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Email: clydemasontherapy@gmail.com
Phone: 437-747-6341
Why Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST), Somatic Experiencing® (SE™), and Somatic Inner Relationship Focusing (S/IRF)?
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. I am committed to working in a way that is culturally safe with immense authenticity.
I often collaborate with trans people who are heavily traumatized with severe dissociation. Sometimes, people experience plurality or have fragmented parts. Some parts want to die, have a hard time in relationships, deal with addictions, disordered eating, self-harm, or shame.
To help trans 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).
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.
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"
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.
S/IRF helps you grow relationships with your parts and learn to communicate with your parts to say, "I know you are here. I hear you."
Resourcing is an important technique 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 allows for 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 am open to everyone trans with intergenerational trauma or developmental trauma who wants to use TIST, SE™, and S/IRF to work on one small piece of trauma at a time, slow and steady, long-term, body-first.