Healing from Trauma with Somatic Experiencing
In this episode...
Today on The Soul of Life I speak to Dr. Lesley Tate-Gould, a psychotherapist that uses Somatic Experiencing to help people overcome trauma.
Lesley runs the Lido Wellness Center, an outpatient trauma and counseling practice in Newport Beach, California.
We talk about her specialization in a form of body-focused trauma treatment called Somatic Experiencing, or SE, and her experience of benefitting from SE herself. SE was developed by Peter Levine, and like IFS therapy, deviates from the norms of traditional talk therapy and its typical cognitive and rational focus.
We talk about how it’s possible to attend to feeling and sensation in a deep way when you aren’t narrating and talking and explaining.
“Some of these physiologically stuck features [like Turrets] are in a feedback loop and it wants to find a way out.”
And we discuss our similar personal journeys, needing to be patient zero, using our own medicine.
"Sometimes people would rather stay away from emotions [but they] are, in their simplest form, there to be felt."
– Dr. Lesley Tate-Gould, Somatic Experiencing Therapist
Dr. Lesley Tate-Gould is a Co-founder and the Clinical Director of Lido Wellness Center (LWC). She was inspired to open LWC following her experience working in residential treatment facilities specializing in addiction and eating disorders for both adults and adolescents. Through her work, she gained a robust knowledge of the complexities of higher care and became aware of the gaps in mental health outpatient treatment, discovering a lack of robust clinical accessibility for addressing underlying mental conditions once substance disorders were addressed. Determined to fill those care gaps, she co-founded LWC as a primary mental health outpatient treatment facility for the local community and patients from treatment programs around the county.
Dr. Tate-Gould specializes in mood disturbances, trauma-related disorders, personality disorders, and secondary substance-use and eating disorders.
As a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP), Dr. Tate-Gould engages with patients in new and mindful ways, such as using gentle, intuitive methods to produce enhanced understandings of the physiological components related to trauma. Paired expertly with other treatment modalities, she supports healing by assisting patients in achieving a greater awareness of themselves in a supportive and compassionate environment dedicated, foremost, to improving their health and well-being.