Achara Tarfa: Exploring Trauma and the Power of Self-Compassion

Have you ever wondered about the power of self-compassion on the road to recovery? Join me as I converse with the remarkable Achara Tarfa, a trauma recovery coach and certified Internal Family Systems therapist who's breaking multi-generational trauma patterns. We unravel the complex nature of trauma, exploring differing perspectives from eminent experts in the field. Achara shares her personal journey, which not only led her to overcome her own trauma but also fuelled her passion to guide others on their path to recovery.

As we navigate the course of our conversation, we talk about the unique ways in which trauma manifests, and how understanding these manifestations can help regain a sense of safety. We delve into the power of neuroplasticity and nutrition in the healing process and underscore the importance of self-compassion in recovery. Achara lays bare her insights on avoiding destructive comparison, practicing self-love, and the surprisingly major role of sugar in our lives. This episode is truly a treasure trove of resources for anyone seeking to heal and thrive.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:04

Welcome to the Kick Sugar Coach podcast. Join me each week as I interview experts who will share the science of sugar, sugar addiction and different approaches to recovery. We hope to empower you with the information and inspiration, insights and strategies you need to break up with sugar and fall in love with healthy, whole foods so you can prevent and reverse chronic disease, lose weight, boost your mood and energy. Feel free to go to my website for details on my coaching programs and to access free resources kicksugarcoachcom. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Kick Sugar Coach podcast.

Speaker 1 0:45

I'm here today with Achara Tarfa Is that how you say your last name? That is Okay, and Achara has such incredible history and so much to offer of the world on the other side of a history of trauma, significant multi-generational trauma. She has an ancestry that hails from indigenous roots, a pyland America, and she has gone through extraordinary amounts of trauma, witnessed it and lived through it and eventually decided to step on the path and break a whole bunch of multi-generational trauma patterns and is just here to share her story of recovery around that. She has her professional background, as a career was she was a speech pathologist and then eventually became certified as a trauma recovery coach and certified in internal family systems, and she's just about to become certified as a mindful self-compassion therapist as well. So she's bringing all of these modalities into the work that she's been doing with women over 20 years and professionally in her coaching website the last couple of years. So welcome, achara.

Speaker 2 2:05

Thank you, I'm so happy to be here. I'm working, working towards the IFF certification. Oh, you're working on it, got it? Yes, yeah, I'm so, so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 2:17

Yeah, absolutely. So. We were chatting a little bit before the camera got rolling, that that you understand and we'll explore the connection between sugar, sugar use and abuse and trauma and shame, and that you are still on that path, that for the most part you know you more or less avoid it and minimize it, but you haven't fully let it go, but you know that it's on its, you know, on the tail end of that. So, yeah, why don't we start a little bit with how did you become interested in trauma? Like there's lots of people that have lots of trauma but they never actually take the step to do trauma recovery work and then let alone share their recovery by becoming a therapist. What inspired all that for you?

Speaker 2 3:00

So I what inspired it was? There's a joke I used to say like if you like coughed Starbucks, thai food and skinny jeans, that it's popular and you'd find a place to belong. And so a few years back I started hearing about trauma and I was like there's something here, like intuitively, there was something there Now to be told. I didn't know that I was a trauma survivor until I started learning about what trauma is. I've always thought that, you know, there are these massive life changing events, and I didn't consider the massive life changing events that I experienced as traumatic. I considered them as life. It's normal, we all go through these types of things, and I didn't really realize that I was a survivor until I got into it. And so the reason why I started going into it because, as a speech pathologist you know we are able to work without our masters.

Speaker 2 4:07

And then I moved from Thailand back to the US and I was working on getting my masters when I moved to another state and had to do it all over again. And so back then remote learning wasn't really the thing and I put sort of my life and whole to bit to raise a family. And when I decided to get back into the workforce again. I had been in the tech field for a while and decided I didn't want to do that and had really listened to a lot of people who had said I missed my calling. You know, because I'd worked in mentorship and with women of multicultural backgrounds for over 20 years. Really it was like, okay, well, maybe I'll get my counseling degree or something like that, and ended up going into public health at George W.

Speaker 2 4:51

The COVID happened and I was like, can't do that, that's a bit too much right now. And so I started looking into programs about trauma, as I started to hear more about it and there were no specific programs for counseling or psychology or any of that. I think that's where I was looking for, which is Dr Dan Siegel's work of interpersonal neurobiology, and I was like I don't want to do all of this if that's not what I want to do with my life. And so I started looking more and found the International Association of Trauma Recovery Coaches and lo and behold, that was. I didn't even know, but that was exactly what I was looking for and I've been with them now for, I think, coming on three years two years solid and I'm a supervisor now with that association. So I get to pour back into other coaches, learning how and stepping out into the world of trauma recovery to help many many others.

Speaker 1 5:58

Amazing, thank you. So talk to us a little bit about what is trauma, what is it?

Speaker 2 6:08

So many people have different definitions and the one that I tend to stick to are two. There's two different ones, right? So Dr Pedro Levine talks about trauma is what occurs in the absence of an empathetic witness. So when something happens that's not so great and you really don't have anyone there to say, hey, that really sucked and I'm sorry and what can I do, to just sort of just need somebody to be here with you. So not lacking empathy in your life and not having anyone to really witness you, Not being seen, can be pretty traumatic.

Speaker 2 6:47

The other one I really enjoy is Dr Gorsma Tave definition of trauma, which is it's not what happened to you, but the wounds in which we carry with us and we can take that a step further and how those wounds really show up. There are after effects of trauma that show up in our lives relationally, emotionally, biologically. From what we know of epigenetics in that field, trauma is passed out from generation to generation and so it's a lot of trauma, A lot of things that I think people don't know Famous me, I didn't know.

Speaker 2 7:25

But I know a lot more now.

Speaker 1 7:26

Yeah, a lot of people think of trauma, as you said, these dramatic events like sexual abuse, witnessing violence, war, hurricanes, right, these things that we read, the actual disasters environmental things, tornadoes, all of that stuff.

Speaker 2 7:46

They don't think child emotional neglect is traumatic.

Speaker 1 7:52

The subtle sort of preverbal moments of abandonment or neglect or abuse that will get registered in the nervous system, that show up as I'm not safe, I'm not seen, I'm not supported, I'm not cherished. And then we tell stories, and then they inform our worldview and then, before we know it, we have developed relationships with things that aren't outside of human relationships, because they don't feel safe or reliable. And then here comes sugar. Who's there?

Speaker 2 8:23

Officer, always soothing, always comforting, always sweet.

Speaker 1 8:27

Yeah, always sweet, just never lets us down and tweaks our brain chemistry and makes us numb when we need to be numb and makes us a little buzzy and high and happy when we need that. And then, all of a sudden, it could be decades later where we think, okay, wait a minute, this is no longer sweet, this is pulling me down and then reminding my health and my mental health. And now I want to find a new way of self soothing, a new way of showing up for myself. And that's inevitably going to lead you to the topic of trauma and trauma recovery, isn't it?

Speaker 2 9:04

Oh, absolutely, especially when we talk about trauma in terms of being pre-cognitive, right, so pre-verbal, pre-cognitive, like before we can even talk, before we can even think, right, pre-conceptual, before we can even conceive. You know any of that. And if we're often given sugar as babies right to see this when we're upset then here's that attachment. It starts before we even have a choice.

Speaker 1 9:31

Yes, it's a really early addiction, I know exactly. Yeah, it's a deep one, it's a difficult one and fortunately, the unhooking process, this sort of okay, I'm no longer going to use that for self soothing, really opens up a world of options in terms of other ways, better ways, different ways that we can show up and do the same thing that sugar used to do for us, and probably by the time we're ready to break up with it, it is no longer doing what it used to do, which is soothe us and make us feel good. It just makes us feel horrible and tired and depressed and anxious and self-loathing and shamed. And oh, but talk to us a little bit about where do you begin? If you're kind of wondering if you have trauma, what are some signs and symptoms that someone might have trauma? What causes trauma, trauma?

Speaker 2 10:20

So really don't like to use the word normal, right, but very normal things are actually indicators of trauma, right? So we could speak with emotional after effects, right? Not really sort of not being able to talk they speak in terms of window of tolerance, right, and really not being able to maintain your cool, right, having a pretty, pretty short fuse. That's often an indicator in patients. Insomnia, you know. Ibs, you know digestive issues, headaches, any sort of stress related inflammation in your body.

Speaker 2 11:06

I mean, I can go on and on about what are some ways in which trauma has appeared in my life, and it's just it'll be the subtle, because we talk about trauma being stored in the body, right, and so there'll be these subtle shifts that we may notice in our system of you know, whether we receive use of danger from the environment around us or whether they're intrusive dogs that we sort of have against ourselves. All these are pretty key indicators that there may have been something that occurred that really, like you said earlier, shaped your worldview, and oftentimes that leads us back to trace a trauma in someone's life.

Speaker 1 11:51

I'm also in trauma training, as you have been, and the definition of trauma that's stuck, that really landed with me, is that it's this moment when the nervous system becomes overwhelmed. It's not stress. Stress is not trauma. Difficult, painful, horrible, even, like natural disasters or even egregious experiences of abuse can be extremely stressful, but that doesn't make it traumatic. Yet it's when it overwhelms the nervous system and there's nobody there to co-regulate with us, that empathic witness, and we are left with it and our nervous system says, oh my gosh, I can't hold this, I can't process this, this is too much.

Speaker 1 12:37

And it moves into the phrase response and it shuts down and the bracing happens. It goes into this extreme energy conservation state, shuts down the digestion collapse, this total collapse of the system, and all of a sudden we're like, oh man, tying my shoe feels like too much, right, because once you're in trauma you're overwhelmed and everything that comes at you is overwhelming. So you just stay in this loop of feeling overwhelmed. You can get caught in the trauma trap. So that whole idea of have you been ever overwhelmed before, like really lapsed into that freeze state where we feel depression, we feel despair, we feel despondent, we feel really heavy and lethargic and unmotivated and overwhelmed. Right, that is the trauma response, that is the freeze response, is the trauma response. And when we don't understand that that is the trauma response and we need to treat it like a trauma, we need to heal it like trauma, then we can just kind of get stuck there for like literally lifetimes not lifetimes, I should say decades, but I'll call it lifetime.

Speaker 2 13:48

No, you know, my particular trauma response often was flight. It wasn't freeze, right, I didn't freeze a lot, excuse me, I would. Flight Flight would show up Some people my mom flight shows up to her like cleaning, right. My sister flight showed up to her like reading, right, anything that takes us out of what's going on right now, because we're overwhelmed and we're just, we just need to get away. And so for me it was socializing. So that's sort of what I did. I would connect with people and, you know, had a great amount of friends. Still have a best friend to this day, 40 years now, almost.

Speaker 2 14:32

So you know, it's interesting how our trauma responses, how they manifest, right, because for some it is freeze, but for me, and often people in my family, it was often flight. It was wanting to get the heck out of and away from and not and just completely disassociate, right, and just be out of my body. So I remember when I first got into trauma recovery, they would, you know, ask me what I felt and it's that whole reintegration process of really feeling what's in your body. I didn't even know like sugar was an issue or anything like that, because I was so disconnected from my body. How would I know that if I wasn't even in tune with me and all of me? And so it wasn't until I started integrating and really started working on my recovery that, oh, I can notice that if I have sugar I'm tired, right. It wasn't until I started to put those pieces together and connect those dots. So it's just interesting how trauma really shows up, at least the responses, how they show up in different people.

Speaker 1 15:39

Absolutely.

Speaker 1 15:40

My flight is work. I think of the three states of the nervous system. There's the parasympathetic, the, the, the, the. I think of the P as being present, being peaceful, the rest, digest, all. Everything's working. We're in the zone Wonderful, that's heaven on earth, that's, you know, that's the place we should be most of the time. And then the sympathetic is S stands for stress, the stress response, fighter flight. And then you know we have the phrase response and there's the font. There's the font in there too, which is a stress response.

Speaker 1 16:12

And for me the parasympathetic is all as well. The sympathetic is all is not well, but I can make it well, I can fix this. There's that hopeful activation You're still, I'm going to get this sorted out. Then the freeze response is all is not well and probably never will be again. I can't solve this, I can't see a way out. I don't think this will ever get resolved. Like it's a pretty dark place, pretty discouraging place. For me. Flight is work. I'll be like okay, things aren't great, I'm feeling anxious, I'm triggered, I don't feel safe, I'm in fear, and I'll just start writing things down on a list, like just getting my to-do list down.

Speaker 2 16:56

Like somehow suddenly, oh well, now things are really back on track, crazy but true, it's true, right, but when we start to do that, then that's information Like, why am I all of a sudden just writing all these lists down, what's really happening? And that's when we get to get curious with the parts of ourselves, right, because I have different parts of myself that respond differently to different situations. So I have, we can have all of those trauma responses. It doesn't necessarily have to be one. That's what makes it complex. So when we talk about complex PTSD but it really is all of those things I absolutely have a fight response and I think what I really I guess I really want your listeners to hear is that, yes, it matters which responses show up for you, because it's all information, but what also matters is understanding that those responses are good.

Speaker 2 18:01

Right, that's a good thing for our nervous system to respond in those ways if we are under threat. It's when that threat is gone. Are we now able to move back into ventral vehicle safety? Are we able to be fluid in our nervous system and return to homeostasis? That is the key. And if we're not, can we get curious about how that occurs? How are there core regulation things we can do with someone else? Do we have self-regulation techniques and tools that we can use?

Speaker 2 18:31

One of the things I have for my parts and when I'm feeling different ways, like, I'll wake up in the morning and my mom part will be really activated, and so you know something with the kids and taking them and dropping them off, and it'll be really easy to make a chocolate peanut butter smoothie and put some extra stuff in it. That's really nice and sweet and what is that about? So I have an actual playlist for my mom part, who's overwhelmed, and music is really soothing as well and it helps with the vagus nerve right, and so all of that is helpful to just sort of be fluid and stay self-regulated. So I really want, I guess, to emphasize that to listeners, that those trauma response, those responses are great. How can we take that as information and maybe figure out how we can use that and apply that to getting to spaces of safety within our own nervous system?

Speaker 1 19:29

Right, I understand everything you're saying and I wonder because we're both in trauma training and therapy and we're doing our own work on this journey I wonder if people who don't know much about trauma, if they're like what, what are we talking about? So maybe I'll unpack this a little bit for people who are really new to this. So basically, I'm going to just kind of reiterate that what Achara was saying is that there's nothing wrong with stress. There's nothing wrong with fight, flight, freeze or font nothing. If there are wonderful responses to levels of stress, I'm going to get really acute. We'll wind up in the freeze or, if it's too much for too long, too much for too long. But they're all wonderful nervous system responses that protect us and either get us mobilized or they put us into.

Speaker 1 20:19

Ok, you need to stop this. I need a time out here. I need to regroup, I need to feel safe again, I need to get some energy rebuilt up and that when we realize that there's nothing wrong with those states, that they're there to support us, we can actually use those states, the mobilized, energized states, to figure out. Ok, I am now getting close to overwhelm. I need to figure out what I can do to get home.

Speaker 1 20:46

I can bring me back to a sense of safety. So how can I use this energy, this mobilized cortisol, adrenaline energy I got my mom energy going on. Ok, how can I go? Ok, brain, we're going to move into overwhelm pretty quick here. We got to figure out what can we do to go regulate. Can we get ourselves back to home base, Can we get grounded and calm and get perspective? And so tell me about some of your favorite tools that help you get you back home.

Speaker 2 21:13

So I do love my playlist. So playfulness was not something that was Playfulness was a bit of something that was quite dangerous growing up in a very Asian strict home, and so now as a parent I've broken a lot of these legacy burdens in my family and I learned how to do that a lot through my interaction with my children and so playfulness with them especially my daughter like just giggling or laughing, that it brings such a sense of self and lightheartedness to my life. And singing I recently. I really believe that song is medicine and so I have for about a year now been part of two online fliers. A Canadian, Coco Love, actually has her online flier, so I plug for Coco. And then also recently there's a flight school Lisa Littleberg's flight school that I went through and that was really intense.

Speaker 2 22:29

But just picking up a song or maybe just even creating a song that comes from the heart with my kids and we'll just sing. None of us are singers, but as long as you have a voice, you're a singer. So that makes it simple and so that's really helpful. Those things typically something that is auditory related, or sometimes I just go and work out, I'll just get that energy, because that energy needs to go somewhere. If I'm in a stress response, it needs to complete the cycle instead of just being stored in my body. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 1 23:05

What else would you like to share about the topic of I guess, addiction, sugar trauma, trauma recovery, how they're all connected up, yeah, I think I'd love to share.

Speaker 2 23:22

Really, what has helped me most is really accepting that all parts of me, even in terms of IFS we call these addictive parts firefighters, so even those parts of me really believe like they are doing the best job possible for me I really truly believe it and being able to really get some space and seeing who's on board, who's not on board and, internally, going inside and seeing the positive intent of everybody and helping them understand the positive intent of each other.

Speaker 2 24:04

And so I understand that this part of me that craves starts or the sugar it's trying to soothe me because the other parts of me that were supposed to be managing my life aren't doing such a great job according to my firefight my sugar parts right and so they need to come and provide some soothing in my life and I really appreciate them for that, because I didn't have a lot of people in my life providing anything soothing for me and so for them to develop and step in and do that for me, I'm so grateful and when I show them appreciation and show them that gratitude instead of trying to shun them away and really be mad at them because I've gained weight or I've done all these things that have happened to me. Really just going, you really think you're doing what I need and so thank you. Let's talk about how I don't need that. In that way, this is actually what I need, and getting to really know them, that's been transformation for me. It really has.

Speaker 1 25:12

Yes, yes, yes, I do IFS work as well. Absolutely incredible. And there's a whole world of voices and perspective Richard would call them, richard Swartz would call them these parts and there's so many different ways that we can get lines of sight into these parts that have agendas and roles that we had no idea Like. It's just all unconscious until all of a sudden we make them conscious and it's this whole other world of ways of meaningfully connecting to ourselves and understanding ourselves and loving ourselves.

Speaker 2 25:50

Absolutely. I'm really grateful. I'm grateful for the trauma recovery psychoeducation I've learned. I'm grateful for internal family systems and I don't think where I'm at in my life now. I don't think I would be in, I don't think that I would have the ability and myself compassion to really accept all of my parts the way that they are. Without those learning about those things in my life and really taking a deep dive and towards looking, there's something that I say it's an ugly, look in the mirror, right, like it just, and I don't mean physically, like you feel it somatically too, like you're. Sometimes you can really feel the sickness of what's happened to you and where you're at and the grief of it all. And having one thing I haven't mentioned is this group of people that I work with in the association. When you find a tribe of people who can not just one empathetic witness, but I can pick up my phone and there's probably 20 empathetic witnesses in my life now and that we talked about co-regulation, that is huge.

Speaker 2 27:15

Kaufman talked about the interpersonal and the intrapersonal bridge and how, when the interpersonal bridge that's broken, then we can't trust ourselves in our intrapersonal bridge, our relationship to ourself is broken as well and we can reestablish that through co-regulation with another empathetic person in our life, and not even so much as empathy, but just compassion. Right, you don't have to blend with my experience or whatever, but can you hold space, you know? Can you just maybe sit in silence and maybe not offer me anything to fix my situation, but just be with? How about we just learn to be with? And there's just such richness in that and I have so many people that will just be with me now in my life that I didn't have before. And it's still. There are parts of me that are like is this our life? This is, are you sure? Do you need to check? But yeah, this is our life now and it's beautiful. It really is.

Speaker 1 28:19

I totally understand. That's wonderful. Is there anything else you would like to say before we wrap up this beautiful conversation today?

Speaker 2 28:29

No, I'm just so excited to have met you and just to have the opportunity to speak to your audience and really just encourage them on their path. I'm still on my journey, too, to kicking sugar out of my life, and I was talking with you earlier about how neuroplasticity is a big part of trauma recovery and how having lots of sugar in our blood really does not help the oxygen in our brains and we want our brains to have lots of oxygen so neuroplasticity can be something that we can achieve, and without hindrance, and so I'm looking towards continuing on my path and kicking sugar out of my life so my recovery can continue as strong as possible.

Speaker 1 29:17

Thank you for that. I'm gonna paraphrase that which, just in case someone doesn't understand what neuroplasticity is, right, it's the rewiring of our brain and that the work that we do in trauma work, therapy, work, all the different approaches. It could be IFS, right in trauma family systems, it could be somatic experiencing from Dr Peter Levine, it could be trauma therapy, it could be EMDR, it could be DBT like CBT. All of those therapies, all wonderful, all have a role, all have gifts to bring us and all will land differently at different times in our journey.

Speaker 1 29:52

And yet if we have a brain that's being stunned, oxygen deprived, toxified, buy sugar and processed young foods and addictions of all kinds, the use and abuse of all kinds of substances that are harmful to the body, that neuroplasticity is either blocked or it's slowed down. It doesn't stick. And so we see, stuck in the trauma trap, right, the freeze, stress, freeze, stress, free, sorry, yes, that's right. We go back from the collapse to the getting activated, getting back into gear all along cortisol and adrenaline and doing again. And we can't break out of that as easily and maybe not at all, maybe not even at all until we have this nutritional intervention for those of us who are using a lot of sugar and are really quite damaged by it. We start getting the whole foods in that raises the energy. So just to ground our bodies, repair our nervous systems so we can start to do the neuroplastic work, because it's really difficult, I think, to use. A lot of us hope that we can just go to therapy and solve our food problem.

Speaker 2 31:01

Yeah.

Speaker 1 31:02

And it doesn't. You're living proof because you are regulated, you've done all the trauma work, you're doing incredible healing work and it does not solve the sugar problem because it can't. No, right, that is a decision at some point that you make to say, okay, this is now the end of the road for us. We're done. That is no parts of mine. That's no longer a lever you can pull, that's no longer an option to bring soothing. Thank you, I've appreciated it. We're gonna have to find other ways now. And they do, and they will.

Speaker 2 31:32

Yeah, and it's a journey it is. It is. It is a path that everyone takes in their own individual time and to just and I also maybe mentioned we tend to compare ourselves to that person or this person and self-compassion literally rewires our brain. So when we compare ourselves to someone else's journey, we're self-abandoning, we're not being self-compassionate, and so it's also not helping us rewire our brains. And the more compassionate you are to yourselves, to ourselves, the more neural pathways like it literally helps rewire our brain. Compassion is so important and so counter-shaming and so when you do do the sugar, you know, if you do have that slip up or something happens, how can you be compassionate towards yourself? How can you sort of get back right to that regulation and that homing of stasis and really sort of continue on, because you can do it, right, it is just, it is a journey for everybody and but it is, it's a journey that's possible, right, it's true.

Speaker 1 32:45

Oh, all healing. All trauma can be healed, all addictions can be healed, all all the things that we can get stuck in that we sometimes will help us about. There's nothing but hope. I love that comment about not comparing our recovery journeys to anybody else's, because the question is are you on the path of recovery? Then you're one of us, you belong. It doesn't matter the order, the tools that land or work with us. You know. It doesn't matter if at some points in our life we look like we're in a messier place than someone else. You have no idea what quantum shift you're from or what this little breakdown is, the breakthrough on the other side. Like it's just impossible to compare. The question is are you on the path? Are you on the path of recovery? Are you choosing? Are you choosing to heal and know that you're worthy of it? And yeah, you are. You're one of us. You're all equal. You belong, you belong, you belong. Awesome. Thank you for your beautiful energy and your smile and your time today. It was appreciated.

Speaker 2 33:45

Thank you, it was an honor. I appreciate you so much. So, yeah, thanks.

Speaker 1 33:52

Oh, I should tell people how we can find you. So your website is you tell them, because I might do.

Speaker 2 33:58

Yes, my website is wwwautratarfacom, so it's literally just my name A-C-H-A-R-A-T-A-R-F-A, and they can find me on Instagram at AtataraTarfa. And I do have a certified trauma specialist course coming up this fall. It's 10 weeks and we take you through the first 10 weeks of our coaching course. But lots of people don't want to be a coach, but they maybe want to learn for themselves and really just be a bit more trauma responsive in the environment in which they operate. So I'm one of the accredited instructors and we have a certified trauma specialist course coming up, and you can find that on my website too, under CTF.

Speaker 1 34:46

Amazing. Thank you, thank you again. Bye-bye, buddy Bye.

Speaker 2 34:50

Bye.

Speaker 1 34:55

Thanks for tuning in this week. If you would like more interviews, more information and more inspiration on how to break up with sugar, go to my YouTube channel, kicksugarcoach or my website KicksugarCoachcom. See you next week.