E09 - Finding Hope Through TRE: Svava Brooks' Journey from Freeze to Freedom

In the Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE®) certification program there's an idea we keep coming back to: post-traumatic growth. The possibility that moving through trauma can redirect a life toward something bigger and more purposeful. It's easy to describe and much harder to point at. Dr. Justin Kennedy is what it looks like up close. He was 29, on a motorbike on a wet road in Cape Town, when a car came out of nowhere. His helmet smashed open and so did his head, and the traumatic ...

For years, Isabelle Claus Teixeira trained leaders on everything you could put on a slide — competencies, values, communication. But one question kept coming back that no framework could answer: what actually creates executive presence? The search took her out of her own head and into her body, and eventually to a floor in Singapore, tremoring, finally getting the answer she'd been chasing for a career. In this episode, Alex sits down with Isabelle to trace that arc: from a French law student...

In 2004, photojournalist Sae Kani was dropped by a US helicopter into Aceh, Indonesia, days after the tsunami erased entire villages. She walked, photographed, interviewed — and felt nothing. It was only back home, diagnosed with PTSD, that she began to understand what disaster leaves in the body. Two decades of humanitarian work later, she is still answering the question that experience planted: why is trauma care the piece disaster response keeps leaving out? In this episode, Alex sits down...

A betrayed business partner. Five years of anger and sleepless nights. A vow of forgiveness that the mind made but the body refused to keep. That was Hindra Gunawan's life before he found Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE®) — and a seven-minute phone call afterward showed him something had changed at a level no amount of willpower had reached. In this episode, Alex sits down with Hindra Gunawan — Indonesia's first TRE provider and now its certification trainer — to trace that arc: f...

Most people meet Neurogenic Tremoring through trauma work. This conversation asks a different question: what if kids learned it first — as a built-in resilience skill, before the world ever tells them something is wrong? In this episode, Alex sits down with three women working at the frontier of that idea — Vera Live, Špela Potočnik, and Katja Jarc — to trace how Neurogenic Tremoring is being reframed for youth: why nervous system regulation has been “kept behind the clinical wall”; how Vera ...