Developmental Trauma Training Institute

12/18/2025

If you’ve ever had a client settle simply because you took a deeper breath…or watched a room shift when your shoulders softened… you’ve already experienced a simple truth: Your embodied presence impacts others more than any technique you use.
Explore The Missing Link - How Practitioner Embodiment Transforms Client Outcomes: https://openviewyoga.home.blog/2025/12/18/the-missing-link-how-practitioner-embodiment-transforms-client-outcomes/

12/17/2025

🧠 Emotions aren’t the problem.

✨️ Avoiding them is ✨️

Attachment research consistently shows that emotional health isn’t built by stopping feelings from happening, but by learning that emotions can arise, be felt, expressed, and then naturally settle.

Children in secure attachment relationships aren’t protected from big feelings.
They’re supported in moving through them.

That same principle holds true in therapy.

When clients learn: • “I can feel this.”
• “I don’t have to get rid of it.”
• “My body knows how to return to baseline.”

…nervous system flexibility grows.

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👇👇Take a look below at the ✅ DO's and 🚫 DON’TS around how this may show up in the therapy room 👇👇

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Attachment-informed work invites a different question:

> “Can we stay present long enough for the emotion to do what it already knows how to do?”

❤️ This is where healing lives—not in preventing activation, but in learning that we can survive it and return home to ourselves afterward.

12/16/2025

Just wrapped up Today’s facebook Live: how awareness builds resilience.

We talked about a simple truth: when life feels overwhelming, it’s easy to think the problem is our thoughts—but often what makes it feel like “too much” is what’s happening in the body. Tightness in the chest, a racing heart, shallow breath, heaviness, restlessness. Those sensations aren’t something to fight or fix in the moment. They’re signals. Information.

We also explored why awareness matters so much. Awareness is the doorway skill that gives us options. And it isn’t only something to practice when we’re already stressed—when we build familiarity with what steadiness feels like in calmer moments, it becomes easier to find that “inner tube” of support when the waves rise. That’s one of the ways resilience grows: through repetition, body-based learning, and choice.

If you missed it, watch the replay and take what you need at your own pace.

▶️ Watch today’s video (replay)

🎧 Check out Steve’s talk on collective stress, Register and the viddo soll be sent to You: https://www.eventzilla.net/e/in-challenging-times-understanding-collective-stress-talk15-hour-talk-2138677744

🌿 Join the 90 Days of Presence and practice with us each day via facebook live : https://www.facebook.com/share/1A7PcPoc8y/?mibextid=wwXIfr

📖 Read Keri’s blog for today’s reflection on embodiment, awareness, and resilience: https://openviewyoga.home.blog/2025/11/27/finding-the-inner-tube-before-the-storm/

If you’d like to share: Where does your body first signal “too much”? (chest, shoulders, stomach, jaw, breath, restlessness, numbness).

12/16/2025

Join Keri This morning Live @ 8am PT to talk about Finding the Inner Tube during the storm - and resilience: https://www.facebook.com/share/1DFpHvUZgp/?mibextid=wwXIfr

12/15/2025

A good overview of Brainspotting.

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/brainspotting-therapy-and-how-it-works?fbclid=IwQ0xDSwOtR_lleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEeTDotueukVi5v5sN_Wqqf5zmXGLqQM230MVHysLI9drkWPeyd-_-el8_iibc_aem_LZ4H4bCX3Lbif81nUOJjlQ

A registered psychotherapist explains how this alternative therapy can help unlock pent-up feelings, memories and tension that may be stuck in your brain and body.

12/15/2025

Shame lives in a narrow strip of land.

Not fully living. Not fully dying.

A place many of our clients know intimately.

From a clinical lens, shame isn’t just a feeling—it’s a state. One shaped by early relational ruptures, chronic misattunement, and the repeated experience of being “too much” or “not enough.” Over time, the nervous system learns that visibility equals danger.

In this in-between land, clients may:

📍Move through life on autopilot

📍Stay functional but disconnected

📍Avoid risk, joy, and intimacy

📍Carry a quiet belief of unworthiness

They aren’t choosing stagnation.
They’re surviving.

Shame constricts aliveness without fully extinguishing it. It keeps people just safe enough to endure—but not free enough to thrive.

As clinicians, our work is not to pull clients out of this land, but to walk alongside them:

❤️ Naming shame without amplifying it

❤️ Tracking how it lives in the body

❤️ Offering relational safety where none existed before

❤️ Moving at the pace the nervous system allows

When shame is met with ✨️ attuned presence ✨️ rather than urgency or fixing, something shifts.

The land between living and dying becomes a threshold—not a trap.

And little by little, life begins to return.

👉 Consider joining us in January for our next Monthly Conversation - Shame: The Land between Living and Dying Webinar

12/13/2025

Collective stress doesn’t stay “out there.”

It lands in bodies.

When stress is prolonged and shared—social uncertainty, global events, community strain—nervous systems adapt. Muscles hold. Breath shortens. Choice narrows. Many clinicians and clients don’t experience this as “stress” at all, but as fatigue, irritability, numbness, or a sense of being disconnected from their bodies.

Trauma-Sensitive Yoga offers a way to meet this moment.

Rather than asking bodies to perform or push, Trauma-Sensitive Yoga focuses on:
• choice instead of compliance
• noticing instead of fixing
• restoring a sense of agency
• gently reconnecting with bodily signals that may have gone quiet over time

In times of collective stress, this matters.
Because healing isn’t simply a cognitive exercise—it’s relational and physiological.

Trauma-Sensitive Yoga isn’t about flexibility or calm.

It’s about helping the body remember it has options.

And in a stressed world, that’s powerful.

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👉 If this sounds like something your body needs, consider joining us for our upcoming free Trauma-Sensitive Yoga Class with
Keri Sawyer, hosted by Yoga for All.

This class offers a gentle, mat-based practice designed to help you reconnect with your body, explore movement at your own pace, and cultivate presence through choice and awareness.

✨ What to expect:

🍃A welcoming introduction to set a safe and supportive space

🍃Gentle, optional movements suitable for all bodies

🍃Emphasis on listening to your sensations and moving in ways that feel right for you

🍃This class is perfect for anyone seeking to connect more with their body, whether you’re new to yoga or experienced.

📅 Jan 11th, 11am CT
📍 Location: Virtual
https://app.glofox.com/portal/ #/branch/64f900caee0dd433c30bb506/courses/693b77ff0245182e6d060b9a/schedule/1765504972221/book

📆 Reserve your spot today and experience trauma-sensitive yoga that honors your body and your presence.

12/12/2025

We hope to see you soon for this important conversation - In Challenging Times: Understanding Collective Stress

Starting at 4pm PST/7PM EST, we'll spend 90 mins digging in to what most of us are feeling this time of year and in the current state of our communities.

👉 Can't make it tonight??? Don't worry - you can register now (and until Jan 12th) to get the recording!!!

12/11/2025

🧠 Therapists, we see you 👀

You’ve been holding everyone’s stress…
clients, partners, pets, the barista who told you their whole life story at 7:12am…
and now collective stress is basically your unwanted extra roommate.

⚠️ So let’s talk about it ⚠️
Join us Friday for our monthly conversation In Challenging Times: Understanding Collective Stress (yes, yours too 😬).

Why you should come 👇

✨ Reason #1: Because you deserve an hour and a half where you get to breathe, lean into your body, and just be. We’ll hold the container. Promise.

✨ Reason #2: You’ll walk away with actually-useful, body-based strategies (no mystic unicorn breathing required).

✨ Reason #3: It’s either this or doom-scrolling. We vote this. 😉

Come hang out, learn a little, laugh a little, and remember you’re not doing this work alone.

Tomorrow afternoon/evening - bring your whole nervous system—we accept it as is!! ❤️