In this week’s Unraveling Adoption podcast, Beth talks with Kelsay Elizabeth Myers, a professional writer, artist, and somatic movement educator living in Marin County, CA. She is passionate about personal and social transformation for trauma healing. She's a Korean transnational adoptee who has been on a healing journey the last several years, after spending the first 32 years of her life in self-destructive behavior patterns.

Kelsay founded Dialogical Persona Healing Arts where she offers individual and group coaching programs and online courses that use expressive arts and transformational processes to help others discover new ways of understanding themselves, reclaim their creative flow and feel more settled in their whole system, so they, too can experience more power, excitement, and joy in life. She is currently a Ph.D student of Transformative Inquiry at California Institute of Integral Studies where she uses a variety of psychological approaches and arts-based research practices for trauma integration and wholeness. 

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RESOURCES:

Kelsay’s information:

• Kelsay’s website: DialogicalPersona.com

• Kelsay’s podcast (co-host with Leela Davis): What I Didn’t Tell My Therapist: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-i-didnt-tell-my-therapist-reboot/id1473447399

Other things mentioned in this episode:

• Tamalpa Institute: https://www.tamalpa.org/

• The Body Keeps the Score: https://amzn.to/3yumsYZ

Other Resources :

• APtitude Support Group for Adoptive Parents Facing Adoption’s Challenges: UnravelingAdoption.com/APtitude

• Other Parents Like Me - oplm.com 

• Heather Ross - Life Coaching for Parents who have a child struggling with addiction: https://heatherrosscoaching.com/

• Adoptee-Therapist Directory: https://growbeyondwords.com/adoptee-therapist-directory/

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Unraveling Adoption is produced and hosted by Beth Syverson

Music written and performed by Joseph Nakao

Email questions or comments to [email protected]

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Support Unraveling Adoption on Patreon: Patreon.com/UnravelingAdoption

www.UnravelingAdoption.com

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TIME STAMPS:

  2:00 Kelsay’s adoption story and childhood, including racist microaggressions and bullying

  4:58 Kelsay’s racial identity

  7:20 Which was worse, racial trauma or adoption trauma?

10:40 How Kelsay’s trauma manifested in abusive relationships

13:20 Intuitively realizing her sexual abuse in foster care through her “felt sense”

15:26 Conscious dancing to begin her healing journey

18:05 Kelsay’s training in somatic movement healing modalities

22:45 How somatic movement has helped Kelsay deal with racism triggers

24:39 Somatic movement to help kids

27:37 Autoimmune conditions and somatic movement

30:57 Our culture’s mind/body split

32:05 Kelsay’s advice for transracial/intercountry adoptive parents