Free yourself from the shackles of trauma that stems from abuse
With David Bedrick
The 6 week guided course to work through the story of your abuse and the symptoms of trauma that live within you.
The first class is on Thursday, April 25.
Free yourself from the shackles of trauma that stems from abuse
With David Bedrick
The 6 week guided course to work through the story of your abuse and the symptoms of trauma that live within you.
The first class is on Thursday, April 25.
Allow me to show you the way through the terrors, the overwhelm, the frozenness, the dissociation the deep feelings surrounding abuse…
Going into deep uncharted territory requires a guide.
I humbly ask that you allow me to guide you, through your body’s deep intelligence, into the experience of your own story… so that you may arrive in the life waiting for you.
Your abuse story is already running your life.
As it tries to heal your trauma, it is recreating the same painful patterns in your relationships, career, family dynamics, and relationship with yourself.
You CAN go into this pain alone trying to heal it, but many of the practices out there, especially if you navigate them without a witness guiding you, will simply retraumatize you, leaving you with even more shame and suffering.
I will show you how to CONSCIOUSLY work with your abuse story without retraumatizing yourself – so you can break these patterns and connect with the beautiful, intelligent, authentically YOU parts of yourself that have been suppressed by trauma.
Understanding your story with this compassionate, unshaming lens will change the way you relate to yourself, your perpetrators, and the world.
This is the only program I know of that is designed specifically to walk you through your own story and give you the skills to continue to bring healing to your trauma after the 6 weeks are over.
For anyone who is ready to face & work through the most powerful events of their life.
Whether you’ve just begun to learn from your trauma, or you’ve been on this path for years
In Trauma & Abuse: The Unshaming Way, you’ll learn tools that you can use for the rest of your life to…
Grow the love and compassion you need to care for all parts of yourself, especially the parts you previously wanted to “heal,” “fix,” or “remove”
Develop the consciousness to safely work through your trauma without re-traumatizing yourself and making it worse in the process
Integrate the clarity & understanding to truly listen to yourself and your body, no matter what comes up
Work with the somatic experience embedded in your story & trauma
Transform your relationship with yourself and others, breaking patterns & freeing you from the entanglements created by earlier abuse
Deeply connect with the meaning and medicine that has been alchemized in these greatest of wounds - abuse and trauma
Abuse and trauma derail our life path and disunite us from our true selves along with our trust in our most fundamental truths.
When you change your relationship with abuse and trauma, you allow your pain and suffering to transmute into medicine that brings your most authentic self into the world.
Until you fundamentally change your relationship with the abuse you’ve experienced, it will continue to traumatize you.
Society teaches us that the psychological and physical symptoms we experience from abuse are wrong. We learn that we should be doing everything in our power to overcome, minimize, and ignore them.
This shame-based model of “healing” can magnify the harm of your abuse by cutting off parts of your soul that have valuable wisdom and intelligence to share. Worse, it can lead to retraumatization and unsustainable practices.
Most of us believe this to some extent, unless you’ve actively spent time unlearning this shame.
That’s why, despite the years of therapy, somatic experiencing, hypnosis, shadow work, and other healing modalities, you still find yourself…
Not knowing HOW to take sustainable healing steps to heal these deep wounds, even as they continue to weigh you down & wreak havoc on your life.
Harming yourself with the same voice / criticism that you experienced from the violence of your abuser – undermining your confidence and clarity.
Trying to “sit with” traumatic experiences in a way feels really painful, and never seems to transform into deeper healing, confidence, or compassion for yourself.
Unable to create a safe inner space to work on yourself.
Unclear about what your abuse and trauma have to do with the meaning and purpose of your life.
Unable to see the relationship between your abuse, trauma and the shame that inhibits your life force and flow – holding you back from deeper joy and purpose.
Distrustful of your most fundamental feelings, impulses, and inner wisdom.
When someone denies, dismisses, silences, or gaslights the violence you experienced, that functions as a shaming witness.
Almost always when that happens, you internalize these viewpoints of the shaming witnesses, and treat yourself as if something is wrong with you. When your body expresses symptoms of having been abused, emotionally or physically, you punish yourself.
“Why am I feeling this way? How come I let this happen? Maybe I’m making it up. Why am I so sensitive? I should stop being such a victim. People won’t like me if I complain too much.”
When that happens, your pain becomes trauma that can stay with you for years or decades.
By changing your relationship with abuse, you begin to find relief from this shaming internal voice + fortitude against retraumatization by others.
Abuse doesn’t always become trauma. Here’s the difference…
One of the greatest injuries of all abuse is the shame we are left with.
If you constantly think to yourself:
“Other people wouldn’t be responding to this abuse the way that I do.”
“I know I didn’t deserve it, but I should have done XYZ instead…”
“I’m just unsure of what I really need.”
“I don’t know how I truly feel.”
“Can’t I just get over it already? It wasn’t that big of a deal.”
“Why do I keep repeating the same patterns that have hurt me in the past? I want to change!”
“Am I going to be a bad partner/mother/friend forever?”
Then it’s likely that your abuse has become shame and trauma.
We all face abuse at some point within our lifetimes. Whether it’s from a parent, family member, romantic partner, peer, colleague, or an oppressive mainstream culture – it’s nearly impossible to go through life without it.
When this abuse is not dealt with, it becomes trauma that lives inside you. It’s not just a single event; it lives in perpetuity until somebody does something about it. That could be years or it could be generations. Eventually it feels like a part of your personality. Is this who I am, or is this my trauma?
A loving witness is a third party who sees the abuse and does whatever is in their power to protect you from it. The loving witness believes you, acknowledges your pain, supports your response, and doesn’t gaslight or blame you.
When this loving witness is present, you will still experience hurt around the abuse, which can be terrible. But you won’t experience the detrimental effects of shame that corrode your sense of self.
Few of us had a loving witness at the time of our abuse. Most people internalized a shaming witness, which says what happened to us is our fault, that we deserved it, and our responses are because something is wrong with us.
In Trauma & Abuse: The Unshaming Way, you’ll have the option to be paired with someone, so you can lovingly witness one another’s stories.
Someone to say:
I witness your pain and suffering exactly as it is right now.
There is nothing wrong with you.
Your body, your illness, your chronic pain, all have something meaningful to say about you and your story.
With your agonies and gifts, you are already a whole person.
Your feelings and responses to that story are intelligent, beautiful, valid.
You becoming YOU is the highest order healing. You are THE BEST WE HAVE.
By the end of our 6 weeks, you’ll have access to an internal loving witness – a non-judgemental inner voice that understands the full power of your beauty and intelligence.
Your internal loving witness will not only support you in processing past abuse, it will also keep you safe from future abuse. You will have a built-in protection system against people and systems that tries to demean, harm, or belittle you.
“The past is not dead. It’s not even the past.”
– William Faulkner
As long as the violence you’ve experienced is unwitnessed, it will stay alive inside you.
What You’ll Learn in Trauma & Abuse: The Unshaming Way
As you learn these skills, you’ll start on topics that are not the most deeply traumatic stories, to give you practice building these healing muscles without re-traumatizing yourself.
We are not here to feel what it’s like to be abused all over again. We will be creating conditions where you feel safe enough exploring your wounds that medicine can appear, not just re-living the same traumatic experiences you already had.
Here is what you can expect from the course:
Week 1 - Dissociation as a Healing Tool
Knowing how to work with dissociation is a powerful way to deepen your understanding of your own trauma story. It can be a powerful guide to connect with and understand your own capacity as a witness to yourself. Where does your mind desire to go? What wisdom can we uncover at that location?
Week 2 - Understanding the Role of the Witness & Integrating Your Protective Instinct
To understand your trauma, you must understand how you were witnessed during and after it, because this witnessing often becomes internalized. One of the most powerful things you can do in unshaming trauma & abuse is unleashing the protective instincts that live within you, that are often forced into hiding. Doing so makes it safer to go into trauma.
This week, you’ll locate the witness inside & you’ll tap into the protective instinct living within your body, to create the requisite safety in order to make space for new growth.
Week 3 - Entering the Somatic Story: Radical Soma
Discover the fundamentals of unshaming your somatic experience of trauma & abuse. Even if you’ve studied this before, looking at it through an unshaming perspective will help you understand your body’s responses in new ways. If you’ve never studied the soma (body) as it relates to trauma, this is a great place to start.
We go way beyond conventional somatic experience, to include your body’s movement and voice - that’s why we call it RADICAL SOMA.
You’ll gain a deep understanding of your body’s feeling experiences, movement, impulses, and voice. The body has energies within it that naturally want to be shaken up and moved, and often these impulses become caught up in trauma and unable to shift. Sound and movement are important parts of allowing that somatic experience; in this class, I’ll teach you how to access your feelings, voice, and movement as avenues to explore your trauma story.
Week 4 - The Profound Healing Power of Soma Storytelling
Radical soma storytelling incorporates all aspects of the body into your healing work. This means going into your trauma stories using the channels of your body, understanding your responses, and holding all parts of yourself with love. Being able to go into your own story is a key component of unshaming your abuse and trauma. This class will give you plenty of experience in doing that, with support, so you don’t get lost or freaked out when you become triggered or go into your trauma stories.
Week 5 - Integrating this Work into Your Relationships
Discover how abuse has impacted the way you relate to yourself and others. This week, you’ll learn to address the internalization of abuse in the form of inner criticism and oppression. You’ll learn how to internalize a positive parental figure that knows how to be present & hold you through emotion.
You’ll explore your triggers and projections, allowing you more clarity with regard to how your earlier traumas influence your current relationships. You’ll gain new understanding of how perpetrators can appear in your life, and reappear as similar figures or situations throughout the years (this is how toxic patterns are created).
Week 6 - Finding the Meaning & Medicine within Your Wounds
Potent medicine has been cooking within your trauma for years. In this class, you’ll explore what has been cooking within your pain and suffering. What deep feelings, inner experiences, and fears are hiding within? What wisdom and intelligence is there to glean? What patterns are waiting to heal? What path of heart emerges out of your story.
BONUSES
Bonus #1: Understanding Inner Criticism (3 hr training):
Inner criticism blocks the flow of life. In this pre-recorded training, you’ll learn how to unshame the critical voices that live inside you. You’ll leave with a new awareness of how you treat yourself & insights from how you can free yourself from trauma.
Bonus #2: A healing evening with David (2 hr special event):
David will read aloud from the play The Gimmick by Dael Orlandersmith, a raw and semi-autobiographical story about being lifted out of abuse and trauma.
How We’ll Meet
Our training series begins on
Thursday, April 25, 2024.
For 6 weeks, we will meet every Thursday 4-6:45pm PT / 7-9:45pm ET.
Each session will be live on Zoom.
There will be at least 45 minutes per class where students can ask questions and get direction from David as they process through the theory and exercises. Whether you raise your hand or speak or you witness the other students share, you will find nuances within your own story through this live unshaming interaction.
Through this modeling, you will see what it looks like to hold a person in this way. You will be able to emulate what it looks like to listen to another person in this way, to unfold the soma in this radical way.
According to students, the most powerful part of the training is witnessing David model his approach with you on these calls.
If you cannot attend live, you will have lifetime access to the recorded trainings.
You’ll also be invited to join our private community where you can share experiences. You will have the option, if you desire, to be paired with another participant in the course to be loving witnesses for one another, so you can continue to practice this work outside sessions.
How to know if you’re ready for
You’re aware that earlier abuse and trauma impact your life, creating difficult feelings and patterns. You would like to learn new skills and sustainable approaches to working with your abuse and trauma as part of your story.
You suspect that earlier abuse and trauma have affected the way you feel, think, and relate to others and the world. You would like to take steps on this healing journey.
You’ve already tried different approaches on healing trauma: courses on healing, therapy, somatic work, shadow work, or any number of other techniques. But they haven’t helped you as much as you expected.
You want a healing journey that authentically addresses your past suffering (without bypassing) WHILE ALSO helping your find the next step on your future path.
You are hungry for radical self-acceptance, especially towards the most painful parts of yourself and your story.
This program is NOT for you if…
You are not interested in deeper investigation and learning about yourself; you just want the pain/difficulties in your life to go away.
You would rather focus solely on the person who perpetrated violence against you than on your own responses and internalization of that abuse.
You don’t believe there is meaning and intelligence in your body, your dreams, or your patterns. You simply think these are pathologies to diagnose and cure.
We are not just looking at your thoughts. We will also be examining the above as ways your soul is trying to communicate with you, especially through your body.
Your goal is to heal your trauma forever
The idea that you can do some work and suddenly your trauma disappears is inherently shaming. Within that belief, there is no room for you to understand every part of yourself.
This program will help you understand and process your abuse and trauma. BUT finding relief from trauma is an ongoing process.
These 6 weeks will give you life-changing tools to begin to heal your trauma – as well as prevent future trauma – and you will want to keep using them for months and years to come.
We will not be looking at “healing” or “fixing” your trauma, but through the alchemizing process you will discover new ways to relate to your traumas. For many of my clients, this has created some relief from pain (both psychological and physical) and given them a more compassionate way to view themselves.
Not sure if you’ve experienced abuse? Read on…
Whenever someone offers a dismissal of their experience, shame is present.
Things that people call “small” are often much bigger, even if they don’t “look bad enough” to be abuse. They’re attached to a whole string of experiences.
For some, their whole childhood may have been one of neglect, teasing, put downs, and one thousand cuts that other people say aren’t abusive.
Abuse can happen in many ways:
NEGLECT can be abusive: Someone might say, “My father wasn’t there for me, but he didn’t beat me or sexually violate me.” This is a minimizing statement. Not being or feeling seen can be a very potent injury.
COMPARISON can be abusive: “Nothing really happened. It’s not like what so-and-so experienced, so why am I so upset? What’s wrong with me?” Someone else’s more extreme experience of abuse does not magically cancel out everyone else’s. If you compare your abuse to another’s, shame is present.
Seeking PROOF can be abusive: Many people tell me they can’t remember. Witnesses told them it couldn’t have really happened or asked for evidence, so now they think, “I don’t trust myself or my experience because I can’t prove it.” Someone in this situation typically experiences great pain, debilitating self-doubt, outer rage, and/or furious inner criticism.
This disconnection from our own stories, which minimizes our experiences, is very common. We live in a world that is invested in so many people NOT speaking up about what happened to them.
Reconnecting to your experiences allows you to work through them.
Even if you don’t fully trust yourself or believe that you really experienced abuse, focusing on your own experiences has the power to heal shame and heavy emotions.
“Your work is miraculous... and it's what I've been waiting to meet all of my life. And it's changing not just my relationship to myself, but the way I love and serve. Countless lives will be changed as a result.
I'm working my way through the recordings... and I often have to pause the recording and cry (which gets awkward because I often listen while taking walks in places like giant malls).
“I feel nothing short of reborn. I know how to come home to myself everyday. I did not know that the first 35 years and 7 months of my life. Now I do.
“It’s very possible that you SAVED me.”
– Simone Seol
“Your way of teaching shame is so beautiful, so important and so bone-fucking-true. I feel so blessed to be able to learn and grow with you. This is so important and you're doing the soul work my man, as a true elder in my life and also for the collective.”
– Emily
“David, thank you for such a truly life-altering experience. Even two days later, I don't fully have words for the depth of what you offered us.
“I felt myself in the presence of an energy that I can only describe as divine. The preciousness of what moves through us, the beauty and poignancy of what can at first seem so disturbing... You held it so gracefully in class!!
“Being with you was a deep, deep reminder of the power of loving presence, the gift of coming into ever greater contact with what it means to be alive with these wild bodies and minds. Ahhhhhhhhhh!!!”
– Samantha
“Working with David absolutely blew my mind. David is compassionate, deeply skilled, and able to support massive shifts if you are ready and willing to make them.
“Our work together has given me more permission to be ME, to be human, to mess up. Emotionally, I feel a million pounds lighter.”
– Brooke Law
“David bears gifts that our world in suffering desperately needs. His way of staying curious and listening deeply to what's unfolding has shifted so much of the way I understand my own trauma and the collective trauma we are all being asked to face.
“His conversations with Spirit have provided me with profound insight, peace, understanding and clarity as I work to make peace with my own suffering.”
– Nilaya Sabnis
“Every once a decade or so, I come across a teacher so inspiring, healing so profound, insight so transformative that it instantly becomes a part of my own ‘canon.’”
– Steven
“Dear David, your session yesterday was so brilliant!!! I had the feeling that all your ancestors spoke through you adding to your own voice. I went so deep so fast into my own process thanks to your approach, as if a part of me I didn't know was knocking on the other side of the wall of shame. Thank you again, pure magic!”
– Xavier
“David Bedrick is a phenomenal psychologist and UnShaming activist, whose work has helped me save my life and now helps me build a life. This is a tremendous offering.”
– Farice
“Our teaching was a profound experience for me, and I am so much more aware of the many small ways I habitually shame myself each day. I’m getting better and better at catching it when it happens, and seeking the intelligence and beauty in what I previously criticized. I’m so grateful, thank you.”
– C.A.
“The brilliance and sensitivity of David Bedrick continues to melt and spark me somatically, emotionally, mentally...
“Honestly, what he has to say is so deeply true, and so often revolutionary in the face of our accepted armchair psychological axioms, that it can feel like a salve to the soul.”
– Kiran Freisen
PRICING
When you enroll, you’ll get…
6 Recorded Trainings with David: During these weekly trainings, you’ll delve into the most pressing aspects of alchemizing Trauma & Abuse that David has identified during his 20+ years of experience doing this work.
The Trauma & Abuse Playbook, a 60-page workbook to guide you through all the material and practices.
Q&A Recordings: Questions answered and witness alchemizing Trauma & Abuse in real time.
David’s Bestselling Workshop, Unshaming the Inner Critic.
Resources for Further Exploration: Throughout this course, David will share relevant teachings, articles, and books to help you dive deeper into this work.
Lifetime Access to the Recordings
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PAY IN FULL
1 Payment of $545
PAYMENT PLAN
2 monthly payments of $275 — $275 today + $275 in 30 days
The first class is on Thursday, April 25.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Alchemy is a psychological and spiritual process where you take material that you think doesn’t have value, and you use that as your primary element in transformation.
In the context of this course, we’re looking at the things that are “wrong” with you, the places where you are “unworthy,” things you want to get rid of. In particular we will be focusing on the “symptoms” of your trauma. You will look at those parts of yourself and pour the warmth of loving awareness onto it.
By doing that, those parts of yourself that you “don’t like” transform and become gold. They become the medicine you’ve been craving and the path forward you’ve been looking for.
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Abuse becomes trauma when the violence we experienced is not witnessed with respect, compassion, and a protective instinct. Shame is a key component here. Shame is created when individuals, and the culture at large, witness violence with denial, dismissal, gaslighting, disrespect, or disbelief. Unshaming is the medicine for this malaise.
The work of UNSHAMING and the work of ALCHEMIZING/TRANSFORMING ABUSE are entwined. You can think of alchemizing abuse as a more advanced level of unshaming. It means unshaming the darkest, most painful parts of ourselves.
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Yes.
This training program is much more than just learning theory. Everything you learn during Trauma & Abuse: The Unshaming Way is designed for you to carry it with you for the rest of your life. Once you learn how to be a loving witness to abuse, you will be able to call upon these tools to live with more joy and purpose long after this program is complete.
It is important to know that this is not a one-time solution. It is a life-long project that you will return to again and again.
The foundational skills of alchemizing and unshaming your abuse, which you will learn in this course, will usher in a new era where you connect more deeply to your soul, see your darkest moments with love and compassion, and have greater appreciation for yourself and your humanity.
While you will learn a lot about the psychology abuse and trauma, the real gold lies during the live calls. There will be time on every live call to raise your hand and talk with David about how this is coming up in your life, or to listen as your classmates share their experiences.
During that time, you will learn how to practically apply these practices to the violence and trauma you’ve experienced. Past students have said this was the most impactful part of the course.
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Trauma & Abuse: The Unshaming Way is for anybody who wants to change their relationship with abuse. In this course, you will specifically be looking at your own story. However, if you are a practitioner, these teachings and insights can be helpful to bring forward into your own practice.
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Abuse includes the obvious examples of being physically or sexually violated, or child abuse.
But we’re also looking at more subtle and insidious violence, such as…
Being criticized
Being neglected
Being unseen or unheard, made invisible
• Being objectified.
• Being treated like a problem
• Being told “something is wrong with you.”
• Being punished in a way designed to hurt you.
• Being sent to a therapist for being “abnormal” in some ways
• Having others comment on your sense of style
• Being a member of society from a marginalized and oppressed group
You could grow up in a world where no one does anything that looks like “typical” violence towards you, and still internalize an incredible amount of violence.
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Many people, myself included, have experienced horrific levels of abuse in their lives. Things no person deserves to go through. This course is NOT designed to paint anyone’s abuse as something positive. What you went through is injurious, unjust, fucked up.
Let me ask you this: Does your abuse still impact you most days?
Are the symptoms of your abuse and trauma – like feelings of unworthiness, loneliness, or depression; or physical symptoms like chronic pain or illness – still present in your life months or years later?
If you answered yes, I’m guessing you’ve already tried a number of different approaches to “fix” or “heal” your trauma. You’ve spent years trying things.
I don’t want you to try one more thing.
I want you to radically reimagine your story to leave room for beauty to bloom even in the darkest moments of your life.
When you begin to transform your relationship to your abuse and trauma, you may also find relief from it. I’ve seen this happen for dozens of my clients for over 3 decades.
Within just 20 minutes of investigating the problem from an unshaming perspective, you will learn something that is fundamental to who you are. Even if the abuse happened years ago.
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If you got a lot out of UnShamed, you will continue to get a lot out of Trauma & Abuse: The Unshaming Way. The information and practices you learned in UnShamed are an excellent foundation to have for this course.
If you go deep enough into almost any of the issues that people brought up in UnShamed, you will find levels of violence within them. Abuse and trauma are often the glue holding “surface-level” problems together – and trying to address those changes without looking at that abuse will make it harder to make deep changes.
In UnShamed, we spent the last week or two focusing on trauma and abuse. In Trauma & Abuse: The Unshaming Way, we’re spending the full 6 weeks on those topics with totally new skills, understandings, and offerings to help you with this aspect of your life. The whole program will be focusing on how you can process your story.
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You can think of Trauma & Abuse: The Unshaming Way as a more advanced level of the unshaming work you began during the Shame Clinic.
There is a little overlap between these courses, but it is not the same. This course is specifically focused on abuse and trauma. So if you would like to take the Shame Clinic teachings deeper, and learn new practices to specifically help with those aspects of your story, this may be a good fit for you.
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During the weekly call, you will learn from David’s teachings live, and several people from the audience will have the opportunity to ask questions and process through the coursework. David does his best to speak with as many people as he can, though he cannot guarantee 1:1 time - it depends on how many people raise their hands.
Previous students have said that witnessing David model unshaming with students during the live calls is the most powerful part of the course. There is much to learn from one another.
You will have the opportunity to be paired with another student in the course to act as loving witnesses to one another. This is NOT required, but some students may find it helpful. It is an opportunity to practice the teachings with someone else in real time.
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I’ve been studying shame and trauma for over 30 years. In that time, I coined the term “unshame” to describe the process of not just changing your relationship with shame, but removing your shame entirely. This is the same framework I bring into my work with abuse.
I've written 4 books, taught psychology at a university for 8 years, and I’m on the faculty of the Process Work Institute. I founded the Institute for Shame-Based Studies, where I teach many courses on unshaming.
BUT, THE TRUTH IS: I have worked with 100's of people, maybe even a thousand over the last 30 years, and I religiously studied each session - what I did, what worked, what didn't work, where I missed the mark, where my own shit got in the way of my clear seeing.
These people taught me, beyond all the books I've read and education I received. They didn't teach me theory; they taught me FACTS - what really goes on in the body and psyche, how a story unfolds, how to access the deep medicine that lives inside people, what healing really looks like (and doesn't look like), the generational force and impact of long term trauma, and the regularly neglected impact perpetrated by those who gaslight and deny abuse and trauma.
And I have my own intimate relationship with abuse from growing up in a physically and verbally abusive household.
Here's what I am most proud of about my work and teaching: I am the real thing. I show up, whether confident or insecure, whether grieving or elated, whether tired or rested EXACTLY AS I AM.
In that way, I model for my students what it means to be radically comfortable with and compassionate towards themselves.
I am what I teach. I haven't only practiced an unshamed approach to trauma for over 30 years, I also LIVE it - it's my personal life, my relational life, my psychological life and my spiritual life.
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It’s possible, but I have no plans to do that at the moment.
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All calls will be recorded. You will have lifetime access to the recordings.
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There are a limited number of scholarships available. Please reach out to info@davidbedrick.com with information about your situation.
The first class is on Thursday, April 25.