Having your world shaken up and become so unsafe at a very early age completely changes your whole world view, that what you mostly do in this lifetime is to try to find safety and a way to feel safe on this earth. Registered Somatic Movement therapist and educator Donnalea Goelz was molested twice, at the age of three and then at the age of five, which made her gravitate toward studying things that will help the issue of trauma. She brings together a lifetime of training in various healing modalities and therapies and is currently involved in research projects about somatic healing which is healing through movement and understanding the brain.
Donnalea marries her love of understanding the scientific aspects through research with experiential somatic work. As a dancer, movement has always been a significant part of her life and her healing. Donnalea says movement is how she came to safety. She would go out and dance her prayers. When the world became really horrible when I was very young, she could go out and dance and would literally tell her mother she was going out and dancing for God.
Listen to the podcast here:
Healing Trauma Through Somatic Healing with Donnalea Goelz
The following interview is from the While We Were Silent project. This interview is with Donnalea Goelz. Donnalea is a teacher of mine in the Continuum Movement and she has become a friend. She is a beautiful being and I love everything about her and everything she stands for and everything she does. She is a wealth of knowledge and information. She has been involved in somatic healing work for much of her adult life and she has been a teacher in the Barbra Brennan School as well as the Continuum Movement. She’s heavily involved in research, doing research projects about healing trauma through somatic work and understanding the brain. She has got a wealth of information to share with us and a beautiful story.
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Our guest is Donnalea Goelz. Donnalea is a teacher of mine. She’s a teacher in the Continuum Movement, which is an incredible healing modality but it’s movement, it’s breath, it’s sound, it’s all of these wonderful things that I’m sure Donnalea can tell us a little bit about. Donnalea Goelz, PhD, RSMT, RSME. Donnalea is Executive Director of Continuum Movement founded by Emilie Conrad Da’oud and she is also Chair of the ECD Initiative for Research for the Somatic Movement Arts.
Donnalea is the Founder and Owner of Cobalt Moon Center, a center for integrative health in Neptune Beach, Florida. She’s a Registered Somatic Movement Therapist and a Registered Somatic Movement Educator, an authorized Continuum Movement teacher, and a Tai Chi Instructor. Donnalea is a graduate of the Barbara Brennan School of Healing where she served as Senior Faculty, as Dean of the third-year class in the US and in Europe.
She is also a certified Brennan Integration Practitioner, a graduate degree at BBSH that incorporates psychology and the human energy field. Donnalea is on the faculty of Esalen Institute, Hollyhock Educational Institute and she teaches workshops nationally and internationally in Continuum, Tai Chi and the healing arts. Donnalea also has a PhD in Somatic Clinical Psychology. Welcome, Donnalea.
Thank you.
Can you tell us a little about your story and how you got into all this incredible stuff that you’re doing that has led you to bring so much help and healing to other people?
I want to acknowledge how important this project sounds to me and it’s so important that you are doing what you are doing. It’s so important. How did I get into what I’m doing? There’s no one single answer. I had a very interesting childhood and I traveled a lot. I had a traumatic experience when I was younger. I was molested twice. When you are molested at age three and five, that changes your whole world view from then on.
There’s a difference. There’s something that has occurred that makes it different. If I could narrow it down, it may be that I have done what I’ve been doing in this lifetime in a way to try to find safety, trying to find a way that it felt safe on this Earth because having my world so shaken up and become so unsafe at a very early age.
I happen to be very fortunate. I have two wonderful friends, Dr. Steven Forges, who created the polyvagal theory and Dr. Sue Carter, his wife, who has done a lot of work on oxytocin and neurotransmitters, especially the oxytocin basil crescent connection. All of this is being brought together and all my curiosity has been in a sense of wanting to make my world safe. Steve and Sue are working on trauma. I tend to gravitate and get a desire to study thing that will help the issue of trauma in this world, especially in this time.
Can you share with us a little about what you do that helps people? How do you help people?
I have several things. I never make my life simple. There are several projects and several things that I am doing now. I have studied movement. Movement is how I came to safety first. I would go out and dance my prayers. When the world became horrible when I was very young, I could go out and dance. I would literally tell my mother and others I was going out and dancing for God.
They thought it was strange but I came from a strange family and they were open to that. It’s not strange because there are a lot of religions that use dance in their ritual with the idea of divinity and oneness coming in, be it Sukism or be it African dancing. It’s all there. With that early beginning and finding my safety through movement, I studied movement my whole life.
The two methods that I found helped me the most, although I did do some Sukism and Zikr and I liked them, but the thing that I concentrated on were Tai Chi and Continuum Movement. Those spoke to my heart and soul and did something for my body that helped me. I have been studying Tai Chi and teaching it for 30 years. It’s the same for Continuum Movement. They both help each other.
Teaching Tai Chi and teaching Continuum, what I see happens after we finish a class, people are so relaxed. They are so in their body and so present. I am very involved research. I am working with the University of North Florida on a research project that Steve and Sue are involved in too. We are working on this project of creating this whole organization that is involved in researching trauma. Sue is very much into the birth initiative and that’s where a lot of us are traumatized right from the very beginning.
Teaching movement and dance is one part and researching. My big question is, “How does movement heal? What is going on in the body?” Tai Chi is different from Continuum, which is different from yoga, which is different than Pilates but all of them have a certain level of helping and healing. I want to understand more of what’s going on.
When we have a sense of safety, only then can we really optimize our way of being and wholeness in life. Share on XI appreciate the work that you are doing. Part of this series is about helping us understand what is happening in the silence because number one, why we remain silent. Many people after sexual assault or violation of some kind will remain silent for years and years and sometimes forever. If we do speak, there is a huge struggle about whether or not to speak. There is so much turmoil. With what’s been going on in our world lately, so many women coming forward to speak up for the first time after years and years.
I’ve been hearing so many people questioning the credibility of people coming forward because why would they wait so long. That’s the question I want to answer here and I want people to understand what happens during the silence. Can you share from your experience, from your research and from your work with clients, why do you believe women and men will remain silent after there’s been a violation or struggle to come forward?
I will first go personal then global. I was three-and-a-half or four years old and then five years old. My mother had told me not to trust strangers, but what did I do? It’s more elaborate than that. The first person tricked me and got my trust and proceeded to start to molest me and it was horrible. I remember even during the time that I felt like I was going to get into so much trouble with my mother and dad. I knew I was a bad girl right then and there.
That was the shame, the feeling I had disobeyed. I got out of there eventually but never told my parents because I was afraid. There was a lot of fear that if I told them, I was going to get more much trouble. I was horrified and I felt stupid. I remember feeling all the negativity at a very young age. I knew I had disobeyed. Then it happened again a year and a half by a family friend.
Given the thing before that it happened, this person threatened me. I believe the threats that if I told, I was going to get into more trouble, so it was all that put together lots of shame. Shame is a major reason people don’t come forward and a feeling that they had been the person that somehow had made the mistake and taking self-responsibility that was not that little girl’s responsibility fault. Fear and shame are the biggest reasons people don’t come forward.
You asked why it’s happening now. A lot of people should investigate the Polyvagal Theory. When we have a sense of safety, only then can we optimize our way of being and our wholeness in life. Women are getting a sense of safety from other women because enough have come forward and said, “Me too,” so they feel like they can be safe, “Maybe I wasn’t so stupid. Maybe it wasn’t even my problem. I was a little girl.” All of those types of things that are happening.
Can you help us to understand from your perspective what happens during the times of secrecy? There are a lot of ways it manifests in life. My sense and my experience is that when we carry it inside and then it has the ripple effect in life in ways that we don’t understand at the time that we’re going through it, it brings on more shame. It brings on the feeling of being the bad girl. It has that ripple effect on the outer and on the inner. Can you help us understand what’s going on during that time?
I can point to some scientific data. There was a wonderful research project. It’s quite known for those of us in the trauma field. It’s called ACE, Adverse Childhood Effects. They look into things such as what does abuse do and how does it all affect. Do look it up because it increases cancer, it shortens your life, it creates a lot of auto-immune diseases. That was the root cause, the seed. We’re not talking 30 people. They had 569,000 people participate because it was at a hospital in Southern California and they did longitudinal studies.
It’s an amazing data that shows that there is a strong effect from having such things happen. Even when I talk about this, I can feel in my own system the sadness and how we’ve got to awaken to the fact that we have got to do something about this. It’s so much on the personal level. Think of how much money would be saved in taxes. Think of the difference that a world that deals with this directly. What could happen?
What’s going on in the inside and how it ripples out into the life of a person? To give us a little more understanding of what a person may be going through battling inside, if it’s someone who is battling a situation inside, memories that are being held in secret in life or a lot of trauma that have been held, how is this rippling out into their life? How can we understand it better? How do we come to grips with it? How do we recognize it? Give us a hope of what might shift if we do break through the silence and into the healing.
I gave the ACE example, that’s a science data. We know we’d be healthier, happier, less depression, all of those things. On a personal level I could share. This little girl was a brave little girl. I am very thankful for her. She thought she had done wrong, so she went forward and tried to be as strong as she could be about it. I had this saying and don’t know when I developed it, but I know I said it to myself, “He hurt me then, he can’t hurt me now.” That’s what I used to say.
That was probably in my teenage years. It wasn’t until I went to the Barbara Brennon School, you do a lot of personal work and you deal on your past. I had compartmentalized it. It was not bothering me. Then I was in this group process piece and all of a sudden, some things started happening and breaking loose, all of the others who had been abused, and all of a sudden, it crashed down on me. I started crying. I’m like, “It is hurting me now.” I came to the conclusion that it is coloring me now. It colored my perception of the world.
To this day, I was always watching out for that other person, for the stranger that might do the thing to me. I have great relationships with men. I have been happily married for 36 years. I realized I didn’t trust men right from the start. With the men, I always had to see that I was safe. I didn’t feel that with women and that’s not fair or right. I had been abused by a strange man, two of them.
I realized that it made my hyper vigilant. I had a higher level of anxiety around certain situations that was not normal or would not have been there if I had not have had the past I had. Working with Barbara Brennon, when I started dealing with it, it helped so much. I realized, “He did hurt me then.” I recognized, “I am a bit wounded from it all.” Now that I know that I am wounded, when you know something you can deal with it. If you keep submerging it, you don’t deal with it.
There is sexuality and sensuality; they are not always connected. Share on XWhat is the greatest opportunity that women can realize when we do finally break through the silence, even the silence and the shutting down and hiding in ourselves and begin that healing journey?
One of the reasons I was attracted to the Continuum Movement is that our society is strange with sexuality. I feel for men today. All of this is coming up, so what is the new way to be together in a healthy way because one does have one sexuality? One’s sexuality should be enjoyed, loved and appreciated. One of the troubles we have gotten into, in the Western culture especially, is that we have mixed up two things that are connected but separate.
There is sexuality but there’s sensuality too. They can be connected when one wants them to be connected. Our enjoyment of food, all of those has a certain sensuality. What I love about Continuum Movement is that we start to honor our bodies. When you start to honor your body, what are you going to be honoring? One’s own sensuality.
The sensuality that’s inside is our birthright. It’s what gives us so much pleasure and brings us present in the moment and feeling one’s heartbeat, enjoying the music of the birds or the ocean. How do we develop a discernment between sexuality and sensuality? It’s a very big task. I see a very handsome man go by and it’s right to say, “He’s good looking.” I don’t want men to stop thinking, “She’s beautiful.” We should still be able to do that but know our boundaries and know where it’s right and wrong. We have not had that discussion and it’s time and we are starting to have it.
This is one of my hope with this series by bringing to light or to the surface what’s going on in the inside, we can come to a greater understanding of each other and how our inner workings are human beings. Though you may have seen some of the ripple effects of my earlier abuse playing out in my life before I started this healing process, there is a human being in here that is working to figure out this life and to learn how to be and underneath and within all of this.
If we look, we can see their light. We can see their beauty. We can see their intelligence, their inner wisdom, that spark. We can see that each and every one of us is worthy of love, honor, and respect. When we can understand each other and see each other’s divinity within our humanity and come to that appreciation of each other, at least if we don’t seek to understand and to find what’s in there that is beautiful, amazing, and wise, or seeking whatever the case may be that is light that may be is hurting.
We can come into this greater understanding and appreciation for each other. We can appreciate each other as human beings and as divinity and all we truly are and come to explore relationships in that way rather than what’s so much of our culture has imprinted on to the psyche, which we see each other as sex objects and to act in that way.
If we see someone as a human being and you start to understand them or you can at least say, “There’s something in there that I want to understand in this person,” the less likely you want to violate that person or overstep a boundary. It brings things to a better, honoring and respectful relationship where we don’t want to cause harm, even unconsciously cause harm.
I have worked with many clients and healing for many years. There needs to be greater diversity brought into this subject. This is not just a male-female thing. I have had a lot of clients where they’ve been violated male on male, female on female. There are all kinds of different things that’s present. It’s coming to terms with one’s sexuality and boundaries and one’s sensuality. I love your thing that recognizing the light, the divinity in each other.
Thank you for pointing out that it’s not just always male and female. It goes every way.
Here’s another thing that is known scientifically too. This is a thing that I can’t figure out. People who abuse usually have been abused themselves. The stats on that is very high. What is that about? It is more than mental health. It’s body, mind and soul. We have got toward what is healthy. We haven’t worked on there enough. What if we spend our money on mental health instead on guns or weapons? What if we became such a healthy society?
You said a little bit about why we are having the shift in the collective with people feeling safe to come forward. Do you have insights or ideals of what the future holds as we come to greater understanding, acceptance, and understanding as we move forward?
I have a lot of hopes but I don’t know. I have hopes and prayers. I don’t know what’s going to happen. There is a saying that one of my teacher said, “We need to shadow work.” She said she loved to bring her shadow and have it set right beside her. She knew what was going on with it and keep an eye on it. When it’s down and hidden, nothing good happens. She loved to keep an eye on it. I would say, especially in the Western world, we are bringing the shadow into the Western light and we have a choice to heal with it.
Overriding, putting things, making them taboo because they’re not right is not it’s n not an ultimate solution. It’s by investigating one’s sensuality. Here’s what I ponder and hypothesis. If we came to terms with our own sensuality, if we learn to love with our self, fall madly in love with ourselves, feel our own wholeness, then I have a feeling that the world would be a different place because of that.
It’s touching, heartwarming and exquisite.
You are studying Continuum. People like you give me inspiration too. I do believe there is a possibility. I am a grandmother also, which is one of my most important roles I’ve ever had in this lifetime. You give me hope for my grandchildren.
You give me hope for the world. I so appreciate the roles that you are playing in our world with the leadership in the Continuum Movement, the leadership and the research you’re doing, and the new endeavors that you are working on with Steve and Sue and the work you are doing with trauma. I am going to stay right on your heels and then some. What would you tell someone who is either still struggling in silence or, at any point on their healing path with that, needing that hope or boost of courage to move forward?
I believe in therapy. Find yourself a good therapist. Here’s an interesting thing I learned in grad school when I was studying to be a therapist, a clinical phycologist. They showed us this report that best friends, clergy, therapist, there was one other category, but all four groups had the same rating, which was surprising to me. I was like, “We’ve studied that it had this rating of reducing anxiety and making a person feel better.”
Go to your clergy or church and put yourself into that. Get a best friend or family member and talk about things. Even if it’s the same rating, going into a deep examination of one’s process is very important and what one sees in the world. I know it helped me, which what was implemented at the Barbara Brennon School. It gets rough. I don’t try to set it out by myself. I go to a therapist, mentors, or friends.
You’ve got a variety of training. You’ve got the clinical phycologist, the Talk Therapy, you’ve got the body, the Somatic Therapy and the Continuum Movement. You have the energy healing through the Barbara Brennon School. That’s quite an incredible mix that covers the body, the energy and the mind in a nice package.
I love going to school and I have studied a lot of cognitive psychology. When I went to get my PhD, I did seek out a somatic psychology school. I have always felt that if you don’t bring the body in, every day I am faced with, “I know I should not do this but I am going to do it anyway.” There’s, “I know I don’t need the strawberry shortcake,” but I will have it anyway. You can’t talk yourself out of something. You’ve got to have the whole-body response.
In my experience in working with myself and others, there is so much that gets locked into the consciousness of the body. Having movement, breath, sound, trauma release work all together and bringing that in together with the conscious understanding of the conscious mind. You can’t focus on one and think that’s going to do it.
If we really come to terms with our sensuality and feel our own wholeness, then the world would be a different place. Share on XYou can feel great by doing some different things like taking a Continuum class and you may release a couple of things. Unless you look at what has gone, you bring the consciousness’ into what has occurred that is the only way that change is going to occur. We call it spiritual bypass. You can take spiritual bypasses but do you change and can you feel one with the universe then you are in hell the next minute? How can you navigate to where it is a wholeness you are coming toward?
Where can our audience find more about you and the resources you offer?
The main one would be ContinuumMovement.com. When Emilie, the Founder and Creator died, she gave me the organization to run. We have teachers worldwide that are quite wonderful. I also teach, which is my integrative center where you find more about Tai Chi. As my work continues with Steve and Sue, we are thinking of starting a center to help people with trauma, just to help people.
We have talked about a healing center where people can just heal. I would not want to call it a trauma center. People have to keep doing a mindful process. Seek out different things. I also like to be very personal. On my website on Continuum Movement, it has my address so contact me personally.
I am so glad that I contacted you. I appreciate getting to know you and spending time with you and learning so much from you and all of the wisdom and experiences that. I thank you for being the beautiful creative you. I honor you. Thank you for being here and sharing your gifts and wisdom.
Thank you for the work you are doing.
About Donnalea Goelz
Donnalea Van Vleet Goelz, PhD, RSMT, RSME, is executive director of Continuum Movement®, founded by Emilie Conrad- Da’oud and also chair of the ECD Initiative for research in the somatic movement arts.
She is the founder and owner of Cobalt Moon Center, a center for integrative health in Neptune Beach, Florida, and is a Registered Somatic Movement Therapist (2002) and Registered Somatic Movement Educator (2002), an authorized Continuum Movement teacher (1998), and a T’ai Chi Instructor (1990).
She is a graduate of the Barbara Brennan School of Healing where she served as senior faculty, as Dean of the third year class in the US and Europe. She is also a certified Brennan Integration Practitioner, a graduate degree at BBSH that incorporates psychology and the human energy field.
She is on the faculty of Esalen Institute, Hollyhock Educational Institute and teaches workshops nationally and internationally in Continuum, Tai Chi, and healing arts. She has a PhD in Somatic Clinical Psychology.
Important Links:
- Donnalea Goelz
- Continuum Movement
- Barbra Brennan School
- Somatic Movement Arts
- Cobalt Moon Center
- Brennan Integration Practitioner
