Embodied Wellbeing as the Foundation of Healing | Elaine Miller-Karas | On Trauma & Power S2 E6

Elaine Miller-Karas, LCSW has spent decades doing trauma work in some of the most difficult places imaginable — post-earthquake China and Haiti, war-affected Turkey and Syria, Covenant House shelters in Atlanta, and now the neighborhoods in Los Angeles leveled by fire. What she's developed from all of it is a biologically grounded, deeply invitational approach to healing that starts with one foundational question: what does your body already know? In this conversation with Jenn Turner, Elaine shares the core frameworks of the Trauma Resiliency Model (TRM) and Community Resiliency Model (CRM), including the wellness skill of gestures — a practice she first observed organically across multiple cultures as people reached for what helped them survive. She and Jenn go deep on what it actually means to work without prescribing, on the difference between a client who isn't ready and a client who is resistant, and on what the research coming out of Rwanda on compassion and forgiveness is telling us about the power of embodied wellbeing. They also get into the word resilience itself — where it gets weaponized, why Elaine has kept it in the name of her models anyway, and what her definition of it requires that most clinical frameworks miss. Plus: why she refuses to call tending and befriending a maladaptive response, and why that reframe matters enormously for the people sitting across from us. Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.