormones and prolactin.
And the, that is the first, that is the deep communication that we call co-regulation. So the baby's nervous system learns to communicate its state based on how the mother's nervous system is. So then, and I, as I say this, I take a deep breath and say, we might use the words trigger warning.
So what happens when a baby is born to a mother or a parent whose nervous system is in freeze?[01:01:00]
The baby goes to attach and there's nothing there. The baby. Cries out and it's possible that the parent's nervous system might hear that cry as a threat because I'm in freeze and I don't know what the threat is 'cause I'm just in th freeze. 'cause freeze happens down here. This hand brain model, which I know of, the understanding of what the freeze is happening in my front brain.
But if I am, my front brain is offline because I'm in freeze and I'm overwhelmed, I may begin to interpret my baby's needs as a threat. Which also brings me back to the conversation you were having about liability and safety. Because when you were saying that as a care provider, if liability, if my fear of losing my license, my job, my [01:02:00] home, my security, if that is what is driving me.
That is how I'm in relationship with my patient or this other person that I am there to care with. It's not rational, it's not in my front brain, but my deep nervous system is looking at that person and experiencing them as a threat.
Well, we can't bring our best open-hearted healing selves to heal somebody when our deep nervous system is experiencing them as a threat.
So then you think about the obs or the nurses who are, and believe me, this is, I am, this is not about individuals or you know, the roles like I, some of my favorite human beings on the planet are beloved labor and delivery nurses and obs who get into this work to help, which is typically what happens.
And then things like the burnout and the moral injury, are so prevalent, which is part of why I just feel so passionate to bring this work to the birth workers. And to the helpers, to those who are helping so that we can [01:03:00] help better without continuing harm, you know? Yeah. But if we see one another as a threat, and of course we can take that under understanding and look at our current political climate, any time that we see each other, not through the lens of connection that we are cells a part of the same cosmos that we are all, you know, interconnected.
It is the remembering of that, that we need to bring healing to the whole.
You know, and to me, the trauma-informed care principles is, are these great little roadmap. Like how do you implement this in this moment? What would safety feel like right now? How can I cultivate trust right now?
Where could I, where can I draw from some empowerment of voice and choice, like that woman running down the hall. Did she really have a choice? We all knew she was going to have, but by bringing her voice forward, she got to have the experience of choice. [01:04:00] And then her system, her unconscious system, did not experience it as something overwhelming that happened to her.
It experienced it as a challenge that she jumped, that she stepped forward in.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): Yes.
Amy Chavez (she/her): To me, that's the difference between whether we come through and experience feeling empowered or feeling like traumatized.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): And that alone is such a, that's the power of this approach, right? Yes. We often get a lot of implied consent in a lot of areas, and I think when we, you know, talk about consent, we always just think of kind of one.
Yes or no permission, but there's different types of consent. And I have a podcast many episodes ago that goes over the different types of consent. So I'll link it in the show notes. But implied consent would be that, right? Okay, there's an emergency. I'm implying that your consenting to this, but the, when we take the human informed approach here, it's the, it's not ceremonial.
It's [01:05:00] not to say something. It is the very act of that person saying, communicating, consent, and the vibrational charge to the nervous system. 'cause we know vibrations that it's the information. There's a lot of power. Yeah. It could, that moment could have made or make or break help or harm somebody in the moment.
And I think that's what we're talking about, these simple shifts. Yeah. That can become intuitive once practiced. Absolutely. That can truly transform someone's life. I mean, that's like it, I hate to be like all whatever, like changing lives, but like seriously, why
Amy Chavez (she/her): else? What is healing if not changing lives?
Right? And so, but what is growing or maturing or evolving, if not changing?
Katie Kurtz (she/her): I see so much opportunity and possibility when it comes to the life work that happens in [01:06:00] healthcare. And I never want to, you know, it's never about demonizing or like putting down the institutional need for policies and practices and liabilities and protocols because they are warranted and.
If we're not doing it from a human-centered or human first approach, then we're putting liability over care. And I think that is a whole other podcast.
Amy Chavez (she/her): Yeah. Yes. Because that's also, I think, what creates divisions, you know, for the first Oh yeah. Years of my career, it was like, Ooh, doctors hate doulas.
And I was like, well, not in my practice. Yeah. Like they're, that's where my referrals come from, you know, because we understand that we're working together.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): Again, I've seen that throughout the lifespan, right. That it happens. It birth trauma and resilience is so. [01:07:00] Real and not talked about enough.
I think people are starting to share and give, have language and spaces for it, but we see that on the opposite end in death work too, which is even less talked about. So I just so appreciate this conversation. I think how you discussed the safety of somatics and the integration of everything is, even if somebody doesn't, is not a birthing person, hasn't birthed or isn't in birth work.
This is so relative to just understanding life, right? Yes. And the examples are so pertinent and can be applicable anywhere. So thank you so much Amy. I before we go into our gentle spreads, how can people connect with you and your work that you're leading in the world?
Amy Chavez (she/her): Okay. So I'm gonna give you the email, right? Okay. Which is amy@lovesomatics.org. Great, awesome. And new website in the process in the next few months. [01:08:00] Wonderful.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): Well, and you can always contact me and I can always connect you, Amy as well. That's perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Are you ready for our gentle spritz? Yes, I think so. Okay. If you could describe trauma-informed care in one word, what would it be?
Amy Chavez (she/her): Love in action. Yes. The rebel in me can't do one way. Oh yeah. I mean, that's okay. I
Katie Kurtz (she/her): I always say can be more than one. What is your current go-to for nervous system care?
Amy Chavez (she/her): Connecting with nature, staying connected to the daily cycle, the seasonal cycle, my breath cycle, grounding the water has been really big lately. That's really core for me.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): And what does a trauma-informed future look like for you?
Amy Chavez (she/her): Liberatory.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): Awesome. Thanks Amy. And I'll also include the CommuniTEA if that's okay. In the show [01:09:00] notes too for folks. Yes, I would love
that.
Amy Chavez (she/her): Yeah. That website is communitea love.org.
Katie Kurtz (she/her): Awesome. And Amy does all sorts of in incredible work with teams, organizations, individuals, not just within the birth work world, but also absolutely within leadership.
And so, thanks so much, Amy. This was great.
Amy Chavez (she/her): Thank you, Katie.
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