In a TickTick post, a somatic specialist offers a simple but complex answer to why people struggle to do things that seem easy, like sitting on a towel for 20 minutes after a shower instead of getting dressed.
Liz Tinto has built a huge following on Tik Tok by sharing somatic exercises designed to release stress and trauma. With more than 1 million followers on the social media platform, Tinto calls himself a “workout wizard,” promoting 30-day online courses that he claims will take anyone “from pain to strength.”
The reason why many of us feel stuck doing basic things is because of the chronic freeze trauma response.
Tinto shared a video of himself, dressed in black athletic gear, lying next to her, gently rocking back and forth. “When you sit on a towel for 20 minutes after showering, you don’t enjoy getting out anymore, and you break up more often because you’re living in a cold state because you’re dealing with too much stress, and that’s why you have a hard time getting out of bed, stretching your muscles, and breathing all the time,” the post reads.
On her website, Tinto shares her story, combining her personal background with her methodology. She describes herself as a “somatic specialist, substance abuse survivor, and someone who knows, first hand, that your chronic pain, your anxiety, and your past trauma are all connected.”
“I learned what anger was from an abusive parent at an unusually young age,” she explained. “It was something that proved unfortunate for my childhood—it affected me in ways that I clearly recognized, but in ways that I could never understand.”
Tinto described her experience as someone who had “excruciating, unexplained pain and muscle tension” when she was 10 years old. She described the physical discomfort as something that was initially manageable, an impossibility that “became [her] The new normal… But as the years went by, the chaos became unbearable. My pain was unbearable. And the life I was living really wasn’t worth living.
In the headline, Tinto announced that people could ‘get beyond the cold response’ and experience ‘total body liberation’ by practicing somatic exercises.
For Tinto, it took until her mid-twenties to find relief from chronic pain and anxiety. She found that somatic exercises, which she defines as “gentle, therapeutic movements that connect your physical body with your emotional body,” alleviated her chronic pain by addressing the root causes of her trauma.
“It turns out that your body can feel much better than what it’s used to,” she declared. Tinto turned his journey into healing to help others do the same. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with somatic certifications in Feldenkrais and Pilates, specializing in trauma and pathology. She credits her 15 years of clinical teaching experience with “changing the conversation about how trauma and anxiety affect the body.”
He specifically focuses on the ways in which “trauma, anxiety, stress, and emotional experiences are all connected to the pain and unexplained pain that we are genetically programmed to simply endure.”
Tinto’s somatic practices and online presence uphold the belief that people can live and heal without pain.
He offers a variety of 30-day online courses, focusing on exercises to release tension in the hips, lower back and shoulders. He maintains that programs do more than just address the physical manifestations of stress that cause pain—they will “allow your body to get rid of the deep roots that are causing your pain in the first place.”
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As she explains it, chronic pain is an indicator of a deeper issue, one rooted in stress and trauma that a person has in their body. All humans have experienced trauma at some level. The past three years of global pandemics have highlighted this fact. Tinto’s work aims to heal the physical and emotional wounds we have as human beings.
As more people become aware of the realities of generational trauma, these conversations have expanded, allowing more access to the healing methods that everyone deserves.
Alexandra Blogger, MFA, is a writer who covers psychology, social issues, relationships, self-help topics, and human interest stories.
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