Clyde Mason Therapy | Somatic Parts Work

Why Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST), Somatic Experiencing® (SE™), and Somatic Inner Relationship Focusing (S/IRF)?

To help people recover from intergenerational trauma and developmental trauma, I practice Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST), Somatic Experiencing® (SE™), and Somatic Inner Relationship Focusing (S/IRF). Together, these styles of therapy are known as somatic parts work.

I practice these styles of therapy because TIST, SE™, and S/IRF are land-based, body-first, and parts work. These styles of therapy are undoing a settler colonial way of treating mental health as separate from your body. Native Youth Sexual Health Network teaches: "the land speaks through our bodies." Treating trauma with somatic parts work gently invites you to notice what your body might be saying to you.

I treat trauma as survival energy in your body. Surviving trauma is made possible by parts. Trauma-related parts belong to states in your autonomic nervous system.

Feeling like you are not really here, connected, or alive, wanting to die, being unable to go outside, having a hard time in relationships, dealing with addictions, disordered eating, self-harm, or shame are all symptoms of trauma and communication from parts. Healing is possible. I will teach you skills for self-compassion and soothing that you can use every day and every night. You can feel safer in your body, more stability, less pain, more compassionate self-respect, more capable, and more alive.

Healing is not linear and it is not something to be completed. Healing is a process of restoring your connection to yourself, the land, community, and ancestors (Diné).

SE™ facilitates the completion of self-protective motor responses and the release of survival energy that is stuck in your body.

Elder Margaret Lavalleé, Anishinaabe from Sagkeeng Nation, has shared a teaching that there are "Seven Natural Healing Ways":

"1. talking

2. laughing

3. crying

4. yawning

5. shaking

6. yelling

7. sweating"

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These ways of healing are what facilitating the completion of self-protective motor responses commonly looks like in SE™.

TIST describes trauma-related parts as belonging to animal survival defense systems. Like other mammals, when human people are threatened, we try to fight, we flee, we freeze and try to be invisible, we submit in humiliation, or we cry for help. Everything your trauma-related parts do is for protection.

In his story blog called "Star Stories, part 8: Our Clans Among the Stars, chapter 1", Zhaawano Giizhik, Baawitigowinini Anishinaabeg, has shared a teaching that: "It was believed that animals disclose certain norms and principles that we, as humans, need for living long and healthy lives."

S/IRF helps you grow relationships with your parts and learn to communicate with your parts so you can become the caregiver you always needed.

Resourcing is an important skill used in SE™. Resourcing is the practice of intentionally focusing on something that gives you a sense of safety and choice, and noticing what it's like for you in your body when you feel okay. Resourcing helps shift your nervous system away from a threat response and toward feeling more present and connected. I practice resourcing by watching eagles, bears, and killer whales here: explore.org free 24/7 access to camera of bald eagle nest.

Across Turtle Island, psychiatry, psychology, and social work are used as a weapon against Black people, Indigenous people, and trans people. Because I practice TIST, SE™, and S/IRF, my practice is not pathologizing, it is not criminalizing, and it is for healing your body, mind, emotion, and spirit.

The word "Indigenous" includes Métis people who do not get NIHB and Black people who have been custodians of ancestral legacies since time immemorial.

I attend trainings on intergenerational trauma to work on my tools for helping people remember who they are and break inherited cycles of suffering. My practice is dissociation-informed and plural-competent.

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