Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner Angela Rivero invited me to her podcast Everyday Intimacy to talk about trauma, chronic illness and to discuss how we come back to our bodies when we’ve gotten disconnected as a result of trauma.
Angela talks about her experiences with symptoms associated with a seronegative rheumatoid arthritis, which some diagnosed as juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA). She shares some of her JIA story, which I refer to as a “Chrillog” or chronic illness weblogs here on the blog.
She describes the sensations she experienced as a “burning inside, like a volcano.” Her symptoms eventually resolved after healing trauma and now pop up only occasionally. She uses her understanding of the triggers of having been bullied as a child to work with occasional flares. We talk about links between Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis and trauma in her experience. We wind up with our mutual experiences that it takes time to heal and to learn how to slow down and to rest.
This podcast did not start out as a Chrillog and before Angela mentioned her story, I shared some of my early experiences training as a somatic psychotherapist at Naropa University that got me wondering if symptoms of chronic illness might represent the same kind of thing happening at a cellular level.
One of these experiences was being mesmerized by faculty Dr. Christine Caldwell’s “movement tags,” which she coined to describe what are often small and subtle yet repetitive movements we do unconsciously that reflect a place in the body that holds unprocessed trauma. Recognizing the habit of throat clearing, the regular tug on the ear, and others of these little “habits of the body” provides an opportunity for exploring what may lie underneath, along with the possibility of healing emotions that may affect us in ways we don’t even realize.
You can download a free transcript of the PDF for this podcast at the bottom of the page and see Angela’s quotes in images all the way to the bottom of this post, including following the references.
Watch our Reel about “Movement Tags”
Table of Contents
Highlights from our Conversation
- Introduction to the Podcast
- Introduction to Veronique
- Connecting the dots between chronic illness and trauma
- Movement Tags: Possible Examples of Trauma in the Body?
- A Kindness to Ourselves
- Veronique and how my own Chronic Fatigue began
- Angela’s chronic illness story – Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (minute 16:54)
- I was really hurting. I had a volcano inside of me
- The only thing that helped was nervous system work
- Do your symptoms have a name? Has this work helped?
- Example of what helped with Juvenile Idiopathic RA
- The self understanding is a big piece in chronic illness
- Sense of Failure
- Emotional Neglect and “The Loyalty Trap”
- Autoimmune diseases: Why might they be more common in women?
- Symptoms as a body’s signals to listen?
- Slowing down.
- What is Rest
- What would you say when it feels our bodies are betraying us?
- Healing trauma takes time
Angela’s Podcast, website & private practice
Angela’s story starts at 16:54 minutes and is on pages 10-18 of the page transcript. Her Everyday Intimacy Podcast is about the process of healing that helps us regain connection with our bodies.
Podcast on spotify
Website: Soma Shift
Instagram – The Angela Rivero
Download free PDF Transcript of this Podcast
Resources on my Blog
Essential Guide to Chronic Illness, Trauma and The Nervous System: Keys to Quelling the Volcano
Chronic illness and the cell danger response
Surveys for Adverse Events in Childhood
The following are surveys on my blog to assess your ACE score and to also look at “Missing ACEs.” You can get your adversity score for the different types of adverse experiences in childhood. Your responses help me learn about nuances in the role of trauma in chronic illness.
All surveys can be found
- on this page and
- on this page with images specific for Rheumatoid diseases (these are all the same 5 surveys)
References Cited in the Podcast
Caldwell, C. (1996). Getting Our Bodies Back: Recovery, healing, and transformation through body-centered psychotherapy (1st ed.). Shambhala. (A book that includes a discussion of “movement tags” as markers of where trauma lies in symptoms in the body that can be accessed and healed)
Caldwell, C. (Ed.). (1997). Getting in Touch: The Guide to New Body-Centered Therapies. Quest.
Naviaux, R. (2018, May). Metabolic features and regulation of the healing cycle—A new model for chronic disease pathogenesis and treatment. Mitochondrion, 46, 278-297. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mito.2018.08.001
Naviaux, R. K. (2014, May). Metabolic features of the cell danger response. Mitochondrion, 16, 7-17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mito.2013.08.006
Naviaux, R. K., Naviaux, J. C., Li, K., Bright, A. T., Alaynick, W. A., Wang, L., Baxter, A., Nathan, N., Anderson, W., & Gordon, E. (2016, Aug 29). Metabolic features of chronic fatigue syndrome. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 113(37), E5472-5480. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1607571113
Priyadarshini, A. (2025). If Our Parents Did Their Best, Why Do We Still Hurt So Much? https://akankshapriyadarshini.substack.com/p/if-our-parents-did-their-best-why?r=paojk&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true
Rappaport, S. M. (2016). Genetic factors are not the major causes of chronic diseases. PloS One, 11(4), e0154387. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0154387
Weaver, I. C., Cervoni, N., Champagne, F. A., D’Alessio, A. C., Sharma, S., Seckl, J. R., Dymov, S., Szyf, M., & Meaney, M. J. (2004, Aug). Epigenetic programming by maternal behavior. Nature Neuroscience, 7(8), 847-854. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1276
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