Emily Young went for a walk during the early weeks of COVID. Normal day. Dog in tow. Nothing out of the ordinary.

She came home, laid on the couch, and could not get up.

Sciatic pain she had never experienced before appeared with no injury, no fall, no obvious cause. And when she sat with it, really sat with it, the answer that came up was uncomfortable in its clarity.

Her body had been asking her to slow down for years. She had not listened. And eventually, it stopped asking.

Emily is a licensed clinical social worker, a certified personal trainer, a somatic therapist, and now the co-author of Trauma Informed Bodywork, a new guide for personal trainers and bodyworkers that bridges the gap between trauma-informed therapy and movement-based care. She is also the co-creator of the Trauma Informed Personal Training certification, which has helped trainers across the country learn to work with clients in a way that does not cause further harm.

Her story is one of the most honest conversations I have had on this podcast about what it really means to be inside a body, and what happens when we stop listening to it.

Emily became a licensed social worker and a certified personal trainer around the same time, in 2017 and 2018. For a while she held them as separate identities. Therapy hat here. Training hat there. Very deliberate.

But something kept pulling at the seams.

Colleagues at her gym started referring clients her way when mental health concerns came up in sessions. People on the therapy side sought her out specifically because they knew she understood bodies. Athletes. People who wanted to be more active. People who had complicated relationships with movement and needed someone who could hold both things at once.

The two worlds were not as separate as the professions like to pretend.

What finally cracked it open was the pandemic. When the world slowed down, bodies stopped being able to stay quiet. Emily's included.

She said something in our conversation that I think applies to a lot of people in helping roles. She asked herself what harm was happening by ignoring all the things that went unsaid at the gym door. Whether that was actually possible. And the answer, once she really looked, was no.

Integration was not a rebrand. It was an ethical necessity.

When I asked Emily to define embodiment, she did not offer a clinical definition. She talked about connection.

Being grounded enough to be connected not just to your thoughts, but to your emotions, your nervous system, your intuition. Being able to notice what is arising in the body. And being able to advocate for it. To express it, release it, or at least name it.

That last part matters. A lot of people can tolerate noticing what is happening inside them. Far fewer know how to do anything with it.

She works with clients at every point on that spectrum. Some people come to her with no idea how to feel their own glutes during a squat. And she said she finds that fascinating, not frustrating. Because if someone cannot access a part of their body, there is usually a story there. There is a reason the connection is missing.

Her approach is curiosity before correction. Every time.

This is the part of our conversation I keep coming back to.

Emily talked about the harm in traditional training culture. The "push harder, mind over matter" approach that she said was never actually about the client. It was about the trainer's own discomfort with human experience, and about a system designed to keep people buying things.

If people learn to trust their bodies, set limits, rest without guilt, and approach movement with sustainability, they need fewer external solutions. That is not a side effect of healing. It is a threat to a business model.

She said something I want every person who has ever felt ashamed in a gym to hear. The pressure you felt to perform, the message that your effort was never quite enough, the goal posts that kept moving. That had nothing to do with you and everything to do with a system that profits from deficit.

Trauma-informed movement asks a different question entirely. Not how do we get you to your goal. But what does your body need today? And how do we build something sustainable around that?

Emily builds ranges into every training program she writes. Not "do 10 reps." Somewhere between 2 and 10, depending on what the day holds. No explanation required.

She blends somatic check-ins with movement. Sometimes a session starts on the mat with quiet attention to what is showing up in the body. Sometimes it moves into release work: slow mobilization, hip openers, breath.

She also uses medicine ball slams when someone has stored anger. Boxing mitts. Pillow punching. Movement as a vehicle for what talking alone cannot always reach.

And sometimes a client shows up and says they almost canceled, and what they really need is to lay down. So that is what they do.

She turns off her mic. Dims the virtual lights. Waits.

And she said some of those sessions end up being her favorites. Because what comes next, when the body has been given actual permission to rest, is often more genuine movement than would have happened if she had pushed the program.

When the body learns it can trust you to hear the no, it stops bracing. It opens.

Emily came to Reiki as a skeptic. After her sciatic pain in 2020, she tried a lot of things. Two of them actually worked. One was a specific physical therapist. The other was Reiki.

That experience changed her framework.

She said something I want to sit with for a while: psychotherapy is energy work. Everything is. The exchange between a regulated nervous system and a dysregulated one is happening in every room, every session, every encounter. Whether we name it that or not.

Co-regulation is real. We learned that through COVID, when people found that being virtually present with another regulated person still helped. The mechanism is not magic. It is nervous system science.

For those of us who hold space for others, this has a clear implication.

Our own regulation is not a bonus. It is the foundation of everything we offer.

Emily co-wrote Trauma Informed Bodywork with her business partner Chelsea Haverly, and it released this month. What started as a guide for personal trainers expanded into something that covers the full range of bodywork disciplines: massage therapy, craniosacral work, acupuncture, and more.

It includes education on trauma and the nervous system, guidance on trauma-informed business practices, how to collaborate with other professionals, and how to protect your own capacity while doing this work.

She said it became more than they intended. That is often the sign of something worth reading.

The full episode is available on The Spiritually Curious Therapist wherever you get your podcasts.